Putting Nature First: Driving Actions for Nature in Cities

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Art, Science, Action: Green Cities Re-imagined

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Cities need to put nature objectives in strategic agendas and then commit to achieving them through meaningful investment and means for accountability. Simply put: get nature on the agenda and act for it.
The COVID-19 pandemic revealed how important urban nature is for our physical and mental health. As urban strategists embark on ideas and think of pathways for recovery and “building back better” our societies and especially cities, it is paramount that the green recovery include nature in the mix of options that cities consider. Nature (varying from remnant ecosystems, novel ecosystems and various nature-based solutions) needs to be one of the highest priorities on the agenda for building resilient and thriving cities. With this thesis in mind, we bring three core messages to the global community of practice for urban nature: (1) cities play.a critical role in biodiversity conservation; (2) cities must put nature at the forefront of planning and action; and (3) cities must promote and enable inclusive governance for urban nature.

Bracken Creek Northcote during Melbourne’s COVID-19 lockdown. Photo: Judy Bush

First, cities have a role to play in dealing with the extinction crisis and with protecting biodiversity and that means they need to act upon it (Oke et al., 2021). The first step is to recognize the potential of cities as places for biodiversity and as spaces where nature can be restored and protected (Ives et al 2016; Garrard et al 2018). Global reports for biodiversity and climate adaptation (e.g. United Nations Environment Program, 2021) document and provide evidence for the effectiveness of actions as well as for the opportunities that cities offer. Yet, simply being sites of opportunity, however, does not guarantee that the opportunities are seized nor materialized. Cities, and their multilevel governance partners, need to realize and act upon the opportunities they have in contributing to urban biodiversity finding solutions to the extinction crisis through connecting global perspectives with a local focus.

While cities may feel constrained by contested interests and a nexus of necessary institutional arrangements that need to be in place; however, many cities are showcasing that when there is a will there is a way. Across the globe, cities grappling with opportunities for making transformational changes with nature have paved the way for others to follow. In the mix of daring cities, we find Melbourne with a global first metropolitan-wide strategy for Urban Forests, connecting and coordinating multiple actions across 32 municipalities and setting an enabling (policy) context for more actions to emerge along the way (Fastrenrath et al 2020; The Nature Conservancy and Resilient Melbourne 2019).

In fact, many cities in Australia are motivated to take action by regenerating urban parks, making biodiversity plans at city level and responding to state-level targets on canopy cover with broader than simply ‘trees in parks’ strategies incorporating biodiversity and renaturing initiatives. The recent announcement by the city of Paris for making an urban green park in its iconic Champs-Élysées boulevard as a next step to its rolling out rooftop cover strategy also falls into this category. It is about realizing the important role that cities can play in dealing with biodiversity crisis and taking daring action to realize in full potential the role, and for this to be recognized by governance peers.

Cormorants at Albert Park, Melbourne. Photo: Judy Bush

Second, cities need to put nature objectives in strategic agendas and then commit to achieving them through meaningful investment and means for accountability (Oke et al 2021). Simply, put nature on the agenda and act for it. Cities’ agendas drive action and are the institutional ‘signposts’ for committing political will or showing political commitment. Until now, guidance and research for designing and implementing city agendas for nature, is rather heavy on critique and light on constructive guidance, yet we recognize that science and research can play a critical role in co-shaping and informing city agendas.

For cities to put nature first in strategic urban agendas they need to:

  1. Employ a system’s approach to guide biodiversity agendas. Approach the full planning cycle with a system’s perspective, from objectives setting to developing implementation programs. This means looking at interactions, feedback loops, and co-benefits between solutions and interventions as well as between biodiversity and other strategic priorities. In this way, more opportunities and also institutional spaces for innovation can be enabled.
  2. Mainstream resilience principles in planning with and for nature-based solutions. With much knowledge and evidence from practice of how to achieve urban resilience through global city initiatives and city networks (e.g. 100 Resilient Cities now evolved into Global Resilience Network, as well as other city networks such as ICLEI-led Cities with Nature), a more daring step will be to adopt resilience principles as guiding or foundational principles for urban planning. Instead of spending resources and time to advocate for the need of an urban resilience approach, cities now have to leapfrog into mainstreaming them to support further the planning and implementation of nature-based solutions as critical for biodiversity and climate adaptation in cities (Race to Resilience: https://racetozero.unfccc.int/race-to-resilience/).
  3. Mainstream experimentation to enrich and strengthen in-house expertise in cities. Urban planners and urban strategists have deep knowledge and expertise on their thematic spheres. This is a resource to be tapped into when putting nature on the agenda as well as for designing plans and programs for it. The in-house expertise should to be woven with recent academic knowledge in ‘safe spaces’ through experimentation and co-creation. In addition, urban governments may benefit from building in-house ecological and scientific expertise where this is lacking. Experimentation requires commitment to monitoring and evaluating the outcomes of actions, and to identifying opportunities to turn ‘failure’ into new approaches and improved responses. We thus propose that many cities can mainstream experimentation as a way to extend and update and put learning into the ‘making of’ the city with nature (Frantzeskaki et al 2019, 2020).

Third, cities need to engage with diverse actors so as to plan and govern nature in cities inclusively (Oke et al 2021). Cities are connected landscapes: landscapes of nature and cultures. As such, every intervention or transformation in the fabric of urban landscapes needs to weave in and engage inclusively with multiple actors. For finding ‘whose nature it is’, there are different lenses and approaches to take on board, each one with benefits and blind spots. A common aspect in all cities is that globalization as an unstoppable driver creates multicultural cities and urban spaces that are always in flux.

For cities to govern nature (and nature-based solutions) inclusively they need to:

  1. Renature co-creatively with Indigenous communities. Bringing and/or sustaining nature in cities is an action for ecological, economic and social sustainability and responds to the quest for intergenerational justice. But thinking and caring for future generations comes hand in hand with respecting, understanding and caring for our history and predecessors. Here is where Indigenous communities and their care for nature, care for place and planet and specifically in Australia “Caring for Country” is of vital importance to lead urban renaturing.
  2. Give voice to cultural meanings of nature in cities. Alongside strategic narratives and business cases for nature in cities, cities should include cultural meanings of nature in the form of narratives, imaginaries, songlines, or images. Place-based understandings and narratives can provide a new form of understanding of how to better integrate or re-introduce nature in cities especially in places that are contested, under conflict or socially or ecologically vulnerable. Cities can foster and enable this weaving of cultural meanings through, for example, transforming existing (and often long-standing) city festivals to embrace multi-cultural meanings, to make the “invisible visible” and to represent diversity.
  3. Embrace citizen science to make inclusive urban nature programs. Citizen science offers an additional lens and means through which to shed light to people’s use of, preferences for and meanings of urban nature. It can complement traditional social science or marketing methods to unravel citizens’ needs and activate feelings of belonging and empowerment that are important both for embracing nature in cities and being active urban citizens.
Bringing nature into the heart of the city, Melbourne Town Hall’s vegetable and herb planter boxes. Photo: Judy Bush
A view of nature of Melbourne city. Photo: Judy Bush

Cities are critical places for tackling the global challenges of climate change, extinction crisis and pandemics. But to do so, we need to foreground biodiversity in actions for nature in cities. This implies a shift in the way urban priorities are set, a move from considering biodiversity and nature in cities as a luxurious after-thought or beneficial add-on to acknowledging them as a key starting point for planning and building inclusive, resilient cities of the future.

Niki Frantzeskaki, Cathy Oke, Judy Bush, Sarah A. Bekessy, James A. Fitzsimons, Georgia E. Garrard, Maree Grenfell, Martin Hartigan
Melbourne

On The Nature of Cities

 

References:

Oke, C., Bekessy, S.A., Frantzeskaki, N., Bush, J., Fitzsimons, J.A., Garrard, G.E., Grenfell, M., Harrison, L., Hartigan, M., Callow, D., Cotter, B., Gawler, S., (2021), Cities should respond to the biodiversity extinction crisis, npj Urban Sustainability, 1, https://doi.org/10.1038/s42949-020-00010-w

The Nature Conservancy and Resilient Melbourne (2019). Living Melbourne: Our Metropolitan Urban Forest. The Nature Conservancy and Resilient Melbourne, Melbourne. https://resilientmelbourne.com.au/living-melbourne/

Fastenrath, S., Bush, J., and Coenen, L., (202), Scaling-up nature-based solutions, Lessons from the Living Melbourne strategy, Geoforum, 116, 63-72, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2020.07.011

Frantzeskaki, N., Vandergert, P., Connop, S., Schipper, K., Zwierzchowska, I., Collier, M., and Lodder, M., (2020), Examining the policy needs for implementing nature-based solutions: Findings for city-wide transdisciplinary experiences in Glasgow, Genk and Poznan, Land Use Policy, 96, 104688, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2020.104688

Frantzeskaki, N., McPhearson, T., Collier, M., Kendal, D., Bulkeley, H., Dumitru, A., Walsh, C., Noble, K., van Wyk, E., Pinter, L., Ordonez, C., Oke, C., Elmqvist, T., (2019), Nature-based solutions for urban climate change adaptation: linking the science, policy and practice communities for evidence based decision-making, Bioscience, 69, 455-566, doi:10.1093/biosci/biz042

Garrard GE, Williams NSG, Mata L, Thomas J & Bekessy SA (2018) Biodiversity sensitive urban design. Conservation Letters. 11: e12411. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/conl.12411/full

Ives CI, Lentini PE, Threllfall CG, Ikin K, Shanahan DF, Garrard GE, Bekessy SA, Fuller RA, Mumaw L, Rayner L, Rowe R, Valentine LE, Kendal D (2016) Cities are hotspots for threatened species. Global Ecology and Biodiversity, 25: 117-126. doi: 10.1111/geb.12404

United Nations Environment Progamme, (2021), Adaptation Gap Report 2020, Nairobi. (www.unep.org/adaptation-gap-report-2020).

Cathy Oke

about the writer
Cathy Oke

Dr Cathy Oke is Melbourne Enterprise Senior Fellow in Informed Cities at the Connected Cities Lab, Faculty of Architecture Building and Planning University of Melbourne.

Judy Bush

about the writer
Judy Bush

Judy is a Lecturer in Urban Planning at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Her research focuses on policies and governance of urban green spaces in the transition to nature-based cities.

Sarah Bekessy

about the writer
Sarah Bekessy

Sarah leads the ICON Science group at RMIT University (Interdisciplinary Conservation Science). She co-developed the ‘biodiversity sensitive urban design’ protocol and works with governments and industry to improved biodiversity outcomes in cities.

James Fitzsimons

about the writer
James Fitzsimons

Dr James Fitzsimons is the Director of Conservation and Science for The Nature Conservancy’s Australia Program where he oversees conservation planning, science, implementation and policy across all the projects the Conservancy works on throughout the country.

Georgia Garrard

about the writer
Georgia Garrard

Georgia is an interdisciplinary conservation scientist and Senior Lecturer in Sustainability in the Office for Environmental Programs and School of Ecosystem and Forest Sciences at The University of Melbourne, Australia.

Maree Grenfell

about the writer
Maree Grenfell

Maree is an accomplished change strategist with a track record of achievement across the community, private and government sectors. Her work focuses primarily on complex multi-stakeholder initiatives and pioneering projects to build capability and collaborative capacity at a community, city and national level.

Martin Hartigan

about the writer
Martin Hartigan

Martin is an experienced manager of environment and sustainability teams in local and state government, developing and implementing a range of environmental strategies.

Vegetation is the Future of Architecture

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Having begun to appreciate the benefits of putting green infrastructure onto buildings, architects, engineers, horticulturalists, and others have developed techniques to make it real.
Most of the inhabitable regions of the Earth were originally covered by forests, grasslands, and wetlands. These carbon-grabbing, biodiverse, spongy landscapes have been largely replaced by agriculture and urban development, which is drier, belches carbon, is erosive of soils, and which has lost most of its wildlife. Indeed, biodiversity declines continue apace. Cities and buildings, in particular, are designed and maintained in ways where vegetation is omitted, removed, or simplified so that the benefits of having vegetation close by are limited or lost. Concrete, glass, and other impervious surfaces that shed water, kill migrating birds, and exacerbate the urban heat island effect have been the essence of architecture for decades now.

There is now a huge and growing body of evidence that green infrastructure or green-blue infrastructure (soil, vegetation, and water) that provides the setting for our cities, provides us with a range of benefits (also described as ecosystem services), including reduction in flooding, purification of air and water, summer shade and cooling, better health and wellbeing, places to relax and mingle, as well as food and habitat for wildlife.

Having begun to appreciate the benefits of putting green infrastructure onto buildings, architects, engineers, horticulturalists, and others have developed techniques to do this. The conventional building is a polyhedron, often a cuboid, which has horizontal and vertical surfaces to keep out the weather. Relatively lightweight coverings of vegetation can be placed onto the horizontal surfaces (extensive green roofs) and vertical surfaces (green walls). Where there is strength in the roof structure, more substantial gardens can be created on roofs of course, although roof gardens have a long history.

Roofs (flat and occasionally sloping roofs) have been successfully greened, led by pioneers in Germany who have produced relatively lightweight extensive green roof systems. The first guidance was published in Germany in 1982 as the extensive green roof market took hold. Although these systems play a useful role in reducing the runoff of rainfall, cooling the building beneath in summer, and providing some space for nature, there are often limitations. Planting can be low-diversity (for example, consider the pre-grown sedum mats that dominate the market) and shallow — growing media can dry out rapidly during dry periods. An improvement over sedum mats is an extensive green roof with an adequate depth of purpose-made substrate, planted or seeded with drought-tolerant wildflowers, an approach pioneered in Switzerland. This approach has inspired others: see, for example, the image which shows the biodiverse extensive green roof, designed by the Green Infrastructure Consultancy for the David Attenborough Building in Cambridge.

Biodiverse extensive green roof on David Attenborough Building, University of Cambridge by Green Infrastructure Consultancy

The vertical surfaces of our polyhedron can also be vegetated. The predominance of glass limits this, although there are ways of combining windows and vegetated trellises, which can provide summer shade with deciduous plants that can allow winter sun to stream towards grateful occupants. The traditional way of vegetating a wall is to grow climbing plants against it. This has worked well for centuries, however, people now tend to favour training plants against wire or mesh, so that plants are kept a few centimetres away from the wall itself. This also has the advantage of creating an insulating air gap that might provide space for nesting birds or roosting bats.

Vegetating walls with a wide range of plants, including many species that would ordinarily not occur on a wall, is now much easier with the range of irrigated plastic modules, fabric pockets, and metal cassettes available. These products contain compost, substrate, or in some cases stone wool. The range of species used is being expanded all the time and irrigation systems can be monitored and controlled remotely. The challenge with these installations is maintenance, which can require specialist equipment, technicians, and is costly in comparison with the maintenance required for green roofs, for example. Neglect or sudden failure of planting quickly becomes evident and will test the commitment of the owner if there are unexpected additional expenses associated with a need for re-planting.

Rubens at the Palace Hotel green wall by Green Infrastructure Consultancy. Image courtesy of Red Carnation Hotels

In recent years, then, it has been demonstrated that conventional buildings can be designed to have green roofs or green walls, or many existing buildings can be retrofitted with these features; however, what happens when the architect embraces the idea of vegetating the building before it is conceived? No longer are there the constraints of the requirement to install a relatively thin surface layer of vegetation, as is usual on the conventional building. Now, energised by the thought of new possibilities, the architect can maximise space for plants and can ensure that there will be structure that supports the desired vegetation, which might include larger plants, including trees. There can be more soil, which means, potentially, all of the rain that falls onto a building can be absorbed. More soil also means a wider range of planting and even more evaporative cooling. Buildings may even be in a position to sequester carbon as the vegetation and soil mature. Easy access for both the users of the building as well as maintenance staff can be planned into the design.

Hundertwasserhaus, Vienna

We can get an idea of what these more heavily vegetated buildings could look like by looking at the work of pioneers. Hundertwasser, for example, the Austrian artist and architect, promoted the planting of urban trees in the 1970s and began to put trees onto buildings in the 1980s, including a district heating plant (Spittelau, Vienna) and residential buildings (for example, the Waldspirale, Darmstadt). Knowing from the beginning that trees and shrubs are to be included on a building changes the building form and structure. There must be space for the growing trees and sufficient strength in the structure to take their weight.

Stefano Boeri and his team, including horticulturalist Laura Gatti, continue to embrace the possibilities presented with heavily-vegetated architecture. Boeri is said to have been inspired by the 1957 novel Il barone rampante, by Italo Calvino, about a boy who decides to spend his life living in a tree. Whatever the inspiration, the opening of the twin towers of Bosco Verticale in Milan in 2014 has changed our perception about what is possible with urban greening and in particular the greening of buildings. Boeri has been busy during the ensuing period, with similar projects in Cairo,Huanggang, and Tirana, amongst other places.

Bosco Verticale. Image courtesy of Laura Gatti

Critics of the Bosco Verticale have noted that the towers house private apartments and that greening on that scale would not be feasible for housing for rent. However, inspired by what has been achieved by Boeri and informed by the evidence of how biophilic design boosts wellbeing, other architects are now looking at what could be achieved for the everyman or woman. An example of this is the Biophilic Living project in Swansea, Wales, by architect Powell Dobsonand developer Hacer, which will include apartments operated by a housing association. This is an example of which I have had personal experience, having advised on how to create green roofs and green walls, however, I have read of dozens of similar proposals around the world where architects are becoming aware of the benefits of urban greening and how it can benefit both people and nature.

The biophilic design agenda is also bringing changes to the interior of buildings. Of course, there is nothing new in interior planting, however, there is a new enthusiasm for it. Decorative house plants have been enjoyed for centuries and were taken from the jungles of Asia and South America to be cultivated on an industrial scale decades ago. Now, people are increasingly aware of how interior planting can lift our mood, lower our blood pressure, and filter the air. Also, interior green walls and the availability of indoor trees is making people think about how interior spaces can be designed to show off planting and help it thrive. Interior green walls can be several storeys tall, bringing a lobby to life. Having trees indoors might require higher ceilings and a different approach to letting in natural light, though.

The interior green wall in the David Attenborough Building by Green Infrastructure Consultancy and ANS Global. Image courtesy of Nicholas Hare Architects

So, what does all this mean for the future of architecture? Climate change, bringing more summer heat, and more intense rainfall will ensure that the soil and vegetation on buildings will make more sense to more people. The opportunities to create accessible greenspace on buildings means that we will see more roof gardens and vegetated terraces. Roofs may no longer be a secret space leftover where mechanical and electrical equipment can be located without question. Heating, ventilation, and air conditioning engineers will have to miniaturise their equipment and take account of the cooling and purification capabilities of plants.

We will see deeper soils on buildings with more trees and shrubs, however, there will still be a role for wall greening technologies and relatively lightweight low-maintenance green roofs, especially on upper levels of buildings (where these green roofs will be increasingly combined with photovoltaic panels – the so-called biosolar roofs).

As well as “open to the sky” greening, buildings will increasingly include “open to the air” greening, where planting is over-sailed by structure, meaning that it will require irrigation, and, in some cases, supplementary lighting, but will bring planting under and through buildings. This “open to the air” planting will appear to merge with interior planting in many situations.

Looking further into the future, it seems possible that parts of the structure of buildings will be alive. For example, trees can be trained to form frames and can be made to grow together through a process of inosculation. The Baubotanik team in Stuttgart, led by Ferdinand Ludwig, is already looking at this, envisioning building structures that are alive and which absorb carbon. As more and more suitable species are found, this concept is likely to gain momentum. Another area of research is looking at structural materials (usually concrete) that absorb water and therefore provide a suitable surface for vegetation to colonise naturally. An example of this approach is the poikilohydric living walls being developed by Marco Cruz at the Bartlett, UCL. I predict that these avenues are only a beginning and that more and more techniques will be developed to complement more conventional ways of integrating vegetation into buildings with living structures.

In terms of maintenance, robots and drones will make access to high and otherwise dangerous-to-access vegetation on buildings much cheaper. People are already inspecting buildings with drone-mounted cameras, and pole and rope-climbing robots have been around for a decade or more. But, of course, more people will be involved in looking after the more easily accessible greenery on the buildings of the future, including both professionals as well the people living and working in them, who will gain a lot from the experience, which can be relaxing and therapeutic.

Gary Grant
London

On The Nature of Cities

 

 

 

 

 

Knowledge Systems for Urban Renewal

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“Science is meaningless because it gives no answer to our question, the only question important for us: ‘What shall we do and how shall we live?’ ” — Leo Tolstoy

Knowledge production can be elitist and exclusionary, with important voices omitted. Further, the knowledge produced by current knowledge systems is often disconnected from action. We need to diversify the kinds of knowledge available to support NBS.
 We know that our cities need to look and function differently. There is a wealth of scientific evidence showing that urbanisation has been, and continues to be, a global driver of habitat loss and ecological transformation, but that cities can also be places of rich biodiversity. Nature-based solutions are needed for urban resilience, human health, and environmental protection, as has been highlighted many times on this blog (e.g. here and here). The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of local green space to human well-being and has opened opportunities for new ways of connecting with and stewarding urban nature.

Here in Nottingham, as in many cities around the world, the pandemic has dealt an enormous blow to the local economy, in addition to the tragic human health toll and social disruption caused by restrictions on social mobility. Yet, in the midst of this crisis, opportunities for change have emerged. The most striking is the Broadmarsh site in the centre of Nottingham. Plans had been in place to redevelop the prominent shopping centre, with the previous building already demolished. However, partway through the redevelopment process, the economic impacts of the pandemic drove the company into administration, opening up an opportunity for the city to reimagine a renewed and ecologically-sensitive urban centre. Creative ideas have emerged such as the site being transformed into an inner wildlife sanctuary incorporating woodlands, wetlands, and grasslands, or a new ‘green quarter’ focussed on sustainability, urban agriculture, and eco-housing.

A concept imagination of a new greenspace in the centre of Nottingham. Credit: Influence Architects and Nottinghamshire Wildlife Trust

The Broadmarsh site is just one of many examples of opportunities for ecologically-sensitive urban transformation. In seeking to operationalise this change, the topic of knowledge comes to the fore. The quote by Tolstoy above suggests that science is unable to provide knowledge of what a good life (or city) looks like, or how we can create one. Certainly this is true of traditional, explanatory science grounded in reductionism and experimental approaches that seek to control complexity. However, in recent years, new forms of “post-normal” science have emerged that embrace system uncertainties, ethical complexities, and value-laden decision contexts – characteristics that define urban systems, and urban science. So what kind of science is required to direct us to transformative, regenerative urban solutions? What kind(s) of knowledge is (are) needed? Who contributes to this knowledge? How will necessary knowledge be produced? As a city that is home to two large universities, how can these institutions contribute to the kind of knowledge needed for a sustainable and resilient Nottingham? These questions lead to a bigger question for many of the readers of The Nature of Cities: with many of us working to generate and apply knowledge, are our knowledge systems failing us? TNOC is a rare home for transdisciplinary dialogue and collaboration yet, arguably at a global scale, our knowledge is not having the necessary impact as urban trends in terms of habitat loss, energy use, and resource consumption continue to show.

The question of how formalised knowledge systems, such as universities, research institutes, and educational institutions can contribute to ecologically flourishing futures was explored in the recent paper by Fazey et al. (2020) “Transforming knowledge systems for life on Earth: Visions of future systems and how to get there”, published in Energy Research and Social Science. The article documents insights from a participatory research methodology that elicited responses from 340 participants from diverse disciplinary backgrounds at the “Transformations to Sustainability” conference in Dundee, 2017. The Three Horizons Practice was used to gather participant understandings of (1) the challenges of current knowledge systems; (2) what future, more effective systems might look like; and (3) the domains of policy and practice needed to help facilitate shifts from the current to the future desired knowledge systems. A summary of the results is outlined below.

A summary of the key characteristics of current and envisioned knowledge systems, as reported in Fazey et al. (2020).

The current knowledge system was understood to be fragmented and compartmentalised. Legitimate forms of knowledge are neglected: there is often an emphasis on positivist epistemologies with little attention to ethics and aesthetics (knowledge of what is right and beautiful). Knowledge production can be elitist and exclusionary, with important voices missing such as marginalised socio-economic groups including the poor, young, women, and non-white cultures and ethnicities. Further, the knowledge produced by current knowledge systems is often disconnected from action, with academia specialising in precisely assessing problems rather than learning how to implement solutions.

