When we conjure up images of animals in temperate cities we think of such pesky creatures as pigeons, cockroaches, English sparrows, crows, rats and mice, while in other cities around the world urban dwellers encounter geckos, Indian mynas, monkeys, raccoon-dogs and baboons. In all of these cases, the organisms have adapted and they thrive due to the profusion of suitable habitats and resources provided by human settlements. With the current human population growth rate and the increase in the amount, size and intensity of urban development around the world, there are grave concerns amongst biologists, ecologists and conservationists that organisms that can adapt and thrive in human dominated landscapes will continue to survive and flourish while those organisms that can’t will decline and eventually go locally extinct.
Not too surprisingly, as human settlements expand there are a growing number of examples of iconic ‘wild’ creatures that have inhabited urban ecosystems, including peregrine falcons, bears, foxes, coyotes, deer, hedgehogs, koalas, kangaroos and microbats to name a few. Bill Sherwonit’s July 2013 post ‘Living with Bears: A Continuing Challenge in Alaska’s Urban Center’, discusses the increasing interactions between wildlife and urban dwellers in cities that are adjacent to wild lands such as Anchorage, Alaska. There are many examples in the news and in the scientific literature of unfortunate interactions between people and wild animals in peri-urban areas around the world. I totally support his message that we need to increase urban dwellers’ awareness of the actions we must take in order to live harmoniously in the same neighbourhoods and cities as these wild animals.
In our current efforts to create green, healthy and resilient cities and towns we (I include scientists, conservationists, architects, designers, planners, engineers, landscape architects, land managers, decision makers and teachers) have an obligation and the ability to create urban ecosystems that will support a diversity of organisms that can help preserve our natural heritage at local and regional scales. As a result of the research conducted by the staff and students of the Australian Research Centre for Urban Ecology (ARCUE) over the last decade, I believe we can move beyond living with a fairly common and limited pool of urban adapted species in our cities by explicitly creating urban ecosystems that provide habitat and resources for a diversity of organisms, including threatened species.
In the rest of this blog, I will describe one of our research projects that examined the expanding range of the nationally threatened Grey-headed Flying-fox(GHFF, Pteropus poliocephalus) into Australian cities and towns, which convinced us that we have the knowledge and skills to make cities around the world refugia for a diversity of organisms including threatened species.
Grey-headed Flying-foxes in Australia
Over the past two decades there has been an increase in the level of interaction between humans and flying-foxes in Australia most likely due to a combination of cities and towns expanding into the range of flying-foxes, as well as flying-foxes establishing new camps within areas populated by humans. There are some 11 species of flying-foxes in Australia, found primarily in the northern and eastern coasts of the continent. Grey-headed Flying-foxes are megabats (Megachiroptera) that live in roosts (called camps in Australia) ranging from 10’s to 200,000 individuals and are commonly found along the eastern seaboard of Australia. There are ancient GHFF camps in two of Australia’s major urban centers, Brisbane and Sydney. GHFFs are one of the largest megabats, ranging in weight from 600 to 1000 g with a wing span of up to a meter (see the photo below).
Grey-headed Flying-fox in Melbourne, Australia. Photo: Ian Kitchen
Up close and personal, these bats are big. I have heard locals refer to them as chihuahuas with wings. They are also long-lived with an average reproductive age of between 6 and 10 years. They are very social animals that can forage an area of 50 km for food at night but congregate in pre-established camps in the morning. They primarily eat fruits and nectar from a variety of trees, but especially enjoy eucalyptus blossoms.
GHFF in captivity eating pollen & nectar from a Eucalyptus blossom. Photo: Rodney van der Ree
GHFFs are critical to Australian forest ecosystems because they play a major role in pollinating and dispersing trees in native hardwood forests and rainforests. They are listed as threatened under Australian Commonwealth law and are considered “vulnerable” because over the last several decades there has been a significant decline in numbers as a result of the loss of their feeding habitat and traditional camp sites due to deforestation. Unfortunately, GHFFs carry several serious disease threats to humans and other animals. The two most dangerous are the Australian Bat Lyssavirus (ABL) which is a virus closely related to rabies and Hendra virus which is passed to horses and then from horses to humans. To date, there have been four human fatalities attributed to this virus in Australia.
Grey-headed Flying-foxes now call Melbourne home
In Melbourne, GHFFshave been recorded occasionally passing through since 1884. The first camp to be occupied year round was established in 1986 at the Royal Botanic Gardens (RBG). Over the following 17 years the camp grew exponentially from 10 – 15 individuals that remained yearround in 1986 to nearly 30,000 individuals in March 2003. The Royal Botanic Gardens was established in 1846 soon after the city of Melbourne was founded and is a much treasured cultural asset that receives between 1.5 and 2 million visitors a year. It was obvious to nearly everyone that 30,000 GHFFs camping in the Botanic Gardens during the day had negative impacts (noise, smell, plant damage, etc.) on the plant collections, RBG staff and visitors.
As the Director of the newly created Australian Research Centre for Urban Ecology, which is a division of the Royal Botanic Gardens, I found this to be a very challenging research and management predicament. Something had to be done to reduce the impacts of the GHFFs on the RBG, but at the same time the health and welfare of the nationally threatened GHFF population needed to be maintained. Ultimately, a solution to this conundrum emerged from the combination of a solid scientific knowledge of the issues (i.e., ecology of the flying-foxes and the city) and a strong working partnership with the local GHFF management authority which in our case was the Victorian Department of Sustainability and Environment and other stakeholders.
To develop a solution to our conundrum we needed to address two primary questions: 1) Why did the flying-foxes migrate over 400 km from their nearest existing camp to establish a new permanent camp in Melbourne?, and 2) Was there scope for moving the camp to a suitable nearby habitat with less public access without negatively impacting on the health and welfare of the population?
Initially, the popular belief was that the GHFFs moved to Melbourne because of the destruction of the native habitat primarily as a result of the expansion of orchard and crop lands and more recent sprawling suburban developments. Upon closer examination it was clear that most of this land-use change occurred over 50 years ago and thus if it was a driving factor in the GHFFs move to Melbourne than it should have occurred much earlier. The primary reason other ‘wild creatures’ inhabit cities is because of the availability of much needed resources, especially food.
So, what had changed in Melbourne?
The urban forest of Melbourne, like many cities in the world, has experienced cycles of change in response to social, financial and ecological factors. Prior to European settlement, Melbourne supported only 3 species of plants that were important food resources for GHFFs. In the 1970s there was renewed interest in cities and towns throughout Australia to plant native species. Thus, in Melbourne there was a significant increase in the number of eucalypts and other trees such as Morton Bay figs from around Australia planted along streets and in parks and gardens. From our analysis of Melbourne’s street trees in early 2000, we found an additional 87 species that provided sustenance for GHFFs and other tree dwelling species such as lorikeets and possums. Not only were there more types of food resources available, because trees came from around the country with different life cycles they also provided blossoms and fruits throughout the year. This point is especially notable, because never before in the history of this species was there an abundant year round availability of food resources in a limited geographic location. Because humans cultivate and water these urban plants even during severe Australian droughts, cities provide an unprecedented food resource for many species of animals. We feel, in part, this is why GHFFs now call Melbourne home.
Once we understood that there was a huge year round food resource for GHFFs in Melbourne we needed to develop appropriate techniques to manage them in a way that would protect them from further harm while also limiting their impacts on urban dwellers. Using good science and a lot of help from volunteers, we were able to move the GHFF camp out of the Botanic Gardens. In 2003 over a period of several weeks, we herded the flying-foxes out of the RBG to a more secluded park along the banks of the Yarra River some 5 km away without any harm coming to the GHFFs or the public. We accomplished this by primarily playing loud sounds, which we had especially developed to excite GHFFs, from speakers attached to garden utility vehicles. This ‘new’ Melbourne GHFF camp has remained intact in this location for the last 10 years (photo below). The techniques we developed to manage urban GHFF populations has been adopted in other cities and towns in eastern Australia.
Grey-headed Flying-Fox camp along the Yarra River, Melbourne Australia. Photo: Ian Kitchen
Over the last few years, GHFFs have established completely new camps in other cities in New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia. We believe that the replanting of urban forests in Australia with native species have provided a totally new resource for many Australian birds and mammals, but especially the threatened GHFFs.
As land-use change, drought and fires create an increasingly unpredictable food resource for these species, cities and towns now provide abundant and stable food resources for the future.
The take-home message from our Australian experience is that everyone should seriously consider what species are being planted in cities and towns around the world and it is possible to plant species that will, in the future, provide valuable resources for threatened and endangered species. Cities and towns definitely have the potential of becoming important refugia for threatened species’ in the future.
Shukuroglou, P., and McCarthy, M.A. (2006). Modelling the occurrence of rainbow lorikeets (Trichoglossus haematodus) in Melbourne. Austral Ecology 31: 240–53
van der Ree, R., M. J. McDonnell, Temby, I.D., Nelson, J. and Whittingham, E. (2005). The establishment and dynamics of a recently established camp of flying-foxes (Pteropus poliocaphalus) outside their geographic range. Journal of Zoology 268: 177-85
Williams, N. S. G., McDonnell, M. J., Phelan, G K., Keim, L., van der Ree, R. (2006). Range expansion due to urbanisation: increased food resources attract Grey-headed Flying-foxes (Pteropus poliocephalus) to Melbourne. Austral Ecology 31: 190-8
Cities are arguably the greatest achievement of our human species. They are such an impressive naturally-occurring phenomenon: popping up over the centuries on six continents, and sharing a common set of characteristics that include a density of built structures, some organized open spaces, a network of roadways and paths to ease mobility, and, most often, close proximity to water. Seen from outer space, cities form an unmistakably similar pattern (as in Beijing and London, below), showing us what people over the centuries create for their habitat.
Beijing.London.
The key hallmarks of cities as habitats are what Kaid Benfield so thoughtfully lays out in his most recent collection of essays, People Habitat: 25 Ways to Think About Greener, Healthier Cities, a self-published volume released last year and distributed by Island Press.
Essay collections are not everyone’s cup of tea when it comes to non-fiction, and with this volume there were times when I would have preferred a more connected narrative. Perhaps in his next outing the author will consider incorporating such a narrative, because after reading this book I was both buoyed and perplexed. Benfield provides twenty-five inspiring examples—principles even—of what makes a city work well. I am an optimist, as Benfield is, so I appreciate his belief that the good will eventually win out, and I appreciate the benefit of sharing the many successes he highlights here. By his own admission, what this book lacks is an analysis of the obstacles that stand in the way of these ideas being pursued more broadly. And it lacks a compelling, central thesis (which might have addressed the obstacles) with which the reader could engage. In the Prologue, Benfield explains: “I suspect that many readers are on that same quest to make cities better. To that end, I am sharing 25 essays related to points I believe are useful to consider as we enjoy and improve this wondrous invention that we call “cities”. It is less expository writing than storytelling, more illustration than proclamation. While I will always say exactly what I think—or believe I am learning—about these subjects, polemic writing and thinking don’t interest me. The nooks and crannies do” (pg xviii).
So, reader be forewarned: the benefit of this format is that you can dip in and out; for my fellow attention-deficit urbanists, this is a handy book to carry on the subway and read episodically. But a subsequent effort by Benfield should include an argument of what is preventing the proliferation of these principles—walkability, good design, adaptive reuse of civic assets, urban agriculture, place-making—in city-building and some tangible examples of how city-builders are overcoming those obstacles.
Benfield appears to be a pragmatic city lover. The city-building field is full of ideologues, rabidly advancing their world view of ‘smart’ or ‘green’ or ‘economically competitive’ or ‘sustainable’ cities (there, I’ve just offended most of my closest friends and colleagues), but Benfield is solidly grounded in what he sees is actually happening; he considers context, and especially how things fit together. To me, this is the discourse we desperately need in planning and designing our cities: ways to integrate various considerations and expertise. It’s what we’ve done so poorly before, thinking too narrowly about one kind of investment or initiative, at the expense of any other.
For example, on historic preservation Benfield writes: “I believe that preservationists must be discriminating and wise in asserting our values, in order to maintain the continued support of the public. If we always push our principles to the maximum without awareness of the consequence to other important societal values, we risk losing our credibility, among other things” (p. 75). This pragmatic tone is threaded throughout Benfield’s commentary, and his chapter titles reinforce it.
Like the city life about which Benfield writes, reading this book brought me to some new, unexpected places: I kept keep Google busy pursuing Benfield’s included references, and my browser cache now shows a very broad range of search terms, from food to faith to Koolhaas and Fisher. In many ways, this dense book reads like a primer. I could imagine building a course syllabus based on the chapter headings. Volleying out so many ideas in short sections comes at a cost, though, as several topics get only a cursory look: you can’t kill sprawl in five pages. (See my earlier urging: sequel please, Mr. Benfield.)
Another quibble: Benfield’s references to other experts and urban ‘thought leaders’ are disproportionately male, which is odd because in cities around the world, local, community-driven work is predominantly led by women. This is all the more curious an observation when one considers the two voices that have dominated 50 years of the discourse on the relationship between people and their habitats in nature and in cities. Rachel Carson (Silent Spring, 1962) and Jane Jacobs (Death and Life of Great American Cities, 1961) both wrote books in the early 1960s that brought into sharp relief the deleterious impacts on people—and their habitats—of human decision-making taken in isolation. Yet, Benfield doesn’t cite either one across these 25 essays, which is remarkable considering the subject matter. Given his philosophical lineage, I am quite sure the absence of Jacobs and Carson is just an odd quirk of this particular collection. (On the bright side, he does mention Gertrude Stein, and her alleged lamentation that there was no there when she first saw Oakland, in a thoughtful essay about the authenticity of place). Still, I have found that both innovation and activism are invariably led by women in local neighborhoods, so more women should have been cited here.
For any urbanist whose mother often asks, “What is it you do again, dear?” give her People Habitat. This book pretty much covers it: hopefully she’ll see for herself what you do, while being reminded of how the neighborhood in which she raised her child either thwarted or supported the attributes of city life that have drawn said child to urbanism.
Benfield’s motivation in collecting these essays is to make the point that the only way we will be able to save our wilderness areas and natural assets is to make our cities so compellingly attractive that people will prefer to live in them, rather than continuing to encroach on rural life (see Epilogue pg 262). I suspect it would be unfair to imply that he is an urbanist by default, that he came to love cities only as a means to preserve nature. A complementary narrative could include examples of neighborhoods with hipster co-working spaces, hole-in-the-wall arts spaces, unique improvised solutions to inadequate infrastructure, independent businesses using the internet to find new foreign markets, pocket parks, sleek new high rises with local retail at the street, and tech enabled jitney services.
The phenomenon of cities as habitat is a marvel, not only for what it protects, but for what it intrinsically manifests: life. That’s the nature of cities.
Resilience is the word of the decade, as sustainability was in previous decades. No doubt, our view of the kind and quality of cities we as societies want to build will continue to evolve and inspire new descriptive goals. Surely we have not lost our desire for sustainable cities, with ecological footprints we can afford, even though our focus has been on resilience, after what seems like a relentless drum beat of natural disasters around the world. The search for terms begs the question: what are the cities we want to create in the future? What is their nature? What are the cities in which we want to live? Certainly these cities are sustainable, since we want our cities to balance consumption and resources so that they can last into the future. Certainly they are resilient, so our cities are still in existence after the next 100-year storm, now due every few years. And yet…as we build this vision we know that cities must also be livable. Indeed, we must view livability as a third indispensible leg supporting the cities of our dreams: resilient + sustainable + livable.
A key problem for the idea of a “just city” is that it works so well in metaphor. Making a reality of justice is harder.
But we have to hope that justice hasn’t gone out of style. Because while resilience is the word of the decade, we’ve struggled with just cities for a much longer time. Largely we have come up short.
So this imagining needs a fourth leg. These are the cities of our dreams: resilient, sustainable, livable, just.
Let’s imagine.
We can imagine sustainable cities—ones that can persist in energy, food and ecological balance—that are nevertheless brittle, socially or infrastructurally, to shocks and major perturbations. That is, they are not resilient. Such cities are not truly sustainable, of course—because they will be crushed by major perturbations they’re not in it for the long term—but their lack of sustainability is for reasons beyond the usually definitions of energy and food systems. We can imagine resilient cities—especially cities that are made so through extraordinary and expensive works of grey infrastructure—that are not sustainable from the point of view of energy consumption, food security, economy, or other resources.
We can imagine livable cities that are neither resilient nor sustainable.
And, it is easy to imagine resilient and sustainable cities that are not livable — and so are not truly sustainable.
Easiest of all is to imagine cities of injustice, because they exist all around us. The nature of their injustice may be difficult to solve or even comprehend within our systems of economy and government, but it’s easy to see.
The point is that we must conceive and build our urban areas based on a vision of the future that creates cities that are resilient + sustainable + livable + just. No oneof these is sufficient for our dream cities of the future. Yet we often pursue these four elements on independent tracks, with separate government agencies pursuing one or another and NGOs and community organizations devoted to a single track. Of course, many cities around the world don’t really have the resources to make progress in any of the four.
Metaphor
A key problem for us, in all of these concepts, is that they exist so beautifully in the realm of metaphor. They work in metaphor. Everyone can agree that “resilience” is a good thing. Who wouldn’t want that? Raise your hand.
I thought so.
But an operational definition is really about difficult choices. Bringing a word like resilience—or sustainability, or livability, or justice—down from the realm of metaphor is hard because it quickly becomes clear that it is about nothing else but difficult choices. Choices that often produce winners and losers. We have to be specific about the choices involved in resilience or sustainability or livability or justice, and the trade-offs they imply. As societies we have to be explicit about these trade-offs—about their consequences. I think often we don’t have open and fair conversations about these issues because we don’t want to know about these trade offs, maybe not so much because we care about the losers, but because the winners of the world have so much to lose. Think developers who consume green space—often with the government’s blessing—without concern for sustainability issues or accommodations for the less wealthy. Or the growth- and consumption-obsessed nations driving the climate change that may destroy communities around the world, communities that have little responsibility that climate change.
Green
Most people in my circles make strong claims about the critical value of nature and ecosystems. Nature is thought to provide key benefits for resilience, such as technical aid to storm water management. Nature—and we way we use it—is the key foundation to sustainability. Nature cleans the air and water. It provides food. Nature provides beauty and serenity for people. This is all to say that nature and “green” provide immense and diverse benefits to societies, cities, and their people.
Do we believe these benefits are real? Are true? I do. If we believe in these benefits, then who should have access to them? Everyone. Does everyone have access to these benefits? No. That’s as true in Cape Town as it is in Los Angeles or Manchester.
If the benefits of green are true—in the broad sense of nature and in our approach to the built environment—then it is clear that issues of green and nature are also questions of justice, and that there is a key and essential role for nature to play in the notion of just cities.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has long had a definition of environmental justice. It intends to specifically address the fact that environmental “bads”—dumps, incinerators, legacies of industrial pollution, and so on—are disproportionally placed in poorer neighborhoods. That’s a fact that results from a host of reasons: inadvertent, economic, political and sometimes more cynical. Here is the EPA’s definition. Environmental justice will achieved:
…when everyone enjoys the same degree of protection from environmental and health hazards and equal access to the decision-making process to have a healthy environment in which to live, learn and work.
Many have written about the limits of this definition, although to me it is pretty strong and progressive, especially the part about decision-making. But it lacks the idea that everyone also deserves equal and fair access to environmental “goods” and the services they provide: healthy food, resilience to storms, clean air and water, parks, beauty. So an improvement to the definition, a more complete manifesto of belief, would be that environmental justice is achieved:
…when everyone enjoys the same degree of strong protection from environmental and health hazards, the same high level access to all the various services and benefits that nature can provide, and equal access to the decision-making processes for both to have a healthy environment in which to live, learn, work, and prosper.
Although some of the world’s cities are better than others in fulfilling this dream, probably none fully achieve it, although more embrace the idea of it. Most don’t even come close.
For example, there is a crisis of open space in many of the world’s cities. My city, New York, offers about 4m2 of open space per capita in the form of parks and plazas. Although the distribution of this open space is not entirely equitable (and some of the parks in poorer neighborhoods are of less quality) New York is to be commended for an explicit PlaNYC (New York’s long term sustainability plan) goal that says every New Yorker should live within a ten-minute walk of a park. We’re about 85 percent of the way to achieving this goal. This is the kind of specificity that can take green’s contribution to livability down from the level of metaphor and into on-the-ground evaluation and action.
Many of the world’s cities don’t fare so well. Although New York is a fairly dense city, Mumbai has 1 percent of the open space per person that New York has, its public commons gobbled up by cozy and opaque relationships between government and developers.
Not that the United States has so much to brag about. The Washington Post reported that in Washington DC there is a strong correlation between tree canopy and average income—the richer people get the benefit of trees. In Los Angeles, areas dominated by Latinos or African Americans have dramatically lower access to parks (as measured by park acres per 1,000 children) than areas dominated by whites. Countywide only 36 percent of Los Angelenos have close access to a park.
These are patterns the world over: when there are open spaces and ecosystem services at all, they tend to be for the benefit of richer or more connected people. This has to change in any city we would call just.
Values
“It is difficult to take in all the glory of the Dandelion, as it is to take in a mountain, or a thunderstorm.”
Charles Burchfield (1893–1967) is legendary for his watercolor landscapes, painted near his Buffalo, NY, home. He was also a great journalist and over his lifetime wrote over 10,000 pages in various handmade volumes. It was there, on 5 May 1963, that he wrote the quote above.
And so they are difficult to take in, both for their beauty and their complexity. How can you describe and assess them? Convey them to one who hasn’t seen? You finally stumble, awestruck, into saying that they are “beautiful,” or “majestic,” or just “amazing.” But all of us—as scientists, decision-makers, participating citizens—typically have to comprehend, describe and quantify such entities and then communicate the results in ways that aren’t hopelessly obscure—that are somehow specific and not just metaphorical. That is, we need to communicate a very complicated thing in a simple, essential and, above all, useful way.
We need to communicate what we value and build our cities accordingly.
Words like improvisation and imagination and intuition can sound awkward in the context of city-building and policy. Yet these are the very abilities that we require to be able to see past and beyond the details—this object is here, that process is there—to create and understand how a vast and majestic thing works and how it might change.
Perspective is another important word—a sense of what you value in the vision you are creating. The Dandelion seeds are close up in Burchfield’s picture. He values them. The sky is there too. You need to see the patterns and perspective and not only the details—the beating of the heart and not just the heart’s location in the chest.
How do you “take in” a complicated multidimensional thing like a mountain? Or a park? Or a community garden? Or a city? Or justice? It starts with an act of imagination.
It is this act that requires of us that we imagine, in specific terms, what the just city would look like. I think it would look something like the modified EPA definition I presented above. We already know what this just city doesn’t look like. You probably just have to drive around your own city. (My apologies if your city has solved this. Shout your solution from all the rooftops and soapboxes. The world needs to know.)
We need the imagination to dream about what this just city looks like, the nature of it, if you will. And then we need the courage to make it happen on the ground, by creating actual urban plans that address justice explicitly, that put justice into literal practice, in law and regulation and real action, the imagining of, say, the EPA definition, in detail, in all cities around the world.
To say this requires a sense of hope. Given the distance we have to travel to achieve just cities, in greenness or most any other sense, we have to hope.
A closing idea from Buzz Holling
One key [to resilience] is maybe best captured by the word “hope.”
Although Buzz Holling was an original elucidator of the ecological resilience concept, here he used a word that is fundamentally a human concept. What does it mean to hope? At its most basic, it is a desire for and the belief in the possibility of a certain good outcome.
So, here’s my vision of the just city. It’s green. It’s full of nature’s benefits, accessible to all. It is resilient, and sustainable, and livable, and just. It is a city that has a clear and grounded vision of what these words mean. It acts on justice and the place of nature in the city. It has the hope to believe that these things can can be achieved, and the courage and faith to bring them to life.
Cities abound with difference: people, buildings, trees, plants, animals, etc. People in cities (and beyond, of course) inhabit various and fragmented identities that include gender, class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, age, and ability/disability. These identities are produced in relation with other people, living- and non-living entities, and the landscape. These social identities are shaped through, and reflect differential access to, experiences of, and control over nature, both rural and urban.
Women and men develop different environmental knowledge based on their experiences and because of their labour and social positions.
In this, the first part of a two-part series I discuss why paying attention to gender is necessary for making cities more sustainable and just. An individual’s gender—woman, man, transgender, or other gendered—determines their spatial freedom, behaviour, and -experiences in cities. There are spaces in cities women feel unsafe, but men do not. For many women and transgendered individuals, large forested parks are not always the therapeutic, serene green spaces they were planned as; indeed, they can often be spaces of fear and anxiety. There are also spaces that women occupy and use more than men, thus developing different knowledges about the city. Because of the differential experience and knowledge of cities, we need to recongise that the spatial organisation of cities is never neutral. As such, any work towards creating more sustainable cities needs to pay attention to difference in cities.
As Elizabeth Grosz so eloquently summarizes:
“The city provides the order and organization that automatically links otherwise unrelated bodies […] The city orients and organizes family, sexual and social relations insofar as the city divides cultural life into public and private domains, geographically dividing and defining the particular social positions and locations occupied by individuals and groups.” (1992, p. 250)
Gender, class, and race are the three main categories that underlie social and spatial difference. The second part of the series will focus on the importance of paying attention to race as it relates to nature in cities.
Gender roles and relations as markers of human difference grounded in biology continue to be commonplace ways of conceptualizing relations within and across societies. As such, gender is a significant factor in understanding a diversity of human-environment relations as well as environmental management, polices, and practices.
