Naturing the City: Anthropocentrism in Urban Ecology
While urban
planning and design practices are increasingly adopting ecology into their
frameworks, our understanding of nature’s value to the city remains highly
anthropocentric, focusing on the economic and psychological value of contact
with nature. While greater appreciation for nature among city dwellers (and
humans in general) is essential to promoting conservation and reintroducing
nature to city, there remains a risk that the role of nature could become
restricted by this anthropocentric approach. For instance, nature as a
resilience tool may simply help sustain the systems we have in place, however
harmful or unsustainable they may be. In the case of Houston’s Buffalo Bayou
Park, which I introduced briefly two weeks ago in the post “Renaturing the
City: A First Glance,” the park may improve the city’s ability to recover from
hurricanes, but also allows an unsustainable and environmentally harmful urban
system to survive unchallenged. To the extent that the park protects the city’s
most vulnerable populations and helps the city save money, this is certainly a
good thing. However, the park also protects some of the infrastructure that is responsible
for climate change-causing emissions in the first place, such as Houston’s overruling
highway system.
As tragic and
costly as disasters are, they also offer cities the opportunity to rethink
their identity and rebuild with a refreshed set of priorities in mind. A city
like Houston may be more resilient, thanks to Buffalo Bayou Park, but how can
it become more sustainable without any real impetus to change something as
significant as its transportation infrastructure? Of course, this is not to
beckon a hurricane in Houston’s direction, but rather to indicate an important
distinction between sustainability and resilience. If we simply ensure that our
highly polluting, unsustainable cities can recover from disasters more quickly,
then we have only addressed half the problem of climate adaptation.
Furthermore, it perpetuates the myth that new design strategies and technology
are sufficient problem solvers and thus render deeper, systemic change
unnecessary.
This myth of
sustained, or sustainable, development appears to be derived from a Western
capitalist understanding of urban planning and its relationship to ecology.
While we have established that high levels of biodiversity and complexity are
important components of a resilient ecosystem- urban or otherwise- recent
adoptions of Western eco-city principles have failed to deliver a significant
level of biodiversity. Ying Li and Ian Mell report their findings on this
phenomenon in their chapter “Understanding Landscape: Cultural Perceptions of
Environment in the UK and China” for the 2019 book Planning Cities with Nature.
Li and Mell focus on the rise of Chinese eco-cities, an idea which emerged in
response to the nation’s rapid development along with an emerging concern at
the national level with urban ecology (Li and Mell, 10).
These eco-cities aim to integrate nature into
the city in order to maintain “ecological functions” as well as provide
residents access to nature (Li and Mell, 10-11). The authors contrast the
eco-city approach, which is Western in origin, with Chinese philosophical ideas
of nature, which tend to be more holistic (Li and Mell, 7). Li and Mell’s work finds
that Western ideas of urban ecology, represented in the eco-city trend, rely
more on “design labels” than using nature as a “theoretical underpinning (Li
and Mell, 11). While the authors’ analysis perhaps relies on an element of
Chinese philosophy that is becoming less culturally central due to rapid
Westernization, it is still significant to understand how a limited, Western idea
of nature may inhibit our ability to effectively and meaningfully integrate
nature into emerging urban forms.
On a more micro
scale than urban infrastructure, other approaches to renaturing the city focus
on promoting deeper human connections between human and the natural world. Many
of these efforts focus on fostering a greater appreciation for a particular
species of animal, following the approach that used polar bears as an early
symbol of the climate crisis. This direction makes sense, as humans might more
readily empathize with an animal than, say, a particular type of tree that is
also under threat. Often, projects aiming to connect people with their
non-human neighbors employ technology and education to develop this
relationship. For instance, in his 2018 book Blue Biophilic Cities: Nature
and Resilience Along the Urban Coast, Timothy Beatley describes projects
which aim to demonstrate to coastal urban residents the wealth of biodiversity
hiding below the ocean’s surface. These approaches aim to show people what is
in “their own backyard,” with the hope that heightened awareness can develop a
greater appreciation for the natural world and how humans affect local species
and ecosystems. In one example, Beatley describes the nonprofit Ocearch, which
tags sharks and allows their migration patterns and live events- such as
mating, births, and deaths- to be tracked digitally. The sharks’ activities are
conveyed through Twitter, so users can tweet personal messages to a particular
shark and thus feel more in touch with them (Beatley, 60). In another example,
a nonprofit in Oregon called Harbor WildWatch hosts events called Pier into the
Night, in which the nonprofit invites visitors to watch videos recorded by
volunteer divers earlier that same day (Beatley, 68). Naturalists provide
narration during the event, describing the species being shown on the screen to
attendees.
Digital tools
have proven useful to building connections between humans and their animal
neighbors in a wide range of contexts, including the Benjamin Franklin Parkway
in Philadelphia. In Christian Hunold’s paper “Why Not the City? Urban Hawk
Watching and the End of Nature,” Hunold describes the online community of urban
hawk watchers that emerged from enthusiasm over a red-tailed hawk nest located
on a ledge on the façade of the Franklin Institute. The science museum
installed a camera near the nest in order to live-stream the hawks’ activities,
and soon a Facebook group and blog emerged that discussed developments in the
birds’ lives, which included the death of a father hawk (tiercel), the adoption
of a new partner by the mother hawk (formel), and two fledgling deaths
resulting from the young birds’ collisions with a nearby window. After the two
fledgling deaths, which occurred during the same summer, impassioned hawk
watchers wrote to the Moore College of Art & Design, whose window both
fledglings had collided with (Hunold, 125-7). As a result of the hawk fans’
efforts, the College hung colorful banners in front of the windows in order to
prevent any more accidents. Digital tools, in this case a live-stream camera
and social media, were able to foster greater human connection to the hawks,
which then provided sufficient impetus to affect change that would encourage
the survival of the species in their home environment of Philadelphia.
In the movement
to incorporate nature into the city, human empathy for the flora and fauna of
local ecosystems is essential to garnering social and political support for
renaturing efforts. As evidenced in the cases described here, digital tools and
public education efforts have proven valuable in connecting humans more directly
with neighboring species, which can result in positive change in support of more
ecologically sensitive planning practices. However, how might we be limited by the
way connections to nature are facilitated by some element of palatability? Resilient
ecosystems require high levels of biodiversity and complexity, meaning that being
too selective with what species and design tools to include in our idea of “urban
ecology” can be detrimental to larger goals of resilience and sustainability.
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Orange trees in Plaza Virgen de Los Reyes, Seville. |
Works Cited
Beatley, Timothy. Blue Biophilic
Cities: Nature and Resilience Along the Urban Coast. Palgrave Macmillan,
2018.
Hunold, Christian. “Why Not the
City? Urban Hawk Watching and the End of Nature,” Nature and Culture, 12.2,
2017.
Li, Ying and Mell, Ian.
“Understanding Landscape: Cultural Perceptions of Environment in the UK and
China,” Planning Cities with Nature: Theories, Strategies, and Methods.
Eds. De Olivera, Fabiano Lemes and Mell, Ian. Springer, 2019.
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