In contrast, the knowledge systems desired by conference participants that can support regenerative futures are characterised by collaboration rather than competition, and an openness to different ways of knowing including intuitive, experiential, and traditional knowledge. The world is viewed as interconnected and inter-related, with an openness to the ‘re-enchantment’ of the mysteries around us. Future knowledge systems need to be focussed on solutions, and these solutions should be empathetic to the needs, desires, and perspectives of the diverse communities impacted via direct involvement in knowledge production. Citizens should play an important role in setting agendas, generating knowledge, and making decisions. Yet solutions must also have a transformational dimension, going beyond incremental change so as to address the scale of the climate and nature crises facing the planet. This kind of knowledge system reflects Aristotle’s idea of phronesis (or practical wisdom), which recognises that knowledge, action, and concern for human (ecological) flourishing are inseparable. Such a system is enabled by cultures of freedom and trust, leading to enhanced creativity, and allowing researchers and other actors to bring their ‘full selves’ to the process of research.

Clearly, this description of a future knowledge system is a long way from what many experience in cities around the world, yet it finds resonance with many of the examples of co-production of knowledge highlighted in The Nature of Cities. The researchers identified a number of domains for policy and action that can help to bring about this change. First, windows of opportunity need to be identified. These can be technological, socio-economic, environmental, or other forms of change. Notwithstanding the huge social, economic, and health costs, the current pandemic offers an enormous opportunity to think differently about how universities, in particular, can help renew and regenerate cities and open up knowledge and learning to a wider citizenry. Second, there is a need to experiment with new ways of creating and implementing knowledge, with research funding bodies having an especially important role to play in this. Third, promising innovations need to be protected and amplified. Fourth, new support and organisations are needed to allow new ways of producing knowledge to become embedded in the context of established structures, routines, and dominant interests. Finally, in many cases, for transformations to knowledge systems to occur, transformations to other accompanying systems (e.g., media, education, finance) are also necessary, as these shape prevailing narratives and norms around legitimate and valued knowledge.

Returning to Nottingham, there is now a valuable opportunity to begin to work towards this new vision of a knowledge system oriented towards the ecological renewal of the city. Already, the local authority has committed to being carbon neutral by 2028. The City’s Carbon Neutral Action Plan has incorporated an emphasis on scaling up biodiverse green and blue infrastructure to enhance resilience and adaptation to flooding and other climate change impacts. Further, the two universities (University of Nottingham and Nottingham Trent University) have recently signed a Civic Agreement with commitments to collaborative working, environmental sustainability, and unlocking the universities to enable stronger partnerships among different actors in the city.

There are already promising signs of action. For example, the Department of Architecture and Built Environment at the University of Nottingham are aligning c.1000 architecture, planning, and engineering student projects to sites across Nottingham to find solutions to challenges and opportunities related to the carbon neutral 2028 target and the pandemic recovery. Similarly, students on the MSc in Environmental Leadership & Management programme are connecting with local organisations such as the Environment Agency and Nottingham City Council to find solutions to local environmental challenges. Further, research on blue-green infrastructure is being conducted in partnership between planners, decision-makers, and university researchers to increase resilience to flood risk while enhancing biodiversity and open space provision. Now is the time to scale up these activities and embed a new collaborative, solutions-oriented knowledge system in Nottingham.

An example of a proposed blue-green solution to flood resilience in Nottingham. Credit: Nottingham City Council – Blue Green Infrastructure.

While the scale of change outlined in Fazey et al. (2020) may seem overwhelming, there are signs of promise from many cities highlighted on TNOC. Let’s continue to identify and enhance opportunities “for future systems to go beyond creating knowledge about the world to rapidly creating the wisdom about how to act appropriately within it.” (Fazey et al., 2020: 15).

Christopher Ives
Nottingham

On The Nature of Cities

Including Diverse Voices in Adaptation Planning

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The environmental justice movement has only just begun to systematically frame the disproportionate impacts of climate change as a justice issue. The present absence of strategies and goals for justice in climate adaptation planning is highly problematic.

This contribution is the result of a thought-collecting Seed Session during the TNOC Summit in Paris, held on June 5, 2019. Pitches, group breakouts, and a facilitated discussion addressed the question: Including diverse voices in adaptation planning, how do we make it happen? Two illustrators, Frida Larios and Marion Lacourt, enriched the session by creating on the spot artwork to capture the process and ignite creative thinking. These artworks were live outcomes of the session and are integrated into this piece. With our session and this piece, we hope to provide an example of how art and science can enhance each other.

People want a voice. Illustration by Marion Lacourt
~ ~ ~  We express our heartfelt thanks to all session participants in Paris  ~ ~ ~
Including diverse voices in adaptation planning—it is not the first and will certainly not be the last time that it is a topic of discussion among city planners, community representatives, policymakers, researchers, urban designers, and social innovators. Worldwide, cities experience climate adaptation interventions in their planning and development: whether as part of a metropolitan masterplan or in combination with foreign investments or donor projects (World Bank, ADB, bilateral). Think of coastal defense and post-flood green infrastructure plans but also port expansions, land reclamations, and ‘building with nature’ projects that are often technical solutions developed with imported expertise and little stakeholder participation in the planning process. If residents are involved at all, this is generally in the consultation phase when plans have already been designed and cost-benefit analyses done.

Illustration by Frida Larios

Climate justice

The primary challenge is this: low-income residents and other marginalized groups are often left displaced or deprived of their livelihood as a result of climate change adaptation planning. As such, they end up paying a disproportionately high price for climate change adaptation, especially given that they are generally not the major contributors to climate change emissions to begin with, and will often not be reaping the immediate benefits of living in a climate-proof city (Anguelovski et al., 2016; Lanza & Stone, 2016; Liao, Chan, & Huang, 2019; Mitchell, Enemark, & van der Molen, 2015; Shi et al., 2016). For example, a new coastal protection plan may make fishing grounds inaccessible to a coastal community while protecting a planned commercial district that will cater to high-end businesses and global lifestyle customers. Such developments lead to further marginalization of already marginalized groups.

The environmental justice movement has only just begun to systematically frame the disproportionate impacts of climate change as a justice issue. The present absence of strategies and goals for justice in climate adaptation planning is highly problematic. It is imperative to ask the question: to which populations does climate change pose the largest risks?[1]

We believe that diverse voices need to be included in climate change adaptation planning. Most environmental justice work in urban planning has focused on distributional justice or the recognition that injustices are spatial and can be mapped. However, procedural justice involving those affected in the planning process itself has been far less addressed, and is of critical importance. A truly just planning process that is open, inclusive, and has diverse voices at the table can help ensure that everyone benefits from living in a climate-proof city.

But how do we make it happen; how do we get more voices at the table while ensuring effective steering of the project? This is a question that many of us ask ourselves. Since the TNOC Summit provided us with a diverse group of experts and practitioners in the field, we decided to take this opportunity and pose the question there. We imagined that gathering people from all over the world, actively living and working in cities that each have their own adaptation strategies, would result in a process of learning from and with each other, furthering the dialogue on justice in adaptation planning.

Illustration by Frida Larios

The Paris session

The aim of our session at the TNOC Summit in Paris was threefold: to create a dialogue around justice in climate adaptation planning, to collect good examples and best practices as well as common pitfalls and lessons learned, and to explore opportunities for collaboration. We invited participants to think along and share their experience around three questions:

  1. How to engage diverse groups in climate adaptation planning? (incl. bottom-up initiatives and top-down policy)
    — How do you know who to engage? And at what stage of the process?
    — How do you actively engage them?
  2. What is the role of governance and how may it need to shift? (Local and international, incl. regulatory frameworks)
  3. How to transfer and learn between places? (tools, methods, approaches)
Workshop introduction. Illustration by Marion Lacourt

Images by Marthe Derkzen

The question: How to engage?

“Walk and talk together. Don’t go sit in a room.”
The challenge of including diverse voices in adaptation planning starts with engaging diverse groups in the process. For this reason, we asked session participants about their experience with engagement projects and strategies. The group agreed that there is a need for two-directional engagement: coming from both bottom-up and top-down. A top-down strategy could be to counter the charitable image of community engagement by paying community leaders for their work and services. This entails recognizing that community leaders are experts and treated as such and that their efforts are sustained over the long term including being paid for providing their knowledge and expertise in any community or city planning project. Another engagement strategy to adopt by city planners and designers is to be physically present in the target area; to make physical connections and be in contact with residents and local businesses, to listen, observe, invite, and pro-actively approach. Such presence should be open, authentic, and enter the engagement to first, listen. This strategy was adopted and experimented with in Glasgow. A third idea that was pitched by the group is the use of scenarios to “make it real”. What does it mean if a coastal defense plan for an estimated sea level rise of up to fifty centimeters is implemented? What are the types of land (and water) uses that are possible on top or next to a sea wall? Who will be the users and who will be in charge of its management? And what on earth does a nature-based solution look like? Does it look the same in winter as in summer, and how does its function change along with the weather? Scenarios, visions, and stories, especially when accompanied by a visual translation, can help a great deal in understanding, imagining, and even accepting urban adaptation measures (McPhearson, Iwaniec, & Bai, 2016).

Street planting. Illustration by Marion Lacourt

Using scenarios as a top-down strategy for community engagement can be linked and combined with the bottom-up approach of design by community. People know best what is needed and desired for their community. They can outline the desired requirements for residents to live safe, healthy, and happy lives. This could look like a pedestrian-friendly urban district equipped with schools, gardens, shops and services, a playground, a library, bike lanes, and restaurants. A place where people go for work, study, and recreation and one that encourages people to meet each other. Or maybe the community rather wishes a quiet residential neighborhood within easy reach of public transport. Within these desired requirements, residents, city planners, and designers can co-create adaptation pathways: how can we adapt the physical, social, economic, and cultural environment so that it can deal with likely climate change impacts? In such a process, awareness and understanding of climate change impacts and adaptation options are very helpful – and can be supported by scenarios. The other way around, scenarios can be “ground truthed” by having them imagined locally. How do you imagine your own future? And how do you imagine your future living in this city with regular heatwaves and flooded public spaces? Imagining scenarios of the future is a promising method to feed in local knowledge and desires while generating support for climate adaptation planning (Iwaniec et al., 2020).

This links to something else that was brought up during the session as a requirement for inclusive adaptation planning: creating a level playing field. Common knowledge and understanding contribute to a level playing field, for example in a design workshop in which all parties base their input, feedback, and ideas on the same set of facts or descriptions. Of course, a legal counselor or a stormwater engineer may know more about specific procedures or construction techniques compared to a resident who is a language teacher, but the idea here is that everyone at the table feels enabled to purposefully contribute to the discussion. Respecting and valuing each party’s expertise, whether that is in engineering or in knowing the ins and outs of a neighborhood (favorite spots and underused areas, vulnerable families, or key persons), is also crucial for creating a level playing field. A shared belief that all the voices present are needed for a successful project (and that no voices are missing) means that everyone’s voice is heard and respected. One pitfall here is that oftentimes such workshops are part of participatory planning processes in which some parties are being paid as part of their job while others are expected to engage on a voluntary basis. It would be worthwhile to invest in new planning experiments, such as paying community representatives for their contributions, that can further level the playing field.

Everyone is an expert. Illustration by Marion Lacourt 

Who to engage

But how do you know who to engage? In the session, four types of stakeholder groups were highlighted. First, are those living in vulnerable neighborhoods in terms of climate change impacts. These can be residents living at the riverbank or near the coast but also those living in very stony neighborhoods where temperatures rise quickly and rainfall has a hard time infiltrating the soil, impacting their health and wellbeing. Mapping area-specific impacts on health, property, and loss of livelihood should be a first step in the identification of affected groups. Second, are those affected by climate adaptation planning, for instance, the fishing community that is no longer allowed to enter their former fishing grounds because a sea wall was built to protect the downtown area from flooding, turning the waters into a bay which is now being used as a recreational harbor. Third, are the “alpha users” or “champions” in a community who attract community involvement and act as spokespersons. They build and sustain local networks, can encourage action, build momentum, and are not to be confused with community leaders. Fourth, are the most “violent” i.e. those who are most resistant to the plan and who may protest against its implementation. Rather than ignoring this group, they should be invited to participate early on, not just to avoid conflict or delay, but because their reasons to resist the adaptation planning process are grounded in their experience as active, knowledgeable, and vocal residents. Tensions are allowed to happen; different people have different views. What we can agree on in a planning process for future impacts, are the boundaries of what can and cannot happen.

Illustration by Frida Larios
Existing social structures. Illustration by Marion Lacourt

And how do people become engaged? Session participants came to speak about community meals as a clear bottom-up example of citizen engagement. In the community of Doorn, where Marthe Derkzen (MD) used to live, a midday meal is served every Wednesday to older and often lonely residents, cooked by the local butcher, and using the City Hall’s public library community house as a venue. Those eating pay the equivalent of $US10 for a three-course meal plus coffee. It is wonderful to see grey-haired citizens dropping in one by one, arriving an hour ahead and staying up to an hour late. The social function of this weekly community meal is unrivaled. And it extends beyond a joyful get together; while working on this TNOC piece in the library, MD witnessed how one of the older men offered his services as a tire repairman to a library employee (a bicycle tire, of course, in this Dutch case). Getting up slowly from the sofa, bent over, he came to walk more and more upright on the way to the job to be fixed. In MD’s former Amsterdam neighborhood, children experiencing difficulties in learning at school are learning how to cook and run a restaurant serving weekly meals to fellow residents. And in MD’s current home, Arnhem, citizen-led urban agriculture initiatives are combined with community cooking clubs in vulnerable neighborhoods. Indeed, community meals come in many shapes, are common worldwide, and are appreciated for their strong social power. Their established social structure can be used for informative and engagement sessions around a variety of topics (as they do in Doorn) and can serve as a best practice example to set up a similar structure for engagement around urban development and adaptation planning.

Chocolate map. Illustration by Marion Lacourt

Community meals are an example of community-led initiatives supported by local businesses and local government. According to several groups in our session, this is the way to go in adaptation planning: alter the way of thinking and have communities in the lead, supported by other organizations. A challenge here is to establish sufficient trust between bottom-up and top-down actors, for instance, trust to leave responsibilities to the other.

“Let top-down support bottom-up efforts.”
One suggestion from the group is to have guidelines or best practices available to learn from. Another group provided a best practice example of bottom-up action that is facilitated by local policy: a permit system operated in Paris and San Francisco. In this system, residents and business owners can apply for a permit to plant trees, plants, and other greenery in front of their home, school, or company which makes them active players in urban land management. These are opportunities for people to change the landscape according to their needs and preferences. Other suggestions for people to become engaged in adaptation planning are: to have a real, clear issue at stake and one that is site-specific, and to invite parties to participate right from the start and during the entire process, including discussing the process itself.

Illustration by Frida Larios

Recommendations for inclusive engagement

Participants in our session pointed out several recommendations to improve the processes of engagement and co-creation. First of all, local governments are encouraged to utilize existing social structures. Participants urged city planners to take advantage of existing community events and networks rather than creating new forums, as it turns out to be much more effective to work within existing structures (see community meals example).

“One-time engagement is a waste of time.”
Where structures are non-existent, “alpha users” can be employed to build them. Second, a recommendation for both top-down and bottom-up strategies is that long-term engagement should always be preferred over short-term engagement. This means that both sides of the engagement coin invest in building strong personal and institutional relations, express their trust and act trustworthy, and believe in each other’s capacity and dedication to positively (re)shape the urban landscape. Third, engagement should be fun! It should stimulate and encourage those involved to strive for positive change and it should result in plans, designs, and measures that are broadly supported by those affected. A resident should feel good about attending and providing their input at a design workshop, and a designer should have inspiring encounters when visiting a target area. Happy people make a happy process.

Cocreating. Illustration by Marion Lacourt

Governance and knowledge transfer

Our session also asked questions about governance and how knowledge is shared and transferred. We found that also here, much attention was given to collaborative, multi-actor efforts. Some participants suggested that a shift in governance is necessary, one in which communities take the lead and one that allows time for transition as the building up of required skills. Yet, in rethinking governance for adaptation planning, there is a certain tension between the perception of climate change as a long-term, global, and complex issue versus the often locally felt urgency of adaptation measures. This led us to a discussion about scale: at what scale can participatory decision-making processes work, and at what political level in a multi-layered governance system? How can they best be managed, and by whom? Here, power asymmetries come into play. Huda Shaka (HS) provided the example of her hometown Dubai where contractors and consultants are the main actors in adaptation planning, operating in a governance system without any legal requirements for community engagement.

In the Netherlands, new legislation is making citizen participation an obligatory step in urban planning. A pitfall here is that the meaningfulness of people’s participation will be dependent on the degree to which the process is a safe and level playing field for all parts of the community. Instead of developing a relatively rigid regulatory framework that identifies key players in adaptation planning from the outset, perhaps it is worth considering a governance shift which focuses first and foremost on creating an enabling and inclusive planning process and engagement environment.

Cocreating tree. Illustration by Marion Lacourt

Our third question was: how can we transfer learnings between places? Several ideas surfaced in the group discussions, from an inventory of best and worst practices to linking people via national citizen science. Compared to the first two questions, there was a clear and shared perception of the prominent role of science and scientists when it comes to learning and transferring knowledge for adaptation. We spoke about the replicability of methods and developing a library of case studies—indicating the need for a systematic approach. At the same time, participants stressed that local knowledge can and should inform adaptation planning. In our eyes, this reveals the challenge of combining different knowledge systems for shared learning and practice.

What is transferable. Illustration by Marion Lacourt

To conclude, some reflections

The session identified a number of challenges for inclusive adaptation planning: getting people to commit to something not yet clearly defined, the difficulty of prioritizing and reconciling conflicting viewpoints (which has implications for the trust that underpins projects), social vulnerabilities, “weak links” such as communication from a key individual to the community, the vulnerability of networks built on personal relationships, and multiple existing knowledge systems. Is our world one where inclusive engagement could be a reality?

Luckily, there are different stories of which some were told during our session. Stories such as Paris’ permit system for green streets and the payment of community leaders. And there are plenty of positive and practical ideas for including diverse voices adaptation planning:

  • role-playing for climate adaptation and resilience
  • public lecture series
  • art for awareness: artists’ role in community activation
  • day-in-a-life experiences
  • joint fact-finding: step back until you find something to agree upon
  • meet at a “third” place, neutral for all involved
  • develop inclusive planning guidelines e.g. C40 Cities guidelines
Illustration by Frida Larios

What stood out for us as organizers is that the session participants, in their groups, appeared to have interpreted the “engagement of diverse groups in climate adaptation planning” as the engagement of residents, and diverse groups thereof, in municipal planning processes. It is interesting to observe that those who are generally considered as key stakeholders, i.e. public and private sector, researchers, and non-profit parties, were mostly left out of the discussion. One assumption could be that by focusing on diversity, inclusion, and justice, we geared the discussion towards the representation of some of the less usual suspects such as marginalized groups. Participants’ affiliation with these groups may also be the reason why our first question on engagement attracted noticeably more interest than our second and third question on governance and transferability/learning, respectively.

We should also reflect on the term engagement itself. Engagement may have become associated with official institutions, e.g. local governments, engaging others, e.g. residents, in their planning and decision-making processes. One group even hinted that engagement can be framed as public education. With such an interpretation, engagement may indicate certain power dynamics: residents may give their opinion at an information evening or in a consultation round, so that they have “participated” in the process, but there is no guarantee (or it may not have been the intention) that their voices are being heard and taken into account, actually shaping the process and outcomes.

Photo: Elsa Ferreux
Illustration by Frida Larios

Rather than constructing knowledge and shaping ideas together, the participation process is perceived as one of the many boxes to be ticked in the municipal planning cycle. This is not what we meant by engagement — we were looking for the engagement of diverse groups with each other. By not specifying or stressing beforehand what we mean with engagement, we may have unintentionally pushed the discussion in the direction of a uni-directional, “top-down” paradigm of engagement: i.e. adaptation planners engaging with community actors as part of a formal process.

There seems to be a gap between what academics perceive as true (meaningful and inclusive) engagement and how engagement is happening in reality. Where we envision a just representation of all affected voices that builds on existing structures in a long-term process that all parties perceive as pleasant, the reality is one of pushed engagement, checked boxes, and hurried change.

We hope to see the discussion on inclusive engagement in climate adaptation planning become more prominent and to see some of the promising positive ideas become reality in all of our cities.

Marthe Derkzen, Timon McPhearson, Huda Shaka, Marion Lacourt and Frida Larios
Arnhem/Nijmegen, New York, Jeddah City, Paris, and Washington

On The Nature of Cities

References

Anguelovski, I., Shi, L., Chu, E., Gallagher, D., Goh, K., Lamb, Z., … Teicher, H. (2016). Equity Impacts of Urban Land Use Planning for Climate Adaptation. Journal of Planning Education and Research, 36(3), 333–348. https://doi.org/10.1177/0739456X16645166

Iwaniec, D. M., Cook, E. M., Davidson, M. J., Berbés-Blázquez, M., Georgescu, M., Krayenhoff, E. S., … Grimm, N. B. (2020). The co-production of sustainable future scenarios. Landscape and Urban Planning, 197, 103744. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2020.103744

Lanza, K., & Stone, B. (2016). Climate adaptation in cities: What trees are suitable for urban heat management? Landscape and Urban Planning, 153, 74–82. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2015.12.002

Liao, K. H., Chan, J. K. H., & Huang, Y. L. (2019). Environmental justice and flood prevention: The moral cost of floodwater redistribution. Landscape and Urban Planning, 189, 36–45. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2019.04.012

McPhearson, T., Iwaniec, D. M., & Bai, X. (2016, October 1). Positive visions for guiding urban transformations toward sustainable futures. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability. Elsevier B.V. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2017.04.004

Mitchell, D., Enemark, S., & van der Molen, P. (2015). Climate resilient urban development: Why responsible land governance is important. Land Use Policy, 48, 190–198. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2015.05.026

Shi, L., Chu, E., Anguelovski, I., Aylett, A., Debats, J., Goh, K., … Van Deveer, S. D. (2016). Roadmap towards justice in urban climate adaptation research. Nature Climate Change, 6(2), 131–137. https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2841

[1] (risk= hazard * exposure * vulnerability)

Timon McPhearson

about the writer
Timon McPhearson

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.

Huda Shaka

about the writer
Huda Shaka

Huda's experience and training combine urban planning, sustainable development and public health. She is a chartered town planner (MRTPI) and a chartered environmentalist (CEnv) with over 15 years' experience focused on visionary master plans and city plans across the Arabian Gulf. She is passionate about influencing Arab cities towards sustainable development.

Marion Lacourt

about the writer
Marion Lacourt

Marion Lacourt is an illustrator, an engraver and by extension a filmmaker. Her film Sheep, Wolf & a Cup of Tea… ( Emile Reynaud Price 2019) got selected in multiple festivals : Locarno, Clermont-Ferrand, Annecy, New-York, Chicago, Aswan, Hong Kong, Berlin, Cork, Moscou, Bilbao, Barcelone ...

Frida Larios

about the writer
Frida Larios

Frida Larios [b. San José, Costa Rica, 1974 (of Salvadoran parents)] has been leading learning since 2000, following her higher purpose of facilitating interpretative visual narrative applied to authored books, artworks, garments, workshops, and dialogues with children, youth, and designers, bridging the stories from Indigenous peoples and lands to contemporary reflection and appreciation, through her award-winning New Maya (Visual) Language coding methodology.

Making Spaces for Edible Gardens in Compact Cities: the Taipei Case

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Art, Science, Action: Green Cities Re-imagined

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Amid the coronavirus outbreak, edible gardens have seemed to become an even more critical practice for cities experiencing lockdown, as food supply chains are upended and an edible garden plot close-by residents could enhance food security and mental health.
Edible urban gardens have gained increasing popularity in the Global North within the narrative of nature-based solutions for cities and as parts of urban green infrastructure, which reintroduce greenspaces and associated functions into built environments, with the aspiration of leading to a socially and ecologically more sustainable city. Amid the coronavirus outbreak, edible gardens have seemed to become an even more critical practice for cities experiencing lockdown, as food supply chains are upended and an edible garden plot close-by residents could enhance food security and mental health. Whilst Taiwan has so far successfully contained the pandemic, the Garden City programme (臺北田園城市計畫), which allocates small edible greenspaces to nearby citizens, might be viewed as a far-sighted policy in this kind.