The entrance to a patio in Managua, showing ornamental plants. Photo Laura Shillington
Gender intersects with race and class in complex ways (Mollett & Faria, 2013). While I concentrate on gender in this article, it is important to stress that gender is never universal. Gender is contextual and always needs to be considered in relation to race, class and place (geography). A white woman living in New York City has different knowledge of, experience with, and access to “nature” than a black woman in Lagos, Nigeria, or an Inuit woman in Kuujjuaq, Nunavik. We can also look at the differences in a specific place: for example, a white woman in Los Angeles may have different knowledges and experiences than a Latina woman in Los Angeles. Such differences may be racial, they may be class related, or both. The differences can also be a function of location—living close to an urban park or beach (easy access) or having to rely on public transport to access urban nature. Alongside the differences among and between women mentioned above, there are also differences between genders, and how gender roles shape and influence one’s perception of and interaction with their environment.
A canopy of fruit trees in Managua. Photo: Laura Shillington
What is gender? Gender, as I use it in this article, refers to the categories of male and female that do not necessarily have to relate directly to biological sex. In other words, the socially constructed ways in which we categorise masculine and feminine—those cultural characteristics that define masculinity and femininity. Moreover, the categories of male and female are diverse and dynamic. What counts as feminine may differ between cultures. Nonetheless, male and female (and masculinity and femininity) have defined social roles and relations in everyday life in most cultures and places in the world.
For example, in North American society, women are still the primary caretakers of children and responsible for domestic tasks. There are, of course, strong challenges to this assumption and gender roles have undergone changes, but a division of labour remains based on traditional (Western) gender roles: men as paid workers (productive labour) and women as caregivers (reproductive labour). This division is reflected in the recent Canadian census. In Canada women are still less likely to be employed than men: 77.5 percent of women were employed in 2015 compared with 85.3 percent of men (Moyser, 2017). Moreover, women are also more likely than men to work part-time (18.9 percent versus 5.5 percent), and to do so for voluntary reasons (67.2 percent versus 53.0 percent), typically to care for children. This meant that women spent an average of 5.6 fewer hours per week on paid work than men (35.5 hours versus 41.1 hours) (Moyser, 2017). While involvement in the labour force is now commonplace for Canadian women, over half (56.1 percent) are employed in traditionally-female occupations: teaching, nursing and related health occupations, social work, clerical or other administrative positions, or sales and services (this is compared with 17.1 percent of men and has changed little since 1987) (Moyser, 2017).
In the domestic sphere, gender roles have also changed, but just like in paid labour (working sphere), traditional gender roles remain. Women continue to do the most household work: in 2015, 93 percent of mothers reported participating in different types of household work and accounted for 61 percent of the total number of hours of household work (an average of 3 hours per day) (Houle, Turcotte & Wendt, 2017). However, men are doing more domestic tasks—in 2015 the proportion of men in families doing household work rose from 51 percent in 1986 to 76 percent in 2015 (mainly preparation of meals) (Houle, Turcotte & Wendt, 2017).
While there have been some changes in the Canadian context, overall there remains a traditional gendered division of labour. One of the key reasons for this—despite the desire to change for many individuals—is the lack of transformation within the workplace to support change, for example, affordable daycare and legislated paternity leave. (see Bloomberg and the Globe and Mail). But what does the gendered division of labour have to do with nature? I propose, that at a fundamental level, what individuals do in their everyday life and their role in broader society shapes how they understand, experience, and know their environment and nature.
There are three key ways that gender shapes relations with nature and the environment: Knowledge, Rights and Responsibilities, and Environmental Interests. I take these from the early work of Diane Rocheleau, Barbara Thomas-Slayter and Esther Wangari (1996) in feminist political ecology. My aim here is to offer a starting point to those who have not had the opportunity to think about gender, nature and cities before. I draw on my research in Managua, Nicaragua to illustrate the ways in which gender shapes relations with nature.
Knowledge
Rocheleau, Thomas-Slayter and Wangari (1996) emphasise that a person’s knowledge of nature and the environment comes from their material, everyday interactions with a specific environment (both built and nature, a combination of). How they interact with their everyday environment is shaped by the role that person plays in the household, in the community, and in broader society. If it is expected that women are responsible for domestic work and space, then their experiences with and knowledge of nature will derive out of their everyday tasks and the spaces they move through and in while doing those tasks.
For example, if women are primarily responsible for the domestic sphere—the home, childcare, eldercare, and other tasks that make up reproductive labour—they will develop intimate knowledge of the surrounding nature and the natural environments close to the home. Such natural elements could include water delivery and quality in the home and green spaces (private yard, community parks, schools, sidewalks, etc.). Such spaces and natural elements comprise their everyday patterns; going to the park everyday with children, walking children to school, carrying out domestic tasks in the yard and home.
In contrast, if men work outside the home most of the day, their knowledge of the environment and nature will be different. Their knowledge of the environments listed above will be less intimate because the interaction is not quotidian. They may learn very little about the nature of the schoolyard and only experience community parks on weekends. Conversely, weekends may involve leaving cities and going out to rural environments and nature, thus reducing their intimate knowledge of commonplace nature in cities.
A gender-based difference with regard to knowledge of nature in everyday spaces can been seen in a collaborative research project I was part of in Managua, Nicaragua in 2006. We had household members in an informal settlement map their home patios to identify the diversity of species (participatory ecological inventory). The majority of women involved in the project worked at home and the men worked away from home (e.g. as taxi drivers, casual labourers, gardeners, agricultural labourers in rural areas). On average, women identified 22 different species in their patios while men averaged thirteen. This difference was a result of the large number of ornamental plants that women mapped: in their patios ornamentals comprised 54 percent of the different species. Men tended to map trees, and the species-diversity they mapped comprised 40 percent fruit- and 18 percent non-fruit trees. By comparison, species diversity in women’s maps consisted of 22 percent fruit trees and only 8 percent non-fruit trees. Overall, women identified 123 out of the 130 species identified (95 percent of the total species-diversity of the patios).
If we had carried out the mapping in upper class households in Managua, the results would have been different. Knowledge of nature and environment will differ also depending on social class and race. A wealthy woman will—as mentioned in the introduction—have a radically different everyday interaction than a lower-income woman.
In other words, women and men develop different environmental knowledge based on their experiences and because of their labour and social positions.
Gendered access to resources resource and environmental services
Access to resources and to environmental quality, also varies according to a person’s identity. Gender plays an important role in many places around the world in defining a person’s access to and control over different natural resources and environmental services, access to clean water or sanitation for example. In many places, the responsibility for securing water for drinking, cooking and bathing falls to women. In many cities (as well as rural areas), women gather water at collective sources (such as wells, taps, and rivers). Travelling to and from the collective water source can be risky—exposing women to theft, to assault, and sometimes rape. The same is true for women who live in without household sanitation. They are required to use public toilets and bathing areas, increasing the risk of assault and rape (see for example Travers, Khosla & Dhar, 2011). Thus, lack of access to certain environmental services raises many security issues for women throughout the world. Environmental quality rights intersect with issues of gender inequality and environmental justice.
We can also think of gendered rights and responsibilities in terms of natural resources, as Rocheleau et al (1996) discuss at length in their book. Land tenure is the classic example, but there are also finer nuances of resource tenure. For example, there are specific gender-defined rights to different parts of a tree (fruit versus timber). The above example of mapping patios in Managua reflects the difference in gender-defined rights. The men in the mapping project identified primarily large trees. Women identified almost all the species. Why? Because men in the household were responsible for maintaining the health of larger trees—trimming the branches, gathering fruit from upper branches. Women were responsible for all other plants in the patio—they use the leaves, seeds, and fruit for food and medicine. Moreover, their everyday tasks take place in the patio and not inside the house in Managua, so they are surrounded by the plants and trees all day. The ecology, that is the nature of their patio, is important in their daily routines.
Women considered ornamental plants and fruit trees to be the most important plants in the patios, both in number and species diversity. Their benefits to the household were numerous. Ornamental plants create an aesthetically pleasing space, and a more homey and comfortable environment. They also are easy to grow and propagate rapidly, and are the only plants that flourish under the shaded canopy of fruit trees that dominate patios. The fruit trees—in addition to providing fruit—create privacy in and shade for the patios. Shade is critical in Managua, where daytime temperatures average 32°C year-round. Thus, large fruit trees such as mangoes and avocados protect the houses and patios from harsh sun and heat, keeping them cool. The shade allows women to carry out their household tasks in relative comfort. Indeed, the combination of fruit trees in all the patios creates a micro-climate in the neighbourhood, with a lower temperature compared to other parts of the city.
The importance of the patio ecologies in the everyday lives of women influences them to fight to maintain their patios when confronted with external pressures to alter the local environment.
Patio in Managua showing kitchen area. Photo Laura Shillington
Gendered interests in environmental politics and grassroots activism
Gender differences in knowledge, rights, and responsibility translate into differences in environmental interests or stakes with regard to environmental change. In the mid-1999s then Rocheleau, Thomas-Slayter and Wangari wrote Feminist Political Ecology,they pointed out that women made up a minority in many of the traditional environmental conservation groups in the developed world , but that they were often in the majority in environmental grassroots movements. Women are now more present in conservation and environmental groups as well as remaining the majority in grassroots movements. Rocheleau, Thomas-Slayter and Wangari (1996) argued that women and men also differ in the types of environmental issues with which they engage politically, as well as in the manner in which they carry out their political and activist interests. For example, women deploy their position as mothers or their place of labour—the home—in their engagement with grassroots environmental movements.
In the example of the patios in Managua, environmental change (in the patios) has come primarily by efforts to establish household scale urban agriculture. Many urban agricultural projects in Managua have encouraged the conversion of the more ornamental patio ecologies described above into so called ‘productive’ ecologies. Fruit trees, for example, have been viewed solely for their role in producing fruit in urban agricultural projects. Indeed, many projects saw the fruit trees as hindering the ability to grow vegetables and recommended that households reduce the number of fruit trees in their patios. However, this view ignores that such trees have roles within the household. Cutting large shade-producing fruit trees to allow vegetables to grow brings about numerous changes in the everyday activities of the home: increased heat in the cooking areas, fewer private areas in the patio (e.g. for showering), increased water runoff during the rainy season, fewer shade-loving ornamental plants to cover the house and make it ‘homey’, and a change in the micro-climate of the barrio (increased temperatures). Most women in the neighbourhood refused to cut any trees and, even though they were interested in growing some vegetables, preferred to keep their patios as they were. However, men in many households were keen to grow vegetables and were willing to cut down trees. In the end, households agreed to create a pilot urban agricultural project in the community areas and school rather than alter the patios and women’s workspaces.
The households in Managua, Nicaragua reveal how gendered knowledge of nature is created through inhabiting the local environment and interacting with it on a daily basis. Moreover, the societal gendered power relations—the gendered division of labour—shape the dynamics of resource access and control.
Uncovering the gendered use, knowledge and spatial practices in private (as the example of Managua here) and public spaces in cities is helpful primarily because it makes visible what is usually invisible in cities. Urban planning historically and at present is still dominated by male planners. And as discussed above, an individual’s gender shapes how they understand, experience, and know spaces. Everyone’s knowledge is always partial and as such urban spatial organisation only reflects certain knowledges and experiences of space. The more diverse spatial knowledge we can uncover, the more inclusive cities can become. This also means that planning becomes more difficult and that we need more diversity in planning departments. Linked to this, recognising gender helps to reveal the unequal power relations within urban order and organization, including green spaces and other ecological organisation in cities. Just as urban spaces are never neutral, planned green spaces and environmental/ecological services are also not neutral.
By paying attention to gender differences in urban experience, we get closer to creating better cities. But emphasised above, we cannot look at gender on its own—we need to also pay attention to race and class. The second part in the series will tackle the question of race, nature, and the city.
Mollett, S. & Faria, C. (2013). Messing with Gender in Feminist Political Ecology. Geoforum, 45: 116-125.
Moyser, M. (2017). Women and Paid Work, in Women in Canada: A Gender-based Statistical Report, Statistics Canada, Ottawa, Ontario. http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/89-503-x/2015001/article/14694-eng.htm
Rocheleau, D., Thomas-Slayter, B., & Wangari, E. (1996). Feminist political ecology: Global issues and local experience. New York: Routledge.
This article was adapted from an article by Julian Agyeman[i].
A professional ecologist’s view of “ecology” is not necessarily the same as a regular inhabitant of the city. This is especially true in cities full of difference, and the various points of view that result from such difference. What does this mean for urban planning?
Cities of difference are places where we are “in the presence of otherness”, as Sennett puts it—namely, our increasingly different, diverse, and culturally heterogeneous urban areas.[ii] Difference is, in my opinion, a more expansive and useful concept than diversity, which has become virtually synonymous, in the United States at least, with race/ethnicity, and/or gender. Sandercock points out that “Difference . . . takes many forms. It acknowledges that population groups, differentiated by criteria of age, gender, class, dis/ability, ethnicity, sexual preference, culture, and religion, have different claims on the city for a full life and, in particular, on the built environment”.[iii]
In the first part of this series of difference and nature in cities, we looked specifically at gender. This current part focuses on the complexity and dynamism of difference—how the multitude of realities in which people re/create identities, meanings, and values produce, perceive, and experience urban nature differently. No one person can be reduced to one single or fixed cultural or other form of identity, and all, as Sandercock says, “have different claims on the city” and a Right to the City, including its nature(s). People in increasingly diverse urban communities construct and understand urban nature in different ways for varying reasons.
This article uses four vignettes—two from the UK and two from the USA—to show how nature in cities is perceived in different ways.
Vignette 1
In the early 1980s, the parks department of the city of Bristol in southwest England was persuaded by the local wildlife trust to develop wildflower meadows in city parks, which like most parks were dominated by hard-wearing, close-mown, multipurpose ryegrass. The parks department obliged, applying an appropriate management regimen and, within a few seasons, had beautiful native wildflower swards replete with a rich fauna towering above the ryegrass. The wildlife trust and most of the public liked it, except for the local Asian and African Caribbean population, who refused to go near the long grass.
Why was this? It was because of a residual fear of snakes in long grass. An environmentally and ecologically beneficial management regime had negative effects on the cultural diversity of the park. This dilemma is supported by Low, Taplin, and Scheld’s point that: “In this new century, we are facing a different kind of threat to public space—not one of disuse, but of patterns of design and management that exclude some people and reduce social and cultural diversity”.[iv]
There are many ways of looking at this issue. One is to say what if a member of the local wildlife trust or the park’s management team was Asian or African Caribbean? Would alarm bells have been raised? Another way is to say that there is only one venomous snake in the United Kingdom, the Adder (Vipera berus), and its venom is rarely life-threatening (but this misses the point that snakes are deeply imbued with mythological traits). Another way is to say that perhaps there is no “answer”, but that someone should have thought to ask the right questions.
In the mid- to late 1980s, I was working as an environmental education adviser, first in a south, then in a north London borough. While some of the schools in these boroughs wanted advice on creating “nature gardens” using native species, which they had been told by ecologists were “better” for wildlife, others wanted advice on creating what I called “multicultural” or “world” gardens in which teachers and parents were intentional in selecting plant species from the diverse countries of origin of pupils in the school. The London Borough of Southwark developed Chumleigh Multicultural Garden in Burgess Park and the London Borough of Lewisham produced a guide on plants for a multicultural garden.[v]
These gardens were in effect autotopographies: cultural and community inscriptions on the cityscape that offered a statement of presence, of recognition, that both humans and nature(s) in cities are becoming increasingly different, diverse, and cosmopolitan, and are welcome.
In a challenge to the clarion call from alternative food movement (AFM) advocates to “buy and grow local”, Filipino immigrants in San Diego, California, see their food as local food. They cook it at home and eat it in local restaurants.[vi] This demonstration of “translocalism”, which is also in evidence when they cultivate their fruit and vegetable gardens in city neighborhoods, ruptures the dominant, geographic notion of “local food” and highlights the need for greater reflexivity within the AFM. Similarly, Mares and Peña use two predominantly Latino/a urban community garden projects—the now-defunct South Central Farm (SCF) in Los Angeles and Puget Sound Urban Farmers (now the Seattle Urban Farm Company)—to analyze how food and farming can connect growers to local and extra-local landscapes, creating an “autotopography” that links their life experiences to a deep sense of place.[vii] In effect, they are writing their cultural stories on the land—or cityscape. This is a type of cultural place-making through the growth and celebration of culturally appropriate foods. Mares and Peña report that one gardener at the SCF, a thirty-year-old Zapotec woman, described her involvement at the farm in the following way:
“I planted this garden because it is a little space like home. I grow the same plants that I had back in my garden in Oaxaca. We can eat like we ate at home and this makes us feel like ourselves. It allows us to keep a part of who we are after coming to the United States”.[viii]
Lanfer and Taylor write about Latino/a immigrants in Boston, Massachusetts, who transform public spaces into familiar landscapes found in their home countries. One group has adopted Herter Park on the Charles River in Boston’s Allston-Brighton neighborhood because it reminds them of the riverbanks and the willow trees they left behind in Guatemala. Lanfer and Taylor quote one Guatemalan American as saying:
“I think one of the reasons that that place . . . is so popular with us, Latinos, is because of the willows. Willows in Guatemala are very common. They grow beside rivers. People like Herter Park because it looks like home”.[ix]
This construction of nature, typical of immigrant groups, can be characterized as nature as refuge.
These vignettes are important because they problematize the dominant, often expert-imposed monolithic notion of nature, as opposed to a more negotiated and constructed notion of natures. They illustrate two ends of a continuum containing many different constructions of nature and the related concept of “the local”.
So if nature is quite literally in the eye of the beholder, how then is nature critical to a twenty-first-century urban ethic where we live in cities of difference—in effect, intercultural city ecosystems? Every culture has a relation to nature in general, and urban nature specifically. Some want the solitude it can offer, some want the socialization; some want recreation, some want relaxation; some want reflection, some want refuge.
Furthermore, what is the role of municipal planners, parks managers, urban and landscape designers, and others in catering to difference and diversity, to recognition and negotiation, to the intercultural city ecosystem/new ecology, while still respecting the traditional ecology? Can they help us think about, design, and manage what I call “culturally inclusive spaces”—spaces of encounter with different people/natures?[x] Can such spaces be designed and constructed to have meaning and authenticity to the multiple publics that inhabit intercultural city ecosystems? There is a solid case to be made that the training and recruitment of such professionals should more fully reflect the makeup of our cities of difference. This would help speed the production, quality, and maintenance of culturally inclusive spaces, and, critically, the embedding and ultimately the mainstreaming of culturally inclusive practice within those professions.
[i] This article was adapted from J. Agyeman, Entering Cosmopolis: Crossingover, Hybridity, Conciliation and the Intercultural City Ecosystem, Minding Nature, 7 (2014): 20-26. The original can be found here: https://www.humansandnature.org/entering-cosmopolis-crossingover-hybridity-conciliation-and-the-intercultural-city-ecosystem-by-julian-agyeman
[ii] R. Fincher and J. Jacobs, Cities of Difference (New York: Guilford Press, 1998); R. Sennett, The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities (New York: Knopf, 1990), 123.
[iii] . L. Sandercock, “When Strangers Become Neighbors: Managing Cities of Difference,” Journal of Planning Theory and Practice 1, no. 1 (2000): 13-20.
[iv] S. Low, D. Taplin, and S. Scheld, Rethinking Urban Parks: Public Space and Cultural Diversity (Austin: University of Texas, 2005), 1.
[v] See London Borough of Southwark, Chumleigh Gardens: The Multicultural Gardens in Burgess Park (London: London Borough of Southwark, 1995); and M. Prime, Plants for a Multicultural Garden (London: London Borough of Lewisham, 1993).
[vi] J.M. Valiente-Neighbours, “Mobility, Embodiment, and Scales: Filipino Immigrant Perspectives on Local Food,” Agriculture and Human Values 29 (2012): 531-41.
[vii] T. Mares and D. Peña, “Environmental and Food Justice: Toward Local, Slow and Deep Food Systems,” in Cultivating Food Justice: Race, Class and Sustainability, ed. A. Alkon and J. Agyeman (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2011), 197-219.
Laura Shillington is faculty in the Department of Geoscience and the Social Science Methods Programme at John Abbott College (Montréal). She is also a Research Associate at the Loyola Sustainability Research Centre, Concordia University (Montréal).
Many entries in this collective blog about the nature of cities will focus your attention on the nature that remains in cities, defined in terms of those patches of semi-natural habitat, the green bits, which are found in all cities, and which can be encouraged or discouraged by human action. Consider for example Celicia Herzog’s recent post delighting in the green landscapes in and around Rio de Janiero, connecting fragments of the famously-biodiverse Atlantic Forest in which Rio is emplaced. Or consider Mike Houck’s paean to the nature nearby, and within, Portland, Oregon, where his organization seeks to make Pacific Northwest cities both livable and loveable for people and other critters. Lovely pieces both, well worth your time.
I want to write about something related, but different, something which I think is both more encompassing and less well understood: that is, the total nature of cities. I want us to conceive of cities in their entirety as ecological places (more precisely, as ecological landscapes), where buildings, streets, boardwalks, sidewalks and parking lots, ball fields, basketball courts, fountains, and power plants, as well as the green bits, participate in a complex and evolving mosaic, where natural things happen. By nature I mean the interactions of soil and rock, air and water, energy and life, that characterize our verdant planet, and by natural, I mean the qualities of everyone and everything that participates in the great congress of life on Earth, including you and me. Those interactions and those qualities do not disappear when we build a city. Rather they take on new, idiosyncratic forms, which contrast in many, ordinary and extraordinary ways, with the ecological mosaics that formerly filled the place where the city now stands.
For example consider the fascinating work from Nova Scotia, where Jeremy Lundholm and his team surveyed the plants living in the cracks of sidewalks, the edges of the lawns, and other corners of the city of Halifax, and then traced back those plants, which most of us would think only as weeds, to the ecological niches where they were originally found in the world. They found that Halifax city plants have affinities with species that normally inhabit cliffs and talus slopes, and less commonly, grasslands and floodplains. Sidewalks are, from these plants’ perspective, a cliff on its side.
Plants adapted to cliffs often do well in cities, like this grass plant flowering next to an abandoned building in Savannah, Georgia. Credit: CasaDeQueso from flickr.com: http://www.flickr.com/photos/casadequeso/2324751838/sizes/z/in/photostream/
Lundholm’s open-minded inquiries are on to something: can we read an urban landscape “naturally”? Perhaps with analogues we can. Let’s let tall buildings stand in for cliffy hills, notice how gutters guide bubbling streams during a storm, observe sidewalks as animal trails with regular patterns of use in morning and evening. Let’s talk about the evaporation coming out of grates on a cold Manhattan morning in the same breath as the evapotranspiration from trees on a summer afternoon, for both flows are part of a hydrological cycle returning rain water from the ground to the atmosphere. Let’s find out how biological matter passes through an ecosystem, whether that biomass is measured in leaves falling from a tree, or sandwiches passing through the deli door. The nature of cities requires us to broaden our sense of what nature is.
Of course part of what we are broadening to include is us. In ancient texts, nature was commonly contrasted with artifice: artifice is what people create; nature is what is created without us. What a terrible notion! Terrible on two counts. Terrible on the first count, because it suggests an equivalency, as if one species (people) were somehow equivalent in creative powers to everything else on Earth, an idea ludicrous and arrogant, no matter how much we may delight privately in our own inventions. Terrible on the second count, because it suggests a sundering, a division of us from our world. Rather than seeing us as participants in the network of life, which we manifestly are, we instead imagine we are removed and separate. Much havoc has been wreaked on the backs of these misconceptions, with not the least of the mayhem originating from cities.
Streams in a city? They reappear after every storm flowing beside the traffic. Credit: Bengt Nyman from Wikipedia.org: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Street_gutter_in_Old_Town_Stockholm.jpg
So let us reconceive. What are cities? Cities are constructed habitat for people. Most species in nature come to an environment with whatever skills and characteristics their evolutionary history has provided them with and then they try to fit in. How well they do, whether they survive, depends on how well-suited they are to the new conditions. Cliff plants do well in sidewalks because they are pre-adapted to living in tight places. The human trick is instead of adapting to the environment, we change the environment to adapt to us. Too cold in winter? Build a building and close the window. Not enough food? Domesticate plants and animals and grow a garden. Water levels uncertain? Construct a dam and an aqueduct.
How are we able to do these things? Because our evolutionary gifts are large and flexible minds, an admirable ability to communicate in language, expression, and deed, and an affinity for each other: we are social like few animals have ever been. Because of these gifts, I can conceive of yesterday and contrast it with today; I can imagine different futures; and I can communicate my ideas with you, through this blog. If you find those ideas have merit, then we can work together to change the environment to match our conception of it. We can even, if we try, change our conceptions to match the environment.
And so we get to the nub of it: the nature of cities. Cities are ecological places, but have rarely been conceived in those terms, despite a history nearly 10,000 years in the making. Perhaps this will be our 21st century contribution to the notion of urban life: that cities are not only places of art, culture, communication, finance, business, science, religion, politics, and economy, but cities are also places for and from and of nature, cities of nature, nature with us in it.