This article is based on work conducted as part of the “IFWEN: Understanding Innovative Initiatives for Governing Food, Water and Energy Nexus in Cities” project, granted under the Belmont Forum & Urban Europe Sustainable Urbanisation Global Initiative/Food-Water-Energy Nexus Programme (SUGI/FWE Nexus) and funded by a Ministry of Science and Technology Taiwan (MOST 107-2621-M-130 -001 -MY3) award to Wan-Yu Shih.

Whilst the programme is named after Howard’s “Garden City”, it is definitely not one of the followers of his spatial planning masterpieces. Rather, the ‘Garden City’ Programme in Taipei is a new type of urban farming that puts hundreds of small edible greenspaces into densely built-up areas to provide horticultural therapy, recreational opportunities, environmental education, and a breadth of social-environmental benefits through engaging citizens in food cultivation. The Taipei Garden City programme was officially launched in 2015 after a long incubation period of practices in local societies, which eventually formed a ‘Farming Urbanism Network (都市農耕網)’ and proposed a White Paper that was accepted by the current mayor – Ko Wen-je. Since then, the programme has rapidly integrated gardens from previous policy legacy, such as allotment systems, low-carbon community gardens, Taipei Beautiful sites, and Open Green sites, with newly established gardens both on the ground and on the top of the buildings. This forms 733 gardens across Taipei City within five years, covering 19.75 hectares and involving 54,013 citizens (as of Feb 2020).

Four main types of gardens have been included in the programme:

  • Happy gardens (30%): the use of disused public lands for engaging local communities to plant vegetables and to maintain the site
  • Green roofs (11%): the use of rooftop on public buildings for engaging surrounding communities to plant vegetables and to maintain the site
  • School gardens (45%): the use of grounds and rooftops of schools (from primary to senior high schools) to engage teachers and students in environmental education
  • Allotment gardens (14%): larger privately-owned lands that are designated as agriculture zones and were created long before the Garden City programme and are mostly located in the urban outskirts

Apart from allotments established at the city outskirt and school gardens using schoolyards and buildings, the first two types of gardens are often created in the most populated districts of Taipei, which provides great accessibility to the citizens. As most central districts of the city have a population density excess of 20,000 persons per km2, finding available lands within such compactly developed areas for farming is challenging, particularly for those on the ground. Several mechanisms have been adopted or developed alongside the programme to secure lands amongst buildings.
A critical strategy was to lift the ban on the use of vacant lands and buildings owned by the public sectors (both national and city governments). A throughout inventory of available lands across the city was conducted and published to enable site seekers to find a suitable land. This has resulted in several rooftop gardens on public buildings, such as district offices, social houses, and hospitals, as well as relatively large gardens at ground-level, such as Zhong-nan Happy Farm next to Nangang metro station and Fujian Happiness Farm. Whilst garden sites established via this scheme are free of charge, their food production is subject to not-for-profit restriction and only allows for self-consumption or donation.

Zhong-nan Happy Farm is right next to the Nangang metro station
Photo: Wan-Yu Shih

Another scheme used to increase ground-level gardens is converting parts of the area inside a park, which has been officially zoned as parks and greenspaces in the city’s urban land use plan. This includes gardens, such as Huoxinren Farm at the Songshan Cultural and Creative Park, Hakka Farm at Hakka Cultural Park, and Dexing Colourful Farm at Dexing Park. Amongst them, the land of Dexing Park next to the SOGO department store was donated by Shihlin Electric as part of its corporate social responsibility activities while its factory location was re-zoned from industrial to commercial use. The process of re-zoning was, however, completed before the Taipei Garden City programme was enacted.

Huoxinren Farm utilises parts of the area in the Songshan Cultural and Creative Park for cultivation
Photo: Wan-Yu Shih
Colourful Farm is located inside Dexing Park in the commercial areas of Shilin District. Photo: Wan-Yu Shih

Attributing to these land acquirement mechanisms, which avoid the need of altering zoning and building codes in the urban plan and save time and budgets from land acquisition, the programme was efficiently implemented. However, the strategy inherent in the spirit of temporary use models of vacant lands from the previous policy – Taipei Beautiful programme, which incentivized temporary greenery on private vacant lands, is not without problems. One of the challenges is that many ground-level gardens sitting on government-owned lands, which are not zoned for greenspaces, are only temporarily available and subject to change for construction. The recent dispute on reclaiming the land of Fujian Happiness Farm for building social housing is one case in point.

“Happiness Farm” in the Fujian neighbourhood of Songsan District was created 7 years ago on a vacant lot owned by the Ministry of National Defence and was assigned as a garden city site under the Taipei Garden City Programme. The garden is located in the city centre, where the land is worth 20 billion $NTD, or 701,340,000 $USD (information based on the interview with warden). It has earned great popularity among local residents as a rare green space within the neighbourhoods to grow vegetables, to meet neighbours, and to ease symptoms of depression, and improve mental health. Over time the gardening activities also fostered good community coherence, as can be seen through the fast organisation of a self-help group when the community was informed to clear the place for social housing to be built by the National Housing and Urban Regeneration Centre. Although local residents keen on keeping this green space nearby, the land of the garden, which is officially zoned for residential use in the urban plan, provides little legal basis for their wishes. Unfortunately, this dispute won’t be the sole case. Sooner or later, many ground-level gardens will face the same problem.

The land of Happiness Farm at Fujian neighbourhood belongs to the Ministry of National Defence of Taiwan
Photo: Wan-Yu Shih
The self-help group of Happiness Farm at Fujian neighbourhood to convey their opinions with the National Housing and Urban Regeneration Centre in a public meeting. Photo: Wan-Yu Shih

Fostering social coherence and resilience amongst urban communities is one of the strengths of the Taipei Garden City programme. The temporary use of available lands to engage residents for farming activities has benefited the social-environmental ecosystem of urban communities. This function is however not sustainable, as current land use mechanisms cannot sustain long-term farming and so social coherence might fade out over time when the garden disappears. Like many cities opt to create urban farms on the rooftop in face of difficulty to acquire lands, Taipei City too pays attention to the top of the building to carry on the programme in the future. However, community gardens on the ground are generally more popular in the case of Taipei since it is visibly and physically more accessible by local communities. Conversely, the use of rooftop gardens is often constrained by safety concerns and building management. It should not assume that the social function of a ground-level garden can be equally replaceable by a rooftop counterpart.

Allocating doorstep green spaces from densely built urban areas is critical but challenging. It requires enormous efforts to negotiate and coordinate between public and private sectors. The success of Taipei Garden City programme so far in terms of implementation and popularity amongst citizens is attributable to the existence of a champion in the government to facilitate cross-sectoral collaboration as well as active local communities to cocreate and to realise the policy. Many popular gardens however might vanish due to its temporary nature of land use and the on-going densification of the city. The pandemic crisis is catalysing urban transformation to be a greener living environment that provides equal and accessible green spaces for public health and well-being. It is also an important time for urban planning to rethink the human-nature relationship while designing the legal mechanisms for not only land use zoning, but also a possibility for nearby residents to suggest a rezoning.

Wan-Yu Shih and Che-Wei Liu
Taipei

On The Nature of Cities

Che-Wei Liu

about the writer
Che-Wei Liu

Che-wei works for Classic Landscape Design and Environmental Planning (http://www.classic1990.com/). He is one of the key initiators of the ‘Farming Urbanism Network’ (https://www.facebook.com/FarmingUrbanismNetwork/), which prepared a policy appeal for the ‘Taipei Garden City’ programme.

Stories of the Nature of Cities 1/2 Hour—Episode 4: Oasis

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Episode 4: Oasis

“Happy Hour at the Green Man” by Kate Wing, read by Lucy Symons
A small bar in the middle of the city has a portal to an ancient ghost forest.

 “Where Grass Grows Greener” by Jenni Juvonen, read by Nora Achrati
The narrator explores a forest and meets a fox. 
 
The stories are read, and then authors Kate and Jenni are joined for discussion by David Maddox.
 
POSTPONED TO MARCH. Date TBD
 
 
Nora Achrati is a voice actress based in Washington, DC.
 
 
 
 
 
 
Voice over artist Lucy Symons has had a varied and peripatetic life – spending a couple of decades on the continent of North America and an equal number in Britain. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
“Stories of the Nature of Cities 1/2 Hour” is a monthly series of readings from TNOC’s collection of very short fiction about future cities. Each episode is 30 minutes and features two readings and then a conversation between the authors and an urban practitioner. The stories are drawn from the book of flash fiction (less than 1000 words) on future cities TNOC and partners created, called “A Flash of Silver Green”. Previously recorded Episodes can be explored also: https://www.thenatureofcities.com/conversations/
 
Banner image: Bamboo forest of Kyoto.
 
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Green Recovery’s Missing Piece: Engagement with Future World Leaders!

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Art, Science, Action: Green Cities Re-imagined

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Green recovery seems to be the only viable strategy for sustainable and resilient economic growth in post-pandemic era. Why aren’t we youngsters the final piece in the puzzle of ensuring its success?
This essay advocates for a unique “Youth Empowerment Based Green Recovery Programme” to be developed and adapted by governments to enhance long-term societal resilience.

As we have collectively moved towards unlocking the lockdowns and quarantines that had been in effect since March 2020, the world’s attention has been gripped in managing the looming economic crisis that has inflicted severe socio-economic impact. This impact shall increase exponentially in post-COVID era mainly on youth and marginalised groups with diminishing future job potential. In just the Third Quarter of 2020, working hours in Asia and the Pacific decreased by 10.7 percent in comparison to Fourth Quarter of 2019, translating to a loss of 400 million full-time jobs (ILO, 2020). In addition, working-hour losses has pushed an additional 22–25 million employed into working poverty. Yet, priorities of public governance have given negligible attention to new employment and any planning for future generations. The $20 trillion commitment by countries was primarily used for emergency fiscal stimulus to recover from fallout of COVID-19 rather than focusing on education and skill development of youth and those recently unemployed (UN Environment, 2020). Our governments’ reliance on such surgical and hasty solutions may fail unless the focus is enhanced towards long-term planning. Another governance challenge is that our world leaders are failing to acknowledge that their fight-or-flight response and “brown recovery” focused COVID-19 revival plans aim for short term recovery and thus are double-edged sword with long term ill effects. These shall add to existing colossal economic and climatic debt that is being passed on to our generation, Gen Z (Singhal, 2020). We shall be the last generation to settle these matters before reaching a point of no return.

This crisis management approach however, must not threaten our existence. Especially in case of the Asia-Pacific region, the pandemic has stunted our progress in all SDG’s, especially the SDG 3, 4, 8 and 11 yet our governments plan of action and implemented strategies do not seem to be making desired progress and rather do the contrary. Current government fiscal stimuli is invested in immediate loans to households of lower income for necessities and keeping small-scale businesses intact as they are considered a major source of employment. While this is necessary, it will certainly not be a strategy for successful economic recovery, let alone green recovery. Instead, if we invest significantly in youth empowerment and provide ample resources for skill growth and incentives for business start-ups, households can become self-reliant and innovative youth-led businesses and start-ups can prosper. Who knows what these companies could achieve for humanity as many multi-billion dollar companies arose during 2008 economic crisis like Instagram, WhatsApp, Uber, Airbnb, Dropbox etc. all started by young entrepreneurs.

Sectors like public transit, hospitality and religious events involved mass gatherings of people, often leading to social and environmental distress even before the pandemic. We realise that their social construction was deeply flawed. For example, public transit in developing countries such as India consists of overcrowd metros and buses and the situation has not changed for years. A public sector initiative could include integration of ICT such as China’s movement tracking and health app that assigns colours indicating if people are healthy enough to be allowed to use certain routes of public transit and Sweden’s SL Transit Map which informs about best route commuter can take at a specific time. We have realised that despite pandemic keeping us holed in homes, world has grown smaller through dense social networking with youth at forefront of this. Our governments are working relentlessly to overcome this pandemic situation, though it seems only to revive the world structurally like the one that caused it to arise in first place. There is urgent need for revival of much stronger green recovery programme to come out of pandemic crisis with minimal depletion of human and natural resources. The need for green recovery has been ignored for too long even though its urgency first came to light during the 2008 global recession. This crisis showed that economic systems of that time solely depended on irrational actions of humans consuming resources indiscriminately, thus leading to global recession for same reasons, a third time after: first, the great depression of 1930s, and second, the energy crisis of 1970s! Out of those impacted by the 2008 recession, countries such as US, EU, South Korea, Japan and China, that invested in green fiscal stimulus, were able to stabilise their economies much easily and faster as there was a 0.1% and 0.5% increase in GDP for two years after the recession in these countries whereas in other countries there was a decline of about 3% to 5% (IEA, 2020). COVID19 unfortunately is a combination of an unprecedented global health care catastrophe as well as an economic crisis nearly at level of the great depression if not much worse. This is evident by contraction in global economy such as that of 23.9% contraction in India’s economy (MoSPI, 2020).

Youth empowerment based green recovery

Countries must be patient in reviving their economies and must start strategizing and implementing green recovery immediately by enhancing the awareness and engagement of their respective future decision-makers, the youth. This will be the deciding factor on whether actual progress can be made towards achieving the SDG’s, that seems harder now due to pandemic pushing us back many years. The concerned youth shall demand greater attention of this green recovery programme towards behavioural and lifestyle changes to protect our ecosystems and climate while accelerating economic revival. A few noticeable initiatives with linkages towards green recovery approach (though with limited focus on youth engagement) include, the European Union’s Green Deal; the focus on climate action by G20 Countries that account for around 80% of current global greenhouses gas emissions (Barbier, 2020); and measures by OECD and partner countries (OECD, 2020) focused on transition to greener economies. In order to sustain the effectiveness of such initiatives, it is critical to converge the focus on a crucial and unique human resource, the youth.

This calls for a youth empowerment based green recovery programme with a few specific aspects such as:

  • Allocation of resources to major upliftment of youth skills and availability of resources for them in addition to existing focus on emergency loans and fund distribution to poor households and small-scale businesses. Youth empowerment shall also lead to increased output in businesses and households becoming self-reliant. The voices of youth to receive attention through dedicated youth columns in national daily’s to capture and highlight a new perspective for greater awareness generation.
  • Productive engagement:
    • Greater allocation of funds for integrating education online, as nearly 45% students worldwide do not have access to internet (WEF, 2020).
    • Curriculum changes to ensure awareness about green recovery and its benefits and how to contribute at individual and institutional level.
    • Vocational training for skills relating to green energy systems for private and government jobs such as that of solar panels installation, rainwater harvesting systems and electric vehicle maintenance.
    • Increased youth representation in governance and decision making bodies.
  • Stop funding and subsidies for new carbon intensive projects rather provide incentives for cleaner energy based development in villages and cities and more importantly by making youth aware of such schemes. The well aware youth that have a large network of contacts on social media, can be at forefront of this movement. The youth with more energy and time, can rapidly catalyse a large shift by holding campaigns both online and physically.
  • SDG18: To advance humanity’s progress on all 17 SDGs, it is essential for global community to have special emphasis on ‘youth empowerment based green recovery’ as a new sustainable development goal – SDG18!

While we have talked of greener futures and development goals for over two decades now, why has there been very limited action on transition towards sustainable lifestyles and economies? Even after the financial stability harnessed by a few countries who invested in green fiscal stimulus during global economic disaster of 2008, why haven’t we learnt our lessons of putting green economic recovery at the forefront of economic crises? Why aren’t there hundreds of youth activists in the realm of sustainable development and associated crucial areas like climate change? The answer is simple: our governments and world leaders fail to see the missing link between them and future world leaders. In post pandemic era, special focus of global community on harnessing youth as a resource for “our” green recovery programme and its success in building a future resilient society, is vital!

Vishisht Singhal
Delhi

On The Nature of Cities

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Highlights from The Nature of Cities 2020

Art & Awareness, Asia, Australia/NZ, Essay, Europe, FRIEC, Latin America, North America, People & Communities, Place & Design, Science & Tools, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Art, Science, Action: Green Cities Re-imagined

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Today’s post celebrates some of the highlights from TNOC writing in 2020. These contributions—originating around the world—were one or more of widely read, offering novel points of view, and/or somehow disruptive in a useful way. All 1000+ TNOC essays and roundtables are worthwhile reads, of course, but what follows will give you a taste of 2020’s key and diverse content. Which is not entirely about Covid, although it could have been.

Check out highlights from previous years: 2019,  2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012.
2020 was difficult. Heartbreaking. I am sure everyone reading this has been battered by COVID. We all have lost people. So much of what we love about cities—performing arts, restaurants, diverse communities, employment…life—has been gutted. I hear us talk about nature coming back, and the value of parks, and yet…and yet there has been so much human devastation. Now that we have seen how our cities around the world truly function at their most vulnerable, what possible excuse do we now have to not emerge solely committed to fixing it? Maybe in searching for a new post-Covid “normal”, we need to act on the idea that the old normal was a big part of the problem.

But COVID is not the only story of 2020. In many ways the “normal” work of the TNOC communities gains some new impulse.

Onward. In essays, roundtables, and reviews we continue to seek the frontiers of thought found at the boundaries of urban ecology, community, design, planning, and art. The Nature of Cities advanced in a number of ways in 2020. The number of contributors has grown to over 900, and we published 100+ long-form essays, reviews, exhibits, and global roundtables. Importantly, we’ve attracted more and more readers: over two million people have visited TNOC. And in 2020 we had readers from 3,500+ cities in 150+ countries.

Thank you. We hope to see you again in 2021.

The Banner photo is Necklace, by Ligia Ceballos de Wiesner. Photo by María José. I choose this image because for me, in addition to being beautiful and the work of our dear friend Diana Wiesner’s mother, it suggests a sense of deep and rich connectivity.

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The Nature of Cities Festival

TNOC Festival pushes boundaries to radically imagine our cities for the future. A virtual festival that spans 5 days with programming across all regional time zones and provided in multiple languages. TNOC Festival offers us the ability to truly connect local place and ideas on a global scale for a much broader perspective and participation than any one physical meeting in any one city could ever have achieved. The TNOC festival will take place from 22-26 February 2021. You can register. You can propose sessions. Join us.

Roundtables

Necklace, by Ligia Ceballos de Wiesner. Photo María José Velasco.

Covid has upended all the normal routines in our lives and work. How do you imagine you might be changed by it, both professionally, but also personally as you negotiate a new post-virus “normal”?

COVID. We are all confined to our homes—if we are lucky (more on that later). Which is something, since most of us are “outdoor types”, “people types”. Can we find meaning, motivation, and renewed spirit for action in this contemplative but deeply strange time? We find ourselves wondering, doubting, planning our next steps or perhaps second-guessing our last ones.

How do we pick up the pieces? What pieces are even still available to us? Which pieces should we cast aside, and leave on the ash heap? There are a few key threads in this collection of 58 people from 24 countries, and many hopeful responses.

Now that we have seen how our cities around the world truly function at their most vulnerable, what possible excuse do we now have to not emerge solely committed to fixing it? Maybe in searching for a new post-Covid “normal”, we need to act on the idea that the old normal was a big part of the problem.

We Need an Ethical Code for Water

After a workshop held at “The Nature of Cities Summit” (Paris 2019), a group of TNOC contributors committed to meeting regularly in order to establish an ethical basis for water use and management.

This document is a preliminary draft of our understandings, hopefully a basis for many conversations and policy discussions as more and more stakeholders address the principles laid out. The document also represents a simple guide for ethical actions with regard to water.

Art and Exhibits

During COVID-19, The Urban Ecological Arts Forum at The Nature of Cities, sometimes known as FRIEC, is bringing to life virtual exhibition spaces, highlighting current exhibitions on urban ecological themes that would otherwise be impossible to experience due to the closure of cultural facilities. We did five such exhibits in 2020. All are remarkable. Here are two.

Beaver Village

Who Takes Care of New York?

This exhibit draws upon the USDA Forest Service’s Stewardship Mapping and Assessment Project, which is a dataset of thousands of civic stewardship groups’ organizational capacity, geographic territories, and social networks. The show features 4 artists whose work aligns with the themes of community-based stewardship, civic engagement, and social infrastructure. Through photography, drawing, book arts, and performance, these artists reflect upon, amplify, and interpret the work of stewards and the landscapes and neighborhoods with which they work.

@naibishotit

Hidden Flows — photographers uncover the invisible flows in African cities

The exhibition emerged out of a need to enrich current conversations about resources, infrastructure and services in African cities. The images and stories shared here portray the diverse ways in which we resource our cities, the unique cultures that emerge because of this, and the value that private actors contribute to our societies. The dialogues which accompany this exhibition seek to invite more perspectives into the conversation on urban resources, to connect quantitative and qualitative understanding of our cities, champion the value of creative expression in meaning making, and reflect on internal and external portrayals of African cities.

Stories of the nature of cities 1/2 hour

We launched “Stories of the Nature of Cities 1/2 Hour” in 2020, a monthly series of readings from TNOC’s collection of very short fiction about future cities. Each episode is 30 minutes and features two readings and then a conversation between the authors and an urban practitioner. You can catch them live the first Thursday each month, or you can watch and listen to the recordings.

The stories are drawn from the book of flash fiction (less than 1000 words) on future cities TNOC and partners created, called “A Flash of Silver Green”.

Essays

Enabling Access to Greenspace During the Covid-19 Pandemic—Perspectives from Five Cities

David Barton, Oslo. Dagmar Haase, Berlin. André Mascarenhas, Berlin. Johannes Langemeyer, Barcelona. Francesc Baro, Barcelona. Christopher Kennedy, New York. Zbigniew Grabowski, Millbrook. Timon McPhearson, New York. Norun Hjertager Krog, Oslo. Zander Venter, Oslo. Vegard Gundersen, Oslo. Erik Andersson, Stockholm.

Using Google mobility data, Urban resilience researchers in New York, Barcelona, Berlin/Halle, Oslo, and Stockholm provide local perspectives on the importance of access to greenspace. While we hope the pandemic and its suffering soon will pass, understanding the importance of greenspace for urban resilience must continue with renewed force.

Cities Are Not to Blame for the Spread of COVID-19—nor Is the Demise of Cities an Appropriate Response
Rob McDonald, Washington, DC. Erica Spotswood, Oakland

Humanity will not and should not abandon our cities because of coronavirus. Rather, we should view this horrible pandemic as a spur to improve upon, to make universal, and to include nature in humanity’s amazing invention of the Sanitary City.

The Place of Nature in Cities: Taking Inspiration from Singapore
Perrine Hamel, Singapore

Taking lessons from Singapore seems difficult as cities in each have their own strengths and legacies. What seems safer to say, however, is that Singapore’s long history of urban ecological experiment can inspire others in the region and around the world.

Re-envisioning Cities Through Bottom Up Neighbourhood Planning, Not Top Down Master Planning
PK Das, Mumbai

A sustainable ecology of cities is possible when we successfully combine environmental and socio-economic dimensions equally in our plans and actions. In fact, it is the extent of their integration and inclusion that should form a criterion by which we evaluate our success.

Gifting a White Elephant, In the Form of Green Infrastructure
Amanda Phillips de Lucas, Baltimore

White Elephant: 2. figurative. A burdensome or costly objective, enterprise, or possession, esp. one that appears magnificent; a financial liability. The history of green infrastructure implementation in Baltimore shows that what communities care about and care for has been co-opted into practices of maintenance for others. The current state of many facilities demonstrates this approach is not effective. It is time to experiment with a new way forward.

Crisis Reveals the Fault Lines of Gender in Environmentalism—How Do We Value Everyday Environments?
Nathalie Blanc, Paris. Sandra Laugier, Paris. Pascale Molinier, Paris. Anne Querrien, Paris

Neglecting gender and the unequal dimension of access and decision-making rights would doom environmental movements to failure. Let us be imaginative. What does it mean to revisit what the promise of equality means in terms of integrating the importance of gender in socio-environmental inequalities?

The Shape of Water, the Sight of Air, and Our Emergence from Covid
Lucie Lederhendler, Montreal

When commuters once again gather at the metro station, they will join the sound of fauna and the fragrance of flora in an atmosphere of palpable connections. Perhaps we may insist on sharing that space with a revived sense of the need for a radical redistribution of resources and care.

The Green Cloud, A Rooftop Story from Shenzhen: A “Living” Sponge Space Inside an Urban Village
Vivin Qiang, Shenzhen. Xin Yu, Shenzhen

On the opening day, The Nature Conservancy invited politicians from Water, Urban Administration and Housing Construction divisions, press, and professionals across sectors of the city to bear witness to this innovative project. The green rooftop became not only a living space for nature, but also a living space for communities.

Renewable Rikers as a Blueprint for a Sustainable City
Rebecca Bratspies, New York City

On 29 January 2019, New York City Council held a hearing on a trio of bills collectively known as “Renewable Rikers”. Rikers is currently home to the most infamous prison in New York City—the Rikers Island correctional facility an island penal colony with one lone bridge connecting it to the rest of the City. Renewable Rikers is an opportunity to end an old, but ongoing wrong. For too long, New York City has disproportionately sited its polluting infrastructure in low-income communities and communities of color.

What I Know Now: The Need for “Good Trouble” to Build an Anti-Racist Science of Ecology
Steward Pickett, Poughkeepsie

What does anti-racism mean for my profession, the science of ecology? We must identify how ecology as a science—which is itself in part a social system of researchers, teachers, and practitioners—can rise to the extraordinary crises that 2020 has highlighted so distressingly.

Bogotá. Foto: Fernando Cruz

The Hills Save Us
Diana Wiesner, Bogota

This work is long and has not been easy. Sometimes we are discouraged by lack of resources and understanding, by violence, by increases in poverty, by politics, by the realities of Colombia. But our hope is still alive, and we remain motivated to contribute our little piece of peace to the life of this beloved corner of the hills of Bogota.

Urban park in Melbourne. Photo: Manoj Chandrabose

Four Recommendations for Greener, Healthier Cities in the Post-Pandemic
Takemi Sugiyama, Melbourne. Nyssa Hadgraft, Melbourne. Manoj Chandrabose, Melbourne. Jonathan Kingsley, Melbourne. Niki Frantzeskaki, Melbourne. Neville Owen, Melbourne

City leaders and urban planners should use COVID-19 recovery strategies and associated resources to enhance existing green spaces, and to support those who are already motivated to maintain their physical activity into the future.

Parks are Critical Urban Infrastructure: The Use of Urban Green Space in New York City During COVID-19
Timon McPhearson, New York. Christopher Kennedy, New York. Bianca Lopez, Amherst. Emily Maxwell, New York.

More people are changing how they use green and open spaces in New York during COVID-19, but we found the perception of access to these spaces remains unequal, and reduction in funding further compromises the ability of parks managers and city officials to manage these significant shifts in use.

The LEAF: Episode 4. Show and Tells from Urban Arts Collective Members

Art & Awareness, FRIEC, LEAF, Podcast, Upcoming Webinar
Art, Science, Action: Green Cities Re-imagined

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Explore with us diverse and connecting threads in urban ecological arts.

In the LEAF, three FRIEC Urban Arts Collective members share something from their ideas and work for 10 minutes each, followed by Q&A.

Theme: Stories that have not been told.

Presenters:
Bibi Calderaro, New York
Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful Espejo, New York
Ursula Heise, Los Angeles

Wednesday 20 January, 10amPST / 1pmEST / 6pmGMT

To register:

https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN__4KSuyMhRES1oPWRdFFPrA

Bibi Calderaro, New York. Caring for the environment means taking immediate action to cultivate stewardship at a bioregional scale. The CARE Program (Collaboratory in Active Regenerative Ecologies) is a bioregion-specific and radically innovative project that aims to invite educators to a summer residency in the Hudson River Estuary that focuses on immersive pedagogies. The program’s overall goal is to learn with the estuary and from ourselves as co-inhabitants in the bioregion, to then circulate the experiences, nurturing practices of care and curiosity. It aims to do so by introducing and integrating environmental humanities and aesthetic practices in the commons of the Hudson River bioregion, while making the latter into an open-air transformative space, fostering communication and awareness of the close interconnections that exist at cultural, historic, geographic, socio-economic, and ecological levels. The estuary is the connective tissue between the rural and the urban publics along the valley, both of whom benefit from the watershed in order to sustain their livelihoods.

Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful Espejo
New York.
I plan to talk about my involvement with the Earth as an artist and my induction into ecosexuality and the daylighting of Tibbet’s Brook in New York.

Ursula Heise
Los Angeles.
My presentation will be on the documentary Urban Ark Los Angeles that I wrote and produced, and the related research project “Urban Biodiversity: Stories, Cultures, Taxonomies.”

* * *

The FRIEC (Forum for Radical Imagination on Environmental Cultures) Urban Ecological Arts Collective is a global group of almost 100 artists and creatives interested in the connection between nature and people in cities. The LEAF is a monthly webinar in which three Collective members spend 10 minutes describing an ideas or motivation central to their work, followed by discussion and Q&A with the audience. The idea to get to know the work of the Collective members, and to explore creativity and imagination in urban ecology. 

Interested in being part of the FRIEC Collective? Write us at [email protected].
 
Banner image:
High RE(n)tropy
Bibi Calderaro
2014; 5′ x 7′
gold ink on Canson paper
 
Nicolas Dumit Estévez Raful Espejo

about the writer
Nicolas Dumit Estévez Raful Espejo

During the last 20 years I have exhibited and performed extensively in the U.S. as well as internationally. Since 2006, I have pursued trainings with key people in the healing, somatic movement, writing and ecosexuality fields.

Ursula Heise

about the writer
Ursula Heise

Ursula Heise is the Marcia H. Howard Chair in Literary Studies at the Department of English and the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA. Her research and teaching focus on contemporary literature and the environmental humanities; environmental literature, arts, and cultures; science fiction; and narrative theory.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Building Practitioner Networks to Better Support Kenyan Frontline Workers During the COVID-19 Crisis: Some Learnings and Reflections

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Art, Science, Action: Green Cities Re-imagined

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Having lost 27 of our colleagues mostly doctors, clinical officers, and nurses to the COVID-19 pandemic, it is so painful, yet our government seems not perturbed how do we continue putting our lives at risk. the answer could be online therapy services.
As the COVID-19 pandemic accelerates and the prevalence escalates, global health care systems become overwhelmed with patients who are either confirmed or suspected to be suffering from the disease (Chen et al., 2020). Frontline health care workers (HCWs) are required to work for long and irregular hours, with heavy workloads that contribute to increased levels of stress and ultimately precipitate burnout (Ho, Chee, & Ho, 2020; Lai et al., 2020). Consequently, HCWs in the frontline experience enormous physical and psychological pressure that subsequently exposes them to mental health problems (Chen et al., 2020; Lai et al., 2020; Petzold, Plag, & Ströhle, 2020).

HCWs have also expressed the heavy workload and redeployment to unfamiliar clinical areas (Hopman, Allegranzi, & Mehtar, 2020; Newman, 2020). These conditions heighten fears of the HCWs who now perceive the health administrators as unsupportive and unsympathetic (Hopman et al., 2020). Psychological impacts affect the HCWs’ well-being and interfere with their ability to provide the much-needed care thus hindering the fight against the pandemic (Chen et al., 2020; Ho et al., 2020; Lai et al., 2020; Petzold et al., 2020). Moreover, psychological impacts have negative long-term effects on the overall health of the HCWs and contribute to a shortage of human resources for health (Ho et al., 2020; Lai et al., 2020).

In Kenya, the frontline HCWs seem to be working in conditions that have been associated with a high prevalence of the psychological impacts (Anadolu Agency, 2020). For example, HCWs in Kenya have complained severely in the media about inadequate and substandard PPEs that are exposing them to COVID-19 in the line of duty (Anadolu Agency, 2020; Daily Nation, 2020). Additionally, HCWs have expressed dissatisfaction with the treatment given to their colleagues who have contracted COVID-19. Nairobi has the highest burden of COVID-19 cases reported in the country with over 13,953 confirmed cases (MOH Kenya, 2020). The health care workers are underequipped despite numerous pleas to get proper PPE as the government lacks enough resources to provide them. This is causing unprecedented stress; therefore frontline healthcare workers need to be heard and supported during these anxious and stressful times. The providers also need up to date capacity building sessions for both mental health and psychosocial support during this time, infused with COVID-19 and epidemic preparedness responses.

INSPIRE study, University of Nairobi

Our innovation

The Nairobi City County Department of Psychological Services sprang into action and, being cognizant of the threat COVID-19, would pose to the health care workers especially when using the traditional methods of offering Psychological First Aid (PFA) and debriefs. The psychologists agreed to venture into the online space and introduce an e-platform where health care workers would still interact and support each other with online therapy services.

Having agreed that the services would be offered online, a biweekly supervision program was developed where a senior clinical psychologist was identified and engaged as the clinical supervisor offering online supervision infused with one hour of Yoga and meditation sessions for the mental health practitioners offering PFA and therapy to the HCWs.

The team then contacted and partnered with an information technology specialist who set up a call center platform based on the Session Initiation Protocol standards (Shacham, Schulzrinne, Thakolsri, & Kellerer, 2009). The platform enables extensions to make calls via public switched telephone network or voice over internet protocol, and also offers communication bundles which include voice, chats messaging, and video conferencing facilities for group meetings and therapy sessions.

The team through the national COVID-19 response unit received the approved national protocols and guidelines that had been developed on the standard operating procedures on Tele counseling and Telepsychiatry (Ministry of Health, 2020)and daily activity register (DAR) for data collecting and reporting.

The platform was then officially launched by the County Director of Health and declared a health workers practitioner’s mental health and psychosocial support services hotline. The information technology team embarked on social marketing through various whats App groups by using e –posters to reach as many health care workers as possible and sensitize them on the existence of the service. Daily support messaging was relayed to the health care workers as a way of support and encouragement during these times.

Steps taken to develop support structures and training for healthcare workers             

1. Needs identification of possible mental issues arising from frontline workers’ engagement with COVID-19 response
2. Identification of mental health specialists to offer the services
3. Formation of a whats App group for the ease of communication
4. Training of the psychologists on the current COVID-19 pandemic in emergency support and PFA
5. Identification and pilot testing of the social media platform to use
(Phone calls, talk chats, video conferencing tested)
6. Testing an integrated platform that can accommodate multiple ways of reaching out to others
7. Setting up clinical supervision structures for the mental health specialists
8. Development of reporting tools
9. Development of the call center roster for the specialists
10. Creation of the referral, and linkage  pathways for the health care workers with preexisting mental health conditions and those newly diagnosed
11. Training of the psychologists in G-IPT  for COVID-19 emergencies

 

INSPIRE study, University of Nairobi

Preliminary results and learnings 

Over 8 months, the center has been able to attend to 3,560 frontline workers (staff and their families), requiring PFA out of which 1,590 are HCWs exposed to COVID-19 and who were placed under mandatory quarantine.

We have received and returned 2,002 calls mostly from HCWs in quarantine sites and health facilities across the city requiring PFA. We have held 120 video conferences over (Zoom and Google Connect) consisting of between 20-30  HCWs each mainly from different health facilities in the city offering them psychological support;  -pretest counseling before they undergo mass COVID-19 tests and post-test Counselling after they receive their results. These sessions have been very helpful to the staff as they get an opportunity to talk about their collective and personal experiences with colleagues. Through these sessions, we have been able to identify 20 colleagues who tested COVID-19 positive and after recovery, they have subsequently developed mental health conditions (namely anxiety disorders, posttraumatic stress disorders, Depression, substance use disorders, and obsessive-compulsive disorders). The center has linked these HCWs to therapists for in-person meetings in our designated facilities and they are receiving support. This continuous pipeline of care has been made possible by our partnership with the University of Nairobi Department of Psychiatry through whom we have 30 psychologists trained virtually on Interpersonal therapy (IPT). IPT is a technique that we are incorporating in the long-term management of the health care workers, especially those developing depression and related distress signs. We have also been able to hold 18 online supportive supervisions of which six were infused with yoga and mindfulness sessions, focusing on guided meditation and Yoga by a trained yoga instructor from New York. These sessions have been very helpful for the therapists. Below are some of their testimonies.

“Great sessions was really tired, I feel better, as clinical psychologists we need more of this, it is really helping me in quarantine sites as I work with children” 34 years old Male Clinical psychologist.

“It is helping me a lot especially guided meditation, practice makes perfect, as for yoga it is great that we are starting off with easier poses progressively” 32 years old female Clinical psychologist

“Thanks for the session they have helped me reduce a lot of psychological pain and weight that I go through every day as I strive to help our colleagues and clients I attend to in the quarantine centers” 38 years old male Clinical psychologist.

Some of the issues raised by the HCWs and addressed through PFA  include lack of adequate information on COVID 19, fear of being infected by patients, anxiety, and panic due to uncertainties caused by the pandemic especially now that we are in the second wave of the pandemic; substandard and inadequate supplies of PPEs provided at the facilities and lack of comprehensive insurance scheme for the HCWs (The New York Times, 2020). Many of the HCWs experience stigma from colleagues at work when one tests positive for COVID19; or is suspected to have been exposed to patients with COVID-19; or working in a reported facility with COVID-19 positive patients or quarantine center. The stigma is extended to their family members by the community members within the communities where they reside. Some HCWs have reported feeling stigmatized by their own families as they are seen as potential threats of spreading the virus to the family members. Those with school-going children express concern that homeschooling is so stressful now that the children at home following the Government directive to close schools since March 2020 (BBC News, 2020). According to them, having children at home is adding to the work-related stress, and feel they should just stay at work. Stigma from neighbors and fellow health care workers if one is suspected to have been exposed to COVID 19 patients or tested COVID 19 positive is so overwhelming to an extent that some health care workers have been labeled as COVID -19 victims hence being forced to move houses because of the isolation and discrimination they are subjected to. Some health care workers had been forced to separate from their families, especially those working directly with COVID-19 positive patients for fear of infecting or passing the virus to their families.

“My spouse is a frontline worker attached to the quarantine center, where he interacts daily with those on quarantine recently they reported many cases of COVID positive clients in that center and I am afraid to tell him to stay away from us because he may be infected and pass it on to us this is stressing me out,” 36 years old female HCW.

“I feel my health is at risk and the seniors give patients more priority than us the healthcare workers. There are not enough PPEs being that I serve a special population. I feel neglected and not well facilitated,” 34 years old male HCW.

“I feel my dignity and honor has been lost, I took the test voluntarily, someone called me from the lab and just told me you are positive for COVID-19 and we are coming to pick you to be taken to quarantine centre. All this was communicated to me without any prior preparation for a positive result. Before I could comprehend my status the ambulance was outside my gate with sirens blaring” 40 years old female HCW.

“It is ironical and painful how we are recognized by the government as frontline workers, we are expected to intervene in the COVID- 19 wards yet no PPEs, no recognition, and no compensation, instead we are referred back to our professional bodies to fight for our rights” 43 years old female HCW.

“Having lost 27 of our colleagues mostly doctors, clinical officers, and nurses to the COVID-19 pandemic, it is so painful, yet our government seems not perturbed how do we continue putting our lives at risk? The government should know health care workers lives matter” 37 years old male HCW.

Discussion

Health care workers have taken up the intervention positively, as they are able to get it anywhere and anytime, with their privacy and confidentiality being maintained, and at the same time their risk to further exposure being minimized considerably as there is no physical contact. The therapists are now more relaxed as they are able to attend to more clients online while still maintaining their privacy and confidentiality, their risk of exposure to COVID-19 has also reduced significantly as there is no physical encounter. They are able to use various tools available on social media to interact with their patients anywhere and anytime without worrying about missed appointments.

The Nairobi City County government has embraced the initiative and is currently exploring ways of sustaining the initiative as it is proving to be helpful. Overall, COVID-19 National and County response teams are encouraging online support services as it is the easiest, yet effective way, to offer PFA to those in need of it as they all have access to internet-enabled mobile phones. Other neighboring counties have visited the city-county to benchmark so that they can set up a similar platform in their respective counties.

While our efforts are very basic in comparison to formalized actions by countries and more advanced systems, we feel that a timely development of services for health care providers generally and a special focus on those on the front lines of COVID-19 clinical care is pertinent. We want to use this opportunity of building Kenyan health systems’ response towards this pandemic. In the Kenyan context, stigma and discrimination around infectious diseases and mental health have been priority public health action areas (Mahajan et al., 2008; Mutiso et al., 2018; Turan et al., 2011). Our work is also focusing on providing HCWs with tools and resources to protect their clients as well as protect themselves and their families when under stress and uncertainty.

It is worth noting that we are not re-inventing the wheel but using established frameworks and guidelines such as improvising International Federation of the Red Cross/World Health Organization endorsed PFA (Vernberg et al., 2008), basic psychotherapy including some focus on interpersonal psychotherapy and cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy to address stress, loss, and grief, coping during lockdown, as well as providing information, referrals for those with higher levels of distress and or mental disorders that need specialist management (Pekevski, 2013; Vernberg et al., 2008; WHO, 2013). As shown in previous response efforts such as during the Ebola outbreak, collaboration amongst different stakeholders and preparedness around prevention and mitigation strategies will be very critical for the success of this intervention (Coltart, Lindsey, Ghinai, Johnson, & Heymann, 2017; Gates, 2015; Jacobsen et al., 2016). As a coordination center, we will continue to mobilize as many HCWs including lay and non-specialist health workers to help build psychosocial and mental health systems and services to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic and other future pandemics.

In the future, we aim to harness digital technology to put a spotlight on health care providers and youth. We feel if we reached these two groups we would be addressing broader social determinants of health and making a real impact in the lives of people (Heyman, Kelly, Reback, & Blumenstock, 2018; Viner et al., 2012). Keeping a human-centered or user-centered design in prioritizing the two groups has a unique advantage of developing newer methodologies and approaches toward strengthening health systems as well as providing care during pandemics. Digital platforms should be integrated with usual care and help reach out the message of Universal Health coverage and equity in health care by providing acceptable, affordable, and effective psychosocial care.

Next steps

i. Strengthen the online therapy platform post-COVID-19 pandemic for continued mental health psychological support.

Once the pandemic is over and its impact withered, the centre will continue to offer online platform services to support mental health services for vulnerable populations such as the youth, people living with HIV, substance dependence, LGBTI groups, sex workers, and pregnant and parenting adolescents who can easily get forgotten and marginalized in the mainstream care. We also want the health care workers supporting this group to benefit from continuous professional education and professional support through the same platform where support groups for staff, counseling in case of need, and mentoring forums can be offered.

ii. Develop an integrated mental health app to move the initiative higher and finds ways of integrating our existing health systems for health system strengthening.

Whilst this is ambitious given our stage of development, we will endeavor to develop multiple apps streamlined under a common platform for delivering psychosocial support and mental health care. Keeping a patient-centered and provider psychosocial support focus, we hope in the future to be able to integrate this app as part of routine services. We opine this may be of value, not only to more vulnerable populations as mentioned above, but also be useful to deliver mental health care embedded within essential services at primary care settings in rural and more remote clinics. We do also see the potential of scaling up in clinics that may be very busy offering support in real-time. Such services may be particularly useful to young people.

Conclusion

Online psychosocial support for health workers has the potential to be adopted as the alternative method of supporting health workers during these times. In SSA and LMIC settings, the earlier such efforts are made, the better it is for health systems health. We know that the pandemic will expose health care workers to additional challenges and such innovations will go a long way in supporting them.

Shillah Mwaniga, Isaiah Gitonga, Manasi Kumar
Nairobi, Maynooth, Naiorobi

On The Nature of Cities

Gitonga Isaiah

about the writer
Gitonga Isaiah

Gitonga Isaiah is a mental health researcher and programmer. His researcher interests are community integration of mental health and psycho-oncology. Gitonga holds a postgraduate degree in Public Health (MPH) from University of Nairobi, Kenya and is currently a doctoral researcher in the department of psychology, Maynooth University, Ireland.

Manasi Kumar

about the writer
Manasi Kumar

Manasi Kumar is with the Institute of Excellence in Global Health Equity in New York University Grossman School of Medicine, US. She is an Affiliate Professor at the Department of Psychiatry, University of Nairobi Kenya.

References

Anadolu Agency. (2020). Local unions decry lack of protective equipment, safety measures for health workers. Retrieved from https://www.aa.com.tr/en/africa/kenya-nurses-risking-lives-in-covid-19-battle/1797293

BBC News. (2020). Coronavirus: Kenyan schools to remain closed until 2021. Retrieved November 16, 2020, from https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-53325741

Chen, Q., Liang, M., Li, Y., Guo, J., Fei, D., Wang, L., … Zhang, Z. (2020, April). Mental health care for medical staff in China during the COVID-19 outbreak. The Lancet. Psychiatry, Vol. 7, pp. e15–e16. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2215-0366(20)30078-X

Coltart, C. E. M., Lindsey, B., Ghinai, I., Johnson, A. M., & Heymann, D. L. (2017). The Ebola outbreak, 2013–2016: Old lessons for new epidemics. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2016.0297

Daily Nation. (2020). Health workers’ nightmare in bid to tame virus. Retrieved from https://www.nation.co.ke/news/Covid-19-Safety-nightmare-for-health-workers/1056-5508540-ifjgn5z/index.html

Gates, B. (2015). The next epidemic – Lessons from Ebola. New England Journal of Medicine. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMp1502918

Heyman, J. C., Kelly, P. L., Reback, G. M., & Blumenstock, K. H. (2018). Social determinants of health. In Health and Social Work: Practice, Policy, and Research. https://doi.org/10.1891/9780826141644.0003

Ho, C. S. H., Chee, C. Y., & Ho, R. C. (2020). Mental health strategies to combat the psychological impact of COVID-19 beyond paranoia and panic. Ann Acad Med Singapore, 49(1), 1–3.

Hopman, J., Allegranzi, B., & Mehtar, S. (2020). Managing COVID-19 in low-and middle-income countries. JAMA.

Jacobsen, K. H., Alonso Aguirre, A., Bailey, C. L., Baranova, A. V., Crooks, A. T., Croitoru, A., … Agouris, P. (2016). Lessons from the ebola outbreak: Action items for emerging infectious disease preparedness and response. EcoHealth. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10393-016-1100-5

Lai, J., Ma, S., Wang, Y., Cai, Z., Hu, J., Wei, N., … Hu, S. (2020). Factors Associated With Mental Health Outcomes Among Health Care Workers Exposed to Coronavirus Disease 2019. JAMA Network Open. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2020.3976

Mahajan, A. P., Sayles, J. N., Patel, V. A., Remien, R. H., Sawires, S. R., Ortiz, D. J., … Coates, T. J. (2008). Stigma in the HIV/AIDS epidemic: a review of the literature and recommendations for the way forward. AIDS (London, England). https://doi.org/10.1097/01.aids.0000327438.13291.62

Ministry of Health. (2020). INTERIM GUIDANCE ON CONTINUITY OF ESSENTIAL HEALTH SERVICES DURING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC. Retrieved November 16, 2020, from https://www.health.go.ke/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/KENYAN-GUIDANCE-ON-CONTINUITY-OF-ESSENTIAL-HEALTH-SERVICES-DURING-THE-COVID-OUTBREAK-20MAY-2020-complete.docx.pdf

MOH Kenya. (2020). COVI9-19 Updates. Retrieved from http://www.health.go.ke/

Mutiso, V. N., Musyimi, C. W., Tomita, A., Loeffen, L., Burns, J. K., & Ndetei, D. M. (2018). Epidemiological patterns of mental disorders and stigma in a community household survey in urban slum and rural settings in Kenya. The International Journal of Social Psychiatry, 64(2), 120–129. https://doi.org/10.1177/0020764017748180

Newman, M. (2020). Covid-19: doctors’ leaders warn that staff could quit and may die over lack of protective equipment. British Medical Journal Publishing Group.

Pekevski, J. (2013). First responders and psychological first aid. Journal of Emergency Management. https://doi.org/10.5055/jem.2013.0126

Petzold, M. B., Plag, J., & Ströhle, A. (2020). [Dealing with psychological distress by healthcare professionals during the COVID-19 pandemia]. Der Nervenarzt. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00115-020-00905-0

Shacham, R., Schulzrinne, H., Thakolsri, S., & Kellerer, W. (2009). Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) Session Mobility. In IETF Netw. Work. Gr.

The New York Times. (2020). Kenya’s Health Workers, Unprotected and Falling Ill, Wa. Retrieved November 16, 2020, from https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/21/world/africa/kenya-doctors-strike-coronavirus.html

Turan, J. M., Bukusi, E. A., Onono, M., Holzemer, W. L., Miller, S., & Cohen, C. R. (2011). HIV/AIDS stigma and refusal of HIV testing among pregnant women in rural Kenya: Results from the MAMAS study. AIDS and Behavior, 15(6), 1111–1120. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10461-010-9798-5

Vernberg, E. M., Steinberg, A. M., Jacobs, A. K., Brymer, M. J., Watson, P. J., Osofsky, J. D., … Ruzek, J. I. (2008). Innovations in Disaster Mental Health: Psychological First Aid. Professional Psychology: Research and Practice. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0012663

Viner, R. M., Ozer, E. M., Denny, S., Marmot, M., Resnick, M., Fatusi, A., & Currie, C. (2012). Adolescence and the social determinants of health. The Lancet. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0140-6736(12)60149-4

WHO. (2013). Building back better: sustainable mental health care after emergencies. https://doi.org/10.1596/29867

 

Antiracist Environmental Leadership in a Virtual World

Essay, North America, People & Communities, , , ,
Art, Science, Action: Green Cities Re-imagined

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A positive outcome of being online is the ability to invite environmental activists and leaders from  BIPOC-led organizations into our ‘Zoom’ classes from all over the world. The Leadership and Reform class recently investigated environmental problem-solving strategies with doctoral students from the University of Rwanda in a lively exchange of culture and effort.