It helps when thinking about the nature of cities to remember the nature that was there before the city, as in the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Mannahatta and Welikia Projects. Credit: Markley Boyer / The Mannahatta Project / Wildlife Conservation Society; Yann-Arthus Bertrand / CORBIS. Originally published in Eric Sanderson’s Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City (Abrams, 2009): http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/books/review/Sullivan-t.html
Seek the silent places where no jarring sound is heard and nothing breaks the stillness but the singing of a bird. Nature tells her secrets not to those who hurry by, but to those who walk with quiet heart and seeing eye. —Chinese proverb
I recently discovered that the word ‘resilience’ in my native language, Dutch, is ‘veerkracht’, which literally means ‘the strength of a feather’. I cannot think of a more beautiful and symbolic way to say how powerful nature is. While a feather may appear delicate, it is incredibly strong, each feather ultimately giving birds the strength to fly and move freely between earth and sky.
Over the past few years, I have been carefully exploring connections between IUCN’s work on biodiversity protection and the promotion of the value of nature within urban development. I have met many passionate experts, became part of new and exciting partnerships, discovered impressive scientific information on urban ecosystems, and found great examples which showcase the untapped potential of nature to enrich urban life.
Looking into the potential of unconventional partnerships and innovative ways to connect cities and urban dwellers to natural landscapes can provide significant benefits in their day-to-day lives. Protecting nature in and around cities can help secure natural resources and turn our current economic challenges into opportunities to achieve a sustainable and resilient urban future.
Pigeon feather. Photo: Chantal van Ham
The benefits of nature protected areas for economy and wellbeing
Investing in nature within and, particularly, beyond urban boundaries can offer a valuable economic return for cities—a value that is often underestimated. Increasing the understanding of the benefits of healthy natural systems and the services they provide, and subsequently integrating them into urban planning and decision-making, can help to strengthen water, energy, and food security; can promote health and wellbeing; can decrease disaster risk; and can reduce the impacts of climate change.
We’ve started to see these ideas catching on. Last year, over 6,000 participants from more than 170 countries met at the IUCN World Parks Congress in Sydney to celebrate an enormous variety of inspiring ways to address the challenges facing the planet through protected area approaches that respect and conserve nature while benefitting human health and prosperity. The Congress made clear that rebalancing the relationship between human society and nature is essential, and took stock of challenges and innovative ways in which ecosystems support our existence, cultural and spiritual identity, economies, and well-being.
A striking example is that a third of the world’s largest cities obtain a significant proportion of their drinking water from forest protected areas, which serve not only as a supplier, but also provide filtration services that lead to clean water and substantial cost savings. For instance, over the last few decades, Beijing has been facing a progressively worsening water crisis. Much of the original broadleaf forest in the Miyun watershed had disappeared. The IUCN Livelihoods and Landscapes (LLS) project in the Miyun watershed responded to the paradox of a landscape dominated by forests and impoverished local communities. Because there was little or no active management of the forests, the livelihood of these communities was under threat. The situation stressed the ever more urgent need to ensure that the source of Beijing’s rapidly dwindling water supplies—the forest—was protected. The project introduced a sustainable use and active management of the forests to be undertaken by local communities and made considerable efforts to find other ways to strengthen livelihoods, to promote sustainable forest use, and to add value at the local level.
This project shows just how immensely valuable, the connections between people and nature are.
Unconventional partnerships
New forms of collaboration will be required to mainstream natural solutions into urban and regional sustainable development and investment decisions. These partnerships will allow citizens to be reunited with nature, will allow our natural capital to be protected, and will optimize the values and benefits of ecosystem services.
A key partner to engage with to achieve this transition is the private sector. Whether knowingly or not, businesses rely on natural resources for their production processes and depend on healthy ecosystems to remove waste and to maintain soil, water, and air quality. At the same time, businesses can have major negative impacts on biodiversity. While the private sector is part of the problem, it can also be part of the solution—it can offer innovative answers to conservation issues.
Innovative business models that combine ecology and the economy already exist, as we learned during a dialogue on the contribution of green infrastructure to the circular economy. The Ford River Rouge Truck factory in Michigan, for example, has green roofs (providing a dynamic ecosystem with over 35 insect, spider, and bird species and 11 plant species) that filter 20 billion gallons of water per year, thereby contributing to storm water regulation and water filtration—all with substantial cost savings.
A partnership between The Nature Conservancy and Dow Chemical demonstrates how valuing natural capital can benefit business and the environment. At a large Dow facility in south Texas, the company, with the help of environmental scientists, has calculated that investing in natural resources such as marshes and mangroves can deliver environmental and financial benefits that are equal to or higher than those generated by conventional pollution controls. A Dow project in Seadrift, Texas, that cost about US 1.2 million and utilizes a wetland would have cost US 40 million if the company had built a traditional engineered wastewater treatment plant. The wetland also provides habitat for deer, bobcat, birds, and even alligators.
Another interesting example of creating business opportunities through investing in green spaces in urban areas is the Green Infrastructure Audit, which was developed in London’s Victoria Business District to identify options for installing new green spaces and improving existing areas. By mapping green infrastructure potential, this audit has revealed that enhancing the natural environment not only has the potential to improve worker satisfaction and increase local property values, but also to reduce peak summer temperatures and the costs to local businesses resulting from flooding, as well as to create further business opportunities.
The European Centre for Nature Conservation (ECNC), an IUCN NGO member organization in the Netherlands, has joined forces with two companies to tackle the problem of marine litter. Healthy Seas recovers abandoned fish nets that pollute our seas and regenerates them into high quality yarn, which is then turned into new gear, such as socks, swimwear and carpets. While producing new products from used materials, the initiative raises awareness about the importance of healthy seas, the removal of abandoned fishing nets from oceans and seas, and the financing of local coastal and marine projects to promote the protection of seas across Europe.
Leaders for Nature is the IUCN Netherlands’ business engagement network of twenty multinationals and major Dutch enterprises working together to green the economy. Its annual forum brings together private sector, government, and civil society stakeholders to identify ways of integrating natural capital into business management and practices. One of the challenges enumerated at this year’s forum was how to identify nature-based solutions for three sites in the Rotterdam and Amsterdam area. It turned out to be an inspiring exchange between unconventional partners on neigbourhood action to prevent flooding and urban heat, as well as to discuss plans for a Green Climate Corridor in the Amsterdam area—an innovative example of potentially larger, landscape-scale, replicable, nature-based action.
Green Cities Challenge, IUCN Leaders for Nature Forum 2015
A new initiative recently launched by IUCN, World Environmental Hubs, aims to create a global platform for recognition of cities and regions showing leadership in using nature to overcome the challenges they are facing and to help secure citizen wellbeing. This platform will bring together subnational governments with international environmental organizations, scientists, economists, and NGOs to increase cooperation, capacity-building, and knowledge-sharing for promoting and implementing nature-based solutions.
The connection between cities and the surrounding natural landscape
The need for increased awareness of the opportunities related to protection of nature is not just of importance for the business community. Many city dwellers do not have a clear understanding of the support that nature provides of their day-to-day lives. Encouraging the enhancement of biodiversity in cities, such as planting species of native plants in our backyards or creating places where butterflies or birds feel at home, can revive nature in even the most densely populated city. This helps people living in urban environments to reconnect with nature and learn about the fascinating relationship that exists between humans and the natural landscape surrounding them.
Shkodra, Albania. Photo: C. van Ham
Many cities have extensive green spaces; sometimes these areas are part of an integrated network linking urban green areas to forests and other natural ecosystems quite far outside the city. In Oslo, almost all citizens live within 300 meters of a green area or park. Helsinki’s 10 km long Central Park extends from the city centre north into an old growth forest, providing multiple benefits for people and biodiversity.
In 2003, the Metropolitan Government in Seoul, South Korea, uncovered and restored parts of the historic Cheonggyecheon River because the infrastructure covering it posed safety risks to citizens, meaning that it had to be either removed or repaired. The restoration of the river has led to an increase in fish and bird populations and an overall increase in biodiversity. The river also helps to cool temperatures by 3-5 degrees ((Yang and Cervero 2009) compared to surrounding areas and attracts an average of 64,000 visitors daily, all of whom contribute to Seoul’s economy. The restoration has served as a catalyst for an estimated US 1.98 billion worth of capital investment in Cheonggyecheon-area redevelopment (Kim et al. 2009).
Gyeongyecheon river, Seoul. Photo: C. van Ham
Vitoria Gasteiz, in the North of Spain, has invested in its natural capital by establishing a green belt, naturally connecting the city with the river and mountain ecosystems in its surroundings. Restoring these connections is essential for maintaining water flow, preventing soil erosion and flooding, reducing the urban heat island effect, creating habitat for a diversity of plant and animal species, offering opportunities for citizens and visitors to learn about nature and providing areas for recreation. Vitoria Gasteiz has been awarded the European Green Capital in 2012 for showing true leadership when it comes to protecting biodiversity and restoring the functions of the natural ecosystems within and around the city. It is an inspiring example for cities around the world.
Connecting people with nature
I believe, as many of The Nature of Cities bloggers do, that a sustainable future is in the hands of urban citizens and their perspectives on nature. The value of biodiversity and ecosystems for life is essential to making the transition towards a sustainable future.
As David Maddox pictures so clearly in his beautiful story ‘It is difficult to take in the glory of the dandelion’, we can decide as societies what we value, what we want the places we live in to look like, and what to do with the financial resources available to our planners, developers, and citizens.
It remains a real challenge to convince those used to traditional investment models and current economic thinking that nature is not a cost, but an investment offering good rates of return. Creating solutions via unconventional partnerships with a long-term vision, a sense of commitment, and a willingness to find ways to share, learn, and promote successful stories is key to transforming nature’s economic role into an asset for business and society. More work is required to establish a comprehensive understanding of when, where, and how investment in natural capital makes good social and economic sense. Like Dow and The Nature Conservancy, finding a common language and shared goals, while building on complementary knowledge, can serve as a strong foundation.
Seeing nature as an essential provider of ecosystem services and key contributor to economic prosperity and social wellbeing starts with considering nature as part of one’s own life, especially if that is in an urban environment.
Faucons peregrines Images cameras IRSNB
Integrating nature into people’s lives can be done in many ways. One of my personal favourites is the Peregrine falcons nesting on the top of one of the towers of the St. Michael and St. Gudula Cathedral in the heart of Brussels, where I live. With the use of modern technology, we can follow the chicks from when they hatch until they spread their wings, ready for their first flight.
I hope that all of us will find new inspiration and value in bringing nature close to our homes, as well as in more remote green spaces and protected areas, so that the understanding of the connection between healthy ecosystems, lands, communities, and economies will place the same value in natural capital as in social and financial capital.
Kang C.D., and R. Cervero (2009). From Elevated Freeway to Urban Greenway: Land Value Impacts 31 of the CGC Project in Seoul, Korea. Urban Studies 46, 2771–2794.
Kim, H.S., T.G. Koh, and K.W. Kwon. 2009. The Cheonggyecheon (Stream) Restoration Project – Effects of the restoration work. Cheonggyecheon Management Team, Seoul Metropolitan Facilities Management Corporation. Seoul, South Korea.
Parks are not simply pleasant amenities, but serve as a foundation to the social, economic, environmental, and mental health of communities. By ensuring every resident of every city lives within a 10-minute walk of a park, we can fundamentally and positively impact the quality of life for hundreds of millions.
Since the mid-nineteenth century, parks have always been deeply intertwined in the modern identities of cities. In the U.S., Central Park is less a feature of New York than it is a key component of its essential character, much as Prospect Park once similarly defined the emerging city of Brooklyn, and Brooklyn Bridge Park defines the “new” Brooklyn; Boston Common remains a testament to Boston’s proud, revolutionary past as Balboa Park in San Diego and Golden Gate Park in San Francisco embody those cities’ forward-looking idealism and promise of opportunity. Small cities and towns too have their Central Parks, if not always in natural and architectural splendor, yet still in their importance to nurturing communities through the provision of a truly public space.
Brooklyn Bridge Park. Photo: Adrian BenepeLong Meadow, Prospect Park, Brooklyn. Photo: Sanden WolffDolores Park. Photo: Tim Bartel
It’s possible, however, that many planners and civic leaders continue to greatly undervalue parks as key pieces of a city’s ecological and social fabric. This is evidenced by how one in three Americans lack access to a park within a 10-minute walk, leaving more than 100 million people deprived of easily accessed green space, creating a cascade of impacts on mental and physical health, and even economic opportunities for these cities. This is why The Trust for Public Land (TPL), in partnership with the Urban Land Institute (ULI), and the National Recreation and Parks Association (NRPA), launched the 10-Minute Walk to a Park Campaign, a movement to ensure a great park within a half-mile of every person, in every neighborhood, in every city across America (see how the 14,000 American cities and towns fare here). The Trust for Public Land and its partners founded the campaign on the essential premise that parks and open space not only have vast inherent value in connecting urban dwellers to nature, they also have a multitude of other benefits that make them versatile and comprehensive solutions to the diverse array of challenges cities increasingly face, and will continue to face as the U.S. and all other nations continue to urbanize.
Parks foster social interaction and provide gathering spaces, they also improve the economies of surrounding neighborhoods, and, consequently, the encompassing city, through the appreciating value of nearby properties, growth in tourism revenue, and the provision of free and accessible recreation. The environmental value of parks is similarly significant, from their ability to soak up storm water runoff and keep it out of storm sewers to their ability to regulate temperatures in our urban “heat islands”, lowering temperatures by as much as 7 degrees Fahrenheit. As cities become forced to think increasingly about extreme weather events and heat due to climate change, parks and more open green space will provide efficient and sustainable alternatives to impervious, heat-trapping gray infrastructure.
Public health is also affected by the presence of parks. The built environment in which we live factors strongly in how our individual health is determined, particularly in how it can encourage or discourage active and healthy behaviors. Parks, in conjunction with a host of other factors, including employment, adequate transportation and housing, strong social ties and access to health care, can positively affect the health and wellbeing of a neighborhood, in turn reducing costs and addressing latent inequities.
Parks then are not simply pleasant amenities but serve as a foundation to the social, economic, environmental, and mental health of communities. By ensuring every resident of every city in the U.S. lives within a 10-minute walk of a park, we can fundamentally and positively impact the quality of life for hundreds of millions of Americans.
More city officials are now realizing the intrinsic and instrumental value of parks. This is reflected in the fact that, as of February 2019, more than 240 mayors have signed onto the campaign. Mayors from Anaheim, Topeka, Memphis, Boston, Chicago, Minneapolis, Oakland, and Washington, D.C., among many others, are taking actionable steps towards realizing a 10-minute walk to park vision, adopting the principles and strategies laid out by the campaign, and working closely with experts from TPL, NRPA, and ULI to design new master plans that propose ways in which their citizens can all have easy access to green space.
Lewisville, Texas is one of those cities that has recently committed to this goal and has met words with action. A suburb of Dallas with a high concentration of immigrants and refugees, the city composed an updated parks and open space master plan with funding from our campaign’s planning grant, aiming to ensure 85 percent of the city’s residents live within a 10-minute walk to a park by 2025. Equity is a top consideration of Stacy Anaya, Director of Lewisville Parks and Recreation, who has called her city a testament to how “poor urban planning contributes to a systematic segregation of access to public spaces and services”. They’ve engaged community members and brought in partners such as Chin Community Ministries, the Youth Action Council, and Keep Lewisville Beautiful to ensure full participation in the creation and implementation of their roadmap to the 10-minute walk vision.
In Tukwila, Washington, a diverse and growing suburb of Seattle, city officials set out to engage their community in plans to reach 100% 10-minute walk park access. Another recipient of the technical assistance grant, Tukwila’s mayor, Allan Ekberg, announced, “Parks play a critical role in the health and well-being of our communities. In Tukwila, we are proud to engage with our diverse communities in connecting all our residents to quality local parks within a 10-minute walk from home.” Tukwila will, by 2020, have adopted a new Park, Recreation and Open Space plan.
Boston is perhaps the ultimate example of a city that has taken its 10-minute walk commitment seriously. In October 2018, Mayor Marty Walsh and city officials announced that they reached 100% 10-minute walk to park access. To reach this milestone, Boston city leaders leveraged a data-driven approach to craft a master plan that pinpointed underserved neighborhoods and offered creative and comprehensive solutions to meet those needs. Joint-use agreements—those between the city and the education department, which allow schoolyards to be used as public parks outside of school hours—also helped create new forms of open space in communities that may have otherwise lacked it. Boston, however, continues to invest in its park system: the city recently allocated $230 million to parks through. Imagine Boston 2030, and their Resilient Boston Harbor initiative includes parks as a key of part of its effort to strengthen Boston’s climate resiliency.
Benita Hussain, Director of the 10-Minute Walk Campaign, with Boston Mayor Marty Walsh.Photo: Maddalena Polletta
For many cities, shared-use agreements between school districts and municipal governments offer perhaps the clearest path towards comprehensively realizing the 10-minute walk vision at scale, particularly in dense geographies. Often poorly equipped, locked after school hours, and consequently underutilized, schoolyards are places with vast potential, capable of being transformed into neighborhood parks that forge new relationships between nature—and the myriad of benefits that come with it—and communities. These new “green schoolyards” that double as water absorbent, green infrastructure are, as Children andNature define them, “multi-functional school grounds designed for and by the school community that [offer] places for students, teachers, parents and community members to play, learn, explore and grow.” In New York, TPL has led the transformation of over two-hundred asphalt lots into green schoolyards, serving 4.5 million people within a 10-minute walk. Other cities are beginning to implement this strategy, Boston being one of them. Since 2014, the city and schools of Philadelphia in partnership with TPL have created green schoolyards that provide 10-minute walk to a park access to 136,412 community members. A pilot program of five sites in Oakland will serve 34,000 people with 10-minute walk access. Green schoolyards can be the lynchpin of a city’s plan to provide more neighborhood park access to its residents.
The 10-minute walk to a park vision is spreading across the country, as it becomes accepted by more communities and embraced by a growing number of mayors and other civic leaders. And this vision, founded on the knowledge that parks are multi-benefit keystones of every neighborhood, is a major part of any solution to the mounting challenges cities face. Cities such as Boston are leading the way, while smaller communities including Tukwila and Lewisville are planning and spearheading their own, ambitious efforts. All share in a common belief: that access to green space creates more vibrant, inclusive cities for all.
Benita Hussain is a former advisor to Mike Bloomberg and late-Boston Mayor Tom Menino with corporate law degree and 15 years of experience in climate change, cities, and sustainable development. She currently leads Trust for Public Land’s national 10-Minute Walk Campaign to expand green spaces in cities.
When I pulled up in my friend’s truck to the tunnel entrance to the Marin Headlands, part of San Francisco’s Golden Gate National Recreation Area, I entered what appeared to be a fine mist of white plant fluff. I turned off the motor and observed. Incidentally, the white plant fluff had wings, and was tumbling frantically in the early afternoon sun. “Less vegetable than animal”, I thought, trying to figure out what I was witnessing.
As a technique for sustainable development, citizen science is a powerful tool that touches on each of the three pillars of sustainability.
When the answer clicked, I smiled to myself. This was the termite flight, a swarm cued by weather. It was to be expected, so I had been told, after the gentle rain that had fallen the previous night—the first “storm” to drop at least a quarter inch of rain (as the termites require) since I had arrived in the Bay Area in July of 2015.
I learned about the termite flight from the formidable Tim Behr, one of the volunteer citizen scientists at my internship with the Golden Gate Raptor Observatory, a non-profit that monitors the migration of birds of prey as they pass through the Bay Area. As a community science project, the GGRO fosters the transfer of natural history information—about the migration of birds of prey and beyond—between scientists and community members through a long-term migration monitoring effort.
The Marin Headlands, as viewed from Hawk Hill. Photo: Laura Booth
Sharing natural history is just one of the ways that citizen science can facilitate the process of sustainable development as understood within the framework of the three pillars outlined in 1987’s Bruntland Report: economics, society, and the environment.
Citizen science is generally described as the participation of non-scientists in scientific projects. Like many of our other decades-long volunteers at the GGRO, Tim represents the GGRO’s model of citizen science: investing heavily in a group of committed volunteers. But citizen science initiatives are remarkably diverse, ranging in scope from ecological monitoring via bioblitzes (check out those held in Melbourne, London, New York, and San Francisco) to crowd-sourced, online data acquisition about the shape of galaxies.
GGRO volunteers at work. Photo: Ruth Cantwell
Economically, citizen science promotes the expansion of research efforts whose worth is not captured by our current capital-based valuation paradigm. From a financial perspective, understanding bird of prey movements, or constellation shapes, for example, lacks intuitive, direct impact justifying the employment of highly trained scientists. By engaging citizen scientists, these research efforts—which provide community benefits in addition to low-cost data acquisition for managing scientists—can still take place, despite challenging funding landscapes.
The GGRO is a prime example: the cost of staffing our hawk watch and banding programs with professionals each migration season could easily exceed our non-profit budget. By keeping a smaller staff and training a labor base of 300 volunteers, the GGRO has been able to maintain a 30-year research effort on hawks that is unparalleled on the West Coast. This data is vital for the evidence-based management and conservation of North American raptors, who perform an important role as ecological indicators and predators high in the food web. In addition, the process of collecting this data is valuable for maintaining a cultural ecosystem service: citizens obtain satisfaction merely from knowing that birds of prey (particularly such charismatic species as the Bald Eagle, our national symbol, and the Peregrine Falcon, an emblem of ferocity and wildness) persist in their natural habitats. In this sense, citizen science circumvents the problem of our undervaluing of conservation biology by ensuring that essential research goes on—funding be damned.
Future citizen scientists: students from the Marin Horizon School visit Hawk Hill. Photo: Laura Booth
Likewise, citizen science can be an economically efficient way to collect massive amounts of data over time. Take eBird, Cornell’s app for birders, which harnesses the information collected by countless amateur and professional bird watchers to investigate the distribution and abundance of bird species all over the world. eBird-ers submitted more than nine million bird observations in May 2015 alone. No team of biologists could collect data at that scale.
Shorter-term citizen science projects can also have long-term economic implications. For example, bioblitzes—rapid efforts that use volunteers and professionals to catalogue as much of the biodiversity in a designated space, such as a park or neighborhood, as possible—have been employed all over the world to provide baseline estimates of biodiversity in locations where none previously existed, as several TNOC writers have discussed. The data collected by citizen scientists in bioblitzes can be used as preliminary data to justify research proposals to funding agencies, can help inform location-based land management decisions at minimum cost to governmental and non-profit entities, and can alert communities to the imminent loss of species that provide financially valuable ecosystem services.
Publicity for the 2014 Melbourne BioBlitz. Image: www.melbourne.vic.gov.au
Of course, all of these citizen science initiatives support sustainability through the benefits they provide to the environment.
In the case of the GGRO, citizen scientists are collecting information on the health of ecological indicator species. By virtue of their high trophic position, birds of prey tend to be affected by environmental contaminants before the damage of those contaminants manifests in other species; in this sense, problems for raptor populations can act as an early warning for problems afflicting entire ecosystems. This was exactly what happened in the 1960s, when the widespread use of the pesticide DDT caused eggshell thinning and population crashes in several species of raptors—a phenomenon famously elucidated by Rachel Carson in her book, Silent Spring. Today, our volunteers are assisting in the research of a different environmental contaminant: rodenticides, the active chemicals in rat poison, which bio-accumulate in predators and which may be impacting species at all levels of the food web.
Generally speaking, online applications—such as eBird and iNaturalist—and bioblitzes make use of citizen scientists for ecological and biodiversity monitoring. Both of these activities are essential for rapidly increasing our knowledge of ecosystem function and community ecology, as well as for assessing conservation threats.
In addition to biological applications, citizen science can provide data and labor support for land-use and planning. One such example is TreesCount2015!, a citizen-science based initiative that Phil Silva has described at TNOC, and which aims to map every single street tree in New York City.
Citizen scientists measure trees as part of TreesCount2015. Photo: @healthforyouths on Twitter.
You’re probably still wondering where, exactly, the termites factor into my citizen science story.
My personal fascination with citizen science stems from its ability to unite the environmental and social facets of the sustainable development challenge.
Through much of this post, I have used my current internship with the GGRO as a case study in the relationship between a citizen science-based initiative and sustainability. And when I encountered the termite flight on my drive home, the linkage of the social and environmental benefits of citizen science became clear in my mind.
As a recent transplant to California, I knew almost nothing about its natural history, let alone its entomological history. The only reason I could correctly identify the termite flight was because of my friendship with one of GGRO’s volunteers. Were the GGRO a strictly professional organization, employing only avian biologists, I may never have had that delightful nugget of natural history passed on to me.
GGRO volunteers in conversation on the Hill. Photo: Nelia White.
Although no formalized assessments of the social impact of the GGRO on the local community, or even within its community of volunteers, have been published, the impact of such work is qualitatively obvious. It builds a community that coheres around experience in and stewardship of the environment.
In each of the examples I’ve given, scientists—biological, social, and astrophysical, among others—have joined with laypersons to gather a little bit more information about the world we share. Such initiatives have the power to rally various kinds of previously disengaged communities around science and the natural world, and to spread the creativity and wonder of science both to groups that traditionally have not had access to science and to future generations.
And although citizen science is far from a panacea for the disillusionment of the public from environmental issues, I believe it has substantial power to reconnect individuals to their environment—and to engage them in fighting back against the many dangers humans pose to it.
Every day, citizen scientists contribute their time and energy to support thousands of research projects around the world (Bonney et al., 2014). They collect, categorize, and analyze data, generously volunteering their time and their personal resources in return for little other than recreational enjoyment or the personal satisfaction of helping others.
An example of Melbourne’s biodiversity: the crested pigeon. Photo: Museum Victoria
However, as we learnt from Melbourne’s recent BioBlitz (a public event to generate a snapshot of the city’s biodiversity), the benefits citizen scientists receive from experiencing biodiversity firsthand and the value of public engagement in managing urban ecosystems can be just as important as the data that is collected.