Our graduate students are figuring out how to best “immerse” themselves in city spaces while staying safe during the pandemic. Students find creative ways to both learn and practice while masked and distanced from community members. A positive outcome of being online is the ability to invite environmental activists and social justice leaders from BIPOC-led organizations into our Zoom classes from all over the world for professional development and antiracist training. 

What a different world we live in. About a year ago, I posted in The Nature of Cities about our thriving Master’s program at Antioch University Seattle. The Urban Environmental Education M.A.Ed. program continues to attract a highly diverse group of students who want to study antiracist environmental leadership in urban places.

Graduation
Photo: Cynthia Thomashow

At this point in the year, the students are usually out on the streets identifying the ‘big ideas’ that determine how a city runs. They would be standing on street corners asking hard questions about the motivations that shape neighborhoods, prompt civic engagement and lead to environmental investigations with a lens on power, money and privilege. Our students are challenged to quickly immerse themselves in communities by walking through, showing up and talking with residents. They learn techniques that open up the heart of urban communities in order to understand, first-hand, the impacts of environmental problems. “Nothing About Us Without Us is For Us” (African proverb) adorns the t-shirt given to each student upon graduation. The 15-month academic experience reflects this sentiment throughout. We pride ourselves on pioneering pedagogy shaped by an ethic of listening from the ground up and actively unpacking the influences of race, equity and justice on policy, regulations and growth.

In the past, spending time with community leaders in their homes, on the street and the workplace, allowed the students to gather stories and observe the realities of environmental inequities. Now, because of the COVID-19 pandemic, we are online or masked-up and keeping our distance while trying to make the same inroads into building relationships based on trust and presence. Our students are actively figuring out how to best ‘immerse’ themselves while staying safe as they navigate participatory action research and find creative ways to both learn and practice in this new and unsettling world.

Beacon Hill Advocacy
Photo: Cynthia Thomashow

Each closely-knit student cohort is as diverse as any urban community. 75% of our faculty are BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) practitioners/professionals. 60% of our students identify as BIPOC. Using the rich diversity of perspectives and life experiences present in each student cohort, we aim to cultivate authentic and visceral skills in antiracist leadership. Our courses dive deeply into how race, inequity and social justice impact communities and influence policies on pollution, displacement, access to healthy food, waste management, lack of green space, and the impacts of climate change. For many of our students, our courses are the first experience in a classroom with a majority of people of color. For most of our students, the Urban Environmental Education (UEE) program is their first academic experience with mostly BIPOC instructors. All students are deeply moved by the revelations of how racism, inequity, prejudice and justice have impacted the lives of their colleagues. That growing awareness leads to unpacking the ways that we are governed, how policies are created and how decisions that shape our society are made…it is not easy to realize and demands careful planning on the part of our faculty.

The UEE faculty have rapidly adjusted pedagogical approaches online in order to build a professional learning community that supports antiracist environmental leadership. In the past, faculty have depended on experiential sessions that allow close encounters among students, safely dropping their guard in order to build the trust necessary for honest sharing and supportive camaraderie. In this article, I will talk about some of the methods our faculty have created to overcome this weird reality of ‘screen education’. We have found that melding art and storytelling into our ‘Zoom’ classrooms helps build those bridges among the students and enrich the community of learners. These experiences translate directly into community engagement outside of the classroom and into the organizations where students are placed in practicum situations.

The evolution of a safe space is important for the success of antiracist approaches to learning. We begin in the summer with three face-to-face intensives that meet every day over a span of three weeks. This year we were relegated to virtually gathering on screen. The new students first introduced themselves using ‘spoken word’ poems. The prompts for this activity are: I Am From and If My Voice is Heard. The poems lead to much talking among the group in ‘virtual breakout rooms’, sharing roots and family histories, divides and unity, stepping through doorways so often closed, and setting the stage for interactive community engagement. Some examples:

I am from the Caribbean. 

I am from sea gates through which people from all over the world transit in and out, through and past.

I am from the movement of that transience holding on to opposing spaces, native, immigrant, enslaved, my ancestors’ wildest dream of liberation.

I am from the urban and the wild, they have shaped me.

If I am heard, white people will wake up to new ways of knowing. They’ll see what my ancestors always saw, that there’s enough on this planet for everyone. That the contradictions all add up to truth.

If I’m heard, white environmentalists will see that there’s beauty in the struggle of liberation work. Joy in the discomfort of having to share and connections to self in our connections to the other.

I am from generations of African Americans who migrated from the South.

I am from black people who settled in a racially Red-lined District.

If my Voice is heard cities will implement liberal policies with action that can be easily measured by all.

If my Voice is heard cities will devote resources to BIPOC urban liberation.

I am from desert where the heat meets your face and makes you glow.

I am from people who moved north and…

I am from the fields with those who tirelessly grow food for town.

I am from sacrifices that made me resourceful

If I am heard we will all act with compassion.

If I am heard we will all be called to action.

Each student then creates a Sense of Place map to share with the cohort members. The resulting ‘maps’ are powerful examples of connection, experience, values, and perspective. Art enables student expression to soar into places that might not be reached with formal papers. The exhibitions provide the venue to share multiple dimensions of one’s connection to the biosphere, to each other, to land and history, to culture, race and politics. The maps serve as provocative expressions of value and intention expanding the sense of what connects all of us to ecosystems, environmental issues and the tumultuous issues of race, culture and justice. We learn about each other without judgment using art to exhibit the places that have defined us and laid the roots of our journey here.

“The sense of place map is a rite of passage that links ecological identity to life cycle development. What are the feelings, events, and choices that characterize how you see yourself in the biosphere through different periods of your life, through various dwellings and travels in time and space. How will you communicate and illustrate the places where you’ve been, where you live now, and where you see yourself in the future?”  Mitchell Thomashow, Ecological Identity, MIT Press, 1995.

The unique culture-building among the students is enhanced by a Migration Map (Thomashow, To Know the World, MIT Press, 2020). Migration is raised as a seminal feature of environmental change. Each student creates and shares a chart of their own family’s history of migration. One student may talk about a farming heritage that has rooted family to a particular place for generations while another may talk about spending a childhood moving up the coast of California from Mexico picking fruit, yet another may have fled political terrorism and come to the U.S. for asylum. Intentional relocation, unresolvable displacement, purposeful migration…all of the students have an experience of moving, uprooting, leaving family, establishing a new sense of place. This activity reveals how common the experience of migration is to humankind. How humans and animals are often on the move to escape drought, ecosystem changes and climate impacts. The study of migration is linked to the dynamics of climate change, power dynamics,  health concerns and political upheaval and all are related to environmental integrity. Students engage with each other easily using these prompts as facilitation.

The summer intensives serve to build a strong and open community of learners ready to tackle hard questions, complex issues, and the difficult acknowledgment of systemic racism in organizational structures. Over the 15 months, courses that cover Race, Diversity, Equity and Environment advance into Multicultural Environmental Leadership courses. This critical thread is one of three that serve to integrate environmental leadership with social justice. Students open up by exploring personal identity, historical perspectives, and the patterns of multicultural dynamics in organizations. This thread of outcomes culminates in exposure to strategies that change exclusionary tactics into strategies for inclusion in organizational hierarchies and practices.

Multicultural Class
Photo: Cynthia Thomashow

The Participatory Action Research thread of the program explores inclusive and exclusive multicultural practices on the ground by placing students in community-based organizations for 30 weeks of direct observation, deep interaction and investigation into antiracist dynamics, policies and practices. UEE is committed to increasing BIPOC pathways into environmental leadership. To do that means dropping the veil on the dynamics of systemic racism, especially in organizational structures. Our graduates are prepared to help guide organizations in their quest to include multicultural perspectives in decision-making, programming, and action through their research. And, now, with this new challenge of taking a highly experiential learning process to a ‘screen’, we are experimenting with pedagogical methods that translate on-the-ground experiences into Zoom events! Faculty work together throughout the year in normal times to share instructional experiential techniques. Now they are actively experimenting together to translate their unique pedagogy into online approaches. I believe that we all are working to make education accessible, provocative, and inspiring in this new world of ours!

A positive outcome of being online is the ability to invite environmental activists and leaders from  BIPOC-led organizations into our ‘Zoom’ classes from all over the world. The Leadership and Reform class recently investigated environmental problem-solving strategies with doctoral students from the University of Rwanda in a lively exchange of culture and effort. This year, UEE will partner with a BIPOC-led organization in Oakland, CA to learn how they have Increased BIPOC pathways into environmental leadership. Youth Outside actively works to change the nature, missions, and practices that have excluded people of color from environmental leadership. They will bring to light alternative strategies to a more honest reckoning with the institutional barriers to recruitment, retention, and promotion for young BIPOC leaders.

Now that UEE is online, we are inviting aspiring BIPOC leaders AND leaders from mostly White-run environmental organizations to participate in antiracist professional development with us. Courses like “Race, Equity and Environment” and “Multicultural Environmental Leadership” can be taken as “Try Us On” opportunities.  We work together to deconstruct systemic racism and its impact on the lives of all. Identifying and undoing the legacy of racism within the environmental field is central to our educational model. Part of antiracist work is acknowledging our role in a white supremacist system. From that point, we uncover the intersectionality of social justice and environmental issues. With intentionality, an antiracist narrative emerges where policies, organizational behavior, governance, ways of knowing are investigated for their racist outcomes and we begin to identify ways of working together that are egalitarian, just, and emancipatory.

“Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded.  It is a relationship between equals.  Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others.  Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity.”  Pema Chodron

UEE extends an invitation to those who can’t put their life on hold in order to commit to an “on-site” academic program in Seattle.  We all have to be creative in finding ways to increase the number of BIPOC professionals in the field while dealing with the realities of COVID-19, economic strain, and social justice. Please check out our program here: https://www.antioch.edu/seattle/degrees-programs/education-degrees/masters-in-education-ma-ed/urban-environmental-education/
And here:    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnVqqewc5v4

Cindy Thomashow
Seattle

On The Nature of Cities

On Privilege as Choice

Asia, Essay, People & Communities, , , ,
Art, Science, Action: Green Cities Re-imagined

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By denying the existence of inequities within our beloved cities, we set the stage to create even more of them.

Two incidents stand out particularly from my memories as a young child. In the first one, I was perhaps 5 or 6 years old—at that age when we ran out of the housing colony and into the streets to play a game of hopscotch or whatever else took our fancy. I remember playing with a child my age when another child’s parent came up to me and scolded me. “Why are you playing with her? Don’t you know she is of a lower caste?” I had no idea what caste was, but to pacify the irate woman in front of me, I, to my everlasting shame, agreed that I would not play with that child. The reason the incident has stayed on in my memory is that, in recounting it to my parents, I earned one of the biggest spankings I have ever received. My parents were upset that I was exposed to the one thing they tried to keep me away from. I had just treated someone differently, not to mention badly, simply because of the family she was born into. Worse, they found it difficult to explain this to someone as young as I was then, and I was left to ponder the incident over the years until I could finally make sense of it.

The second incident was also equally bewildering to me at the time. I was eight, it was the 14th of April and, here in India, the date is celebrated for a number of reasons. It signals the start of a new harvest year for many people across the country. It is also the birthday of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, the architect of India’s constitution, a member of the country’s famous untouchable or Dalit community, and someone who went against the social limitations imposed by his birth to shape the direction of the country post-independence. For me, a little school-going child, the day was simply another holiday in which to have fun. Coming from a privileged background, and belonging to the so-called “upper caste”, while I knew that Dr. Ambedkar was an important person, I was oblivious of the struggles and lived inequities of his community, which he worked to address through drafting the Indian constitution. On this particular occasion, I had to run an errand for my parents at a small shop, an “upper caste” family-run business. At the shop, the conversation went something like this:

Shopkeeper: No school?

Me: No, it is a holiday.

Shopkeeper: Why?

Me: Well, it’s Ambedkar Jayanti (the birthday of Dr. Ambedkar) and Vishu (the harvest festival as it is known in the southern state of Kerala, where I come from)

Shopkeeper (with a snicker): Oh, you celebrate Ambedkar Jayanti then?

Me: Yeah, doesn’t everybody?

Shopkeeper (with another snicker, this one louder than the other, and addressing another group of customers): Oho! She celebrates Ambedkar Jayanti; (to me) You celebrate Ambedkar Jayanti—do your parents know about it?

The group found it deeply hilarious and went on to have a huge laugh at my expense. I was unsettled, and, in a bid to escape from the situation I found myself in, denied celebrating the said holiday and ran back to the safety of my home.

These two incidents were my induction into the world of social privilege and, in recent months, I have found myself repeatedly going back to those memories and realizing that my social privilege did not just come about because of the family I was born into; rather it was further enabled and amplified because I could choose to walk away unscathed from both those events. I find myself thinking of that other young child, who in my ignorance I had snubbed, and who might have grown up with deep scars as a result of that and other experiences she would undoubtedly have been subjected to. I think what if it had not been me, but an actual Dalit child who was laughed at because he or she belonged to a community that celebrated Ambedkar Jayanti? And then I realize, while there may have been many such children who bear deep scars that cut into their very being because of events such as this, I was privileged because I was able to simply file them away as unpleasant memories. I had the choice to either remember them or forget them, and I had the choice to decide how much those events would influence me.

I was privileged. I had choice.

During my fieldwork as a Ph.D. student in Bangalore, I spent a lot of time documenting the traditional institutions that existed around lakes, the people who live there, and social changes in the area. One such institution was that of the neerganti or the village waterman—his job was to manually operate the sluice gates of the waterbody and let out required quantities of water to individual farms that were irrigated by the lake. He was compensated for his efforts through a share in the total produce from the area. He was also a member of the scheduled castes and tribes—a dalit, an untouchable—someone whose social status was far beneath those of the farmers and other upper societal echelons, and because of which they were subject to many societal restrictions including their choice of water source. Today his profession is rendered obsolete because agriculture is no longer widely practiced, and, where it is still present, people use electric pumps for irrigation. In several interviews I have conducted with members of this community, I would often hear of how they did not wish to be associated with their former identity:

“In the older days, we were untouchables, yes, but we were self-sufficient. We got our food and grain because of what we did. Today, we have to pay for our food, but people still look down upon us. Why should we call ourselves neergantis anymore?”

“We have seen how it affected our parents—how they drank themselves to ruin because of society’s taunts. It is why we choose not to be associated with the community and an occupation that we were once very proud of.”

That young child whom I had once snubbed was now grown up and she did not have a choice.

An old sluice gate, once manually operated by neergantis to allow precise amounts of water into surrounding farms. Photo: Hita Unnikrishnan

The ongoing COVID pandemic has only brought out the worst in us like never before. Each day brings with it a fresh wave of distressing visuals—thousands of people walking thousands of miles to reach their villages amidst a lockdown announced in the dead of the night, with about four hours of notice. A young child, asleep at the end of a trolley, being dragged along by his parents. A pregnant woman giving birth to her child on the roadside with no medical attention and plodding on with just a couple of hours of rest. Another toddler attempting to wake its dead mother, a woman who perished from hunger and thirst. Several people being sprayed with hazardous chemicals in the name of sanitization and disinfection. Muslims across the country being blamed for spreading the disease thanks to one particular congregation and conveniently forgetting a number of events across other religions also flouting rules of social distancing. A state callously oblivious to their plight, going so far as to treat all of these people like second class citizens in their own homeland. We have seen it all —from denying the hunger and thirst of the migrants, to actively stopping them from travelling back because that would adversely impact the construction industry.

As tragic as these events were, another set of voices were conspicuously absent – of those who depend upon natural resources for their lives and livelihoods—farmers, fishermen, commercial washer folk (dhobhies), urban foragers, livestock owners. Each of these groups of people would have found it exceedingly difficult to eke out their livelihoods, given that the country’s many parks, lakes, and other urban green spaces were closed during the period of lockdown. This undoubtedly would have caused shortfalls in many resources —for instance pasturage for the livestock owners, water for the farmers, or forage for the urban foragers. Given ongoing limitations to social interactions placed by the pandemic, we are still unaware of strategies that these groups of people have evolved in order to continue to sustain themselves and their families.

There is something else that continues to stand out amidst all these events—the deep fault lines existing within urban spaces brought about by privilege—or rather the choice that is enabled by urban privilege. On one hand, the vulnerable migrants were trekking across the country from the cities which once gave them hope and from which they now had to escape in order to reach their distant loved ones. On the other, urban middle to upper-class residents were worried that their supply of fruits and vegetables, which would once reach their homes in less than thirty minutes, would now take over four hours to be delivered. And all the while, in the background, was the ubiquitous television which continued to stream endless visuals of masses of people thronging railway stations, or walking long distances, sometimes with very limited food or water to sustain them. Against such stark contrasts were conversations I had with people around me—people fortunate enough to be able to continue calling the city their home. There were two distinct conversational tones that I found deeply interesting. First, and most prominent were the group of people who while expressing sympathy for the plight of these vulnerable populations, also laid blame at their feet for the aggressive spread of the pandemic. “We are very sorry that some people have to go through this misery—but think about it Hita, if these people would only maintain social distancing and not trouble the government when it is doing so much for our protection.” The head of the country also apologized to “his poor brothers and sisters… but there was no other way to wage war against the corona virus.” On the other hand, there were people who chose to help—volunteering and setting up helplines so these communities could have somewhere to seek help from, setting up neighbourhood task forces in order to provide domestic help, daily wage workers, and other vulnerable populations with support, food, and shelter.

This is, however, not the first time that these fault lines in urban planning have been exposed. Urban planning has historically been iniquitous and geared towards improving the lifestyles of the already privileged. During our long term research conducted into the socio-political and ecological changes driving the loss of lakes within Bengaluru—capital of the south Indian state of Karnataka—we found that certain groups of people have been historically marginalized and continue to remain vulnerable to pressures posed by ongoing urban change. Take the story of a central lake within the city, the Dharmambudhi converted into the city’s central bus station. Driven by colonial concerns of the sanitary city, and the belief that western technologies of managing water and sanitation were superior to native ones, this story is one of how existing forms of infrastructure were superseded by other forms—in this case, local water supply systems (lakes) by networked closed pipes enabling long-distance water transfer. Piped water supply systems were provided into the homes of urban middle to upper-class members of the community who began to dissociate themselves from the water body that formerly sustained them. This dissociation fed into other forms of urban development—it rendered the resource open to being repurposed in other forms, for example, stormwater channels connecting this lake to others within the network began to be built over into other forms of public infrastructure—railways and public utility structures among other things. As a result of this, the lakes themselves began to fall short of meeting the water requirements of those people, mostly those of marginalized urban residents and resource-dependent livelihoods who had continued to depend upon it for meeting their needs. Drought and famine ensued, causing widespread chaos, migration, and death, each event further spelling a death knell upon the already vulnerable water body. Today, memories of the former water body are evoked all around the landscape, for instance, through the names of roads (Tank Bund road, etc) or a solitary temple that still proudly proclaims its association with the former lake. The lake, meanwhile, has given way to another form of public infrastructure: a bus station evocative once again of the processes of change that drove the transformation of this urban space.

The city’s iconic Majestic bus station, and formerly the Dharmambudhi lake.
Photo: Hita Unnikrishnan

These inequities are not confined to the past either. Even today, urban transformations tend to prioritize the needs of the privileged over the marginalized. Waterscapes are seen as spaces of entertainment, recreation, and aesthetics. The result is widespread commercialization of water bodies, increasing efforts to landscape them with fountains, gardens, and night lights, as well as the widespread hoardings advertising real estate that promise spectacular lake views to its buyers.

Missing in each of these narratives about the urban space are the people who live in the fringes. Cities, especially those that have grown by engulfing their peri-urban boundaries, have a substantial population of resource-dependent people—migrants who depend upon urban blue and green spaces to meet their domestic needs of food, shelter, and water, urban foragers who supplement their diet or income through harvesting local greens, farmers who cultivate on the banks of water bodies (even polluted as they are), livestock owners who make use of pasturage, and water supplies from these spaces, and so on.

One of the many luxuries offered by an enclosed privatized lake in Bangalore.
Photo: Hita Unnikrishnan

Equally visible are voices of other privileged urban populations who either choose to draw attention to these urban fault lines or turn away while still acknowledging and sympathizing with those who may be affected by such changes. It brings home an important thought: yes, privilege is about power, about possessing sufficient bargaining power within communities, neighbourhoods, and bureaucracies, but privilege also confers upon people the ability to choose. That young girl whom I had snubbed long ago did not have that choice. Instead, I had choice and the ability to decide whether or not I wanted to continue playing with her. That I chose not to is a reflection of how societal conditioning allowed, or rather disallowed, me to exercise my own privilege.

Likewise, privilege gives people the ability to sympathize with others while yet staying distant, it gives people the choice to deny that systemic inequality has always been a part of the urban fabric, be it with respect to social or ecological interactions. For example, I have been told several times: “You know issues of gender and caste are not part of a city like Bangalore at all. I am not denying that inequality in India exists, but it exists in backward towns and villages, not in a global cosmopolitan city such as ours.”

At the same, privilege also gives people the choice to fundamentally rethink what “urban” means, what “urban inequality” represents and who urban spaces actually support. It gives us a huge opportunity to rethink the fundamental inequities of our society and drive transformative change towards addressing them. In many cases, however, we choose to leave our privilege undisturbed because it allows us to exist within our own comfortable bubbles. The choice we make may not always be morally or ethically sound—we simply make them because they either represent the path of least resistance or a cop out. This is not to say that individuals who make these choices are inherently bad—in most cases we are simply unaware that we are choosing the easy way out. Perhaps what is needed is more introspection into the privilege we consciously or unconsciously exercise. It’s probably important to remember that in singling out and denigrating an entire religion, we also affect individuals practicing that religion and who may also be part of our own inner circles—people we consider to be close friends for instance. That by denying the existence of inequities within our beloved cities, we set the stage to create even more of them. We also need to reflect on the choices we make, its influence on the collective good of societies we live in, and the broader moral and ethical implications of what we choose. We may need to recognize that in choosing to be comfortable, we may unconsciously be enabling the opposite, not just for the countless faceless people that make up the population of a city, but also for those we deeply care about, can identify in a crowd, and can recognize as individuals in their own right.  Because, in the end, it is always a choice down to governments, communities, and individuals—we choose the kind of urban neighbourhood we live in and privilege plays an important role in deciding how, what, and who become part of that cityscape.

Hita Unnikrishnan
Bangalore

On The Nature of Cities

 

 

What is One Tree Worth?

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Art, Science, Action: Green Cities Re-imagined

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How much is a tree worth? My tree was somehow both priceless, and utterly inconsequential.
Writing this during National Forest Week here in Canada, I’m reflecting (as I frequently do) on the urban forest. As a scientist, I often find myself collapsing the beautiful, multidimensional, urban forest into a few general measurements: stand density, canopy cover, biomass, etc. But as an urban resident, I cherish these trees as individuals, too. Not long ago, I wrote elsewhere about measuring my life in trees; today, I have a new tree to introduce you to. A relationship that I’m afraid may not last as long as I had hoped.

So, how did my new tree acquaintance and I come to meet? Amidst a world that seems increasingly to be crumbling, I often find myself counting my blessings. Keeping a mental gratitude journal, if you will, of the many ways in which I have been incredibly lucky during a time in which luck is elusive for many. Among those blessings is the recent end of a year-long house hunt in a new city, resulting in access to a small yard. A yard! The height of luxury after six months of apartment-bound pandemic-living here in Montreal. However, the real blessing, to me, is that our small yard came with a tree. For the first time in my adult life, I was to become the new caretaker of a beautiful, mature canopy tree of my very own.

Photo: Carly Ziter

We signed the papers to our house on a sunny morning, smiling—and a little nervous—under our masks. Within an hour, we received a phone call. “I’m so sorry, but the neighbours’ inspection has discovered an issue with a pipe. The tree will have to go.” You see, the attached house next door was for sale too, and the tree—my tree—was quite close to the property line.