Citizen science in history
In the early 2000s, scientists at the University of Washington, Seattle, outsourced critical scientific work on protein structure prediction to citizen scientists. Within three weeks, those citizens produced a near-exact model for a protein whose structure had eluded scientists for more than a decade. In fact, as far back as the 17th century, naturalists such as John Ray (1627-1705) were commandeering the goodwill of friends and family to assist in recording plant and animal classifications. Ray’s work paved the way for Carl Linnaeus, the “father of modern taxonomy,” and thousands of others.
There are many such examples of positive and unexpected contributions of citizen science to knowledge, and interest in citizen science for urban nature is growing, as evidenced by recent essays on TNOC. Yet, in the peer reviewed literature, the validity of citizen science outputs remains in doubt.
For those city practitioners and scientists who wish to advance knowledge of urban nature, there are some serious questions that need to be asked. As technological sophistication increases and barriers to rapid data collection and analysis subsequently decrease, are we denying an untapped army of citizen enthusiasts the opportunity to collaborate to benefit urban nature? Through evaluating our experience with the Melbourne BioBlitz, we argue that the potential for citizen scientists to contribute significantly to the stewardship of urban biodiversity is very great indeed.
The Melbourne BioBlitz
Another example of Melbourne’s biodiversity: White’s Skink. Photo: Museum Victoria
Last year, the City of Melbourne called on citizen scientists to help develop the city’s first Urban Ecology and Biodiversity strategy by participating in a BioBlitz—an intense period of dedicated mass biological surveying.
Melbourne is a biodiverse city, blessed with parks, rivers and a bay all on its doorstep (Ives et al., 2013). However, Melbourne’s biodiversity is challenged by a combination of factors including climate change, rapid population growth, and land use change. In addition, an increasingly urbanised public has less and less familiarity with nature and wildlife.
The City of Melbourne plans to address this issue through the development of a contemporary strategy that aims to bring biodiversity to the fore of urban design and planning in the city. However, apart from a public tree database and limited biodiversity data for three parks, city officers had no comprehensive records of biodiversity. Without such data, it is difficult to set meaningful targets and goals for the strategy. Wide-scale biodiversity data collection by professionals in a short time frame would have been resource intensive and cost prohibitive. The concept of a BioBlitz represented an appealing method of data collection for a number of reasons—such an initiative would involve the community in the development of the new biodiversity strategy from the outset, would increase biodiversity awareness and education levels, and could remove private realm access barriers.
The Melbourne BioBlitz was conducted over 15 days from 31 October to 14 November 2014. During that time, more than 700 citizens participated in the initiative, collecting over 3,000 biodiversity records for the city. Of those 3,000 records, 600 sightings were identified to species or genus level and 500 different species were identified by common names. Groups of taxa identified included insects, mammals, reptiles, birds, plants, fungi and aquatic life. Invertebrates and birds together accounted for 90 percent of all sightings across the municipality.
The lesser long-eared bat (Nyctophilus geoffroyi). Photo: Caragh Threlfall
Rare moths that had not been sighted for decades were discovered fluttering around Fitzroy Gardens, the city’s most central and most visited park. Hidden amongst the canopy in the same park, participants found microbats that have not been encountered in the same abundance in any other urban park in the area. Melbourne’s media became particularly enamoured with the local biodiversity, with conversations and observations on butterflies, bats, bees and birds making positive national headlines.
The BioBlitz employed a variety of methods to facilitate citizen participation, from expert led surveys and activities to a variety of online tools including Bowerbird (an interactive biodiversity data repository), Instagram, Twitter, and the City’s own Participate Melbourne website. The preferred method for data capture during the BioBlitz turned out to be handwritten sightings, with over 750 sightings submitted in this format. Submissions to Participate Melbourne and Bowerbird closely followed the tally from handwritten sightings, with 744 and 739 uploads, respectively. Participants used Instagram and Twitter to a much lesser extent; participants used Twitter primarily to promote the BioBlitz rather than to record sightings.
This unique event represented Melbourne’s first foray into citizen science to inform policy development. The lessons learned offer an ideal basis for reflection on whether citizen science can be an effective means for influencing urban policymaking.
Lessons learned
Our experience with the City of Melbourne BioBlitz has provided many insights, both about how to administer a citizen science project as well as how the general public responds to urban nature. Typically, the primary object of citizen science programs is to generate data that can be used to answer scientific questions. The efficacy of the BioBlitz for this function has yet to be demonstrated. Despite the huge number of species observation records, the design of the event has made it impossible to determine what proportion of the biodiversity of Melbourne was represented in the survey. The BioBlitz does, however, provide a baseline dataset that can be expanded. Of greater value than the data that citizen scientists collected was the level of public engagement that occurred. We found that BioBlitz participants expressed a high degree of interest in contributing to the development of the City’s urban ecology and biodiversity strategy. This is clearly a novel approach to public engagement with policy and it has potential to be adopted in other jurisdictions around the world.
Regardless of the robustness of the scientific data gathered, the event helped to make visible the often-invisible ecology of the city. This was true for both scientists and the public. Scientists made many comments about their surprise in finding so many species (particularly of invertebrates) in the middle of a major capital city. Perhaps even more rewarding was the surprise and joy expressed by the community participants at the animals they found in the city. Indeed, many did not realise before the event that microbats live in Melbourne! The event made evident that people have a natural curiosity for nature, which was surprisingly easily accessed. Further, the educational value of the event for children was evident from their many questions and fascinated expressions as they were shown around the gardens and green spaces.
Local residents participating in the BioBlitz. Photo: City of Melbourne
The BioBlitz helped to foster a sense of stewardship towards biodiversity in local residents. While this is difficult to demonstrate empirically, anecdotal evidence suggests that many participants will undertake new gardening practices that enhance biodiversity in their own backyards. We felt that the experience of biodiversity through the BioBlitz had a far greater impact on people’s behaviour than the presentation of information ever could.
Conversations with participants also pointed to the benefit of the BioBlitz as an exercise in building social cohesion and connection with local government. Participants made positive comments about the non-commercial nature of the event and were pleased that it was free to attend. Clearly, there is a strong community desire for these types of programs, with benefits extending far beyond purely ecological outcomes. The positive sentiment towards the event was even expressed strongly in numerous tweets and Facebook posts. For example:
“I’m not generally keen on spiders, but they all have their role to play.”
“Surprisingly, since I took part in #bioblitzmelb I have a newfound respect for flies.”
“I’m loving all of these native bees! Who’d have thought that we had so many!”
A Melbourne BioBlitz particpant’s Tweet following BatBlitzing.
Finally, one of the biggest lessons that we learned from the experience is the value of collaboration between different organisations and individuals within the city. The BioBlitz was supported by a range of partners (Museum Victoria, RMIT University, University of Melbourne, the Australian Research Centre for Urban Ecology, naturalist groups, ‘friends of’ groups, non-government organisations, and many natural resource management agencies). The event represented a unique opportunity for collaboration between multiple researchers and scientists from these institutions that would not otherwise have occurred. Although each organisation had its individual agenda in participating in the BioBlitz, they all shared an important vision: helping to enhance Melbourne’s natural environment and biodiversity. Museum Victoria, for example, has both an interest and a mandate to document and promote the natural places and animals of Victoria. University academics eager to make a tangible difference to the future of the city were also given opportunities to pursue research questions related to the event. The BioBlitz therefore provided the ideal vehicle for organisations to work together to achieve shared and individual goals. Encouragingly, the connections forged through such an event persist long after its conclusion and have potential to enhance biodiversity initiatives in the city in the future.
Practical guidelines for implementing an urban BioBlitz
There are many insights that we gained for running a successful BioBlitz that we hope can assist anyone planning an event in the future, regardless of your location or budget!
Foster collaborations with local organisations
The success of our event was largely a reflection of strong partnerships between the City of Melbourne and our diverse range of partner organisations. The partnerships brought together people with complementary skills and allowed the event to reach a much wider audience than would have otherwise been possible.
Draw on the experience and talent within your organisation
Organisations such as local governments, Museums, and Universities have a range ofpersonnel that can assist with executing a successful event. The Melbourne BioBlitz not only drew on the scientific expertise within participating organisations, but also on the expertise of staff in communications, media, events management, horticulture, park management and cultural heritage. We also ran staff-specific events and staff photo competitions to increase the participation of staff within each organisation and to get them engaged with issues of urban biodiversity.
Establish an interactive website
As part of the Melbourne BioBlitz, we established a website dedicated to the event. The website detailed the aims of the event and the pathways for participation, from joining an expert-led tour to downloading a toolkit that provided step-by-step instructions for seeking biodiversity in one’s own backyard. Apart from being a repository of information on the event, the website allowed people to upload their own photos of biodiversity from around the city. This allowed members of the public to contribute meaningful data on Melbourne’s urban biodiversity, which is subsequently being used to plan how to better manage biodiversity with the city.
Develop a toolkit to assist people to participate when & where it suits them
To ensure people could participate in the BioBlitz at any time, we developed a toolkit that could be downloaded as a PDF on our website. The toolkit provided hints and tips for finding biodiversity, such as where to look for reptiles or insects, and what times of day are best for finding birds and mammals. It also detailed the various pathways available for people to submit their observations, from mailing or emailing a form to uploading photos to our website. The toolkit allowed people to engage with the BioBlitz as citizen scientists in areas that our facilitated events couldn’t reach, such as their backyards, streetscapes, local parks, and even businesses. As a result, the spatial reach of the event was far greater than we could have ever achieved with the finite number of events we could host ourselves.
Utilise web-based biodiversity databases and phone apps
There are many web-based databases currently in use to collate biodiversity data from around the globe, such as iNaturalist. Fortunately, some of these databases have associated platforms for uploading data via phone apps or online forms. In Australia, the Federal government has created the online Atlas of Living Australia (ALA), which hosts all of Australia’s biodiversity data. To facilitate the upload of data captured during events such as BioBlitzes, Museum Victoria has created an interactive website called Bowerbird, which can be used by citizen scientists to create biodiversity records for Australia. All data uploaded to Bowerbird is linked to Australia’s national database (ALA), allowing citizens to contribute to the collection of meaningful data, which is being used across the country by scientists and policy makers. Wherever possible during Melbourne’s BioBlitz, we encouraged staff, participants, and expert leaders to take photos of the biodiversity they were finding across the city and to upload their photos to Bowerbird. Not only does Bowerbird allow for the identification of species within each photo, it also links directly to the ALA, allowing for the development of a spatially explicit biodiversity data layer that can be used to help develop biodiversity policy for the city. The use of Bowerbird during Melbourne’s BioBlitz provided a complementary method for data collection in addition to our website and toolkit.
Use conventional and social media to your advantage
One of the ‘did you know’ posts used to generate public interest in the BioBlitz.
The Melbourne BioBlitz attracted its fair share of radio interviews and newspaper articles, but we also developed a social media campaign that we designed to sustain interest in the event at key times throughout its duration. Not only did we have all institutions involved in tweeting before and during the event, we also created a hashtag that was used on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, #BioBlitzMelb. We used a series of sponsored posts on Facebook to advertise the event, which assisted enormously with increasing its reach. To generate interest, each post included a new photo of an animal or plant that was known to occur in the city, and a fun fact about each species. This series of ‘Did you know……’ posts received between 700 and 45,000 views, and turned out to be the most successful way of increasing participation in the event.
Consider hosting events across a range of locations and times
We hosted 52 events over a two-week window, instead of running a more traditional, intensive 24-hour BioBlitz event. The event schedule was designed to span times critical to fauna and included sites for which biodiversity data was needed. We also designed the schedule to include weekday and weekend events that captured a wide range of participants. We included early morning dawn bird surveys, lunch-time invertebrate walks, and nocturnal bat and moth surveying events that attracted people before work, workers on their lunch breaks, tourists, families, school groups, and local residents. We also chose a mix of locations in the city to hold these facilitated events: some that we knew would be great places to spot birds, others for which we had no data at all. Our chosen locations had a range of facilities such as a power sources, shelter, toilets, parking, and public transport to ensure everyone could get to each location. Through this mix of sites and times we were able not only to acquire information on a wide range of taxa, we were also able to highlight the fantastic array of wildlife that calls Melbourne home in unexpected places, helping to create a sense of excitement about the potential for Melbourne to be a biodiverse city.
Chris Ives, Yvonne Lynch, Caragh Threlfall, and Mark Norman
Melbourne
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.
Dr Mark Norman is Head of Sciences at Museum Victoria where he leads the large and active natural sciences research team of curators, collection managers, postdoctoral fellows, postgraduate students, research associates and volunteers.
How can humanity live, together with this earth instead of against it? This question is at the core of what both City as Nature and FRIEC are doing.
Co-sponsored by The Nature of Cities and FRIEC, the inaugural City as Nature Festival took place from 11-22 October 2019 in Osaka, Japan. Featuring interactive, place-based art, workshops, concerts, walks, talks, and storytelling events, the festival aimed at cultivating our awareness of urban environmental landscapes.
The works and activities within the City as Nature Festival represent not only multiple disciplines and ways of seeing, but also nearly every living generation, with participants ranging in age from 5 to 89 years.
Speaking to themes of environmental justice, the voices of festival participants consider both human consequences and those of our non-human brothers and sisters—plant, animal, fungi, bacterial—with whom we share this precarious position, as living beings struggling to find our proper place within a living, rapidly changing, earth.
In doing so, thirty creative practitioners from seven countries and over eight-hundred festival attendees helped each other to uncover moments and places where humans and our cities are intertwined with the rest of nature.
Core Festival Exhibition
Water: Multi-Species Migration and Displacement
When we think of the roles that flags play in our culture, we most often think of their divisive roles. A national flag for instance, brings together people within borders, yet in doing so, it also requires the alienation of the people inside those borders, from those on the outside. Such flags create unity, yet also division. But what of the flags which unite us with each other and our environments, rather than divide us?
Guest artist Takuma Uematsu (Minoh, Japan) talks about his work during a City as Nature exhibition tour. Photo: Patrick M. Lydon
This question forms the nexus of the exhibition, Water: Multi-Species Migration and Displacement. The core exhibition of the City as Nature Festival in Osaka, this exhibition is based on the system of international maritime flags, and it enables us to take a different view of what flags might represent. The works give new life and meaning to a 150-year-old system of international maritime communication, creating, as artists Robin Lasser and Marguerite Perret state, a “new language” that like the ocean itself, is in a continual state of ebb, flow, and transformation.
Here, rather than symbols of division, flags start their life as symbols of unity, and of a common language across and through bodies of water. These symbols have been further transformed by artists into celebrations, messages, and inquiries at the crossroads of culture, creativity, and our living environment. Rather than tools to stake claim and build borders, the flags here offer us bridges between borders.
Indeed, the bridges created within this exhibition are many: bridges between countries, generations, social standing, and economic power, between disciplines, between jobs, between ways of living, and between political viewpoints. In this, they show the power of art to help cultivate social wellness between people of different backgrounds and cultures, connecting human concepts of place, power, and providence.
Musician Bomnunbyeol Kim (Seoul, Korea) gives a live performance for the Water Film exhibition during the City as Nature Festival. Photo: Patrick M. Lydon
To mark the occasion of the exhibition’s visit to Osaka, the curators invited a cast of nearly thirty creatives from seven different countries to contribute works of textile, sculpture, photography, drawing, installation, weaving, film, music, and performance. Further groups of volunteer teachers, community leaders and academics, helped connect the exhibition with the community by co-hosting various public events and workshops. These participants add their voices to an already impressive array of what is now more than 120 artworks from professional artists, students, and the general public, that comprise the Water: Multi Species Migration and Displacement project to date.
Art & Nature: Connecting neighborhoods, regions, and nations
Of the artworks displayed in Osaka, roughly half are produced by international artists, and the other half by artists living in the Kansai region where the exhibition is being held. Though these works vary widely in medium, they are all linked together, through a common goal of examining our relationships with water. Perhaps just as important, they are also linked through the geography and history of the very place where the exhibition is held, and its own relationship with water.
Artist Masahiro Kawanaka (Osaka, Japan) explains his work, which considers relationships between the machine oil from nearby factories, and the waterways beside them. Photo: Patrick M. Lydon
Today, the Osaka neighborhood called Kitakagaya hosts a combination of warehouses, factories, gardens, homes, small businesses, and artist studios at estuary’s edge. Chidori Bunka, the main exhibition venue for this festival, was built and repaired, often in strange fashion, by the shipwrights who lived here over the course of several decades. Informally, their marks also make up part of the exhibition. A few centuries before the shipbuilding factories, this entire area was itself part of the ocean. This land today, still breathes with the sea.
The art here speaks to these local situations, and yet also to a larger global awareness and context. As this exhibition docks itself in Osaka, it enters a space and time where the urban landscape becomes part of the artwork, not only as a subject, but through engaging the eyes, ears, hands, and minds of local people—craftspeople, farmers, chefs, architects, children, parents, teachers, students from local high schools and universities, and various other practitioners—in dialogue, and in the act of producing new knowledge.
In doing so, they offer us clues to answer a critical question facing humanity: How can humanity live, together with this earth instead of against it? This question is at the core of what both City as Nature and FRIEC are doing.
As we have learned, the answers here—as any answer to such a question must be—are unique reflections of the diverse individuals asking the question. Their common ground is in acknowledging the need to form working relationships with their environments, and in this, each culture, each place, and each person must find their own ways. In this multitude voices, the participants each play a role in following the water’s path, uncovering and sharing the wisdom it gives each of us along the way. Through the power of art and awareness, such community-engaged exhibitions fulfill an important role for the future of humanity, by helping urban dwellers investigate the collective and connected current of which they are a part.
Visitors take part in a “Signaling Water” workshop by Robin Lasser and Pittore Felice, one of the multiple public workshops held during the City as Nature Festival. Photo: Patrick M. Lydon
One might also view this exhibition as a river, one which flows and meanders its way through mountains, into low-lying valleys, wetlands, and further out to sea, along the way collecting and depositing—as rivers do—valuable nutrients. Each momentary pause offers a chance to deposit the treasures of person and culture from the last place, while collecting new treasures to bring where the currents take these works next.
West Asian countries Azerbaijan and Georgia recreate themselves and their cities in post-Soviet times.
Walking gives us a slow and intimate way to notice the subtle similarities and differences between cities.
We consciously and sub-consciously collect details and compare cities as we slowly make our way from Point A to Point B by foot. We have even created a mental game to pass the time during the many hours we are outside.
One version of the game is mentally listing and analyzing the things we perceived about cities in countries that have had a recent shared history but are now left to cast a new footprint in the world. Since we have spent many months walking in Central and West Asia, we often find ourselves stacking up cities that until the 1990s were under Soviet rule, and are now defining their new niche on the regional and global stage.
Azerbaijan walking route.
We started doing this last year when we passed through Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan and stayed for some time in the cities of Bishkek, Osh, Khorugh, Dushanbe, Bukhara, and Samarkand. We consider the look and feel of the cities now, imagine how they were before and guess what direction they are heading in. We notice things like architecture, infrastructure, housing construction, cars driven (a subjective wealth indicator on our list), popular shops, how people spend their time in the city and what products line market shelves (are they locally grown and made or imported?). From this, we make very subjective conclusions about whether the city is thriving or struggling in their new age, and whether we think it’s a livable place, at least in our heads.
We continued this game play in August and September 2017 when we walked through Azerbaijan and Georgia, former Soviet countries nestled between Iran, Turkey, Armenia, and Russia. Their main cities’ sense of place made strikingly different impressions on us.
Baku’s influence
Baku is a place where people come to be seen, party, shop, and stroll along the renovated waterfront promenade.
The Azerbaijan capital seems to have a new-found sense of itself, even if the urban zoning and planning elements look randomly assembled rather than thoughtfully and uniformly considered.
Baku’s post-Soviet personality is being built with oil and natural gas money, an image reinforced by the drills holing the dry earth around the Caspian Sea city and the number of tankers and trucks waiting to be loaded near its port. Modern buildings—the most famous of which are the flaming towers, which when lit, resemble flames of fire—are located a short walk away from historical sites and traditional houses.
Commercial centers and pedestrian areas lined with shops selling Western brands, trendy and crowded restaurants and cafes, expensive, luxury apartments with “For Sale” signs draped on balconies, and this “look at me” feel walking through city center rounds out the picture.
While the city is growing into its new shoes, so to say, and staking an economic claim in its ability to be strong trade partner with its regional neighbors (namely, Iran, Turkey, Russia, Georgia and Europe), Baku’s wealth, at least superficially, seems to trickle out to other cities along our walking route. *
The increasingly obvious movement of goods and money, along with the development of sea and land logistics infrastructure (including the construction of a cargo and passenger train line that will connect Baku with Tbilisi, Georgia, Kars, Turkey and eventually Istanbul, the doorway to Europe), touches other towns, like Ağstafa, Ganja, Lankaran and Yevlakh. These smaller urban hubs have refurbished their city center streets in a way that makes strolling easy. There are sidewalks and benches and conformity in the facades. Men, mostly retired men (never women), play backgammon for hours on patios of tea houses in nicely manicured parks. Drivers look for customers in high-end, second-hand Mercedes and Sprinter microbuses, and farmers use Russian Ladas, workhorse-types of cars common throughout former Soviet countries, to get from their homes to their fields.
Supermarkets have a broad display of products, written mostly in Russian letters, but also in Turkish, which is a cousin of Azerbaijan’s local language.
Although Azerbaijan is still less developed compared to its powerhouse neighbors and may be developing at a pace similar to Uzbekistan, in our walkers’ eyes, it seems to be faring better than, say, Georgia.
Georgia’s hope
Across the border in Georgia, another former Soviet country shaping its place in the 21st Century, a different scene plays out.
Georgia walking route.
Tbilisi, the capital, feels like a place where legends and fairytales were born. Old bathhouses, churches, a fortress on a hill and riverside buildings embedded into the rock cliffs mark its history. Crumbling apartment buildings that would be condemned as uninhabitable in other places may initially come off as charming pieces time forgot, but, really, they are a reflection of the city’s challenge in levying affordable property taxes and securing local and foreign investment for development.
Bakeries selling hot bread from deep circular ovens and ladies selling fruits, flowers, and churchkhela (candle-shaped, local type of energy bar traditionally made from grape must, nuts and flour) are quaint Tbilisi features, instilling a romantic feel of age-old customs.
Although there are places in the old (and hyper touristic) part of the city and upscale neighborhoods where it’s easy to find Western amenities and brands, the number of second-hand shops, and the number of women inside them, gives me pause. The frequency of these shops, both in Tbilisi and in other cities we walked through, lead me to believe that locals have to manage their budgets, and opt for classic black pieces (black is the popular color for women of all ages in Tbilisi) that can be mixed and matched instead of spending their cash on fast fashion that eats away at the little extra they have at the end of the month.
There are, too, signs of shifting tastes. Tbilisi’s urban development leans towards catering to tourists and creating a European feel. A new park, the elegantly designed Bridge of Peace, trendy cafes and bars playing Russian and Western pop music, and upscale wine shops cover up scars from the civil war that started after the Soviet Union collapsed. Fenced in construction sites usher in the new hope of urban chic, and renovated, modernized apartments are being rented out on Airbnb, a common trend among Tbilisi’s citizens looking to profit from increased tourism.
Outside Tbilisi, we follow a route through the southern mountains. We simultaneously feel Georgia’s natural beauty and its isolation. There are long, stunning stretches of wheat and grass fields being cut and dried for livestock during the harsh winter, and farmers scurrying to pile up their old Soviet-style military trucks with as much hay as possible before the frost comes. Other rural stretches come with miles of barren, wind-swept nothingness. Small villages—with bare-shelved shops where locals buy basic goods like sunflower oil, biscuits, pasta and frozen chicken—are depressing with their abandoned, windowless houses, signs that locals have packed up and moved on.
Throughout Georgia, we walk with a feeling that most people are just getting by, and are struggling to accomplish that. Many Georgians have left the country, migrating to other parts of the world for economic security. And while politicians set their eyes on developing stronger relationships with the European Union, as witnessed by the EU flags flying on nearly every public building and police stations, Georgia’s West Asian geography and mountainous tough-to-mine exports of copper, gold and ferroalloys limits wealth distribution throughout its cities. It feels that way for weeks of walking… at least until we reach Batumi.
Batumi, Georgia’s important port and resort city on the Black Sea,* feels like a circus after the miles of quiet rural areas and small gray towns we passed.
Like Baku, which has a certain appeal for Iranians who are looking for a nearby, easy-visa place to party (many Iranian men told us they go to Baku to drink and dance at night clubs), Batumi attracts its share of Georgian, Russian and Turkish partiers. Its waterfront park, a good green space in its own right, is filled with clubs, bars and restaurants and kitsch tourist amenities catering to summer beachgoers; and for about 100 kilometers in Turkey, we saw billboards advertising Batumi’s luxury hotels, casinos and night life.
But, inside Batumi’s neighborhoods, where locals stroll, there is something subtle that makes the city livable.
There is a bustle that moves at a more relaxed, less heavy pace than Tbilisi. Whiffs of sea air catch us as we criss-cross city streets and parks, and there appears to be more investment in making the city a nice place to call home.
Still, though, locals want more.
“How do you like Batumi?” we ask a 20-something-year-old woman working in a fast food shop.
“It’s okay, but it’s too small for me,” she answers handing a customer an orange Fanta. “I want to live in a big city. I’m going to Russia…in Moscow, there is a lot to do”.
This is a sentiment we have heard in many former Soviet cities across Central and West Asia.
Young people, faced with limited job opportunities in their recovering and developing countries, want to go to Moscow, Istanbul, Berlin, New York, anywhere but where they are.
We walk on wondering who will stay behind to build whatever comes next for Baku, Tbilisi, Batumi, and all the cities in between.
* Baku and Batumi were not directly on our walking route. We took public transportation to visit them.
Jennifer Baljko
Bangkok to Barcelona on Foot
All photos by Jenn Baljko.
Baku, Azerbaijan
Baku’s development, which is being fueled by the oil and gas industry, has “look at me” feel. Its post Soviet style blends modern buildings, a recently built seaside promenade and restoration for old monuments.
Other cities in Azerbaijan
The wealth being generated in Baku, Azerbaijan’s capital, seems to trickle out to other main and smaller cities. Outside Baku, we found pretty main streets, modern buildings and parks where residents shade themselves on benches or play backgammon.
Tbilisi, Georgia
Tbilisi reminds us of legends and fairytales with its old castles, fortress and churches. New apartment buildings, that may be rented to tourists, are being constructed next to buildings that would be condemned in other places.
Other cities in Georgia
In rural areas, Georgia’s natural beauty captures our imaginations, but that doesn’t seem to be enough to keep the locals living there. Many cities in southern Georgia feel run-down, depressing, abandoned. Those that stay work the land or tend to livestock.
Batumi, Georgia
Like Baku, Batumi has a circus feel, a place where people from neighboring countries come to party on the beach. With that has come new development and renovations to parks, neighborhoods and shopping areas, all of which help make the city livable.
Edges are transforming. They are shifting from historic barriers into areas of opportunity for creative architecture and urban design, where the new innovative digital economies that are creating a convergence between maker spaces and making cities.
When I look at cities, I always think about the edges.
Urban edges: the gaps, the voids, “messed up” sections, interstices, leftover pieces, polluted or forgotten areas; sites along waterfronts, highways, rail lines offer the greatest challenges in cities today. Edges also offer the greatest opportunity today—for innovative architectural and urban design and the on-going transformation of cities in the 21st century.
There is another gap in cities, often overlooked—the gap between uses.
Cities are by definition the places where different uses and people come together. The Integration of living, learning, working and playing, within concentrated communities is what defines urbanity. Integrating living and working space in cities is attracting interest today, but is not a new phenomenon, and edges are where these different uses are now coming together again.
Urban thinkers, as diverse as Jane Jacobs and Rem Koolhaas, focus on the fundamental needs and effects of combining uses.
Jacobs identified urban vitality in mixed use, stating “to generate exuberant diversity in a city’s streets . . . a district must serve more than one primary function; preferably more than two…” Jane Jacobs, The Life and Death of Great American Cities
Koolhaas celebrated the exuberant and experimental vertical stacking of wildly divergent uses in New York, identifying “the vertical schism, which creates the freedom to stack such disparate activities directly on top of each other (is) without any concern for their symbolic compatibility” Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York
Prior to the Industrial Revolution, manufacturers regularly lived where they worked, producing and selling goods from ground floor work spaces. As industry dramatically expanded in scale in the 19th century (along with the cities they enabled), manufacturing created new dangers, emissions, and pollution that impacted communities. After millennia of city making, a modern urban invention, zoning, for the first time segregated uses from one another—for the health and safety of residents. Industry was relegated to the edges and the city retreated from its dangerous “working waterfront.” In New York City, which has 520 miles of waterfront, industry was developed, relocated, and isolated on wharves, canals, wetlands, bulkheads, and beaches, where storage and distribution were best supported and waste products most easily (often unfortunately) disposed.
As technology and industry led to the division between use in the modern city, the reinvention of technology in the digital era is now presenting the impetus to re-integrate uses within the contemporary city. Once again, we return to edges: underutilized waterfronts and edge communities are providing the central opportunity in both city making and maker spaces that are transforming the city in the 21st century.
Originally, tenants from creative new digital media sectors led the demand for new types of development, as those companies sought flexible, creative, and expandable new office spaces and talent. As usual, real estate professionals were among the first to identify and target the emerging market, struggling to come up with an imperfectly hip acronym to describe this opportunity; the best they could do was “TAMI” an awkward acronym for Technology, Advertising, Media, and Information. While the name was less creative than the tenants, TAMI tenants did significantly change the way the market thought about office space, as startups repurposed old buildings and created offices offering greater flexibility. A one-size-fits-all perspective no longer met the needs of creative sectors who often require blended office and studio spaces, as well as authentic environments. As Jane Jacobs also famously stated: “you need old buildings for new ideas”.
This was just the first wave. Today, New York City’s edges are again being re-invented and dramatically reindustrialized, but in different ways.
Within urban edges, small businesses that combine making and industry with digital technology are now emerging. New developments are mixing uses in original ways to combine maker space, digital fabrication, and just-in-time manufacturing with experiential retail, creative office, and hospitality. 3D Printers and CNC (Computer Numerically Controlled) mills are creating a “maker” economy; digitally controlled machines and robots are becoming accessible to small businesses and consumers, starting at mere thousands of dollars, and are completely transforming industries with large-scale custom manufacturing opportunities.
Digital technologies are accelerating the new Maker Economy through innovative fabrication and are transforming small business operations and marketing. Today, the most traditional and historic small-scale businesses—breweries, distilleries, craft goods, furniture making, metalworking, jewelry, homewares—are coming back with a vengeance, as they use digital technologies to market innovative design, build brands through viral campaigns, and sell their wares through the internet directly to broader markets, connected by vast digital marketing platforms such as Amazon and Etsy.
Maker spaces are bringing the factory and the office back together—combining manufacturing and design, digital marketing and industrial making, and synthesizing them into new experiential retail spaces where people can buy, taste, experience, and understand the products. Today everyone is discussing how “Retail” is under pressure from the digital economy, but “Making” is on the rise: experiential “Maker Spaces” have transformed into the new experiential retail of the 21st century. This has huge impacts for cities—and returns us to the concept of the edge, as in “active edges”. How can we activate urban streets if retail companies become bankrupt and urban stores are shuttered as on-line retail explodes? How can we move beyond credit-driven national chains and support local retail?
And in some neighborhoods, new zoning experiments are coming back full circle: combining industry and residential development in ways that are re-inventing 19th century mixed use with 21st century innovation.
Architects are investigating how the maker economy affects the future of cities. Chas Peppers, principal at Woods Bagot collaborated with The Living, an open source space sponsored by Princeton University to research the future of construction with computation. They developed a study examining how TAMI industries are changing in a newer maker economy and developed a kind of tool kit of maker space potential, looking at space and equipment requirements at all scales. As the name “TAMI” no longer seemed sufficient to encompass the diverse combination of making, designing, and marketing, they came up with the new name “TIM” for Technology Innovation Manufacturing. If “TAMI” reminds you perhaps of your eccentric aunt who ventured into the creative economy in the 90’s, “TIM” is her millennial hip nephew who is branching out in the maker economy.
Although TAMI has led the demand for development across industry sectors, TIM is becoming a significant part of this new wave of mixed-use development. Manufacturing’s presence in urban centers is important due to the many types of jobs it creates, its ability to foster innovation, and to diversify local economies. The jobs it provides range from entry level workers, to creative designers, technology jobs, and top management professionals. Its equipment allows the creative class of a city to more easily transform ideas into marketable products. Its cleaner technology supports a city’s ability to maintain local production and have a diverse innovative economy (and co-exist with residential communities).
How can urbanists, government officials, architects, and entrepreneurs address this new potential and what it may mean for our cities?
Based on these conversations, and looking specifically at new developments happening in the “edges” and gaps of New York City, we found four very different typologies or case studies illustrating how TIM and the maker economy has the potential to transform our cities:
Organic Mixed-Use Neighborhoods – transforming existing communities that are naturally combining manufacturing, residential, and the maker economy.
Industrial Business Zones (IBZ’s) – protecting areas through zoning, allowing new and old kinds of modern manufacturing to co-exist.
Gated Industrial Campuses – subsidizing and supporting industrial uses though government-sponsored gated developments, such as the Brooklyn Navy Yard (detailed below).
Zoning & Planning Experiments—government and private initiatives exploring up-zoning opportunities that include manufacturing uses within new residential neighborhoods.
Each of these examples has different potential, challenges, and opportunities to help transform our cities. I have also included examples from my firm STUDIO V Architecture, and other firms’ current projects to illustrate the intersection of architecture and urban design with digital technologies and the creative maker economy.
1. Organic Mixed-Use Neighborhoods
Case Studies: Bushwick, Red Hook, & DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass), Brooklyn
Bushwick streetscape, combining manufacturing and residential buildings. Photo:
Around the edges of New York City, certain neighborhoods are emerging as centers combining maker space, residential communities, and creative industries. Diverse and often conflicting factors have influenced their organic evolution and growth, including historic use as older manufacturing, locations outside the core of the city, the original availability of less expensive housing options, the presence of former or underutilized industrial buildings, and the relative accessibility or inaccessibility of mass transit.
Bushwick offers (although this is evolving) less expensive housing interspersed with manufacturing uses and industry. Razor wire fences encircle industrial lots next to small-scale residential buildings that are once served as neighborhood working-class housing, now attracting creative professionals drawn to lower rents and the neighborhood’s gritty authenticity. Bushwick’s funky character combines TAMI and TIM: traditional manufacturing, creative industries, fabrication shops, artisanal workshops, galleries, and an emerging restaurant and bar scene. The New York subway’s “L” line continues to push north and east as escalating rents drive urban pioneers further out, and inner stops become more valuable, mixing uses and gentrifying neighborhoods.
In contrast, Red Hook’s relative isolation, including its lack of mass transit, has somewhat protected it, even as its original 19th-century working waterfront character started to attract pioneering makers, artists, and creative professionals, taking over industrial buildings, and reinventing storefronts. But growth continues as new industrial projects build on the success of a new water taxi that now connects it to the rest of the City, jumping over lacking subway development: the waterfront edge is also becoming a new transit option.
The neighborhood of DUMBO is a more mature example of an organic neighborhood that evolved from a working waterfront to an industrial center, to an alternative incubator of maker space—and is now a mixture of residential space with creative and tech industries. An essential corner of Brooklyn’s “Tech Triangle”, DUMBO is the epicenter of creative and digitally driven industries in New York City. While surrounding warehouses have been developed as luxurious residential housing, the waterfront warehouses of Empire Stores (as in 19th-century ship’s “stores”) has been developed by the City of New York for creative and digitally driven industries that are playing a major new role in the city’s economy. Meanwhile, the rents from the Empire Stores go to supporting a state of the art new public waterfront park, as well as a new waterfront museum and a rooftop park overlooking the Manhattan skyline.
Empire Stores in Dumbo, Brooklyn combines maker space, creative office, and restaurants. Rents are used to support public programming for Brooklyn bridge park. Architecture by STUDIO V Architecture. Photo: Lester Ali
These qualities have made former “edge” communities into laboratories for mixing residential with creative and maker economies. They serve as a critical place to examine and promote how we might re-integrate housing with new kinds of manufacturing and making as it was in the traditional city.
But as organic developments, these communities are highly fragile: laboratories one day, gentrified neighborhoods the next. Affordable housing policies serve as a potential solution to displacement, while still allowing for rezoning that promotes mixed use developments in previously industrialized areas. In New York City, the Mandatory Inclusionary Housing Program (MIH), enacted in 2016, preserves and requires affordable housing in neighborhoods and new developments that have been rezoned to accommodate residential uses. This program attempts to negotiate between preserving affordable rents and encouraging the introduction of mixed use developments.
To further encourage the mixture of uses, governmental agencies and communities are exploring additional ideas and policy options, including zoning controls, to protect, expand, and promote manufacturing areas—such as Industrial Building Zones and Gated Industrial Campuses.
2. Industrial Business Zones (IBZs)
Case Studies: Industry City, Sunset Park, Brooklyn
A yoga class being held at Industry City. Masterplan by STUDIO V Architecture. Photo: Courtesy of Industry City.
New York City has created sixteen protected zoning areas called IBZs to expand industrial and manufacturing business services across the five boroughs. This designation fosters high-performing business districts by creating more competitive business opportunities within the five boroughs. IBZs are supported by tax credits for businesses that relocate within them, zone-specific planning efforts, and direct business assistance from industrial providers of NYC Business Solutions Industrial & Transportation. IBZs promote industrial sector growth and create real estate stability, and have resisted attempts for rezoning for residential uses.
The Sunset Park waterfront district is one of sixteen protected IBZs in NYC that once struggled to be a competitive industrial working waterfront. One significant project that has contributed to the regeneration of this working neighborhood is Industry City. Industry City, with about 6 million square feet of buildings, is the largest multi-tenant industrial complex in the United States. It was originally built as part of Bush Terminal, by utopian American industrialist and serial entrepreneur Irving T. Bush (his friend Thomas Edison wrote the introduction to his book, Working with the World) and he tried (unsuccessfully) to convert Leon Trotsky to capitalism.
Exterior rendering of Industry City. Masterplan by STUDIO V Architecture. Image: Courtesy of Industry City
Industry City lay mostly empty for nearly forty years after most of its manufacturers moved operations elsewhere. In 2013 Industry City was redeveloped to encourage a broader combination of traditional industry, maker spaces, and retail to focus on the “innovation economy”. Today, Industry City is home to local manufacturing and creative industries such as the revolutionary 3D printing company MakerBot, drone-maker Aerobo, Time Inc’s video production studios, and eyeglass, furniture, candle, vodka, apparel, and chocolate makers, among many others. Industry City is currently pursuing re-zoning to retain and promote this mixture of uses. More than half of the tenants are small workshops and businesses ranging from 500 to 2500 square feet. Industry City’s CEO, Andrew Kimball who is helping to guide the vision for the new innovative maker complex, originally worked to retain and expand industrial development in the Brooklyn Navy Yard—the next example of a government sponsored gated industrial campus, renewing the maker economy on the edge of the city.
3. Gated Industrial Campuses
Case Study: Brooklyn Navy Yard
Aerial view of the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Photo: Courtesy of the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
The Brooklyn Navy Yard (BNY) is an example of a city owned and sponsored urban office park or campus model, based in an historic former naval yard dating back to the American Revolution. BNY offers affordable leases in a large protected area reserved for light manufacturers. Stable rents and lease agreements best accommodate start-up businesses at the Yard’s 300-acre campus. It is now home to over 330 businesses which employ more than 7,000 people and generate over $2B per year for NYC’s economy. These light manufacturers provide a crucial pathway to the middle class for many city residents.
The gating of part of the city is highly unusual, but the BNY’s intent is to create both a protected and a safer environment for industrial companies within the city. However, the Brooklyn Navy Yard is transforming. While its gated industrial campus offers greater security for manufacturing, its isolation has made it harder to attract creative tenants who require amenities such as co-working studio spaces, access to shared technology, flexible spaces for startups to expand, as well as amenities to attract workers, such as outdoor spaces and dining options.
Inside the New Lab at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Architecture by Marvel Architects. Photo: Courtesy of the New Lab
In response, BNY has begun experimenting with making portions of the campus public, adding communal and public amenities, and offering different types of working environments. This includes the New Lab, a massive building supporting businesses utilizing innovative technologies including robotics, artificial intelligence, connected devices, and nanotechnology. Companies include Honeybee Robotics, StrongArm Technologies, and Nanotronics. The Navy Yard is also working to create waterfront open spaces, a whiskey bar for its on-site distillery in the gatehouse, and rooftop beer gardens among its industrial and historic buildings within the protected campus. Despite pressure from developers, the protected campuses and IBZ’s are holding the line against integrating residential uses—but that potential is being explored through new zoning and planning experiments.
4. Zoning & Planning Experiments
Case Studies: Long Island City & Crown Heights
Rendering of 1010 Pacific in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, showcasing affordable and market rate housing over community arts/maker space. Image: Courtesy of STUDIO V Architecture.
Zoning and city policy are the next frontier of exploring how the maker economy can be combined with other uses, especially residential—using policy to control, counter, or guide the pressures that are transforming organic neighborhoods, and balance forces of economic development and gentrification. New residential development is one of the driving forces in the New York real estate economy—but pressures to redevelop former industrial edges into new residential markets is meeting conflict with the desire to support economic development, maintain manufacturing jobs, and prevent the erosion of the city’s industrial base. TIM and TAMI uses offer enticing opportunities to combine living and working that harken back to the traditional city’s mixture of uses.
Illustration showcasing new zoning and development in Long Island City, featuring maker space and residential development. Image: Courtesy of New York City Department of City Planning
Zoning experiments are being proposed in two ways: top down from government agencies and ground up though community organizations. In the Long Island City community, part of the New York City waterfront in the borough of Queens, the Department of City Planning is pursuing an unusual and much anticipated experiment in zoning. They are exploring allowing for additional zoning as part of the waterfront re-zoning if a portion of the area is zoned for light manufacturing uses combined with new residential developments. It would not only permit these uses—but would essentially require them to achieve the full density and development rights when the sites are rezoned.
Rendering of Silver Cup development combining creative office and maker space with residential. Current zoning predated this scheme. Image: Courtesy of STUDIO V Architecture
In a different manner, the edges of the Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights are filled with manufacturing districts that have gone underutilized for years. These areas were left out of the city’s recent rezoning efforts due to the difficulty and expense in including them in environmental studies. However, entrepreneurs are encouraging the conversion of these prior manufacturing districts to housing because of the great potential in the residential market. While local organizations, working with community boards, are encouraging the mixtures of manufacturing with residential development, developers sometimes struggle to find the middle ground between these groups. The maker and TIM economies may provide a middle ground, as innovative and digital manufacturing and residential uses are no longer seen as incompatible—but rather as complimentary.
* * *
Edges can be part of the solution for rapidly transforming cities, but edges also reveal challenges cities face. Residents of existing neighborhoods are being pushed out to new edges, while makers backfill residents until they too are pushed out. These four examples—organic evolution of neighborhoods, IBZs, protected campuses, and zoning experiments—are all seeking ways to address this conflict while still accommodating these rapidly changing technologies and promoting development. This conflict will continue to play out, and its resolution will be critical in the reinvention of the city.
Edges are transforming. They are shifting from historic barriers into areas of opportunity for creative architecture and urban design, redefining how we work, our public spaces, commercial innovation, job creation, affordable housing—and the new innovative digital economies that are creating a convergence between maker spaces and making cities.
Even when full-blown deliberative democracy is not possible in complex societies, we can strive for a more modest goal: “civic coproduction”, which concerns the many grassroots initiatives that we now see in cities and landscapes. Even where the complex needs and desires of diverse publics must be conjugated with scarce resources, people and civil society are participating and making a difference.
There is a common refrain in liberal democracies: local government is where participatory action is most likely to happen. Indeed, we often presume that neighbourhoods and towns and cities are privileged—perhaps even natural—spaces for the deliberative coproduction of plans, policies, strategies, and projects for sustainability and the common good. By “deliberative coproduction” I mean meaningful participation in decision-making so that issues, opportunities, ideas for action, and intervention strategies get discussed by many individuals so that power isn’t over-concentrated in the hands of only a few actors. It is a compelling aspect of city life, in principle, and it is a theme I’ve been exploring for many years as a researcher, a practitioner in architecture and urban planning, and of course as a citizen. Here, I want to reflect on the work I’ve been doing mainly in Montréal but also in others parts of Canada, in Finland, Germany, and Sweden—contexts that have contrasting histories of public engagement in governance and city-building.
Conventional wisdom tells us that deliberative democracy works best at local scales thanks to superior and immediate access to decision-makers, the tightness of feedback loops for citizens, deciders, and third parties (expressed by the notion that disgruntled citizens will “vote with their feet”), and the importance of local places to self-identity [1]. We generally want to believe this, perhaps foremost because it supports our very sense of self as individuals in existential terms—one might argue that if we can effect change in our immediate settings, then we must exist in good (meaningful) ways. To influence decisions is to both have agency and to exercise that agency in real terms. This is certainly more appealing than to see ourselves as mere cogs in machinic systems that will continue operating regardless of anything we do as individuals. It is also appealing because it fits with broader arguments about social justice and what Henri Lefebvre so usefully declared in 1968 as “the right to the city”. It is a theme that permeates many of the thoughtful pieces on TNOC, such as Diana Wiesner’s call for meaningful involvement to ensure that sustainability and resilience come from the soul, the determination expressed by P.K. Das in his call for reclaiming participation as an inalienable right in urban planning and design, and Ben Hecht’s suggestions for how we can rebuild institutions to create a “new civic infrastructure”. The imperative to participate is so compelling that Hannah Arendt (1958) defined it as a fundamental quality of the human condition. Political philosophers talk about how we can enact this imperative through the principle of subsidiarity—the work of bringing decision-making to the nearest or most immediate scales of governance in human affairs [2].
The issue is this, however: where it is presumably easiest to engage in deliberative democracy, it also seems most challenging. We have seen increasing evidence of voter apathy (suggesting citizen ambivalence) at the local level in recent decades [3]. Perhaps this is because local governments often lack resources and the powers of taxation to generate the budgets needed to do substantial work—for instance, to build and maintain most types of infrastructure—and thus the big decisions tend to be taken at state/provincial or higher levels. Compounding the problem is that the resources needed for meaningful public engagement are scarce.
How, then, do we promote civic coproduction beyond “town-hall” meetings, which are often dull and disenchanting, and to which only some citizen-participants have effective access? This means getting beyond participatory moments that exist only to satisfy statutory requirements for public involvement without having real impacts on policy or planning. All of this is compounded by the paramountcy doctrine in federal systems such as Canada and the United States—whereby higher levels of government prevail over local institutions—and which can therefore be seen as thwarting local democracy [4]. One might even worry about the high levels of residential mobility observed in many OECD countries (with many people moving house so often that they have few opportunities to get involved and/or to have credibility as local stakeholders) or the predominantly transactional ways in which many citizens interact with their local governments (e.g., simply using local services such as public libraries, rather than active community-building).
Participation matters. It seems easiest at the local scale, yet forces conspire to make it difficult, and people are understandably ambivalent or even cynical. This is a depressing set of observations…
In response, I want to assert (both optimistically and pragmatically) that even if full-blown deliberative democracy is not possible in complex societies, we can strive for a more modest goal, which I call “civic coproduction”. My main premise concerns the many grassroots initiatives that we now see in cities and landscapes. Even where the complex needs and desires of diverse publics must be conjugated with scarce resources for infrastructure, limited space, and time constraints for many of the protagonists, people are engaging with their local contexts and making a difference, and change is afoot.
People are increasingly engaging in the (co)production of urban space through actions in public space (as in the San Francisco example on the left) and through informal online debates (as in the Facebook example from Toronto on the right). Photos: Nik Luka
I present three sets of ideas here. First, I briefly comment on the importance of civic coproduction in the light of certain hesitations and critiques that we find in scholarly debates. Second, I highlight the importance of civil-society organisations in this coproduction. Finally, I present a few suggestions on how (and where) to make civic coproduction work that have revealed their importance through my 15 years of empirical action-research in urban, suburban, and periurban contexts. Mixed into the narrative are various thoughts and queries coupled with theoretical arguments on how to structure and maintain civic coproduction in terms of the practical (and admittedly instrumental) work I do in urban design and landscape planning.
Contrarianism, conflict, and collaboration
Collaborative planning and design remains a holy grail of sorts in liberal democracies. Since the 1960s, theorists and advocates have sought to develop practical methods and to articulate useful strategies in ways that have shifted the very mission of professional practitioners in architecture, planning, and urban design. From Sherry Arnstein’s seminal 1969 work on a “ladder of citizen participation” to Joan Iverson Nassauer’s 2015 commentary on the importance of embracing landscape as a “medium for synthesis” in civic engagement (of both knowledge and potential interventions), debates have raged in exciting ways on who does what and how. An enduring problem is how to ensure that cheerful contrarianism (whereby citizens question the state) does not default to enduring conflict or what Lucien Kroll (1984) called “anarchitecture”—tiresome patterns of angry confrontation that became typical in the 1960s and 1970s, as Richard Sennett described in The fall of public man (1977: 294):
… planners have largely given up hope on properly designing the city as a whole—because they have come to recognize both their own limits of knowledge and their lack of political clout. They instead have enshrined working at a community level, against whatever interests of money and politics dominate the shaping of the whole city. … today’s urbanist conceives of community against the city.
We now see various efforts to reconcile the two solitudes that Sennett identified. This is more important than ever because metropolitan regions are defined now perhaps more than ever in history by the diversity of the publics to whom they are home, adding new layers of complexity to the daunting work of engaging citizens and other stakeholders in meaningful ways; having found full expression in public law, policy planning, and governance writ large, the imperative to coproduce in meaningful ways is increasingly central to the work of urban design and landscape planning [5]. Collaborative design for resilience is recognised as vital as urgent concerns over the effects of climate change, the ageing population, and worn-out core physical infrastructure (CPI) now dominate public debate in many OECD countries, linking disparate debates over the interdependence of nature and culture in cities [6].
Getting people to participate is easier to say than to do. For one thing, public meetings are dull, difficult to attend, and often treated by local officials as necessary evils. As John Forester (1998) noted 20 years ago, they have few clear or robust ways of capturing the wealth of ideas and concerns that find expression and even fewer mechanisms for cultivating trust and civic learning among participants. Even where participation occurs, expressions of dissent can be obscured through what Macleod (2013) describes tending to forge a disingenuous “post-political consensus”. In short, there is a continuing unmet need for meaningful exchange, for reasons of accountability, the legitimacy of public decision-making, and efficacy in governance.