I like to think of myself as a relatively calm, positive, measured person. You could describe me as friendly, neighbourly, and perhaps above all, as non-confrontational. At least, when it comes to most matters. Yet my response to this news was neither calm, measured, nor neighbourly in the least. (In fact, I believe my reaction to my husband was something along the lines of “they will not take my tree” but peppered with language much less suitable for print). Our realtor—more suspicious than us of the auspicious timing of it all—commiserated with me, “I’d be upset too. You know, that tree is worth something!”

Photo: Carly Ziter

Here was the crux of the issue. Of course, my tree was worth something! Yet suddenly, I, a researcher who continues to devote much of my time to understanding—and professing to anyone who will listen—the myriad ecological benefits of urban trees, was faced with this question in a very different light. What was this specific, decidedly non-abstract tree actually worth to me, personally? 

In the days following our phone call, I try to look at the situation with objective, ecologist eyes.

My tree is a box elder, or Manitoba Maple. Acer negundo. A weed among trees, some might say! (Although… native to Canada… another voice in my head whispers).

At 45 cm diameter, and slightly tilting, our tree may even be past its prime for a species that typically lives only 60 years. (But we’d take such good care of it, the voice whispers. And I’ve certainly seen larger ones in the city).

This really requires a landscape perspective, I think to myself. It’s just one single tree and we could replace it, plant new trees of species that would bring increased diversity to a neighbourhood of other maples! (But they won’t grow up for years… and our neighborhood is a heat island, now. Plus, look at the way its leaves catch the light outside your office window). 

I try and remind myself how utterly lucky and privileged I am to have access to a yard at all but it’s no use. So, how much is a tree worth? My tree has value beyond measure.

…

Now, after a few weeks to sit with my emotions, I have calmed down considerably. I even explain the problem to backyard visitors without fuming. My friends are shocked by this seeming nonchalance, saying, “Carly…this is your tree? Do they know who they’re dealing with?” Nevertheless, my initially angry internal voice has quieted to a murmur.

Perhaps, with a little time, I’ve simply managed to remember that my “problems” are in fact minuscule compared to the incredible systemic injustices and climate breakdown the news confronts us with each day. The knowledge that while I recently packed boxes to move into my home, my colleagues on the flame-engulfed west coast were packing bags to evacuate theirs. How much, again, is a tree worth? My tree was somehow both priceless, and utterly inconsequential.

Or perhaps my change of heart is a result of the lecture I gave this week to a new class of undergrad biologists, on the principles of urban ecology. “Cities are dynamic,” I explained to my students. “Constantly changing as a result of changes in land use and management. Human and natural process also interact in cities.” Built infrastructure (say, a leaking pipe) is inexorably linked with nature (a towering tree). Setting down roots in the city, I now realize, means coming to terms with these principles, even when they come home to roost in your own backyard.

Make no mistake. I still fully plan to—calmly, and non-confrontationally—seek out a tree-preserving solution when our new neighbour moves in next month. But if need be, our tree will be replaced with a new sapling—or maybe even two. Our very small piece of the city will change, just as the broader urban landscape always has, and will continue to do. And, next summer, I will undoubtedly write a new personal essay here in TNOC about my backyard vegetable garden (full sun!) that I can’t imagine living without.

Carly Ziter
Montreal

On The Nature of Cities

Quarantine Fatigue and the Power of Activating Public Lands as Social Infrastructure

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This essay is part three in a series. Since 13 March 2020, our team of social science researchers has been keeping a collective journal of our experiences of our New York City neighborhoods and public spaces during COVID-19. Read the essays from spring and summer here.

Our public landscapes have the capacity to absorb so much of our personal trials and our societal tribulations. But it is active stewardship that can, at its best, transcend politics and build trust between people. When we have trust in each other, we have hope. 
1. Winter is coming: Second wave and quarantine fatigue

In New York City, after a bit of respite this summer, infection rates are rising again as we are facing a second wave. Among our research team, we have friends and family who have gotten ill, a reminder that the virus is very much still present as a threat. In our communities, we observe that there is persistent need and acute risk of hunger—with municipal agencies, religious organizations, and mutual aid groups continuing to serve as frontline providers of food relief and social services to meet the needs of the most vulnerable. After just eight weeks of in-person schooling, NYC public schools moved to an all-virtual format on 19 November. Yet, indoor restaurant dining, gyms, and nail salons still remain open in December, raising ire among some parents and prompting multiple opinion pieces on the matter (see also this). This rollercoaster of openings and closings continued as the city announced a plan for resuming in-person learning in public schools starting in mid-December. No more than days after this announcement, plans for reopening changed again. Fatigue sets in from constantly having to recalibrate things like daily work-school-shop schedules and many routine activities. Everything is fluid—testing our own adaptive capacities.

NYC Parks’ Red Hook, Brooklyn pool repurposed as a NYC Health + Hospitals COVID testing site. Photo: Lindsay Campbell

We have all had to adapt, cancel, or move to virtual our planned family fall gatherings and holidays. The CDC issued official guidance encouraging Americans not to travel for Thanksgiving celebrations, which was amplified in the social media space through norming and shaming like the trending meme “I’d rather have a zoom Thanksgiving than an ICU Christmas.” Further, we navigated a patchwork quilt of COVID-related restrictions that varied by state and county, including everything from travel-related quarantines, to curfews, to business shutdown, to bans on outdoor socializing outside the household. We feel the weight of our own personal decisions and responsibilities as we navigate household variation in risk perception, and socio-cultural norms–which are not uniformly shared.

Excerpt from Laura’s journal, 21 September:

I wanted to share a few reflections from Rosh Hashanah this past weekend. On Friday I baked challah and cooked a big meal for my zoom family dinner. Since COVID has made many of our usual holiday traditions unsafe it felt important to focus on the things I could still do, like make an apple cake that filled my apartment with a familiar smell and connect virtually with family members who are normally too far away to see this time of year. Saturday my partner and I drove to Connecticut for an outdoor picnic lunch with my family and the tashlich service (where we throw bread into water to symbolically cast away our sins). My brother-in-law led a short and socially-distanced service in the parking lot of his Synagogue; every other parking space was filled by one family unit and they asked us not to sing along for COVID reasons, a reminder that the new year was starting in a very different context. But then we did tashlich in a nearby pond and the simple act of throwing breadcrumbs into water felt unchanged. Back in Brooklyn on Sunday I went to an outdoor “shofar across Brooklyn” service at Grand Army Plaza and reflected on the power of participating in ritual in a public space.

As we move into our tenth month of the COVID-19 pandemic, quarantine fatigue is real. Recognizing that there are axes of incredible difference based on social vulnerability that shape personal exposure to risk, we are all–in unique ways—experiencing the sustained impacts of this public health crisis, the cascading economic effects, and the transformations of our social worlds.

Excerpt from Lindsay’s journal, 30 October:

On the personal front, I think I’ve finally realized that I am entering a stage of fatigue. I’m working a ton, I’m home with Mia, Ricardo does almost all the cooking, but still I find myself with zero time—no exercise, not seeing friends. Time is just flying by. I miss the sum total of lived experience in the city. No, I don’t miss commuting, but as my friend Minna said, “I miss the randomness.” It’s all just starting to wear down—the sameness, being home all the time, connected only through the computer. I miss my SOCIAL WORLD. I keep thinking about Erika’s comments from Frank Snowden. So hard to put a finger on, to capture, and to see, but that erosion of our social bonds is real, personal, and deeply felt.

Yet, we have seen an amazing range of adaptations that allow us to sustain and continue our social and economic lives. Here in New York City, we have moved more of our lives outdoors—particularly in our parks and open spaces, which have become even more the lifeblood of the city, hosting outdoor fitness classes, classrooms, book clubs, birthday parties, playgroups, community dialogues and more. Municipally-enabled programs of Open Restaurants, Open Streets, and Open Storefronts transform and repurpose the public right-of-way for diverse uses. Yet, these programs cannot fully support or save whole sectors—arts and culture, retail—the economic impact is staggering. As of September, fewer than 10% of Manhattan office workers had returned, with cascading impacts on retail, restaurant, and service providers connected to those workers. For colleagues that work in these sectors, we have little to offer but sympathy and worry, mumbled apologies and distress.

Overall, many have expressed the feeling that the novelty of distanced socializing and outdoor dining is waning.  With shorter and colder days, comes a grim sense of preparing for a long winter. We are now all acting like amateur meteorologists (as well as amateur epidemiologists), keenly aware of sunrise, sunset, temperature gradients, and wind chill factors. Many people are getting serious about thermals, boots, jackets, and space heaters. But all the best gear and “can do” attitude doesn’t fully shake the feeling of dread and worry about what lies ahead over the next few months. Yet, with recent announcements on the development of vaccines, we can see a light at the end of the tunnel. With spring, summer, and vaccines ahead, we redouble our efforts to stay safe and sustain ourselves and our communities through this winter.

We cannot write about this fall without reflecting on the impact of the election. As federal employees and researchers, it is not our role to take a political stance. But as observers of our social worlds and cultural milieus, we can plainly see that once again our public spaces serve as crucial sites for contestation, celebration, and protest. We are reminded that there are few places other than public lands that have the capacity to absorb all of our strife and angst, our protest and peace. And sometimes, all of it can be expressed in one weekend and within a single public space.

2. The power of public lands and the possibilities of social infrastructure

Given all of these overwhelming divisions and chronic challenges, how can our public realm continue to offer social support? When and how can our shared public spaces at minimum meet a wide range of needs and, at best, help us to come together or transcend these differences?

First and foremost, the power and potential of public lands lies in the fact that they are just that—public and open to all. We have been conducting a series of interviews with city, state, and federal land managers across the northeast, asking them to reflect on the role of the forests and parks that they steward in light of the events of 2020—including both COVID-19 and the uprisings around racial injustice. A consistent theme we heard echoed again and again at every scale of government is that these lands are for everyone:

  • A New York City Parks administrator said, “[our park] is a place for people to come together and is welcoming of all people” and “We have this incredible open space resource. It’s an educational resource and a recreational resource, but we have to find out how we can best be of use to those [under served] communities.”
  • A New York State Parks official said, “public lands are for all.”
  • A National Forest representative said, “make people see that this forest, this public land is YOURS.”

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a renewed attention to the importance of green space and nearby nature as a crucial resource that supports all dimensions of physical, mental, social, and emotional health and well-being. Going further, the pandemic has shined a light on pre-existing inequities in the distribution of, access to, and financing and programming of these greenspaces across landscapes and communities. As has been well-known in environmental justice circles for decades, access to parkland and tree canopy is uneven, including along dimensions of race and class (see, e.g., Grove et al., 2018; Heynen, 2003, Schwarz et al., 2015; Watkins & Gerrish, 2018).

The NYC City Council Parks and Recreation Committee held a hearing on 22 October on this very issue: “Improving the Equity of Green Space throughout the City in Light of the COVID Epidemic.”  Not only did the NYC Parks Commissioner, Mitchell Silver, offer testimony, but dozens of non-profit partners, advocacy groups, labor unions, community gardeners, park workers, and committed residents and stewards spoke out on the need for an equitable open space system, now more than ever.  As Forest Service researchers, we too offered testimony, reflecting in particular on the importance of civic groups and their role in activating these public spaces as social infrastructure. While it is important to focus on the physical resource of parks and open space, it is not enough. We also need to support people and organizations that care for these green spaces, so that they can truly function as equitable and inclusive social infrastructures. Community organizations play a pivotal, but often unseen role in supporting public open spaces and activating them as social infrastructure — leveraging significant person power, time, and resources (Landau et al. 2019).

NYC Parks COVID social distancing signage at Valentino Pier, photo by Lindsay Campbell. Followed by activist signage using the same design and identifying racial justice issues, installed in Prospect Park and Dr. Ronald McNair Park. Photos: Laura Landau

During times of disturbance, these civic stewardship groups act as “green responders”. After a crisis, first responders help to stabilize life and property. As part of longer-term recovery and preparedness cycles, stewards can help to rebuild communities and landscapes through environmental action (Campbell et al. 2019; Svendsen and Campbell 2010). The act of caring for local places can transform not only the physical environment, but also our relationships to those places and to each other. In the wake of COVID-19 and the murder of George Floyd—two crises that co-occurred and intersected, we saw many stewardship groups spring into action to address new needs that came from the pandemic and the uprisings around racial injustice:

  • One group added a set of “recovery icons” to their open source digital mapping materials, so that stewards and activists around the world can map assets such as food banks, temporary housing, and hand-washing stations.
  • Another group that was impacted by loss of funding for the city’s public composting program responded by partnering with other compost groups to advocate for a partial restoration of the community compost budget.
  • A group in the Rockaways more than doubled their farm share program and offered free Thanksgiving dinners to support community members in need. In addition to their food justice work, their educational team also created a documentary reflecting the lives and stories of their youth participants during the pandemic.
  • A group in Flushing pivoted to providing online content – including a virtual environmental justice book club – to keep participants connected in conversation and community and fight “quarantine monotony”.
  • During the protests in the wake of the George Floyd murder, banners riffing off the NYC Parks official COVID social distancing signs appeared in some parks in Brooklyn. While they are not park of the parks’ official signage, they have been left up and serve as a reminder that public lands serve as sites of expression.

Civic engagement is critical to public space. In addition to providing labor and increasing capacity, it strengthens democracy via empathy, innovation, and fostering social trust. For example, a study of volunteer tree planters participating in the MillionTreesNYC found that–other than voting or attending religious services–tree planting was many participants’ first act of volunteerism; follow up interviews found that they went on to be more highly civically engaged in their communities in other ways. As such, we find that environmental stewardship can be an on-ramp to other forms of engagement (Fisher et al. 2015). Civic stewardship can increase community and cultural relevance by providing locally tailored and specific programming, events, and activities. Prior to the pandemic, one local friends-of park group in Queens organized nighttime dance parties, public health fairs, and arts activities for children to bring diverse residents together around issues they cared about–all with a fun and educational tone. And this summer, a group in Brownsville, Brooklyn responded to the shifting needs of their community members by building out a focus around mental health care and wellness. In addition to new needs that have emerged during the pandemic, groups have also continued annual events, like raking leaves, which can feel like rituals, grounding neighbors in time and place.

Neighbors and friends creating a garden in an empty street tree bed in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Photo: Lindsay Campbell

Excerpt from Lindsay’s journal, 26 October

This past weekend, I did some long-overdue stewardship on Pioneer Street, after having been dormant for a few seasons. Marisa (friend, neighbor, and garden steward at Pioneer Works) and I organized it and ALL the kids in our building came out to help. We created a new stone border on the empty tree pit outside our door, planted an indigo bush, moved a sumac from the planter, planted bulbs I had bought, and echinacea Marisa brought. We also replanted the planter with grasses and wildflowers. We made hand-made signs espousing our love for our human and plant neighbors, and took a tea break served off the back of a wagon. It was hard work and fun — and it was the first time since the pandemic that I had seen so many of my neighbors together. Now this tree pit that Ricardo and I had tended as a household in the past became truly a shared space, stewarded by our building and with our neighbors down the block.

Astoria Park Alliance LeafFest. Photo: Michelle Johnson

Overall, we have an over-reliance on, but under-resourcing of civic stewardship groups in frontline communities. A “both/and” approach is needed to support an equitable system of stewardship across public, civic, and private sectors. The public sector provides crucial parks maintenance workers as paid jobs–and is currently facing devastating losses to this essential permanent and seasonal workforce in light of budget cuts.

Volunteerism and civic leadership also provide important sources of personal meaning, community contribution, and social ties, particularly in these times of high unemployment and underemployment. Vibrant urban public open spaces require government and NGO programs that enable and foster civic engagement at all times of year and in all neighborhoods.

Astoria Park Alliance LeafFest. Photo: Michelle Johnson

Our public landscapes have the capacity to absorb so much of our personal trials and our societal tribulations. But it is active stewardship that can, at its best, transcend politics and build trust between people. When we have trust in each other, we have hope. Reflecting on the experience of everyday people during our nation’s hardest times in the 20th Century, NYC-born Studs Terkel once reminded us, “Hope springs up, it doesn’t trickle down.”

Lindsay Campbell, Erika Svendsen, Laura Landau, Michelle Johnson, Sophie Plitt
New York

On The Nature of Cities

Erika Svendsen

about the writer
Erika Svendsen

Dr. Erika Svendsen is a social scientist with the U.S. Forest Service, Northern Research Station and is based in New York City. Erika studies environmental stewardship and issues related to hybrid governance, collective resilience and human well-being.

Laura Landau

about the writer
Laura Landau

Laura is currently pursuing a PhD in geography at Rutgers University. Her research focuses on the civic groups that care for the local environment, and on the potential for urban environmental stewardship to strengthen communities and make them more resilient to disaster and disturbance.

Michelle Johnson

about the writer
Michelle Johnson

Michelle Johnson is a research ecologist with the USDA Forest Service at the NYC Urban Field Station.

Sophie Plitt

about the writer
Sophie Plitt

Sophie Plitt is National Partnership Manager the the Natural Areas Conservancy. Sophie works to engage national partners in a workshop to improve the management of urban forested natural areas.

The Hills Save Us

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Art, Science, Action: Green Cities Re-imagined

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En español.

Citizenship is derived from city, and floristry from forest or jungle. Forest and human being live a socio-ecological pact in which the forest becomes a new citizen respected in its integrity, stability, and extraordinary beauty. Both benefits, as the utilitarian logic of exploitation is abandoned and the logic of mutuality is assumed, which implies mutual respect and synergy. — Leonardo Boff[1]

2020 has been a year full of uncertainties for the whole world. The COVID-19 pandemic has forced us to change our perception in many aspects of daily life.

This work is long and has not been easy. Sometimes we are discouraged by lack of resources and understanding, by violence, by increases in poverty, by politics, by the realities of Colombia. But our hope is still alive, and we remain motivated to contribute our little piece of peace to the life of this beloved corner of the hills of Bogota.
In times of compulsory quarantine, we citizens of Bogotá have had to look to the hills again. The over 13,000 hectares that makeup Bogota’s Eastern Forest Protection Reserve, commonly known as the Eastern Hills[2]—in which the localities of Usaquen, Chapinero, Santa Fe, Candelaria, San Cristobal, and Usme are located—seem unperturbed by what is happening in the city, in the country, in the world. It seems as if this piece of the Andean mountain range is statically watching over the life of its inhabitants from its 3,600 meters of altitude.

The country’s capital is a privileged city, as it is surrounded by a majestic mountain range, a set of moorlands[3], peaks, and multiple watercourses that have unfortunately been barely accessible to its inhabitants.

Bogotá. Photo: Fernando Cruz

This low access is a subject of reflection and action for those of us who are part of the Bogota Hills Foundation (Fundación Cerros de Bogotá) and for the various groups formed for the defence and the informed and sustainable use of the hills. We assume ourselves as citizens in the high plain tropical forest in the region of Bogota. We extend this type of citizenship “inter-retro-connected” in a new civilizing narrative. In an area of transition between the city and the forest reserve, we promote ways of relating to others and nature in an urban-rural peace process within a city of more than eight million inhabitants, and in a country that is still trying to understand what this means on a national scale. That is why we are agents of peace.

We are part of the ecosystem as citizens of the forest. Source: own elaboration from photos by Leonardo Centeno. Editing: Gabriela Fernández.

Quarantine does not stop life in the hills

During this year, which has been full of uncertainties, intimacies revealed in virtual meetings, and work with people who only know each other through a screen, the strength and passion of a group of florestanios (“citizens of the forest”) added to the fears derived from the scarcity of opportunities or resources and generated a challenge of creation and intense movement.

The quarantine, which has just been lifted in Bogotá after six long months, shows the impact that the pandemic has had on the streets, on businesses, and on meeting places. We can now see the citizens, almost hidden behind their masks, walking at a different pace of life.

Despite this landscape, life buzzes in the Eastern Hills. Nourished soils and others in the process of regeneration, species of fauna and flora as well as the bodies of water that surround it give life to the city, clean the air, provide a sense of well-being, and reaffirm the sense of belonging.

Apart from the importance of their very existence, the hills are also subjects of reinvention. Coinciding with our 11th birthday, as Bogota Hills Foundation, we decided to launch the campaign: The Hills Save Us to highlight the vital and protective role of the hills for the city and reiterate the importance of complying with the ruling of the Council of State that ordered the creation of a social, ecological, and recreational corridor. A need that became more evident in these times of pandemic and quarantine. #LosCerrosNosInspiran (#TheHillsInspireUs) #VozCerros (#HillsVoice) #VisionCerros (#HillsVission) #LosCerrosNosSalvan (#TheHillsSaveUs).

During these six months, we worked intensely to launch the largest platform with complete information about the Eastern Hills, its people, its flora, its fauna, its moors, and its water basins. In addition, citizen initiatives, projects undertaken with children, footpaths, historical studies, and neighbourhood histories are shown there. The citizens will be able to take the hills home thanks to the drawings we designed to download and colour, and, in the process, learn names, toponyms, and sacred places.

Graphic piece Sofía Estrada Photography: Juan Amarú Rodríguez

Bogotá Campaign with and without the mountains. Photography: Pouya Razavi. Graphic piece: Erika Tovar.

A socio-ecological project that cannot be postponed

 As “florestines” citizens, we have witnessed the changes that have altered the ecosystem of our hills, and, perhaps pretentiously, we have always said that the mountain needs us for its restoration. We make plans and talk about how necessary these actions are to recover the biodiversity lost by the construction of the city. But at this historic moment, after having spent six months in quarantine, we have seen from our windows the wonderful chain of life. We have breathed the fresh air; we have rediscovered the landscape and only now do we realize that it is not we who will save the hills, but they are the ones who can save us.

In light of the current crisis, the need for green spaces in urban environments – for us and for the whole world – has become clear and precise. People from different latitudes found there a source of strength to face the crisis. However, in other cities, perhaps in too many, the deficiency of safe and accessible green spaces that affect the improvement of the physical and mental health of the communities became evident.

To corroborate this statement, it is interesting to mention a survey carried out by Greenpeace Colombia, as a result of the isolation, in which it was found that 41% of the people interviewed currently value public green spaces more and consider it important to expand, take care of and protect them for the good of the people and the communities, in addition to promoting their sustainable use. Likewise, according to what was observed by the Bogota Hills Foundation at this time, the pressure from citizens to walk the trails, even at the risk of safety, shows the acute need for natural spaces without congestion.

It is precisely this scenario that has motivated us to insist on the possibility of building a shared vision and comprehensive management for the city’s eastern hills. The Foundation dreams of creating a socio-ecological corridor in the Adjustment Strip that restores existing trails with native species and integrates new public spaces. The dream also involves neighbours and hill leaders in the care and management of this new urban ecosystem (what the Foundation calls neighbourhood pacts). The neighbourhood pacts will be trained guides and share stories about ethnobotany, geology, and environmental history at lookouts, among native species as cedars, tibars, tunos, and amargos[4], through visible and clean streams, while spotting Andean guans, hummingbirds, weasels, and frogs.

This affectionate and productive coexistence of the citizen with the imposing Eastern Hills, utopian or risky for some, is already becoming a reality through a small living laboratory in the three hectares of the Civil Society Natural Reserve called Cultural Threshold Horizons. There, with the collaboration of volunteers and experts, talks, collaborative restoration with native species, orchards, and composting processes have been carried out, forming a pilot project that can be replicated as private property for public use.

The Natural Reserve acts as a laboratory of collaborative transformation and, through a volunteer program, we have been carrying out participative restoration for five years now (730 plants of more than 33 different species)[5]. We also generate collective works such as the creation of barriers and filters to retain plant material, mitigating the impact of rain on the area; we produce land art, and offer weekly talks on urban ecology called Cátedra Cerros Bogotá (Bogota Hills Chair) in which the mountain takes the stage.

We, at the Land art workshop. Photo: Lauryn García.

The mountain takes the word all fridays in the  Bogotá Mountain Classroom #CatedraCerrosBogota Photo: Carlos Lince

Graphic piece: María Paula Guerrero for the “Fundación Cerros de Bogotá”. Photograph: Leonardo Centeno.

This work is long and has not been easy. Sometimes we meet walkers who do not fully understand our work. We are discouraged by the lack of resources or frustrated by the slow progress of our activities. We are also overwhelmed by the reality we live in our country, the violence, the attacks on environmental leaders, the increase in poverty, and the generalised pain of a country that resists change, even though it tries hard. We are sometimes saddened by the lack of will and political action to restore the Eastern Hills to its role within the community. However, our hope is still alive, and we remain motivated to contribute our little piece of peace to the life of this beloved corner of the hills of Bogota[6].