Provocative actions in the city include (left) the “Villa compostela” garden in Montréal (photo: V. Mikadze); (middle) popup installations on a city sidewalk in Vancouver (photo: S. Hanson / Atrux Collective, @atruxcollective); and (right) as part of a street festival in Montréal (photo: Nik Luka)
One intriguing manifestation of the city as “the hope of democracy” (Magnusson, 2002) is what we often call the third sector (thus named to situate civil society on an even footing with the public and the private sectors). This includes small local groups that mobilise to deal with neighbourhood-specific concerns (see e.g. Kaliski, 2009), broader alliances that arise in response to megaprojects or policy shifts (see e.g. Bornstein, 2010), and trans-border movements that form global assemblages of advocacy for change (see e.g. Sassen, 2008). One might think of initiatives such as guerrilla gardening, which abounds in my own city of Montréal and in many other places (see the thought-provoking piece on this topic by Pippin Anderson as well as Douglas, 2015; Mikadze, 2014; Zukin, 2010) or the general wave of “popup” and “tactical” initiatives that have corresponded with the Occupy movement, many of which are consistent with Marshall Berman’s now-classic (1986) admonition that we “take it to the streets”—as hinted at by Jack Travis in his piece on resistance, education, and the “just city” (cf. Fainstein, 2010).
Should these events and movements be seen as marking a new sort of urban crisis of confidence vis-à-vis the state? Perhaps their proliferation is linked to the frustration of those who doubt the efficacy of local government—many of whom, like Jane Jacobs, might have an anarchist-libertarian streak that is difficult to satisfy regardless of how much inclusiveness or humility might be demonstrated by local government. Perhaps, too, they are symptoms of the decline of the so-called “welfare state” in liberal democracies—a pattern of state disinvestment in civic affairs since the 1980s—an idea that has led some critics to argue that partnerships between local government and non-governmental organisations are part of a sinister plan to force people to fend for themselves as much as possible in society (Rosol, 2010; Wekerle, 2004). Another perspective comes from Susan Fainstein (1999, 2010), whose work on the just city had led her to conclude that healthy, democratic cities are defined by a vibrant third sector, and that we need to nurture what she calls “counterinstitutions”:
Urban citizen participation, as it is conducted now, mainly involves participants demanding marginal changes in the status quo or benefits that respond to their narrowly-defined interests. Movement towards a normative vision of the city requires the development of counterinstitutions capable of reframing issues in broad terms and of mobilizing organizational and financial resources to fight for their aims. … The inherently divisive character of identity politics cuts against the building of such [counter]institutions and, therefore, can only be self-defeating.
—Fainstein, 1999: 268
Fainstein’s conclusion can be usefully juxtaposed with a new set of arguments made by planning theorist Robert Beauregard (2018: 90-101), highlighting the important tension between democracy and oligarchy in cities in a recently-published book. He suggests that five basic categories of counterinstitutions can be observed in the history of the contemporary city:
Those formed around common interests of culture and social practice, including religious groups, sport clubs, and hobby-focused associations
Unions, labour organisations, and other collectives or coalitions that form around common struggles
Interest-focused associations such as residential ratepayer associations and merchant alliances (Business Improvement Districts, for instance)
Formal and informal place-based organisations, some of which are state-supported on a continuing basis, others arising on an ad-hoc basis
Advocacy groups, whether issue-specific or broader social movements
Some categories are more active in coproduction, while others get involved only occasionally when situations demand citizen mobilisation. Regardless, Beauregard and Fainstein are among many observers who remind us of what local actors have been saying for decades: third-sector counterinstitutions cannot be seen as ephemeral responses to failures of the state and/or the market. Rather, they must be (and indeed are) recognised as both continuous and integral to city life, and thus in the very nature of cities. To this conclusion must be added something especially important about that history has shown about why collaboration and its procedural bosom-buddy of compromise matter in liberal democracies. Even if they aren’t easy in practice, as brilliantly argued by Daniel Weinstock (2013), they are often morally necessary because of the shortfalls that unavoidably separate democratic institutions from democratic ideals.
What I call “civic coproduction” is thus based on a recognition that what we want in terms of public participation must be tempered by what is possible.
Two examples of how counterinstitutions express themselves in cities (both from Montréal): on the street, as in this march in favour of traffic calming, and through civil-society organizations, where motivated citizens come together to develop strategic actions in concert. Photos: Nik Luka
Making civic coproduction work: A few hot tips for practitioners and citizens
Clicking through the dozens of inspiring pieces here on The Nature of Cities will reveal the importance of counterinstitutions in ensuring that cities are healthy, democratic, sustainable, and resilient places. The many case studies that have been curated here tell us a great deal about how positive change can be effected in large and small metropolitan landscapes. They often also showcase the happy possibilities that arise when counterinstitutions and local officials seek to collaborate, even if this is not what was originally intended by either party!
To this rich array, I would now like to add thoughts on how we can practice civic coproduction based on my own experiences. My three suggestions are intended to help citizens and practitioners to move from rhetoric (including philosophical bickering about how many angels might deliberatively dance on the head of a pin) to action. They’re also informed by two core claims in debates on ecological design. The first is articulated by Sim van der Ryn and Stuart Cowan (2007), who call upon all of us—especially credential-bedecked “experts”—to recognise that everyone is a designer. The second comes from Michael Hough (1990), who reminds us to start where it’s easiest.
Focus on tangible things: It is hugely important to work on the physical stuff of landscape. Perhaps this comes from professional self-interest, but one of the joys of working professionally on architecture, landscape architecture, urban design, and hard infrastructure is that people can relate easily to things that have material expression, and in ways that are even more palpable than with art—often galvanising local publics into action. Sometimes, as in the case of a city-building project intended to improve the quality of tramway service in Toronto, people get involved because they fear uncertainty and change, but even engagement borne of frustration is better than none at all. In my experience, it’s regularly been the case that immaterial goals such as housing affordability are frustrating for diverse publics to discuss beyond the broad, fuzzy conviction. More engagingly, we can debate how different housing types might be more accessible to certain individuals or households will require place-specific examples with which participants are familiar. Similar sorts of questions have been discussed by Senbel & Church (2011) and Forsyth et al. (2010).
People can engage easily with physical projects. The St Clair West Designated Right-of-Way for a tramway line mobilized several dozen citizens who opposed the project because they perceived it as a threat to the quality of life in their home neighborhoods. Photos: Nik Luka
Seek places where transformation is already happening: We should seize the challenges, tensions, and opportunities of reurbanisation to engage diverse publics. I’m referring here to the processes of transformation that reshape existing landscapes—where a defunct shopping mall or disused industrial precinct gets converted to a dense, mixed-use complex of transit-supportive housing, shops, workplaces, and pedestrian-oriented, public space, as seen in projects undertaken in San Diego and Stockholm. These are not easy projects to tackle, because change is difficult for most people, and familiar landscapes—with all the as proverbial blood, sweat, and tears they represent—demand special attention.
Where the cranes rise, so too does the public interest; physical change engenders citizen concern. Exciting opportunities for civic coproduction are to be found in changing city contexts. Shown here are Toronto’s Canary District, the renovation of underground infrastructure in Montréal’s lower Outremont area, and the new Rosendal “active-living” neighborhood in Uppsala (Sweden). Photos: Nik Luka
Narrow the scope: Small is beautiful when it comes to broad participation. The bigger the scale of the project, the harder it is for people to relate to for the purposes of discussion and debate. In Montréal, we’ve had our greatest success on engaging diverse publics by focusing on smaller “pieces” of the city, such as a five-block stretch of Saint-Viateur, a beloved local main street in the lively Montréal’s neighbourhood known (in a fine example of the wonderful franglais mashup we enjoy in this multilingual city) as Le Mile-End. Larger pieces, such as the 18-ha site in a neighbourhood adjacent to Le Mile-End that was the focus of a long-term participatory project, simply tend to baffle many participants and force them to retreat into vagueness and ambivalence when specific interventions get suggested.
When I say small, I mean small in physical terms, but also in terms of the imaginary. A place with a clear and discrete albeit complex identity is easier for people to talk about than spaces that have a huge array of roles, qualities, and narratives associated with them.
Explorations into community-based urban design in Montréal have confirmed that it is better to focus on smaller, well-defined sites when working with diverse publics, such as the “Repenser Saint-Viateur” project shown here (including an interactive “tent” in which citizens participated in on-the-spot deliberative discussions about the future of this local “main street”), which contrasts with the “Imaginons Bellechasse” example shown in the next set of images. Photos: Nik LukaWhen engaging in civic coproduction, large sites are often harder for diverse publics to discuss in meaningful and satisfying ways, as we found on the “Imaginons Bellechasse” project (encompassing many city blocks), in contrast to the compact “Repenser Saint-Viateur” project area shown in the previous set of images. Shown here are a newspaper blog entry encouraging broad participation, one of many community workshops, and an example of content from an online forum that was created to test practical techniques for deliberative democracy. Photos: Nik Luka
* * *
In closing, I want to add a final point in the interest of procedural pragmatism. Not all processes need to be subject to civic coproduction. Many acts and events can be left to experts. Think of it this way: I don’t want to participate (except as the patient) in an invasive medical procedure because I have confidence in the experts who have focused on that in their careers. I’ll be proactive about wellness, but I don’t want to talk about how to hold the scalpel if surgery is required. Examples include the everyday maintenance of hard infrastructure or changes to snow-removal procedures in Nordic “winter cities” such as Montréal. Rather than soliciting general participation, specially-convened and duly-democratic committees of “citizen experts”—sometimes called “ward councils” or “neighbourhood councils”, as discussed by Kong (2010) and Parlow (2008), respectively—can meet many of the needs for input from diverse publics.
We have lots of work to do in terms of progressive reform if we are to make civic coproduction the norm in cities, but we are starting from strong positions when we work with established places where people have lived, worked, and played for generations. Even if cynics suggest that public participation is a democratic ideal that we cannot achieve in a world driven hard by politics and capital, I remain convinced that civic coproduction is in the very nature of cities.
This piece is based on empirical work funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Fonds de recherche du Québec (Société et Culture), and NordForsk. The ideas presented here were presented at a symposium on Landscape Planning and Governance held in Uppsala in June 2018 with researchers from the Institutionen för stad och land at Sveriges Lantbruksuniversitet (Department of Urban and Rural Development, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences) and the Institutet för bostads- och urbanforskning at Uppsala Universitet (Institute for Housing and Urban Research, Uppsala University). Individual work is often itself the byproduct of deliberative coproduction; in this case, I must thank Marie-Hélène Armand, Jean Beaudoin, Katherine Berton, Laurence Bherer, Martin Blanchard, Lisa Bornstein, Andrew Butler, Stuart Candy, Simon Chauvette, Andréa Cohen, Anne Cormier, Jaimie Cudmore, Carole Després, Anurag Dhir, Jayne Engle, Cynthia Farina, Isabelle Feillou, Alanna Felt, Eve Finley, Isabelle Gaudette, Nils Hertting, Michael Jemtrud, Anne Juillet, Mari Kågström, Hoi L. Kong, Jill Lance, Margo Legault, Becky Lentz, David Maddox, Chelsea Medd, Irene Molina, Christine Mondor, Jimmy Paquet-Cormier, Itai Peleg, Raquel Peñalosa, Anna Persson, Johan Pries, Alphie Primeau, Gary Purcell, Mattias Qviström, Luc Rabouin, Kenneth Reardon, Érick Rivard, Pamela Robinson, Annie Rochette, Margaux Ruellan, Jessica Ruglis, Daniel Schwirtz, Maged Senbel, Renée Sieber, Geneviève Vachon, Darren Veres, and Daniel Weinstock.
Notes:
See Bherer et al. (2010, 2015), Boudreau (2003), Magnusson (2002), and Paddison et al. (2008).
See Collier (1997), Fung (2003), Inwood (2005), Kong (2015), Paddison et al. (2008), and Walker & Belanger (2013).
Notable empirical work includes Ghajnal & Lewis (2003) and Holbrook & Weinschenk (2014).
On paramountcy, see Inwood (2005) and Kong (2014).
On multicultural metropolitanism, see Agyeman & Erickson (2012), Lee Uyesugi & Shipley (2005), Macedo (2000), Sandercock (1998), Walker & Belanger (2013), and Watson (2006); on participation and public law, see Bherer (2010), Fennell (2013), Fischer (2006), Fung (2003), Kong et al. (2010, 2014, 2017), and Paddison et al. (2008); on emerging modes of coproduction in metropolitan landscapes, see Forester (1998, 1999), Healey (2002), Hou (2011), Luka et al. (2015), Nassauer (2015), North (2013), Rabouin (2009), Scott et al. (2013), and van der Ryn & Cowan (2007).
This is a burgeoning area of debate; notable contributions include Collier (1997), Kaliski (2009), Larsen (2015), Lister (2015), MacLeod (2013), North (2013), Radywyla & Biggs (2013), Rosol (2010), Scott et al. (2013), Steiner (2014), and van der Ryn & Cowan (2007).
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A pop-up garden in Kiev, volunteer “spotfixes” along sidewalks in Bangalore, and a flower garden planted atop a deadly landslide after an earthquake in Japan. These and other civic ecology practices are expanding in number. But how do we connect people across these disparate practices and places so that we learn from and motivate each other? And perhaps realize a common identity or, even, a movement?
When I started work on the Garden Mosaics community garden education program in the late 1990s, I first realized the difficulty of reaching out to small community-based organizations that were not connected through national organizations or networks. These were half-way homes like Abraham House in the Bronx, or youth programs like Literacy for Environmental Justice in San Francisco. They were interested in Garden Mosaics, but we had to reach out to each community organization one at a time. Later, when Keith Tidball and I expanded our work to encompass tree planting, dune restoration, and an ever expanding diversity of civic ecology practices, we experienced the same challenge. How could we facilitate social learning and action by connecting multiple organizations around the world, all of whom were conducting some flavor of community-based environmental stewardship?
Images from the Civic Ecology course.
The answer came in an unexpected place. Last year, I was invited by Cornell to develop an edX Massive Open Online Course—or MOOC—which we named Reclaiming Broken Places: Introduction to Civic Ecology. Like all unsuspecting MOOC instructors, I was overwhelmed by the number of hours it took to prepare the lectures, readings, and assignments—and terrified at the prospect of talking straight into an unforgiving camera. It took the better part of 10 months full time to develop and teach the 6-week MOOC.
Also like most MOOCs instructors, I facilitated a discussion board, which was clunky on the EdX platform, but which generated novel perspectives about civic ecology. (We are in the process of analyzing these data to further our civic ecology scholarship.) And like some MOOCs, we had a Facebook group. But unlike Facebook groups for MOOCs that are content- rather than idea- or action-driven, our Facebook group became a means for people from all over the world, who were engaged in similar yet diverse practices, to connect and learn from each other. My favorite example comes from a Facebook conversation initiated by a student in Syria, who was supported in her quest for information from fellow students in Lesotho, Iran, and the USA.
Not only did the MOOC provide a platform for connecting civic ecology stewards around the globe, it was also an experiment in motivating civic action. Students shared stories about their civic ecology practices on the Storify multi-media blogging platform. We harvested a bunch of interesting cases: a group building trails to the site of “Caved in Castle and an Old European Wild Pear” in the Czech Republic, one of the first community gardens in Kiev Ukraine, and a coal mine restoration project in Alberta Canada, among others. (The author of the Czech story later visited community gardens in Kiev, hosted by our Ukrainian student.) One student, Danny Rueda Cruz from San Francisco and the Philippines, decided that he was going to compile an eBook of all the practices that were shared. Watch for the Civic Ecology MOOC eBook later this year, which will be a compilation of these and other stories.
Stanford professor and Coursera co-founder Andrew Ng’s statement that “we now have the technology for professors to teach not just 50 students at a time but 50,000” has come to define the way we view MOOCs—as sharing content with the masses. But so called content-driven or xMOOCs, which often focus on science and engineering, are not the only game in town. In fact, the first MOOC was a cMOOC, or connectivity MOOC, where students designed their own learning experience. And although MOOCs have been called a “disruptive” force in higher education, they are not just upsetting the ivory tower. WA State University professor Justin Smith has worked for years with people trying to create online platforms to motivate democratic action. He feels that our MOOC Facebook site is one of the most successful experiments he’s seen to date of “designing” an online platform to facilitate social learning and action.
Our MOOC wasn’t totally successful in connecting people and creating opportunities for what’s called “many-to-many” (as opposed to “one-to-many”) learning. Similar to other MOOCs, we reached few low-income students in the US. We actually we tried an experiment in “mentored MOOCs” to address this issue. And we are just starting to analyze the student postings to find out how much we motivated them to engage in civic ecology practices. But MOOCs are many different things. For some, they offer a chance to gain a certified professional credential. For others, they are simply a free library of resources. For still others, they represent an opportunity to meet people with similar interests. But as groups such as Occupy Wall Street and The Ugly Indian have shown, social media can be a platform for forging a common identity that sometimes coalesces into a social movement. So let’s keep experimenting with MOOCs and online learning, in combination with mentors, Facebook, Storify, and other people and platforms, to connect people from around the world who are stewarding urban nature and community.
Acknowledgements: I thank my MOOC teaching assistant Samar Deen; MOOC production team Rob Vanderlan, Dina Banning, Colbert McClellan, Mike Tolomeo, Serge Petchenyi, Patrice Prusko, and Diane Sempler; and co-instructor Keith Tidball.
A review of Civic Ecology, Adaptation and Transformation from the Ground Up, by Marianne E. Krasny and Keith G. Tidball. 2015. ISBN: 9780262028653. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. 328 pages. Buy the book.
Krasny and Tidball’s Civic Ecology is a book that promises something different—and then actually delivers. The book sets out a clear mandate to demonstrate the notion of “civic ecology” and, to this end, presents an array of case studies showcasing people and their practices towards “transforming broken places” through their engagement with community and nature.
Krasny and Tidball’s book is peppered with the active voices of civic ecology stewards. Their stories are nothing short of inspirational.
At the outset, the authors present their “two pillars”, drawing on the work of two historic figures pertinent to American history. They look to Alexis de Tocqueville, who wrote about civic engagement in his travels across America in the 1830s, for their notion of “civic”, and to Aldo Leopold, one of America’s earliest ecologists, for a definition of “ecology”. They make no apologies for their singular selections and come up with clear and interesting definitions and principles that in turn can be readily applied to the case studies in the book.
Ten principles are set out to guide the reader; while none of these is in-and-of itself spectacular, I have yet to see these values presented together in this manner, in a way that is clear and uncluttered by more traditionally academic writing. What follows is a rich collection of stories from “stewards” and reflection pieces ordered to illustrate each of the 10 civic ecology principles. Through this arrangement, the varied (both geographically and in character) content speaks to the emergence of civic ecology in broken places, the exceptional nature of stewards in their pursuit of civic ecology, and how civic ecology builds community, draws on socio-ecological memory, produces ecosystem services, fosters well-being, and provides opportunities for learning.
The authors demonstrate the role of systems in civic ecology, including notions of scale, partnerships, and cycles of chaos and renewal. In concluding, the authors bring the text back to what is possibly a more comfortable and conforming space in positioning civic ecology within the realm of policy makers. The content is well written and the voices of the stewards are evident, making the work feel fresh and relevant. I was, of course, delighted to see the inclusion of cases from both the Global South and Global North. For a glimpse of just a few—we meet Helga Garduhn and Marian Przybilla from Germany, who share their story of seeking a united environmental community following the fall of the Berlin Wall; Mandla Mentoor, who grew up in a township in South Africa and seeks to draw communities together through engagement with art and nature; and Nam-Sun Park from South Korea, who carries out restoration projects under the banner of United Nations’ action plan on sustainable development, Agenda 21.
The book is peppered with the active voices of these civic ecology stewards, and their stories are nothing short of inspirational. These stories are carefully woven together with chapters that reflect on the emerging narratives in relation to the authors’ guiding principles. In all respects, the book manages a balance between its clear direction, as set out in the guiding principles, and a clear purpose emphasized by the more understated narrative and reflection. The reader is never left feeling cramped or stifled.
As someone who teaches urban ecology, I think this is a most refreshing addition to the otherwise predictable, traditional academic texts in this field. The combination of diverse case studies with normative directives provides excellent material for postgraduate teaching, where students can be both exposed to a diversity of experiences and provoked to consider their own civic duty, and—more broadly—what constitutes civic duty. I thoroughly look forward to introducing the book to my class this year and imagine I will draw on it for teaching and personal inspiration for years to come. Pippin Anderson
Cape Town
I believe that Urban Planning & Design (UP&D) should be considered a ‘Right’ and brought to public dialogue. The democratization of UP&D would be a significant step towards the achievement of just and equal cities. Exercising this right would be an effective means for bringing about much-needed socio-environmental change.
The impact of urban spaces on our lives is so enormous that it is necessary to focus on the planning and design undertaken by governments and various private agencies, planning that reshapes spaces continuously through time. As a matter of fact, planning and design can be effective democratic tools of social change and therefore must be brought to public domain and popularized in order to free it from the shackles of manifold control and exclusivity. Moreover, cities are built not merely with physical structures—buildings and infrastructure—but also with social and civic capital, for which building inclusive cities is a priority. Sadly, the two realms are polarized. Barriers between people and development decisions are continuously reinforced by sophisticated government policies and programs. This often leads to unacceptable and unsustainable growth with alarming social and environmental consequences.
Claiming urban planning and design rights has to be understood as part of larger movement for claiming “right to the city,” as much as other democratic rights movements, enshrined in law.
Mainstream UP&D ideas that predominantly reflect the political ideology and interest of the ruling class and their agents are often in conflict with larger development interests. This has been realized through many examples world over, including in the historical cases of Haussmann’s plans for Paris and Moses’ plans for New York, and the protests that followed in both cities. Plans for cities could be utilized for exactly the opposite objective: to achieve social integration by engaging communities as agents of change, as has been championed by Jane Jacob and others. In the context of rapid urbanization, people’s movements in and across cities claiming “Urban Planning and Design Rights” have therefore come to be essential. It is heartening that people in different parts of the world are intervening in decisions that affect their lives and questioning the plans and projects that are being forced on them. Communities in different neighborhoods and cities are demanding public discussion on matters relating to planning and design issues.
In India, for reasons that suit the policy makers and governments, UP&D are not considered important in defining the nature of cities. Instead, city building is driven by policies without any understanding or assessment of their impact on built-form. By claiming planning and design as a right, people across communities would no more be casually or cynically invited by governments to participate and respond to decisions after their formulation and announcement. Rather, they would have opportunities to engage in the process of decision making right from inception of plans, deciding the objectives and intent of proposals. This demand for planning and design rights goes beyond the generally accepted notion about the limitations of their right of participation.
Public perception in India is that planning requires exclusive knowledge and only few are capable. This must be de-mystified and expose its bluff. It is important for people to not merely respond to change but envision change. Most important, the democratization of UP&D would hopefully facilitate unification of the fractured cityscapes and heal deep social and cultural fissures.
Urban planning and design dialogue
In my own city Mumbai, where I have worked for many years as architect-activist, the exclusion and marginalization of the majority from development decisions has produced critical levels of social alienation and apathy. Meanwhile there has been unsustainable and anarchic growth of the city.
Today, citizen’s movements in many Indian towns and cities are actively engaged, not just in questioning the government’s plans, but also evolving people’s vision and alternatives for democratization. A notable example is Mumbai, where there are two important movements: the Open Mumbai plan, by this author; and the integration of slums into the development plans and programs of the city, by Nivara Hakk, an housing rights movement by slum dwellers. I have been a key participant in both these movements.
CAPTION: Left: Slums & open spaces mapping (in red) carried out by Nivara Hakk and this author in the year 2012, is the first comprehensive viewing of the slums occupied areas. Right: the vast extent of natural areas (in green) of Mumbai, bringing out facts that expose many myths and bluffs. Both these efforts brought critical data to public view.
In Mumbai, close to 5.5 million people, constituting nearly 50 percent of the city’s population, live miserably in slums. They occupy just 8 percent of the cities developable land, living under traumatic high-density conditions, without adequate services, infrastructure or open spaces.
Over the years, through various sophisticated slum redevelopment policies, the slum lands are forcibly taken-over for free by private builders. Under this policy existing populations in slums are squeezed to one third of the land they occupied prior to redevelopment. The land reclaimed from slums is built over with expensive housing and commercial projects for sale in the open market. This development model is leading to further slummification of the city and worsening living conditions for slum dwellers. Displacement and dispossession continue to characterize slum clearance and redevelopment schemes. Tragically, there is no space and opportunity for participation and engagement of the slum dwellers in the redevelopment of their areas.
Slums proliferate in Mumbai because there is no construction or availability of affordable housing in the formal market, for both the poor and middle class people. Slums are spread widely, and mostly are informally located (i.e., without government sanction or planning), thus adversely affecting the quality of life and environment of the entire city. As a matter of fact, Mumbai, or Bombay as it was once and sometimes still is called, is referred to as ‘Slum-bay’ by many academicians and activists. A documentary film jointly produced in 1989 by the Indian Institute of Architects and the Commonwealth Association of Architects and co-directed by this author is titled Slum Bombay.
Yet Mumbai’s official development plan leaves them as blank areas, without documenting them, and a detailed mapping of the slums has been avoided over the years. For the first time the city got to see and realize the extent of slums across Mumbai is when this author and Nivara Hakk mapped the physical extent of slum land. This map showed that slums were substantial and contiguous. It exposed the myth that slums occupied most of the open spaces, reserved lands and large tracts of mangroves and other natural areas, posing serious threat to the environment of the city. This had been the incorrect claim of middle and upper class people.