Diana Wiesner
Bogotá

Translated by Elizabeth Barragan Porras

On The Nature of Cities

Notes:

[1]Boff, Leonardo. “Florestanía” in FLORÆ Magazine # 1. Bogotá: Flora ars+natura, August 2015.

[2]The hills shelter 91,444 inhabitants (2018) distributed in 64 neighbourhoods between the localities of Usme, San Cristóbal, Santa Fe, Chapinero, and Usaquén.

[3] https://cerrosdebogota.org/index.php/nuestros-paramos/

[4] Native trees species common names

[5]According to records published in the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF)

https://www.gbif.org/, the Bogota’s Eastern Forest Protection Reserve, as of August 2020, has 1673 species of flora and fauna, of which 137 are endemic, that is, their geographical distribution is limited to this area.

[6] This article is a tribute to that passionate group that has accompanied me this year and whom I thank from the heart to continue increasing the population of “florestanios”: Maria A. Mejía, Lucía Martínez, Isabela Uribe, Jorman Romero, Gabriela Fernández, Miguel Leguízamo, María Paula Guerrero, Nicolás Bazzani, Adriana Cabrera, Mateo Hernández, Ricardo Gamboa, Francisco González, Martha Gómez, Santiago Rosado, Leonardo Centeno, Fernando Cruz, Carlos Lince, Mateo Hernández, Leonardo Villa, Lina Prieto, Jaime A. Vargas, filmico. col, Laura Gómez, Elsa Rey, Carolina Fiallo, Ingrid Obando, Juan Camilo Cruz, Byron Calvachi, Johanna González, Lina Prieto, Andrés Gómez, Juan Camilo Castro, Sebastián Cerquera, María Alejandra Peña, Ana Puerto, Luisa Castro, Juan Pablo Rojas, Nicolás Barrero, Jacqueline Vargas, Erika Tovar, Sofía Estrada, Mark Skepasts, Elizabeth Barragán, Ivone Malaver, Nathaly Ortiz, Gabriela Fernandez and Lauryin García.

* * *

Los cerros nos salvan

Ciudadanía se deriva de ciudad, y florestanía de floresta o selva. Floresta y ser humano viven un pacto socioecológico en el que la floresta pasa a ser un nuevo ciudadano respetado en su integridad, estabilidad y extraordinaria belleza. Ambos se benefician, pues se abandona la lógica utilitarista de la explotación y se asume la lógica de la mutualidad, que implica respeto mutuo y sinergia. —Leonardo Boff[i]

2020 ha sido un año lleno de incertidumbres para el mundo entero. La pandemia derivada de la enfermedad denominada covid-19 nos ha obligado a cambiar nuestra percepción en muchos aspectos de la vida cotidiana.

Este trabajo es largo y no ha sido fácil. A veces nos desalienta la falta de recursos y comprensión, la violencia, el aumento de la pobreza, la política, las realidades de Colombia. Pero nuestra esperanza sigue viva, y seguimos motivados para contribuir con nuestro pequeño trozo de paz a la vida de este querido rincón de las colinas de Bogotá.
En tiempos de cuarentenas obligatorias, los ciudadanos de Bogotá hemos tenido que volver a mirar a los cerros. Las más de 13 000 hectáreas que componen la Reserva Forestal Protectora Bosque Oriental de Bogotá, comúnmente conocida como Cerros Orientales[ii], en los se ubican las localidades de Usaquén, Chapinero, Santa Fe, Candelaria, San Cristóbal y Usme parecen imperturbables ante lo que ocurre en la ciudad, en el país, en el mundo. Pareciera como si ese pedazo de cordillera de los Andes vigilara estático, desde sus 3600 metros de altura, la vida de sus habitantes.

La capital del país es una ciudad privilegiada, ya que está rodeada por una cadena montañosa majestuosa, un conjunto de páramos, picos y múltiples cauces de agua que han sido, infortunadamente, poco accesibles para sus habitantes.

Bogotá. Foto: Fernando Cruz

Ese bajo acceso es un tema de reflexión y de acción para quienes hacemos parte de la Fundación Cerros de Bogotá y para los diversos grupos conformados para la defensa y el uso informado y sostenible de los cerros. Nos asumimos como ciudadanía en la floresta tropical de altiplano, en la región de Bogotá. Ampliamos esta forma de ciudadanía «interretroconectados» en una nueva narrativa civilizatoria. En un área de transición entre la ciudad y la reserva forestal promovemos formas de relacionarnos con los otros y con la naturaleza en un proceso de paz urbano-rural dentro de una ciudad de más de ocho millones de habitantes, en un país que aún trata de comprender lo que esto significa a escala nacional. Por ello, somos agentes de paz.

Somos parte del ecosistema como ciudadanos de floresta. Imagen de elaboración propia con fotos de Leonardo Centeno. Montaje de Gabriela Fernández.

La cuarentena no detiene la vida de los cerros

Durante este año, que ha estado lleno de incertidumbres, de intimidades reveladas en reuniones virtuales y de trabajos con personas que solo se conocen a través de una pantalla, la fuerza y la pasión de un grupo de «florestanios», sumadas a los miedos derivados de la escasez de oportunidades o de recursos nos generó un desafío de creación y de movimiento intenso.

La cuarentena, que recién se levanta en Bogotá, después de seis largos meses, permite constatar el impacto que la pandemia provocó en las calles, en los negocios, en los escenarios de encuentro. Podemos apreciar ahora a los ciudadanos, casi escondidos detrás de sus mascarillas, caminando a un ritmo de vida diferente.

A pesar de este paisaje, la vida bulle en los Cerros Orientales, suelos nutridos y otros en proceso de regeneración, especies de fauna y flora así como los cuerpos de agua que la rodean dan vida a la ciudad, limpian el aire, brindan una sensación de bienestar y reafirman el sentido de pertenencia.

Aparte de la importancia de su misma existencia, los cerros también son sujetos de reinvención. Coincidiendo con nuestro 11.º cumpleaños, como Fundación Cerros de Bogotá decidimos lanzar la campaña: Los cerros nos salvan, a fin de resaltar el papel vital y protector de los cerros para la ciudad y reiterar la importancia de cumplir el fallo del Consejo de Estado que ordenó la creación de un corredor social, ecológico y recreativo, una necesidad que se hizo más evidente en estos tiempos de pandemia y de cuarentena. #LosCerrosNosInspiran #VozCerros #VisionCerros #LosCerrosNosSalvan

Pieza gráfica: Sofía Estrada Foto: Juan Amarú Rodríguez

En estos seis meses trabajamos con intensidad para lanzar la mayor plataforma con información completa sobre los Cerros Orientales, su gente, su flora, su fauna, sus páramos, sus cuencas hídricas; además, se muestran allí iniciativas ciudadanas, proyectos emprendidos con niños, senderos, estudios históricos e historias de barrios (https://cerrosdebogota.org/). Los ciudadanos podrán llevar los cerros a su casa gracias a los dibujos que diseñamos para descargarlos y colorearlos, y de paso aprender nombres, toponimias, lugares sagrados.

Campaña de Bogotá con/sin sus cerros. Foto Pouya Razavi. Montaje Erika Tovar.

Un proyecto socioecológico impostergable

Como ciudadanos «florestanios» hemos presenciado los cambios que han alterado el ecosistema de nuestros cerros, y, tal vez pretenciosamente, siempre hemos dicho que la montaña nos necesita para restaurarla. Se hacen planes y se habla de lo necesarias que son estas acciones para recuperar la biodiversidad perdida por la construcción de la ciudad. Pero en este momento histórico, luego de haber pasado seis meses en cuarentena, hemos visto desde nuestras ventanas la maravillosa cadena de vida, hemos respirado el aire fresco, hemos redescubierto el paisaje y recién ahora nos damos cuenta de que no somos nosotros quienes salvaremos a los cerros sino que son ellos los que nos pueden salvar.

A la luz de la actual crisis, la necesidad de los espacios verdes en los entornos urbanos —nuestros y de todo el mundo— se ha vuelto clara y precisa. Habitantes de distintas latitudes encontraron allí una fuente de fortaleza para enfrentar la crisis; sin embargo, en otras ciudades, tal vez en demasiadas, se hizo evidente la deficiencia de espacios verdes seguros y accesibles que inciden en el mejoramiento de la salud física y mental de las comunidades.

Para corroborar esta afirmación, es interesante mencionar una encuesta que realizó Greenpeace Colombia, a raíz del aislamiento, en la que se encontró que un 41 % de los interrogados valora en este momento más los espacios públicos verdes y considera importante ampliarlos, cuidarlos y protegerlos para el bien de las personas y de las comunidades, además de promover un uso sostenible de los mismos. Así mismo, según lo observado por la Fundación Cerros de Bogotá en esta época, la presión de los ciudadanos por recorrer los senderos, inclusive corriendo riesgos de seguridad, evidencia la necesidad acusiosa de contar con espacios naturales y sin congestiones.

Es justamente este escenario el que nos ha motivado a insistir en la posibilidad de construir una visión compartida y una gerencia integral para los Cerros Orientales de la ciudad. La Fundación sueña con la creación de un corredor socioecológico en la Franja de Adecuación que restaure a su paso los senderos existentes con especies nativas e integre nuevos espacios públicos. El sueño también involucra a los vecinos y líderes de los cerros en el cuidado y manejo de este nuevo ecosistema urbano (lo que la Fundación llama pactos de vecindad), quienes serán guías capacitados y compartirán relatos sobre etnobotánica, geología e historia ambiental en miradores, entre cedros, tíbares, tunos y amargosos, a través de quebradas visibles y limpias, avistando al tiempo pavas de monte, colibríes, comadrejas y ranas.

Esa convivencia afectuosa y fructífera del ciudadano con los imponentes Cerros Orientales, utópica o riesgosa para algunos, ya viene haciéndose realidad mediante un pequeño laboratorio vivo en las tres hectáreas de la Reserva Natural de la Sociedad Civil denominada Umbral Cultural Horizontes. Allí, con la colaboración de voluntarios y expertos, se han llevado a cabo charlas, restauración colaborativa con especies nativas, huertas y compostaje, conformando un proyecto piloto replicable como predio privado de uso público.

Grupo de colaboradores en el Taller El arte de la Tierra en la Reserva Horizontes. Foto Lauryn García.

La Reserva Natural actúa como un laboratorio de transformación colaborativa y mediante un voluntariado llevamos ya cinco años de restauración participativa (730 plantas de más de 33 especies diferentes)[iii]; generamos, además, obras colectivas como la creación de barreras y filtros para retener material vegetal, mitigando así el impacto de las lluvias sobre la zona; producimos obras de arte de la tierra (LandArt), y ofrecemos charlas semanales sobre ecología urbana denominadas Cátedra Cerros Bogotá en las que la montaña se toma la palabra.

La montaña se toma la palabra los viernes en la Catedra Cerros Bogotá” Foto: Carlos Lince

Pieza gráfica: María Paula Guerrero para la Fundación Cerros de Bogotá. Foto de Leonardo Centeno.

Este trabajo es largo y no ha sido fácil. A veces nos encontramos con caminantes que no comprenden bien nuestra labor, pasamos sinsabores por la falta de recursos o nos frustra el bajo eco que a veces tienen nuestras actividades. También nos apabulla la realidad que vivimos en nuestro país, la violencia, los atentados contra líderes ambientales, el incremento de la pobreza y del dolor generalizado por un país que se resiste a cambiar, aunque lo intenta con fuerza. Nos genera tristeza a veces la falta de voluntad y de acciones políticas que le devuelvan a los Cerros Orientales su papel dentro de la comunidad. Sin embargo, nuestra esperanza sigue viva y seguimos motivados por contribuir con nuestro pedacito de paz a la vida de este rincón amado que son los cerros de Bogotá.[iv]

Diana Wiesner
Bogotá

Traducido por Elizabeth Barragan Porras

Sobre The Nature of Cities

 

Notas:

[i] Boff, Leonardo. «Florestanía» en Revista FLORÆ # 1. Bogotá: Flora ars+natura, agosto de 2015.

[ii] Los cerros albergan 91 444 habitantes (2018) distribuidos en 64 barrios entre las localidades de Usme, San Cristóbal, Santa Fe, Chapinero y Usaquén.

 

[iii] Según los registros publicados en la Infraestructura Mundial de Información en Biodiversidad (GBIF)

https://www.gbif.org/, la Reserva Forestal Protectora Bosque Oriental de Bogotá, a corte de agosto de 2020, cuenta con 1673 especies de flora y fauna, de las cuales 137 son endémicas, es decir, su distribución geográfica está limitada a esta área.

[iv] Este artículo es un homenaje a ese grupo apasionado que me ha acompañado este año y a quienes agradezco de corazón seguir adelante aumentando la población de «florestanios»: María A. Mejía, Lucía Martínez, Isabela Uribe, Jorman Romero, Gabriela Fernández, Miguel Leguízamo, María Paula Guerrero, María Elvira Talero, Nicolás Bazzani, Adriana Cabrera, Mateo Hernández, Ricardo Gamboa, Francisco González, Martha Gómez, Santiago Rosado, Leonardo Centeno, Fernando Cruz, Carlos Lince, Mateo Hernández, Leonardo Villa, Lina Prieto, Jaime A. Vargas, Laura Gómez, Elsa Rey, Carolina Fiallo, Ingrid Obando, Juan Camilo Cruz, Byron Calvachi, Johanna González, Lina Prieto, Andrés Gómez, Juan Camilo Castro, Sebastián Cerquera, María Alejandra Peña, Ana Puerto, Luisa Castro, Juan Pablo Rojas, Nicolás Barrero, Jacqueline Vargas, Erika Tovar, Sofía Estrada, Mark Skepasts, Erika Barragán, Ivone Malaver, Nathaly Ortiz, Elizabeth Barragan,Gabriela Fernandez, Maria Jose Velasco y Lauryin García.

The LEAF Episode 3: Show and Tells from TNOC Urban Ecological Arts Collective Members

Art & Awareness, LEAF, Place & Design, Podcast, , ,
Art, Science, Action: Green Cities Re-imagined

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Want to explore diverse and connecting threads in urban ecological arts? In the LEAF, three FRIEC Urban Arts Collective members share something from their ideas and work for 10 minutes each, followed by Q&A.

Presenters:
Tim Collins, Glasgow 
Robin Lasser, Oakland 
Wendy Wischer, Salt Lake City

Wednesday 16 December, 9amPST / 12pmEST / 5pmGMT

To register: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_YlbxpLD4RSGmj_NxuscDVA

Tim Collins, Glasgow. I will talk about Deep Mapping: Lough Boora Sculpture Park a recently published deep mapping project that considers a ‘cutaway’ bog in Offaly County Ireland which was strip mined for its peat fuel over a period of fifty years. In 2000 with efforts to reclaim the land for agriculture it was turned into amenity public space that featured a sculpture park. I will talk about the historic conditions and future options revealed in our publication. https://collinsandgoto.com/deep-mapping-lough-boora-sculpture-park/

Robin Lasser, Oakland. I will be sharing two projects: Dress Tents : Nomadic Wearable Architecture and Migratory Cultures.  The DressTent project is a conflation of photography, fashion, performance and installation dealing with the geo politics of place, social, and environmental justice issues.  Migratory Cultures is a site-specific video projection mapping and documentary video project connecting regional experiences of immigration with stories from around the world.

 

Wendy Wischer, Salt Lake City. I am going to talk about 3 projects that encompass different aspects of my work. One is “Displacing Vibrations” a collaboration with a geologist, this is about my scientific collaborations. Then I’ll discuss “Written on the Wind” a video/sound installation for the Natural History Museum of Utah that included a community component with 4th graders. And then “Your Memory is Already Fading” an installation and sound piece representing my object making and turning data into personal meaning.

* * *

The FRIEC (Forum for Radical Imagination on Environmental Cultures) Urban Ecological Arts Collective is a global group of almost 100 artists and creatives interested in the connection between nature and people in cities. The LEAF is a monthly webinar in which three Collective members spend 10 minutes describing an ideas or motivation central to their work, followed by discussion and Q&A with the audience. The idea to get to know the work of the Collective members, and to explore creativity and imagination in urban ecology. 

Interested in being part of the FRIEC Collective? Write us at [email protected].
 
Banner image: Ms. Homeland Security: The Illegal Entry Dress Tent. Robin Lasser
 
Robin Lasser

about the writer
Robin Lasser

Robin Lasser produces photographs, sound, video, site-specific installations and public art dealing with environmental and social justice issues.

Wendy Wischer

about the writer
Wendy Wischer

Visiting Director for the Contemporary Art Galleries at UConn in Storrs, Connecticut, Wendy Wischer is an artist and educator with a focus on artwork in a variety of media from sculptural objects to installations, video, projection, sound, alternative forms of drawing and public works. Much of the artwork is based on blurring the separation between an intrinsic approach to working with nature and the cutting edge of New Media.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Opportunity in Crisis: Ecojustice Education for Pandemic Resilience 

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Art, Science, Action: Green Cities Re-imagined

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While much of the nation reacted to coronavirus by enacting either strict lockdown procedures or reckless reopening, we sought to demonstrate that it was possible to carry out in-person experiential education that was designed around strict health protocol and productivity.
At the beginning of the pandemic, there was widespread concern and uncertainty. How many people would get sick? How long would this last? Will I lose my home, my job? Will there be food shortages? There were also widespread shutdowns—schools, offices, restaurants, libraries, even the police were only responding to “non-emergency calls”. One thing that was not closed however—deemed “essential” along with supermarkets and hospitals—were farms. This included urban farms. Municipal governments had the foresight to realize the potential for food shortages in cities, and the more-than-ever need for good nutrition when people’s health would be stressed. It was because of our “essential” determination that the Radix Ecological Sustainability Center, an urban environmental education center and one-acre farm based in Albany New York, was able to continue operating though the pandemic, pivoting to meet the challenges and the uncertainties of the coronavirus head-on.

Photo: Scott Kellogg

Disasters, from hurricanes to wars to plagues, disproportionately impact the poor. The coronavirus pandemic, combined with this summer’s worldwide protests against police brutality and systemic racism, has laid bare and shone light upon multiple persistent societal inequalities. These inequities are notably visible and pronounced in inner city environments. Poverty, along with other social and environmental determinants of health, have left low-income and communities of color particularly vulnerable to the effects of the virus. Widespread unemployment and economic uncertainty have compounded these stresses, while access to nutritious food and healthcare has only grown more limited. In the meantime, environmental, climate, and food justice issues plaguing inner-city communities continue unchecked.

In response to these challenges, Radix put out the call for and began organizing the creation of “pandemic resilience gardens”—food production centers built to not only give residents some sense of control over their futures, but to seize the opportunity in the crisis to address long-standing issues of food access and sovereignty. Similar to the victory gardens of the world wars, pandemic resilience gardens provided a sense of stability and reliability during frightening times, while simultaneously encouraging people to go outside, eat nourishing food, breather fresh air and feel sunlight—all essential for immune support. The several pallets worth of seeds we had been donated the previous fall proved enormously useful as widespread panic buying resulted in national seed shortages. This allowed us to get numerous trays of vegetable starts going in our greenhouse to be distributed to Albany residents and to neighborhood gardens. Our biggest limiting factor in planting more was a labor shortage. Working within the confines of a greenhouse, it was difficult to maintain social distancing among volunteers. Furthermore, our year-round afterschool youth program was forced largely online after schools closed. As the weather warmed, however, it was possible to move more of the planting work outside where distancing was easier and air exchanges increased.

Photo: Scott Kellogg

It is in this context that the Radix Center ran its “Pandemic Resilience and Climate Justice” summer program. It consisted of a ten-week in-person experiential education offering involving fifteen AmeriCorps employees (recruited through Siena College’s SPIN program) and twenty high-school age youth employed through the city’s summer youth employment program. As a team, we planted multiple garden sites, keeping them weeded and watered throughout the summer, composted significant amounts of food waste, and distributed food and vegetable starts to neighbors in need. Going beyond gardening work, students worked as teams to engage in community-based participatory research throughout the South End neighborhood, investigating socio-environmental issues including food access, evictions, lead-based soil contamination, and “innovation blocks” a door-to-door neighborhood outreach program of our partner organization, AVillage…Inc. For intellectual growth, collectively we read and studied a number of articles on topics ranging from environmental justice, food access, gender studies, prison abolition, climate change, redlining, urban commons, and more. This focused study was necessary for understanding the big picture issues and theories that informed our work in its particular context.

As their opportunities for education, employment, and entertainment have been drastically curtailed by the shutdown, urban youth have been notably impacted by the coronavirus. When schools closed in March, many of them were left in precarious positions with tenuous access to computers and reliable internet connections. At-risk youth were in danger of slipping through the cracks, cut off from meals, guidance, and other essential services provided by schools. Some youth found themselves in dangerous situations, forced into lockdown isolation with abusive family members. Far more students were simply bored, weary from zoom calls, frustrated by the lack of sports, camps, or extra-curricular opportunities of any sort. In this sense, we hoped to provide an enriching employment opportunity that gave youth the chance to be outdoors, learn, and engage with one another, albeit wearing masks and from six feet away.

Safety was of utmost importance to us in the pandemic resilience program. While much of the nation reacted to coronavirus by enacting either strict lockdown procedures or reckless reopening, we sought to demonstrate that it was possible to carry out in-person experiential education that was designed around strict health protocol. Employing program participants of co-designers of these pre-cautions, we enforced a strict stay-home-if-sick policy, mandatory mask wearing, and social distancing, all while being outdoors nearly all the time (we were blessed with remarkably good weather—on only one or two occasions was it necessary to take shelter in the neighboring warehouse, itself a well-ventilated and spacious structure). We are happy to report that to our knowledge, there were no transmissions of coronavirus within the group. In stark contrast to much of the rest of the country, infection rates in upstate New York remained relatively low throughout the summer.

Photo: Scott Kellogg

The rise of Black Lives Matters and the racial justice movement over the summer of 2020 created an intense synergy with the conditions of the pandemic, and for the focus of our program. The South End of Albany is itself a prime example of what happens to a neighborhood after decades of racist policies—federal redlining practices creating zones of disinvestment where basic services are absent, substandard housing is prevalent, and opportunities for advancement are few. Just one week before its start, the South End was engulfed in protests, tear gas flooding every corner of the neighborhood. The South End precinct station, less than a block away from the Radix Center, was the epicenter for much of the protest activity, with community members demanding accountability from the local police. In response, giant concrete barricades were placed in the road by the station, blocking any vehicular access to the street. Their presence was a constant reminder of the intensity of the moment as we each day navigated wheelbarrows loaded with soil, food, and tools between their confines. The eventual removal of the blockades was a moment of jubilant celebration for the group, their symbolic shadow of oppressive securitized control lifted. While the problems facing the South End will require generations worth of work to remedy, the events of the summer created a sense of urgency and timeliness to the work of challenging degenerative structures and regenerating enviro-social equity and health.

The Black Lives Matters movement timed well with the beginning of the South End Night Market, a weekly outdoor market organized by AVillage…Inc. that featured local, predominantly black vendors selling a variety of products to the local community in an effort to build local black wealth and prosperity. After the initial shutdown, the future of the market was cast in doubt as there was a ban on gatherings of almost any sort. Fortunately, Radix’s agricultural “essential” designation came in useful once again as it permitted farmers markets to continue. By selling our locally grown produce at the Night Market, it could be regarded as a farmers market and be allowed to continue. Vendors were carefully spaced on the sidewalk outside of Radix with tape marking the safe setbacks for shoppers to stand behind. The Night Market drew progressively larger crowds over the summer, creating a community event where local wares and affordable produce could be bought. We were fortunate to involve Pandemic Resilience participants in the market, having them help with tasks ranging from set up, produce sales, vendor questionnaires and promotions.

As the summer ends, autumn brings cooler temperatures and continuing uncertainty. How long will this state of emergency continue for? Will in-person education ever resume? Are further waves of disease and political violence on the horizon? While there are no clear answers, we know that we must increase our adaptive capacity to effectively respond to future events with the needed urgency. It may be entirely possible that summer 2021 is a replay of summer 2020, but if it is, we at least have some blueprint of success to work from.

Scott Kellogg
Albany

On The Nature of Cities

Ecosystems as a Framework for Urban Planning: Reconnecting. Rediscovering. Reinvigorating.

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Art, Science, Action: Green Cities Re-imagined

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When is the best time to consider developing an urban ecological network plan for your city? The answer varies based on a city’s long-term planning process and the immediate issues a community may be facing, but it is always the right time to integrate ecology and nature into urban planning and revitalization efforts.
If we peel back the layers of our urban infrastructure and examine the ecological patterns that originally formed the landscapes beneath our feet, we can shape more resilient cities through an interdisciplinary and inclusive urban design process based on the braided narratives of place: ecology, history, and culture. More than a decade ago, designers studying approaches to urban planning noted that “new models of urban ecological networks will improve biodiversity, aesthetics, and cultural identity and be an important framework for creating sustainable cities” (Ignatieva et al, 2008). The impacts of climate change, evidenced by increased drought, record heat, raging megafires in both hemispheres, an Atlantic hurricane season that has run out of names, as well as COVID-19, and the ongoing racial justice movement, have over the last several months (and years) laid bare much about the state of our society and our cities.

There is a growing clamor for a shift in perspectives and practices that will lead to a more resilient future. Much of this is coming from and focused on our cities, where over half of the world’s population already lives, and more are expected to join. A lens of landscape ecology and a foundation in community input provide the keys to designing for tomorrow’s resilient cities.

Mural of native habitat gardens in Baltimore, MD. Photo: Jennifer Dowdell.

As an ecological planner and writer, I have found that when we pause for a moment and listen for the stories of a place, we become more aware of its essence. We notice the patterns and processes that root us in a sense of belonging, a call toward stewardship, and a connection to community. Many of us, without even thinking, can easily name the natural features that define our relationship to our home cities—a creek or harbor we love, a favorite woodland park, a majestic tree we could draw from memory. In some traditions, this connection of community to ecosystem is even more explicit. For example, when formally introducing themselves, the Māori people of Aotearoa (New Zealand) invoke their connection to their cultural and ecological heritage by naming the boat that brought them to the country, their mountain, their river, their marae (cultural hub/ancestral home), and their tribe. This not only grounds these individuals in the heritage of their families but also their kinship to nature and their responsibility as guardians of these landscapes. The Māori, like many indigenous peoples around the globe, value and pass down ancestral knowledge of the relationships, patterns, and rhythms of nature—a knowledge they refer to as mātauranga.

Our urban communities, likewise, have a reciprocal relationship with nature. If we steward our natural resources, restoring ecological function, and preserving the remnants of once-dominant ecosystems, everyone benefits. Access to nature has been proven time and time again to increase life expectancy, decrease recovery times from major surgeries, increase test scores, improve concentration, increase health metrics, and lead to greater happiness (sources). Unfortunately, access to green space is inequitably distributed in many of today’s cities and the integration of open and natural spaces into underserved communities often leads to gentrification and ultimately, displacement of those most vulnerable.

As a practice, we at Biohabitats have been applying ecological principles as an underpinning for more resilient city planning efforts through the development of urban ecological frameworks, or green network plans. We start our planning process by examining the historical ecological narrative of our cities: the geology; the rivers, streams, and creeks (some of which might have been buried or drained in the past); the wetlands and meadows that may have existed prior to our settlement; the remnant forest patches; the mountains or valleys that shape our views and access into and out of the city; and the biodiversity inherent in these systems. Much of this has settled into our consciousness as background noise to the skyscrapers, urban parks, interstate highways, bustling town centers, and neighborhoods that have come to define our identity as city dwellers. But we can bring it back to the fore as a place to begin dialogue with the community in planning for a more resilient future.

Legacy green network analysis results. Photo: Baltimore Green Network Plan

In a recent project with the Department of City Planning in Atlanta, GA, we posed the question to the community members, “What does Nature in the City mean to you?” We wanted to make sure as we kicked off an effort to help the City craft an urban ecological framework to guide future development, that we began with what the residents knew, valued, remembered, and desired of nature in their city. We were regaled with so many personal stories: tales of fishing in neighborhood creeks, tending to grandmothers’ gardens, camping under trees in backyards, hiking along stream valleys, and hearing frogs singing in wetlands and birds calling overhead. Clearly, we have not completely lost our connection to nature in our cities. On the contrary, we know, love, and seek that connection. Yet ecology has never been at the forefront of urban planning, or zoning for that matter. Now is the time to change that.

In addition to the positive public health impacts of increasing our contact with nature in cities, ecosystems provide a model for landscape resilience in response to climate change. Wetlands and marshes help to alleviate the impacts of flooding as natural sponges in the landscape. Shifting and rising dunes of barrier islands provide resilience in light of rising sea levels. Vegetated or forested floodplains provide space during massive rains to capture and contain water. Continuous tree canopy shades and cools our cities as warming continues. Wooded corridors along our rivers and streams help soak up and distribute water during large storms. In the same way that 3.8 billion years of evolution informs biomimetic design approaches, the natural systems that exist in and flow through our cities can inspire an eco-mimetic approach to urban planning.

Community members provide their reflections on Nature in Atlanta at the kickoff of the UEF process. Photo: Atlanta Urban Ecology Framework

This approach is grounded in community input and the culture that animates our cities, at the neighborhood and district scale. Add to that, input from ecologists, landscape architects, environmental engineers, city planners and staff, community leaders, economists, architects, and activists. This is an iterative and consultative interdisciplinary process. We, as ecological planners, serve to facilitate wide-ranging and inclusive discussions with residents, addressing the needs of their neighborhoods as well as those of the broader city and region. Ecosystems are not constrained by political boundaries and we are always aware that our actions have ripple effects.

Ecological framework planning weaves community input at regular intervals into a science-based design and planning approach. This is inspired by Ian McHarg’s work on Designing with Nature, which emphasizes the interactions and interrelationships between ecosystems, historical settlement patterns, and projected development. It requires an intimate understanding of the social and cultural factors at play, the basic ecosystem types and functions in question, the impact of the legacy of disempowerment and systemic racism on the community, the specific issues of climate change impacting the landscape, and the existing or projected biodiversity loss.

The general process we follow for developing an urban ecological framework includes these steps:

  1. Engage the community to set a vision and goals
  2. Analyze existing conditions to establish a narrative of place based on both ecological-social characteristics
  3. Conduct a needs assessment or suitability analysis with community input
  4. Explore alternative scenarios of change and solicit feedback on the needs and priorities in the community
  5. Develop a final urban ecological framework
  6. Create pilot projects and funding plans
  7. Revisit zoning and other regulatory tools for updates that reflect urban ecological guidance

While in Atlanta, our focus was on responding to population growth and its impacts on tree canopy and community access to open space, in a Green Network Plan we developed recently with the Baltimore City Planning Department. Our planning team was tasked with addressing dense areas of vacancy through this approach. In both cases, community members described how they experienced nature; which aspects of nature they wanted to see preserved, protected, and celebrated; how nature was unique or special to their daily lives; and where they thought nature made the most sense in their city- their narrative of place. There were important points raised during this dialogue about the need to support the communities in managing and maintaining restored green space and the need for affordable housing and job creation.

Based on this input, we examine the city through a data-driven analysis of socio-ecological conditions. We gather data on soils, hydrology, landcover, habitat and biodiversity hot spots, floodplain, riparian corridor buffers, and historical streams. Studies of social vulnerability, urban tree canopy change, traffic patterns, safety and access issues are also examined. We perform analysis at multiple scales to ensure consideration of broader impacts to ecoregions, wildlife and habitat corridors, and watersheds. We also endeavor to uncover the historical patterns of nature that settlement may have disrupted.

Biodiversity analysis results for Atlanta. Photo: Atlanta Urban Ecology Framework

Once the general conditions have been mapped and vetted with the community, our team delves deeper and explores ways to harness the natural patterns and processes inherent in the local ecosystems to address the vision and goals established at the outset of the process, whether that is increasing access to open space, utilizing vacant lots for revitalization and restoration, managing climate change impacts, focusing development and preserving tree canopy, or other socio-ecological aims. In Baltimore, through the initial data analysis, we identified four priority areas that had overlapping needs for revitalization and ecological uplift potential, very high densities of vacant land and structures, and very active and engaged neighborhood groups. In the case of Atlanta, we examined the need for habitat and biodiversity protection, harnessing ecosystem services, increasing equitable access to parks and open space, and addressing vulnerable communities’ needs.

Our team connects with residents, local advisors, and advocates at regular intervals to confirm and vet the evolving framework. In Atlanta, as the needs and priorities became clearer, we began testing alternative future scenarios of change with the community.  We explored citywide change scenarios associated with improved equity and access, increased ecological connectivity and function, and conversion of all grey infrastructure to innovative green practices. This allowed everyone to visualize patterns of change that could result from different priorities in land use allocation. This pulling apart of key priorities and weaving them back together through the community feedback process provided a powerful visual tool for honing the elements of the urban ecological framework.

From the personal stories shared by community members during the visioning and goal-setting to the input given in other stages of the process, it becomes evident that place—neighborhood, block, home, and all that surrounds it—is inextricably linked to identity. This connection, in turn, becomes a guide for a city’s plans for future development and growth, rather than an afterthought. What has resulted is an acknowledgement that a city’s infrastructure can take more cues from nature and community. A final urban ecological framework creates a cohesive network of greenspaces, restored ecosystems, and civic spaces that serve both human and nonhuman communities in coexistence. It fosters equitable and safe access to open space and recreation, increased biodiversity and habitat, and a variety of ecosystem services including, urban heat island mitigation, flood attenuation, stormwater management, air quality improvements, pollination, and nutrient cycling.

In the case of Baltimore City, the Planning Department went one step further, and it is a step we highly recommend for all municipalities. In each of their four focus areas, Planning Department staff who work with the neighborhoods identified specific community groups and advocates to guide the design of pilot projects. Residents worked directly with the planning team to develop site-specific concepts that reflected their needs. They identified the required programming, types of features, and concerns that should be addressed. In one example, the residents wanted a central, flexible plaza space for community street festivals, a splash pad, a space for watching films, and signage for community notices. In another, the community’s priority was to have a safe space for toddlers to play and a memorial for a fallen female firefighter who had perished on the site. These designs have continued to evolve, gaining local advocates and partners to help in their funding and implementation, fulfilling a promise to the community.

Pilot project concept for a new civic space in a neighborhood on the west side of Baltimore. Photo: Baltimore Green Network Plan

Pilot project concept featuring a playground and a memorial to the first fallen female firefighter in a neighborhood in Baltimore. Photo: Baltimore Green Network Plan

Cities like Atlanta and Baltimore are exemplary in their use of ecology to guide urban planning, but they are not alone in this approach. Other examples include parallel efforts in Edmonton, Canada and Paris, France; and past efforts in Barcelona, Spain and Hamburg, Germany where city leadership identified opportunities to strengthen green networks to foster greater community resilience. The story of Christchurch, NZ,  where a natural disaster led to a unique opportunity for re-envisioning urban planning as part of a massive rebuild effort, is even more striking.

In February of 2011, a 6.3 magnitude earthquake hit Christchurch, resulting in widespread structural damage and loss of life. In the wake of this tragedy, the city took the unprecedented step of holding an inclusive and holistic planning process to inform a multiyear and multibillion-dollar rebuild effort. The resulting Christchurch Blueprint sets out a spatial framework for redevelopment, combining actions for economic, social, and environmental revitalization within a central city framed by open space. The Blueprint includes plans for the Te Papa Ōtākaro/Avon River Precinct, which celebrates the river that flows through the center of the city. Many gathered along the river after evacuation from the surrounding buildings on the day of the earthquake and it now hosts a memorial to those who perished in the earthquake and the rescue efforts that followed. Design and planning work along the Avon corridor has focused on supporting the return of native wildlife like the bellbird, whitebait, and eel through channel restoration and increased native plantings. Today the river is a gathering place and a natural spine along which the city continues to see economic revitalization and strengthened community, as well as the return of the eel and other native wildlife.

The memorial to earthquake victims integrated into the enhanced Avon River corridor in Christchurch, NZ. Photo: Jennifer Dowdell

The restoration of the Avon River’s corridor supports the return of native wildlife and water quality improvements in the heart of Christchurch, NZ. Photo: Jennifer Dowdell

When is the best time to consider developing an urban ecological network plan for your city? The answer varies based on a city’s long-term planning process and the immediate issues a community may be facing, but it is always the right time to integrate ecology and nature into urban planning and revitalization efforts. Ideally, this type of planning effort can inform zoning updates, public works planning, park master plans, or transportation plans (that may occur on five to 10-year cycles). This approach can also be integrated into a citywide General Plan or as a stand-alone Urban Ecology Network plan to inform other efforts aimed at economic and climate resilience, environmental equity and justice, and ecological uplift.

There will always be competing priorities in the planning process. The most important step we can take is to listen and then respond in a way that reflects not only the community’s needs but also their stories of identity with, and connection to, nature. There is likely to be a certain level of planning fatigue in many cities. One way to address this is to make sure these plans are actionable and implementable—landing at the site scale and making sure the community sees tangible results. One of the most frequent comments we receive during these processes is that the community members want to see results, not another glossy plan on a shelf. The pilot project process is a great way to do just that, by seeding the energy in the community early and engaging them in a design process that includes potential funding partners.

Another issue we must face head-on is the potential negative impacts that greening (even with the best intentions) can have on a community, including gentrification and displacement. During the planning process, this is bound to come up in discussions with residents. In parallel with planning efforts, municipalities can and should be exploring systemic changes that provide economic security to longtime residents in these communities, such as tax abatement options, housing security, land trusts, legacy community designations, and other options to deter displacement and support historic ties between the community and the land.

Ideally, the final urban ecology framework becomes a reference for all future planning efforts, a living reminder of the connection between the native ecology and the human spirit that animates the city, and an amplifier of community voices and identity.

Jennifer Dowdell
Baltimore, MD

On The Nature of Cities

A Pattern Language for Urban Nature

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1 We are part of nature

We are part of nature and we are interdependent with nature.

 

2 We think we can be separate from nature

We cannot escape this interdependency. Even when we try, we are tied to living systems by umbilical cords of technology, constrained by natural limits.

 

3 Human culture is a force of nature

Our culture is manifest in our actions. Everything we do affects the natural world in some way. We are a force of nature.

In his slim but vital tome published in 2004, Stephen Boyden wrote from a “biohistorical” standpoint about human culture as a force of nature in The Biology of Civilisation and his main conclusion was that “biounderstanding is key to sustaining civilisation and ecological health and the dominant culture must ‘embrace, at its heart, a basic understanding of, and reverence for, nature and the processes of life.”

There are few reasons to be optimistic about the prospects for biounderstanding becoming central to culture, but the need for it is inarguable.

 

4 Patterns of action

Everything we do is part of the patterns that make up our lives. Patterns of action reflect culture. The graphic is based on the seminal studies by Appleyard which captured the patterns of community and communication in a street and how it was affected by vehicle traffic.

 

5 Culture and power

The dominant culture is determined by power relationships. Patterns of living are part of the patterns of occupying and using space. They are part of how we form our human habitats within the bubble of the biosphere.

How we build affects the natural world.

 

6 Patterns that remain

Like vortices in the stream of biohistory, our constructed habitats are human patterns that remain. In “Steps to an ecology of mind” (1979), Gregory Bateson identified patterns as key to understanding the relationship between humans, culture, and nature and wrote of the “pattern that connects”.

One result of those patterns is human habitation in its relationship to the biosphere as mapped by villages, towns, and cities.

 

7 Nature needs social distancing too!

To enable nature to recover from the severe impacts of human exploitation on the patterns of nature, from habitat loss to plastic pollution, climate change, and everything in between, we have no choice but to change how we build. Which means changing our patterns of behaviour.

We are implementing behavioural change to tackle the spread of COVID-19 because our lives depend on it. We must do it to rescue the biosphere from collapse because our lives depend on it.

Nature needs “social distancing” too.

 

8 The big picture is ugly

The big picture isn’t looking good. But the patterns for real change come from below, from daily life changes at a local level. 

 

9 Despair

We can’t afford to despair. Lives depend on it. All lives.

 

10 Everything is fractal

Everything we do is fractal. It is all part of a larger pattern. It is the larger pattern writ small.

 

11 Design guidelines for non-human species

In my first TNOC blog, building on my doctoral thesis from 20 years ago, I argued that the creation of ecological cities requires the development of Design Guidelines for Non-Human Species. I suggested that an urban fractal or neighbourhood should be able to provide sufficient viable habitat that could support at least one key indicator species of fauna and a majority of the species of birds indigenous to the place. Later, I tried to take that idea further; it was supposed to be about changing the culture, deeply, it was supposed to be about something that is exciting, challenging, and worthwhile.

 But it still turned into a somewhat uninspiring list.

 

12 Points of view

The design guidelines spoke to responsible planners and change-makers but, whatever its merits, I am compelled to observe that they really aren’t the sort of thing that stirs the blood and, more importantly, they don’t paint the bigger picture – to see how the patterns connect you have to actively make the connections. You have to see and experience the patterns.

Fractals are about pattern, not lists, but to see that bigger picture more clearly we have to speak with science, poetry, and art.

It’s about culture, after all.

The above graphic shows three points of view. The top one is the nominally objective “normal” as described by human mapping, the left one is “mainstream” culture with a consciousness of the car and house dominating all other reality. The right part of the image suggests how it might be seen from nature’s point of view.

There is some movement towards looking at the city from a non-human point of view see, for instance, Urban Animals: Crowding in Zoocities, reviewed by Chris Hensley in TNOC in 2015  in which Hensley notes that “using a nonhuman-centered framework, it sheds light on issues from a very different angle than that from which we are used to approaching such subjects” and that “the animal-focused framework presented here will be crucial in understanding urban life of the present and future.”

But patterns must be key.

 

13 A Pattern Language for Urban Nature

Taking my cue from Alexander et al and Mehafy, Salingaros et al, I am becoming convinced that there may be a way to bring these ideas to life in a way that has the potential to connect with the daily life of humans and other species. The proposition is simple: What happens if we take a pattern language approach that puts nature first?

I don’t have the resources to take this line of thinking a lot further, much as I would like to, so this graphic essay is little more than an indicator of what may be possible as something that might be developed in a similar fashion to and complementary to “A new pattern language” as an evolving toolbox open to iteration and further development.

All frameworks and insights, e.g., those described in “Urban Animals”, have the potential to be included and sustained within a Pattern Language for Urban Nature – which needs to have an understanding of the need for cultural change based on biounderstanding at its very core.

An example of a page from “A new pattern language”

 

Paul Downton
Melbourne

All drawings are by Paul Downton

On The Nature of Cities

 

Why Would the Economy Need Biodiversity?

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Art, Science, Action: Green Cities Re-imagined

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And What Grassplots, Amur Leopard, and Mold Have in Common

It is estimated that the extinction of the Amur leopard resulted in $722 million in damage to the Russian economy.
What is biodiversity for? Some don’t need that question answered: you just adopt a philosopher’s perspective, and everything becomes clear—all living things have the right to dwell on the planet. For others, the question is confusing. Those trying to find a quantitative answer to this question include not only biologists, but also economists—the latter may calculate the “price of ecosystem services” rendered to humankind by nature. If you crash a car, everyone understands what material damage will be suffered and by whom. And what if a forest is cut down? Or a grassplot is converted into a parking lot? Were the last Amur leopard to die somewhere in the mountains, would the economy be affected at all? In 2008, the answer was found in the Russian State University of Management, where for calculations they used a formula by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration: the disappearance of the last 40, to that day, individuals of that leopard species on the planet would have equaled $722 million in damage to the Russian economy.

Megalopolises are oftentimes referred to as concrete jungle. And it is true that living in a city doesn’t overturn laws of biology. Somewhere in distant mountains, the Amur leopard is dying out because of random deforestation, fragmentation and reduction of its habitat, and inbreeding, ie, mating of individuals closely related by ancestry due to their population being too small. The very same adverse factors also affect city-dwelling populations of plant and animal species in our vicinity. A new highway cuts through a forest? Animals living there will most probably not be able to leave their respective resulting plots. And the stronger the fragmentation, the faster the local population will go into decline. The only bit of wasteland between the houses has been repurposed into a parking lot? Yet another grassplot has been paved? That means not only soil animals, many plants, and insects have died, but, to make matters worse, butterflies and bees in adjacent territories have been deprived of the means to populate broader areas, as they could have used that plot as a place to stop, rest, and refuel on some food.

Cherished Meadow, Moscow, Russia, 2020. Photo: Alexey Denisov.

For example, many bees are known to be only capable of flying no farther than 1.5–2.0 kilometers. “So what?” you may ask. In order to survive, some bees only need one single plant. For example, Moscow’s red bartsia bee (Melitta tricincta) only feeds on red bartsia. What would become of humankind if that red bartsia bee were to disappear? Regretably, it can only be found out by experience. And we may not like that experience.

For instance, last year alone, according to the estimates by the National Beekeepers and Bee Product Processors Association, the decrease in the population of one single species—domesticated Western honey bee—cost Russia over 1 trillion roubles (around $13 billion) in losses. And that estimate doesn’t include losses resulting from wild bees dying out—the ones not counted by beekeepers. According to the UN, the world relies on pollination of crops by bees to produce almost a third of its food worth an estimate of $380 billion.

There’s another example illustrating the Butterfly Effect, which is a story dating back to the mid-20th century: two years after China declared a war on sparrows for allegedly destroying field crops, the resulting major pest outbreak and the deterioration of crops that followed were of such a scale that around 10 to 30 million people died of hunger.

It would be rather naïve of us to believe that any damage can be estimated in advance. Or that—should the ecosystem lose even one of its elements—the course of events can be foreseen. Humankind hardly knows anything about the planet it lives on, but succeeds in taking advantage of discoveries that happen from time to time. There was a time when we were in the dark about the properties of the mold fungus Penicillium that we have to thank for penicillin, of the willow bark that gave rise to aspirin, and of the rice hulls from which vitamin B1 was synthesized. I believe it will be easy enough to evaluate the economic effect brought about by those discoveries to the world’s economy.

On the contrary, it’s impossible to calculate the forgone benefit resulting from the loss of those species whose properties will forever remain unknown to us—with biodiversity declining at a dramatic pace. Scientists estimate, for example, that every year the total insect biomass decreases by 2.5 percent. And that estimate doesn’t take stock of the plants, fungi, microorganisms, and other living things—many of which the humankind never knew—that, potentially, could have come in handy for people.

For example, back in 1990s, when many Moscow’s grassplots were still covered with knee-high grasses, and city parks had some decent forests and meadows, fragmentation already prevented even mid-sized animals, such as hare or stoat, from establishing viable populations there, while small (and well-studied) animals, such as day butterfly, had lost up to a third of species composition by 2001, when Moscow Red Book’s first edition was published. But the dying out of a third of butterflies also means that about a third of less well-studied insects followed suit: pollinators, entomophagous insects, soil formers, dead wood destructors, etc. By the time Moscow Red Book’s second edition was published in 2011, that assumption had proved true for bumblebees and dragonflies.

Nevertheless, about 70% of species remained and continued performing their functions. Due to that, data obtained from forest pathology research showed that large natural expanses—contributing the most to maintaining a normal environmental situation in the city—are in a relatively good condition.

According to Liudmila Volkova, Biodiversity Conservation Center’s expert and Moscow Red Book’s scientific editor, a 50 percent “threshold” of Moscow’s insect survivability will be the limit, meaning another 20–30 percent of entomofauna species will have died out—because of excessively frequent grass-cutting, mass park (and even special protection natural areas) beautification, and a sheer extensive “sealing-off” of soil in the city. And it’s from then on that the humankind will have to compensate for the undermined capability of green areas for self-regulation and to resort to insecticides in order to control pest population in city parks, as populations and diversity of entomophagous invertebrates (e.g. ichneumonoidea, parasites, predators) and songbirds will have decreased.

An alternative solution would be to use nature’s “ecosystem services” rather than fight it. Thus, its restorative influence on the human body was tested in practice more than once. As far back as in 1981, scientists from Sweden’s Chalmers University of Technology proved that patients assigned to rooms with windows looking out on a natural setting recovered faster than those in rooms with window views of a building. Similar findings have been made for children: researchers Taylor and Kuo noticed that children with attention deficits showed improved concentration results after a 20-minute walk in the park.

So why do we need biodiversity? To eat, heal, stay healthy, take rest, save money, and earn money. Do those arguments suffice to protect a grassplot, a wasteland, or a forest? To finally shift our perspective from “what is it that nature gives us” to the one where the only answer begs itself, and namely “because all living things have the right to dwell on the planet”?

Nadya Kiyatkina
Moscow

On The Nature of Cities