More importantly, our mapping put forward a larger vision for slums redevelopment and their integration with the city. The need for comprehensive planning and design finally got acceptance in the government parlors and housing policy documents. The Slums Redevelopment Authority under the state government has now begun a detailed mapping exercise and is considering a new slums redevelopment master plan.
In one of the largest slum demolition and eviction drives in India, ordered by the court, a protracted struggle waged by the over 75,000 slum dwellers families (over 400,000 people) residing in the Sanjay Gandhi National Park. Nivara Hakk challenged the order, demanding rehabilitation first. Brutal attacks by the demolition forces of the government, deploying armed forces and helicopter surveillance, led to many homes being crushed and lives lost. After legal interventions, the court amended their order of eviction, proposing to the government to undertake rehabilitation of the eligible people at an alternate location and only then carry out demolition.
Nivara Hakk conducted this rehabilitation, successfully carrying out a participatory planning and design exercise, and organized the slum-dwellers into co-operatives at the new site for management and maintenance of their buildings and common areas. Today, more than 12,000 families proudly occupy their new homes.
On the other hand, Mumbai is a unique city having a vast and diverse extent of rich natural assets, covering nearly 240 km2, or approximately 50 percent of the city’s total area. These include, wetlands, mangroves, creeks, rivers, watercourses, creeks, hills, forests and beaches. Sadly, over the years, we have not only turned our backs on these valuable natural areas but have continued to abuse them. Rampant destruction of these sensitive areas over the years by land sharks and real-estate agencies has led to threatening environmental situations. Yet the development plan for the city does not document them in detail nor does it record their boundaries and areas. Through the “Open Mumbai” plan, we have demonstrated how creating open spaces all along the natural areas would enable their integration with the city, put them to daily life experiences and ensure their protection through citizens vigilance.
The lack of transparency in planning and urban land use demonstrated by these examples is a problem world over, as governments and their various agencies publish specific plans and projects for public knowledge and response, doing so with a set of severely imposed conditions. In many instances the relevance and need of the project itself is seldom open to question. Instead, they tend to engage the public with technical details with which most people cannot engage. As a result, only select individuals and groups respond with their suggestions and objections. Such a situation has lead to systematic exclusion of large sections of the public who are adversely affected by the very plans that should benefit them. For most people, their interaction and relationship with the city is limited, apparently by design of those in power.
A key objective of open dialogue in land use and planning is to inform and educate the public on the ideas, objectives and impact of various plans and development programs that are promoted not just by governments but also by powerful private agencies that have achieved specific development rights. This way people who are detached from the city can get closer to it. Ironically, urban design as a tool has been most often used to promote discriminatory and exclusionary practices, as in Mumbai and other Indian cities, operating within the confined and barricaded city spaces.
Values: a paradigm shift for cities
Today, planners and architects are operating within a web of contradictions. With market driven city builders being increasingly obsessed with construction turnover, they have come to consider designers as mere service providers. In turn most designers express very little or no concern for larger socio-environmental causes. The prevailing context of exclusion and discrimination, and the city’s fragmentation, along with environmental abuse, has to be radically altered towards the achievement of social and environmental unification. These objectives have to form the basis of urban planning and design programs, leading to a paradigm shift in the idea of cities and their built forms and structures. This shift requires going beyond the obsession with viewing cities only through the lens of financial valuation and into an assessment of socio-political and environmental economy.
Public dialogue ensures that governmental organisations and elected representatives are answerable throughout their tenure and not just during election period, turning urban development into a dynamic, vibrant and sustainable process.
Let’s review an example from Mumbai. Recently the Municipal Corporation and the state government put forward the new Draft Development Plan 2012-2032. The plan was clearly anti-people and detrimental to the ecology and environmental interests of the city. It avoided the question of slums redevelopment and their integration with the city, and proposed plans that would further cut down the meager open spaces. Mumbai has a miserable ratio of less than 1.5m2 per person open space. In comparison, London has 31.68, New York, 26.4, Tokyo, 3.96.
Citizens groups, NGO’s, workers, slum-dwellers and even the middle class organized public meetings in protest. Concerted effort to build public opinion forced the government to recall the plan and start the process all over again. Earlier appointed consultants for the preparation of the plan were terminated and the municipal corporation in charge of it is presently going through public hearings, evaluating over 50,000 suggestions and objections filed by individuals and organizations. Hopefully a more acceptable plan will emerge reflecting the development needs and demands of all the people.
Such participatory momentum needs to be sustained and expanded, not just in Mumbai, but also in all towns and cities across India, and today, there are such movements around the country. They are of vital importance.
Rights to concessions in a neo-liberalized world
From rights to concessions is yet another oppressive social and political trend that has come to prevail, particularly evident in the neo-liberalised world. Public freedom and rights over a wide array of issues that affect life in cities have been turned into matters of negotiation and concessions, leading to reductions in open space and little opportunity for public participation. Land deals are led by private agencies bargaining for concessions in monies and goods rather than engaging in issues of basic rights. It is only when there are people’s uprisings that the governments begin to grant fringe or peripheral benefits to the public under the guise of public largesse, without altering the very foundations upon which colonization, exclusivity and private empires are built across cities. Increasing commodification under expanding markets has engulfed basic social and human development needs, and has substantially eroded fundamental rights of most people.
But there is light at the end of the tunnel due to the innumerable rights struggles the world over. People’s collective’s are intervening and participating in the development and governance of public spaces, for example in movements to reclaim Mumbai’s waterfronts, led by various citizens groups along with this author. For management and governance of these waterfronts, a tri-partite between citizens, government and private agencies has been established with the residents association at the top of the pyramid.
Similarly, housing rights movements by Nivara Hakk has forced governments to reluctantly recognize land rights of the poor. But, policy after policy continues to doll out concessions to regulate people’s demands in measured doses, without altering the fundamental premise of permitting land grabs for real estate business interests by private agencies.
The way forward
Considering neighborhoods as the base for organising movements for effective democratization of UP&D is key. Such an approach facilitates local people’s active participation in matters concerning their area, which they know best, while influencing the city’s planning and development decisions.
Through a neighborhood-based development approach it would be possible to decentralize and localize projects and their designs, breaking away from mega-monolithic planning and design ideas with enormous investments that impose unbearable burdens on the lives of most people. Neighborhood based UP&D approaches would also facilitate closer interaction between people and their elected representatives. Importantly, neighborhood work creates a more collaborative approach to city and place making. The various movements reclaiming public spaces in Mumbai — the seafront development in Bandra; the Juhu beach redevelopment work; and the “Juhu Vision” plan with work along the watercourses called Irla Nullah — have amply demonstrated the gains of neighborhood based approaches to city development. For citizens, these projects have allowed the immediate reclamation, redesign and re-programming of public space.
With public space being the main planning criteria, we hope to bring about a social change: promoting collective culture and rooting out alienation and false sense of individual gratification promoted by the market. Our experience of neighborhood actions in Mumbai has come to confirm that such initiatives can influence long- term change in ways cities development is understood. Interventions by citizens, as in Bandra, Juhu and other areas of Mumbai, would have never been anticipated by a ‘master plan’ for the city.
Conclusion
Urban Planning & Design can be oppressive. But on the other hand it can be progressive and liberating. As city spaces have been fragmented and colonized, reflected in the growth of gated communities and other exclusive spaces, it is our challenge to use UP&D tools to network the disparate spaces and people into a cohesive and accessible city. It is only through active dialogue and participatory programs that individual, family and community relationships can be nurtured.
Claiming ‘urban planning and design rights’ has to be understood as part of larger movement for claiming “right to the city,” as much as other democratic rights movements, enshrined in law. To claim Urban Planning and Design rights is to assert peoples’ power over the ways in which our cities are created, with a determination to build socially and environmentally just and democratic cities.
The Rockefeller Foundation announced its third and final set of its “Resilient Cities”, rounding out a group of 100 cities that have demonstrated success in and commitment to enhancing resilience to climate change and other natural or man-made disasters, among other urban challenges. These cities, along with hundreds of others without the designation, are experimenting with different ways to “climate proof” their infrastructure, to strengthen disaster preparedness and response capabilities, and to integrate considerations of natural hazards and climate change impacts into planning processes.
To date, adaptation plans rarely seek to change development patterns or drivers of socio-spatial inequality
To date, academics, policymakers, and advocates have emphasized studying the ways in which cities are vulnerable; the barriers to local action; tools and assistance to help them take action; and the development of new technological, design, and partnership solutions to facilitate implementation. But few studies have asked: who actually benefits from urban adaptation plans and projects? Do projects prioritize the vulnerability of the most disadvantaged and marginalized groups? Do projects succeed in reducing vulnerability and, if so, for whom?
In a new research article published in May 2016 by the Journal of Planning Education and Research, we and six other colleagues respond to this research challenge and present the results of a large empirical study examining the equity impacts of land use planning for urban climate adaptation in the Global North and South. We selected eight cities—Boston, New Orleans, Medellin, Santiago, Dhaka, Surat, Manila, and Jakarta—that are at the forefront of adaptation planning. The adaptation interventions these cities have created together represent a spectrum of planning strategies, including developing explicit adaptation plans, linking adaptation to disaster risk reduction or broad efforts to promote resilience, and meeting longstanding infrastructure and developmental backlogs. By and large, these plans seek to reduce the threats of flooding, landslides, and drought through technological fixes—mostly green or grey infrastructure—and land use policy changes. These projects are imagined as a benefiting the city as a whole, but do not explicitly evaluate their impacts on different social groups, particularly in relation to other ongoing societal changes.
A 2006 plan commonly known as the “Green Dot Map” proposes converting low-lying neighborhoods into parks after Hurricane Katrina. Image: The Times-PicayuneRendering of potential “Water Walk” along Lake Forest Boulevard in New Orleans East in the Greater New Orleans Urban Water Plan. Image: Urban Water Plan
As a result, we find that these efforts, while technically rational on their own, can nevertheless exacerbate existing inequalities through “acts of commission” and “acts of omission” that either disproportionately affect or displace disadvantaged groups, or protect and favor the interests of advantaged groups. These mechanisms crop up in places with very dissimilar developmental and environmental conditions. They echo past experiences with land use and infrastructure development, but represent a “double injustice” because disadvantaged groups who contributed the least to global carbon emissions are bearing the brunt of climate change impacts and social costs of adaptation, even as they are being excluded from the benefits of climate adaptation action.
Many cities are investing in engineered infrastructure to reduce flood risks, even though this tends to increase future flood losses as more people build behind the protective infrastructure. These structures provide an illusion of safety in a process known as the levee effect, only to be overtopped during the next record-breaking storm or infrastructure failure. Flooding in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina broke the levees and made palpable the effects of decades of racial segregation that relegated poorer, predominantly black communities to lower-lying areas such as the Lower Ninth Ward, Gentilly, and New Orleans East. Even worse, the immediate planning processes post-disaster proposed to “shrink the footprint of the city” by converting some of the worse hit (black) communities to parks that would create new ecological buffers for more privileged neighborhoods. The proposal, logical from a purely ecological planning perspective, produced an outcry against the now infamous “Green Dot Map” as a thinly veiled and unethical attempt to remove poor blacks from New Orleans.
Planning has since shifted to community-scale rebuilding on the one hand, and rebuilding massive new levees on the other, which controversially removes much of New Orleans from the FEMA flood map. New urban plans and design strategies also try to reintegrate water into the fabric of the city through strategies such as rain gardens and bioswales to infiltrate and slow stormwater. However, at no time has the municipality fundamentally included community-based planning into its own planning practice and decision-making, nor changed its land use planning for greater socio-economic and racial integration, even as gentrification of former low-income and black neighborhoods, such as Tremé, exacerbates racial divides.
The Great Garuda plan will house 1.5 million residents on new seawalls in the bay, while evicting tens of thousands of low-income residents from along the city’s riverbanks. Image: Kuiper
Across the world in Southeast Asia, Jakarta, Manila, and Dhaka echo this pattern. In Indonesia, the government responded to Jakarta’s devastating floods in 2007 by proposing a new city for 1.5 million people on a massive series of seawalls in the Jakarta Bay in the shape of the country’s national symbol, the Great Garuda. The plan, supported by the Dutch government, also calls for the eviction of extensive kampong settlements along the city’s many riverbanks in order to widen and dredge the canals and rivers, without addressing existing and new housing needs for the poor. In Manila, the government approved a flood risk management master plan after a 2009 typhoon flooded as much of 70 percent of the metro area that, among numerous grey and green infrastructure proposals, would remove 100,000 poor households (as many as 800,000 people) from alongside waterways. In Dhaka, embankments in the western side of the city built in the 1990s were designed without consulting residents, caused major disruptions to adjacent communities, and excluded extensive low-income settlements.
Such climate adaptation projects discriminate in the application of land use rules between wealthier groups who have greater political clout and access and low-income and informal residents without land title and access to decision-making structures. In Medellin, the city proposed a Metropolitan Green Belt to protect the valley’s upland slopes to reduce landslide risks. Although over 230,000 residents live within what has been designated the protected area, higher-income neighborhoods are not being resettled and indeed are being allowed to expand, while thousands of lower-income residents have been designated as being located in areas of “non-recoverable risk” that will be relocated to housing towers in the valley. In Manila, no one is permitted to develop within three meters of waterways, but the government enforces the law where it is easiest to do so: in informal settlements, even though it has permitted 41 percent of the region’s waterways to be filled over the years for roads, malls, and middle and upper-class housing.
Medellin’s Green Belt proposes a zone of consolidation in the urban valley, a zone of transition with parks and risk mitigation efforts, and a zone of protection. Photo: Municipio de Medellin
Adaptation projects are often done without participatory processes and values that prioritize the interests of the most disadvantaged. From the outset, the definition of the problem (flooding, landslides) and the choice of strategies (green or grey infrastructure) obscures the root causes of vulnerability, such as income inequality and the right to housing, as Fadi Hamdan explored in his TNOC post. Such proposals indicate that hazard risk is not an intrinsic physical condition, but a value judgment about the kind of development and people who can pay for the protective infrastructure. At best, disadvantaged communities can stop particular proposals, like the Green Dot Map, but often have little voice in the design and implementation of overarching strategies. Where planning processes do emphasize public participation—as Santiago’s climate adaptation strategy did—facilitators nevertheless prioritize producing consensus around a narrow set of issues over addressing underlying causes of inequitable access to water and the capture of natural resources by elite private corporations.
Finally, the costs of climate adaptation have led many cities to rely on private sector leadership. In Surat, India, the Rockefeller Foundation supported a six-year resiliency planning process that began by cataloguing the vulnerability of the city’s 400 slums in low-lying areas, but ultimately did little to consult local communities and pursued infrastructure redevelopment strategies that focused on protecting refineries and textile mills. In Boston, the city developed proposals for public assets and worked with the business community to develop proposals for private property owners to respond to flooding and storm surge. Downtown asset management firms developed relationships with emergency service providers for direct access during disasters, invested in temporary flood barriers, and institutionalized these strategies through industry plans and reports. By contrast, only one low-income community in the city has begun adaptation planning with the support of the Kresge Foundation. One approach in Dhaka—to facilitate autonomous adaptation by letting private developers landfill areas for middle and upper class housing—has worsened flooding in surrounding areas and provides a cautionary tale for many cities beginning down this road. As Richard Friend’s TNOC blog noted, market-based solutions cannot forge transformative and inclusive urban futures, especially if they are implemented without state control or oversight.
Elevated walls mark land claims and show the height of a future real estate development site in eastern Dhaka. Photo: Zachary Lamb
In each of these four areas—the provision of infrastructure, enforcement of land use regulations, inclusion in the planning process, and engagement with the private sector—we find acts of commission and acts of omission. Acts of commission occur when infrastructure investments, land use regulations, or new protected areas disproportionately displace disadvantaged groups to areas that are themselves unsafe or do not allow communities to thrive, create long-term environmental gentrification, prioritize elite groups’ agendas and definitions of vulnerability, or support disaster capitalism rather than community development. Conversely, acts of omission are plans that protect economically valuable areas over low-income or minority neighborhoods, frame adaptation as a private responsibility rather than a public good, avoid enforcing land use regulations against wealthy communities, or fail to involve affected communities in the process or recognize their alternative proposals for development. These processes operate within cities, but are further exacerbated by unequal planning capacities between cities in a region, and between regions or countries. Left unabated, these mechanisms help form ecological enclaves of the resilient “haves” and vulnerable “have nots”.
Certainly not all adaptation projects produce such unequal and unjust outcomes, and the Rockefeller Foundation’s own framework for resilience and accompanying package of technical assistance to its 100 resilient cities calls out social justice. Nevertheless, our research presents the first effort to comparatively assess how land use planning for climate adaptation can exacerbate existing inequalities. It demonstrates the need for further critical assessments of emerging adaptation plans, and to open up difficult conversations around the sometimes competing priorities for the expansion of affordable housing, urban densification in post-industrial waterfront and coastal communities—not least to reduce carbon emissions, adaptation to climate impacts, community empowerment, and municipal fiscal health.
A fundamental challenge is that, to date, adaptation plans rarely seek to change development patterns or drivers of socio-spatial inequality. Where adaptation plans do call for equity and justice, as many California state documents do, the language tends to be vague and goal-oriented, making them difficult to be enforced or measured. Some cities, such as Baltimore, have emphasized participatory planning processes that better engage disadvantaged communities. These strategies and principles for environmental justice, from the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit in 1991 and the 1994 U.S. Executive Order 12898, provide a basis for thinking about equity and justice in adaptation planning. But there is an urgent need to find examples where climate adaptation and resilience projects have moved towards more equitable outcomes and to identify specific normative principles, design strategies, and evaluative outcome metrics for alternative adaptation strategies that highlight equity and justice.
Linda Shi and Isabelle Anguelovski
Cambridge and Barcelona
In Memoriam: This research honors and builds upon the work of Professor JoAnn Carmin, whose scholarship pioneered the field of urban climate adaptation governance.
Isabelle Anguelovski is a Senior Researcher at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. She is a social scientist trained in urban and environmental planning and coordinator of the research line Cities and Environmental Justice.
In October 2012, Hurricane Sandy slammed into the New York and New Jersey shoreline, with winds of 145 kilometers per hour and a storm surge 4.3 meters above mean low water. The superstorm flooded the city’s subways, destroyed thousands of homes, washed away beaches and boardwalks, and caused at least 53 deaths and over $18 billion in economic losses. On the other side of the world, between 2006 and 2014, Singapore experienced multiple 150-year record rainfalls and droughts. How can cities experiencing climate-related flooding and other disturbances protect their citizens now and into the future?
Climate change education addresses immediate safety and risk reduction, as well as longer-term actions to enhance environmental quality.
Environmental education—including school and public programs developed by universities and government agencies as well as initiatives that emerge from the efforts of grassroots organizations—can play a role in responding to and preparing for climate change and related disasters. But in so doing, environmental educators face a dilemma: how can we hold true to our foundational values of enhancing the environment, including efforts to mitigate climate change, while addressing the reality that climate change has already irreversibly changed our environment and that we need to adapt and transform? We address this question using examples of formal school curricula, engineered infrastructure development, and public outreach in Singapore, and through an exploratory “three Rs” approach to climate responsive environmental and sustainability education in the U.S.
Singapore has responded to climate change through a combination of building infrastructure to ensure safety, implementing climate change requirements in the school curriculum, and public education (Figure 1). An example of infrastructure is engineering efficient drainage systems. Reflecting government directives, climate change has been incorporated into the grade 8 and 9 syllabus with a focus on “variable weather and changing climate” (Chang, 2014). Climate change education in Singapore seeks to help learners develop knowledge, skills, values and action to engage with and learn about the causes, impacts, and management of climate change. Students are expected to be proficient in climate change science, make informed judgements about climate change issues, convince others of their beliefs about the causes of climate change, and take personal action to reduce their carbon footprint. Complementing these infrastructure and school efforts is public education on floods, which is focused on public preparedness. For example, Singapore’s Public Utilities Board communicates flood updates on the radio, Facebook, Twitter, and other websites. The public is actively engaged through crowd-sourced reporting of flood locations. In response to droughts, public education has focused on information dissemination and on providing an advisory to households to voluntarily manage water demand.
Whereas Singapore’s multi-pronged efforts are impressive, Chang and Irvine (2014) recognize the need for a more integrated approach to prepare the public. For instance, they suggest developing a program to help the public prepare for precipitation extremes by identifying vulnerabilities and risks, creating an understanding of the notion of adaptive capacity (e.g., through improving drainage systems), and monitoring precipitation. They also promote a relief action program that describes what can be done for post-event recovery. In short, Singapore, which similar to many coastal cities around the world is highly vulnerable to sea level rise, has embarked on a comprehensive approach to protect and educate its citizens and can be expected to take on even greater efforts in the future.
Figure 1. Like many coastal cities, most of Singapore is no more than a few meters above sea level; thus efficient drainage systems and education for public preparedness for floods are essential. Credit: Alex Russ.
Climate-responsive environmental and sustainability education: reclamation, resilience, and regeneration (three Rs)
Education that focuses exclusively on reducing our carbon footprint, or mitigation, is no longer realistic given that changes in climate are already occurring and threatening livelihoods, communities, ecosystems, and biodiversity.
In addition to efforts like those in Singapore that help residents prepare for and respond to the immediate threat of disasters, Hauk (2016) has called for more fundamental rethinking about how we address ongoing climate instability. She had proposed the three Rs approach to climate-responsive environmental and sustainability education. The Rs include reclamation, a form of mitigation or reducing our impact on and improving the environment; resilience, which incorporates notions of adaptation and adaptive capacity; and regeneration, which is most closely aligned with transformation or envisioning new social-ecological processes and systems. We suggest how environmental education can support each of these processes below.
Reclamation
Reclamation involves designing systems to reclaim lost ecological and social capacity. It can include ark-like preservation or conservation via sanctuaries, weather-proof libraries, seed banks, and reserves that maintain cultural lifeways. Whereas we often think of reclaiming in terms of mine reclamation, here we refer to reclaiming more complete sustainable living systems such as those incorporating indigenous ecological knowledge. Innovative technologies, including those informed by deep biomimicry (Mathews 2011), can contribute to reclamation. Because reclamation is driven by an ethic of caring, and by political and social structures that allow for the expression of that caring, it depends on a culture’s commitment to sustainability. Further, because it invites reconsideration of marginalized ecosystems and lifeways, reclamation also depends on the cultural commons, and the continuity and honoring of elder cultures that provide an alternative to practices with a high carbon footprint (Bowers, 2013). While this seemingly excludes the possibility of reclamation for many cities, remnants of social and ecological memories are often retained, for example, by farmers who have immigrated or migrated to urban centers and grow vegetables and herbs in community gardens. Cuba’s permaculture and organic farming revolution and use of appropriate technologies following loss of Soviet support in the 1990s provides an example of reclamation. Such urban agriculture, as well as smaller-scale urban allotment and community gardens, bring together multiple generations and people with different skills, and thus create opportunities for environmental learning.
Resilience
A person, a community, an ecosystem, or a social-ecology system can be resilient. Thus, psychology, sociology, and ecology have developed definitions of resilience, all of which have in common notions of hardship, disturbance, recovery, adaptation, and in cases where an individual, community, or system experiences “tipping point” changes, transformation (Table 1).
Type of resilience
Definition
Community
Ability of communities to cope with and recover from external stressors resulting from social, political and environmental change (CARRI, 2013)
Ecological
Magnitude of disturbance that a system can experience before it moves into a different state with different controls on structure and function (Holling, 1973)
Psychological
Processes of, capacity for, or patterns of positive adaptation during or following exposure to adverse experiences that have the potential to disrupt or destroy the successful functioning or development of the person (Masten and Obradovic, 2008)
Social-ecological systems
Capacity of a social-ecological system to adapt or transform so as to maintain ongoing processes in response to gradual and small-scale change, or transform in the face of devastating change (Berkes, Colding, and Folke, 2003)
Krasny, Lundholm, and Plummer (2010) suggest four ways in which environmental education programs can contribute to social-ecological and other forms of resilience.
Environmental education can foster attributes of resilient social-ecological systems such as biological diversity, ecosystem services, and social capital (cf. Walker and Salt, 2006).
Through collaboration with government agencies and nonprofit and community organizations, environmental education organizations can become part of polycentric governance systems, which offer options for adapting to and bouncing back from small disturbance and major disasters (cf. Ostrom, 2010, cited in Krasny et al. 2010).
Resilience can help bridge the controversy over whether environmental education is an instrument to promote behavior change, or a means to foster critical thinking and emancipation, by showing that environmental education can foster social-ecological systems (instrumental) and psychological (emancipatory) resilience simultaneously.
Parallels among concepts from learning theory and social-ecological resilience may contribute to badly needed cross-disciplinary approaches to address linked social and environmental problems. For example, learning theory suggests that discrepant or unexpected events foster transformational learning, and social-ecological systems resilience suggests that major disturbances spur new approaches to environmental management and environmental education.
A study of environmental educators who experienced Hurricane Sandy in New York City revealed that educators commonly used the term resilience to describe their programs. They drew on their environmental education practice to create working definitions of resilience, which roughly mirrored the academic definitions of psychological, community, and social-ecological resilience. A program emphasizing psychological resilience sought to equip participants with the skills to respond to future disturbances; programs designed to support community participation in planning reflected community resilience; and those that fostered engagement in civic ecology practices, such as oyster and dune restoration, reflected social-ecological resilience (DuBois and Krasny, 2016).
Education for adaptation and transformation can foster healthy ecosystem and community processes, consistent with reducing carbon footprint.
Although educators in the New York City study commonly did not make a distinction between resilience and adaptation, they spoke about resilience more often. Possible explanations include being influenced by resilience-focused funding and resilience-related city government reports. But an intriguing possibility is that the notion of resilience as a pathway forward in the face of personal hardship as well as larger systems disturbance made this term resonate with educators. Or, as one educator put it: “Adaptation—sometimes there is a, I don’t want to use the word helplessness—but less of a proactive feeling than resiliency. Resiliency says it’s a pathway and process—the words adaptation and mitigation—not a lot of love in there.”
Regeneration
Regeneration involves creating more fundamental, transformational change, recognizing that climate change is altering ongoing social-ecological processes and that systems may lose the ability to adapt (Hauk, 2016). Such transformations are consistent with the reorganization phase following tipping point disruptions in the adaptive cycle, and with the emergence of entirely new processes at multiple scales (Gunderson and Holling, 2002; Krasny et al, 2010). Similar to resilient systems, regenerative systems are characterized by multiple and multi-scale feedback mechanisms, including feedbacks among social capital, empowerment, urban food production, justice, and knowledge-sharing networks. For example, students engaged in community gardens may build social capital, which in turn may foster willingness to engage in further action for the common good—including actions that require creating new systems for managing collective resources such as urban open space. Urban environmental education can play a role in regeneration not only by helping young people engage in activities such as creating and monitoring artificial algal systems designed to filter contaminants or produce energy, but also by reflecting on the human, community, and ecosystem processes that enable such systems to thrive. We can think of regeneration as “re-weaving living systems.” Williams and Brown (2012, pp. 44-45) argue that these more radically transformative approaches “redesign the mindscape” while restructuring environmental and sustainability education through “the development of a regenerative metaphorical language to inform sustainability teaching and learning.” The learning is characterized by cooperation, mutual reciprocity, and vibrancy, and catalyzes transformations in the structure and pedagogy of learning contexts.
Summing-up
All three Rs—reclamation, resilience, and regeneration—can occur simultaneously. In fact, we may envision them as embedded processes, with reclamation occupying the more limited vision, followed by resilience and finally regeneration. Further, all three processes may depend on horizontal networks of nongovernmental organizations, scientists, government, and community groups that mobilize actions, and vertical integration of community action with larger political structures so as to effect larger changes (Soltesova et al., 2014).
Environmental education can incorporate reclamation, resilience, and regeneration. Environmental education for reclamation occurs when students become involved in preservation, conservation, and the establishment of sanctuaries of exemplar systems, including in small urban parks or gardens. Environmental education for social-ecological resilience focuses on building adaptive capacity, including through creating social networks to support collaboration and learning, which are in turn applied to an ongoing process of collaborative and adaptive management or so-called “learning by experience.” Similar to environmental education for resilience, environmental education for regeneration incorporates an emphasis on feedback processes and nurtures participation in stewardship activities; however it adds a focus on learning through creating entirely new systems, like algal energy production, and on reflecting on how new types of complex systems operate.
The “reclamation, resilience, and regeneration” climate education framework encompasses learning about mitigation, adaptation, and transformation.
Conclusion
Returning to our original question about the challenges environmental education faces in an age of climate change, we contend that environmental education can integrate mitigation and adaptation in cases where adaptation is grounded in processes that occur in healthy ecosystems and communities (Krasny and DuBois, in press). Examples of so-called “ecosystem-based adaptation” include restoring populations of oysters that provide filtering and other ecosystem services, and restoring dunes to serve as natural barriers for storm surges. Environmental education also can address adaptation in a manner consistent with its social values, including participation and equity, by incorporating “community-based adaptation” options. These include efforts to engage youth and adults in collaborative, hands-on stewardship and monitoring. Although many such initiatives may not sound like environmental education per se, we propose a definition of urban environmental education that in addition to structured lessons, encompasses the learning that occurs through engagement in hands-on reclamation, restoration, and creating or monitoring regenerative systems. In some cases, this will mean that engagement in restoration and other forms of stewardship, normally considered a goal of environmental education, occurs prior to and creates a context for learning.
How might we integrate environmental education alongside mitigation, adaptation, and transformation, and the three Rs climate responsive education? We can start by drawing on a long-term tradition of environmental education that has focused on mitigation. When efforts to foster pro-environmental behaviors address conservation, environmental education is consistent with the first R, reclamation. Climate responsive environmental education expands to encompass ecosystem- and community-based adaptation, which is consistent with the second R, resilience. Finally, climate responsive environmental education encompasses transformation or regeneration, the third R (Table 2). Although we refer here to social-ecological resilience and transforming social-ecological systems, environmental education also fosters psychological resilience and transforms individual lives. Both individual and social-ecological systems resilience and transformation are critical to addressing climate change.
Climate Response Categories
three Rs
Examples
Mitigation
Reclamation
Preserves that incorporate indigenous knowledge, seed banks
Adaptation
Resilience
Ecosystem- and community-based adaptation (e.g., dune restoration)
Transformation
Regeneration
“Reweaving” new systems (e.g., algal energy production system)
In this chapter, we present two paradigms for climate change education in cities. The first is based on the real-life experience of Singapore, a small, coastal city-state in constant risk of flooding whose options are limited by its size and location. Here, a more government-directed approach to ensure the safety of individuals and their water supply has been successful in saving lives.
The three Rs tries to move beyond existing ways of thinking and political structures that reinforce social and economic injustices and environmental degradation. It also suggest moving beyond top-down control strategies for emergency preparedness, despite the fact that such strategies may be desperately needed to save lives and infrastructure in the short run. Finding the balance between real-time responsiveness to ensure safety and save human lives, stewardship action coupled with reflection and integrated understandings of social-ecological systems, and long-term capacity building to create transformed energy and social systems, is a critical challenge facing environmental education as we address social and ecological changes brought about by a warming and more erratic climate.
Marianne Krasny, Chew-Hung Chang, Marna Hauk, and Bryce DuBois
Ithaca, Singapore, Portland, and New York City
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This essay will appear as a chapter in Urban Environmental Education Review, edited by Alex Russ and Marianne Krasny, to be published by Cornell University Press in 2017. To see more pre-release chapters from the book, click here.
References
Berkes, F., Colding, J. and Folke, C. (2003). Navigating social-ecological systems: Building resilience for complexity and change. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Bowers, C.A. (2013). The role of environmental education in resisting the global forces undermining what remains of indigenous traditions of self-sufficiency and mutual support. In Kulnieks, A. Longboat, D.R., and Young, K. (Eds.), Contemporary studies in environmental and indigenous pedagogies: A curricula of stories and place (pp. 225-240). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.
CARRI. (2013). Definitions of community resilience: An analysis (pp. 14): Community and Regional Resilience Institute.
Chang, C.H. (2014). Is Singapore’s school geography becoming too responsive to the changing needs of society? International Research in Geographical and Environmental Education, 23(1), 25-39.
Chang, C.H. and Irvine, K.N. (2014). Climate change resilience and public education in response to hydrologic extremes in Singapore. British Journal of Environment and Climate Change, 4(3), 328-354.
DuBois, B. and Krasny, M. E. (2016). Educating with resilience in mind: Addressing climate change in Post-Sandy New York City. Journal of Environmental Education.
Gunderson, L. H. and Holling, C. S. (Eds.). (2002). Panarchy: Understanding transformations in human and natural systems. Washington DC: Island Press.
Hauk, M. (2016). The new “three Rs” in an age of climate change: Reclamation, resilience, and regeneration as possible approaches for climate-responsive environmental and sustainability education. Journal of Sustainability Education, 7(2).
Holling, C.S. (1973). Resilience and stability of ecological systems. Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics, 4, 1-23.
Krasny, ME and B DuBois. (in press). Climate Adaptation Education: Embracing Reality or Abandoning Environmental Values? Environmental Education Research.
Krasny, M.E., Lundholm, C. and Plummer, R. (2010). Resilience, learning and environmental education. Environmental Education Research (special issue), 15(5-6), 463-672.
Masten, A.S. and Obradovic, J. (2008). Disaster preparation and recovery: Lessons from research on resilience in human development. Ecology and Society, 13(1), 9.
Soltesova, K., Brown, A., Dayal, A. and Dodman, D. (2014). Community participation in urban adaptation to climate change: Potentials and limits for community-based adaptation approaches. In Schipper, E.L.F., et al. (Eds.), Community-based adaptation to climate change: Scaling it up (pp. 214-225). New York: Routledge.
Walker, B. H. and Salt, D. (2006). Resilience Thinking: Sustaining Ecosystems and People in a Changing World. Washington, DC: Island Press.
Williams, D. and Brown, J. (2012). Learning gardens and sustainability education: Bringing life to schools and schools to life. New York: Routledge.
Dr. Chang Chew Hung is concurrently the Associate Dean for Professional Development, at the Office of Graduate Studies & Professional Learning,and an Associate Professor of Geography Education with the Humanities and Social Studies Education Academic Group, National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
Marna Hauk, Ph.D., is a professor, regenerative designer, and collaborative creativity catalyst. She innovates experiential educational programs for wild Gaian thriving.
Bryce DuBois is a doctoral candidate in the Environmental Psychology program at the City University of New York. Bryce is also an Extension Associate with the Civic Ecology Lab in the department of Natural Resources at Cornell University (PI: Marianne Krasny).
Impacts of extreme heat are uneven across geographies and communities. People who live in micro-urban heat islands and who lack the capacity to cope with extreme heat are disproportionately vulnerable to heat-related health risks. Collaborative climate action planning processes should directly engage vulnerable communities in identifying neighborhoods with concentrated and multiple risk factors, as well as in co-producing strategies for reducing vulnerability.
By engaging in collaborative processes of mutual learning and action, we might identify solutions for protecting people who are most at risk from extreme heat.
It’s only getting hotter
2016 is shaping up to be the one of the hottest years in human history, with record-breaking temperatures creating some of the most intense heat waves modern humans have experienced. During the month of June, for example, cities in many parts of the southwestern United States—including Burbank and Death Valley, California—experienced substantially hotter maximum temperatures (109-126ºF). In July, temperatures in two Middle Eastern cities—Mitribah, Kuwait and Basra, Iraq—reached the highest levels ever recorded in the Eastern Hemisphere (129.2ºF and 129.0ºF). The summer rounded out with heat waves striking northeastern U.S. cities. Philadelphia experienced the most 90-degree days in its recorded history, making it that city’s warmest August on record, and Washington, D.C. experienced its second-hottest summer on record, with consecutive 100-degree days and a record number of 90-degree days. Climate change will only exacerbate these warming trends in cities, at rates faster than the global average.
Urban climate governance must address disproportionate impacts of heat
Many local governments and residents in urban communities are understandably concerned about the impacts of these heat waves and overall temperature increases. In major cities with large and diverse populations that rely on public infrastructure and public services to meet peoples’ basic needs, some of the most urgent concerns focus on impacts on human health, human well-being, and damage to or suspension of crucial energy services, such as residential air conditioning. As with most challenges we face in the age of the Anthropocene, the impacts of extreme heat are not experienced equally across socio-cultural subpopulations. Who suffers from extreme events is a function of cumulative risk factors—determined by geography as well as personal, household, and community preconditions.
However, these risk factors are not the whole equation. Climate action planning and related governance processes can be intentionally or unintentionally exclusionary, alienating minority and marginalized groups from decision-making processes that steer mitigation and adaptation investments. For instance, a recent study on “Urbanization, Exclusion and Climate Challenges” finds that religious minorities, recent migrants, and people living in poor neighborhoods and slums of surveyed Indian cities lack municipal governance and institutions that enable access to services such as all-weather roads, drainage, sanitation, and reliable drinking water. Structurally-exclusionary decision-making processes reinforce patterns of inequity that determine who suffers injury during extreme climate events. Planners must go beyond civil rights era stakeholder participation approaches (e.g., informing the public) to more meaningfully engage diverse actors, especially those who tend to lack political power. Through processes of mutual learning and action, we can envision strategies for creating more just and resilient urban futures..
Cities experience more extreme heat than their surrounding, less built-up areas
Cities experience higher daytime temperatures and less nighttime cooling than surrounding (peri-urban) areas—a phenomenon known as the urban heat island effect (or UHI). This urban/peri-urban difference is driven by large amounts of built infrastructure which have thermal properties that facilitate concentrations of heat; fewer trees, vegetation, and soil that facilitate evaporation and evapotranspiration processes; and urban geometry configurations that cause air stagnation.
People are exposed to extreme heat when summertime weather is hot and humid. Dramatic temperature spikes can be an important driver of heat-related morbidity and mortality, as can small differences between day and nighttime temperatures. Because these events are extreme relative to normal conditions, individuals, households, and communities are often unprepared to cope with their impacts.
Since 2008, our global population has been mostly urban. By 2050, up to 70 percent of the world’s total population will live in cities and urbanized regions (United Nations, 2014). These urbanization trends and accompanying increased densities of people and built materials will only compound the urban heat island effect and its negative impacts on human health and wellbeing unless we begin to design, plan, and manage our cities differently.
Urban heat poses health threats and reinforces effects of climate change
Understanding the spatial relationship between landscape compositions of buildings, green and blue space, bare soil, and paved or other heat trapping surfaces can help communities understand their exposure to heat and extreme heat. Left: NYC land cover and building height; Right: Surface temperature on July 15, 2011.
In the United States, heat is the leading weather-related killer (Klinenberg, 2002; U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 2014). High temperatures become dangerous to human health when people have difficulty maintaining their internal body temperatures. This condition can lead to heat cramps, heat exhaustion, or heat stroke, and can impact other health problems, such as circulatory or respiratory diseases. In the New York City metropolitan area, mean annual temperatures are projected to increase by 4.1–5.8ºF by the 2050s and 5.3–8.8ºF by the 2080s (New York City Panel on Climate Change, 2015). With these increased average temperatures, the region is also expected to experience a tripling of heat waves by the 2080s, leading to an overall 70 percent increase of heat-related premature mortality by the 2050s over a 1990s baseline (Knowlton et al., 2007).
While direct heat-related health and human comfort impacts are among the most immediate concerns, extreme heat events are also problematic for energy consumption and air quality, leading to feedbacks that reinforce climate change. As temperatures rise, so does energy demand, which in turn leads to increased fossil fuel consumption. Fossil fuel consumption reinforces climate change, thus reinforcing extreme weather events, thus reinforcing our ever-growing reliance on fossil fuels. In addition, higher electrical demand increases air pollution emissions, and higher temperatures enhance ozone formation and evaporative emissions. Climate action strategies must not only reduce vulnerability to heat-related risk, but also disrupt the undesirable feedbacks through which some risk amelioration strategies (such as residential air conditioning) further drive climate change.
Risk is geographically uneven
Not everyone who lives in a city experiences the urban heat island effect in the same way. Temperature variation within a given city can be even greater than the average temperature difference between that city and its surrounding areas. Exposure to extreme heat is largely driven by conditions of the built environment and these conditions vary considerably across urban landscapes. The various compositions of landscapes and built environments that we find throughout cities have different temperature signatures (Hamstead et al., 2015). Areas of the city that are hot relative to the city as a whole are known as micro-urban heat islands. People who live in micro-urban heat islands are disproportionately exposed to heat-related health risks. Spatially-explicit environmental data, such as land cover and surface temperature, can help communities identify distributions of exposure in cities like NYC (Fig. 2).
Left to right: distribution of elderly individuals, Black/African American individuals; individuals below the poverty line and overall sensitivity index of all three sensitivity risk factors.
Not only are people who live in cities exposed to heat differently, but even those similarly exposed to hot conditions are not necessarily impacted by those conditions in the same way. People with physical, mobility, or economic constraints can be disproportionately sensitive to heat-related health impacts, as can those with cognitive impairments or those living in social isolation. For instance, in New York City, recent studies have found that Census Tracts with high proportions of African American and economically-constrained populations tend to have relatively high levels of heat-related mortality (Madrigano et al., 2015; Rosenthal et al., 2014). Demographic data provided by the U.S. Census can provide indicators of extreme heat sensitivity.
City governments, including New York’s, have begun to recognize that extreme heat is an increasingly dangerous threat to urban residents. In New York City, the Mayor’s Office of Recovery & Resiliency has established an Urban Heat Island Task Force to examine the causes and consequences of UHI and extreme heat in the city, and to develop community-based and citywide solutions for building resilience to heat-related threats. Yet unlike hazards such as floods and storm surges, which are commonly studied by agencies such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the United States, communities often lack basic knowledge of where extreme heat threats are likely to have the most impact, and who is most likely to be affected. Mapping distributions of extreme heat vulnerability and understanding the fundamental drivers of heat-related risks are crucial components of spatially-planning extreme heat mitigation and adaptation strategies.
Distribution of combined exposure and sensitivity to extreme heat in NYC.
People who experience multiple forms of risk—such as people of minority race status who are also living in poverty in communities that are highly paved and lack tree canopy—can be particularly vulnerable to heat-related impacts. By identifying neighborhoods with concentrated and multiple risk factors, we can identify geographic concentrations of risk and better focus risk reduction interventions where they are needed most.
Harlem is considered one of the ten most “heat vulnerable” neighborhoods in the city. Source: Urban Gazelle/Flickr Creative Commons
The Harlem Heat Project is directly engaging communities in climate action processes
In NYC, one such high-risk neighborhood, Harlem, was the focus of a pilot project during the summer of 2016 that used participatory community engagement techniques to gather thermal data from inside residents’ homes, where heat stress can be an invisible public health risk. The collaborative Harlem Heat Project, led by climate news service AdaptNY, involved community members, journalists, scientists and residents. Approximately 30 citizen scientists were recruited through the community-based organization WE ACT for Environmental Justice to place inexpensive, hand-built heat-tracking sensors in their homes. During the course of the experiment, residents also shared their experiences on a digital journaling platform ISeeChange, that matched their observations to NASA satellite weather data. These stories were reported by the project’s mass media partner, WNYC, which revealed how poverty, restrictive regulation in public housing, and other factors left Harlem residents especially vulnerable to heat’s ill effects. (See also this short video on the project at the Huffington Post).
Most of the residences Harlem Heat Project gathered heat index data from this summer found indoor temperatures were hotter than outdoors. (Graphic: Brian Vant-Hull, Prathap Ramamurthy, City College)
Subsequent analysis of data from the sensors—which captured thousands of temperature and humidity measurements over an approximately two-month period—found that for two-thirds of residences, the indoor heat index was consistently higher than ambient conditions, and that because of thermal inertia, indoor temperatures lag heat waves, warming and cooling slower than outdoor temperatures. This suggests that it may be possible to forecast indoor heat waves, as distinct from outdoor heat waves. The summer project culminated in a collaborative community workshop in which residents, experts, media, and local officials used the project findings to collectively brainstorm possible solutions to urban heat risks, such as the creation of a more advanced sensor that could serve as an early warning system during periods of dangerous indoor heat. The project team presented solutions to a high-level panel of representatives from city government, foundations, and community-based organizations, and these are currently the subject of ongoing development. The project as a whole represents an important new way not only to collect elusive indoor readings, but also to involve citizens in the processes of gathering data, presenting narrative experiences, and offering a transformative strengthening of the sometimes fraying relationships among communities, city officials, scientists, and local news media.
Mitigation and adaptation strategies must be informed by democratic planning processes
Extreme heat vulnerability reduction in urban areas will rely on a broad array of strategies, expertise, knowledge, and engagement. Some strategies involve incorporating landscape features that reduce exposure to extreme heat into the urban built environment. Urban greening—planting trees and vegetation—as well as “blue-ing” and “turquoise-ing” (Childers et al., 2015)—increasing access to surface waters, restoring wetlands, and daylighting underground streams to above-ground channels—will help to cool air temperatures through processes of evaporation. Increasing water infiltration through green roofs, porous paving, and other green infrastructure will promote cooling through evapotranspiration. These kinds of public investments have numerous benefits beyond moderating temperatures—particularly if they are designed in such a way that enables people to access and use them for recreation or other kinds of activities (McPhearson et al. 2016).
We can also build community capacity to respond in the event of an extreme heat threat, as efforts such as the Harlem Heat Project are beginning to do. By developing emergency response or early warning protocols for nursing homes, public housing, and other residential communities that are especially at risk, we can develop ways for people to better access the resources they may need in the event of a hazard. Other public investments—such as cooling centers and community spaces with air conditioning—could be designed as hubs that enhance social cohesion, strategically located in areas with concentrations of people who may be at risk.
Perhaps most importantly, urban communities need robust processes of democratic participation that enable people whose voices are often left out of planning processes to engage in decision-making and help steer public investment where it is needed the most. For instance, a United States National Science Foundation-funded urban resilience project (URExSRN) taking place in 10 U.S. and Latin cities is engaging communities in scenario development workshops. These workshops, held in partnership with NGOs, city planners, and local community activists, are intended to provide opportunities for residents, community leaders, and particularly underrepresented voices to connect their insights and goals to larger scale, citywide planning processes. In NYC, WeACT, the West Harlem Environmental Action advocacy and community planning group, as well as the NYC Mayor’s Office of Recovery & Resiliency, and other city agencies, academics, and community organizations, are collaborating to develop community-based, data-driven innovations for reducing risk to heat waves and other climate driven extreme events.
The fact that risk of injury due to extreme heat (among other threats) is not evenly distributed across social groups is emblematic of deeper structural inequality embedded in our systems of governance and economy. Differential access to crucial resources such as healthcare, healthy living conditions, high quality education, and robust social networks are reinforced through decision-making processes. Climate action processes that rely too heavily on existing governance structures may serve to reinforce the power structures that produced differential vulnerabilities. By engaging in collaborative processes of mutual learning and action—such as vulnerability assessments or resilient futures scenarios that are co-produced by local communities and city agencies—we might identify solutions for protecting people who are most at risk.
During crises, communities with engaged and self-empowered citizens supported by social institutions fare better, often regardless and in spite of geography and socio-economic status. Yet, our decision-making processes tend to be democratically weak at best, and authoritative at worst. As anthropologist David Graeber notes in The democracy project, even when opinions are shared by a majority of Americans (let alone those that stem from pluralist or minority values), they can be entirely left out of mainstream political discourse (2013). Direct, participatory democracy through techniques such as collaborative community design is necessary to address societal problems whose impacts are disproportionately felt: climate change, poverty, energy dependence, lack of access to employment, extreme weather events, and the like. City agencies, civil societies, and citizens—informed by the expertise of engineers, climatologists and others—can collaboratively develop effective mitigation and adaptation strategies in ways that tackle structural inequality.
Zoé Hamstead, Timon McPhearson, and A. Adam Glenn
Buffalo, New York City, and New York City
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Dr. Timon McPhearson works with designers, planners, and local government to foster sustainable, resilient and just cities. He is Associate Professor of Urban Ecology and Director of the Urban Systems Lab at The New School and Research Fellow at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies and Stockholm Resilience Centre.
Resilience is the word of the decade, as sustainability was in previous decades. No doubt, our view of the kind and quality of cities we as societies want to build will continue to evolve and inspire new descriptive goals. Surely we have not lost our desire for sustainable cities, with ecological footprints we can afford, even though our focus has been on resilience, after what seems like a relentless drum beat of natural disasters around the world. The search for terms begs the question: what are the cities we want to create in the future? What is their nature? What are the cities in which we want to live? Certainly these cities are sustainable, since we want our cities to balance consumption and resources so that they can last into the future. Certainly they are resilient, so our cities are still in existence after the next 100-year storm, now due every few years. And yet…as we build this vision we know that cities must also be livable. Indeed, we must view livability as a third indispensible leg supporting the cities of our dreams: resilient + sustainable + livable.
And so they are difficult to take in, both for their beauty and their complexity. How can you describe and assess them? Convey them to one who hasn’t seen? You finally stumble, awestruck, into saying that they are “beautiful,” or “majestic,” or just “amazing.” But all of us—as scientists, decision-makers, participating citizens—typically have to comprehend, describe and quantify such entities and then communicate the results in ways that aren’t hopelessly obscure—that are somehow specific and not just metaphorical. That is, we need to communicate a very complicated thing in a simple, essential and, above all, useful way.
A striking example is that a third of the world’s largest cities obtain a significant proportion of their drinking water from forest protected areas, which serve not only as a supplier, but also provide filtration services that lead to clean water and substantial cost savings. For instance, over the last few decades, Beijing has been facing a progressively worsening water crisis. Much of the original broadleaf forest in the Miyun watershed had disappeared. The 
Stanford professor and Coursera co-founder Andrew Ng’s statement that “
The authors demonstrate the role of systems in civic ecology, including notions of scale, partnerships, and cycles of chaos and renewal. In concluding, the authors bring the text back to what is possibly a more comfortable and conforming space in positioning civic ecology within the realm of policy makers. The content is well written and the voices of the stewards are evident, making the work feel fresh and relevant. I was, of course, delighted to see the inclusion of cases from both the Global South and Global North. For a glimpse of just a few—we meet Helga Garduhn and Marian Przybilla from Germany, who share their story of seeking a united environmental community following the fall of the Berlin Wall; Mandla Mentoor, who grew up in a township in South Africa and seeks to draw communities together through engagement with art and nature; and Nam-Sun Park from South Korea, who carries out restoration projects under the banner of United Nations’ action plan on sustainable development, 
I believe that Urban Planning & Design (UP&D) should be considered a ‘Right’ and brought to public dialogue. The democratization of UP&D would be a significant step towards the achievement of just and equal cities. Exercising this right would be an effective means for bringing about much-needed socio-environmental change.
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