Naturing the City: First Glance
As climate change increasingly permeates urban planning
discourse, the image of the “sustainable city” has evolved as planners,
policymakers, and citizens grapple with what a term like “sustainability”
actually implies. In some ways, the growing discourse around sustainability
planning is outpacing knowledge about how to implement meaningful change. Some
of that delay is a consequence of the different rates at which elements of a
city change. Brenda Scheer elaborates this idea in her 2001 paper “The Anatomy
of Sprawl,” in which she identifies the ways in which slower-changing elements
of a city’s layout, such as the property lines of surrounding farmland,
directly inform spatial patterns of later development, such as suburban sprawl
(Scheer 1). Scheer uses an urban morphology technique, which she defines as the
“study of the city as physical form” (Scheer 1). This approach echoes one
proposed by Emilio Jose Garcia and Brenda Vale in their 2017 book Unraveling
Sustainability and Resilience in the Built Environment. Garcia and Vale describe
the idea of “morphogenesis,” defining it as an analysis of how a given
environment has changed (Garcia and Vale 2017, p. 167).
Garcia and Vale suggest morphogenesis as a partial solution
to the problem of measuring urban ecosystems, which they present as a
significant challenge in better understanding ideas of resilience and
sustainability in the urban context. Ecologists, according to these authors, have
well-established methods of measuring natural ecosystems, but the rates of
change are so different between these systems and urban ecosystems that it is
impossible to directly translate these strategies into a planning framework.
Instead, planners must “analyse cities as urban landscapes that depend on
ecosystem services, which have their own scales and dynamics of change” (Garcia
and Vale 2017, p. 206). By using a morphogenesis framework, planners can measure different rates of change in the city and thus pursue what the authors refer to as a Panarchy, which emphasizes the
importance of implementing resilience strategies at multiple scales (i.e. street, block, city, region) (Garcia and Vale 2017, p. 40).
The subject of nature has taken its place the broader
discussion of how to design more resilient cities, reflecting an increased
understanding of the value of ecosystem services in improving environmental
quality as well as a city’s capacity to recover from environmental stress. For
instance, SWA’s 2015 plan for Buffalo Bayou Park connected and repurposed 2.3
miles of green space, designing the expansive park to double as flood
infrastructure. This park, along with similar projects around the world, is an
example of what planners refer to as Urban Green Infrastructure (UGI). A number
of recent renaturing efforts focus on introducing or improving UGI in a city.
Other instances of renaturing are more focused on encouraging biodiversity,
which has its own positive impacts on a city’s resilience. As Garcia and Vale
discuss, a more complex system is a more resilient one, thus a city may benefit
from investing in higher biodiversity of flora as well as fauna (Garcia and
Vale 2017, p. 36).
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Houston’s Buffalo Bayou Park, designed by SWA in 2015, is an example of urban green infrastructure (UGI). Image from SWA. |
Rumble et al discuss two cases of renaturing in their
chapter “Understanding and Applying Ecological Principles in Cities,” which
appears in the 2019 book Planning Cities with Nature: Theory, Strategies,
and Methods. The first of the two cases the authors discuss that of RondonĂ³polis,
Brazil, where the Urban Macaws of RondonĂ³polis project aims to conserve declining
populations of blue-and-yellow and red-and-green macaws in the city. As Brazil’s
rapid rate of urbanization threatens its wealth of biodiversity, the aim of
this project was to study the habitats and behaviors of the macaws in order to
shape the city around their needs. For instance, researchers found that macaws used
deadwood from a particular species of palm, which happened to be a non-native
species, to nest as well as to feed (Rumble et al 2019, p. 226). Using this
data, the city could adapt their deadwood clearance practices in order to meet
the macaw’s needs and thus support a higher urban population of the birds.
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Blue and yellow macaws in RondonĂ³polis. Image source. |
The second case the authors describe is similarly focused
on habit conservation and urban biodiversity, however, it takes place in a very
different context. Unlike Brazil, the United Kingdom has experienced stable
urbanization over a long period of time, and thus is facing different issues
when it comes to nature in the city. For London, the authors point out, the
issue is less about conserving existing species and more geared towards
encouraging the return of species to the city (Rumble et al 2019, p. 217). The
case the authors present centers around brownfield development along the Thames.
Commonly thought of as “unproductive” space, brownfield sites in this study are
shown to be valuable habitats for a wide range of species, especially invertebrates,
who are increasingly displaced from natural ecosystems (Rumble et al 2019, p.
227). The authors describe a brownfield development known as Barking Riverside,
which was designed to accommodate such biodiversity, taking special care to
provide habitat niches for the various species living on the site. This project
used green roofs, which, like Houston’s Buffalo Bayou Park, acted as a form of UGI
to serve the city as well as promote biodiversity through thoughtful,
contextualized design (Rumble et al 2019, p. 228).
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Green roofs at the Barking Riverside development in London. Image source. |
As many benefits that nature does offer a city, both
strategically and socially, its status as an amenity requires a critical
discussion of access and inclusion. Improved green space can have a direct effect on property values, which threatens residents
with displacement and prevents equitable access to the benefits that green
space provides. This is especially important in reference to nature’s ability
to mitigate the consequences of climate change, among which are poor air quality, flooding, and urban heat island effect. In pursuing renatured, resilient, and sustainable design, it is
essential that planners not simply reproduce the environmental inequities that already
exist but actively work to reduce them through design, policy, and advocacy.
This post is the first in a 7-part series focused on resilience, renaturing, and the city.
Works Cited
Garcia and Vale, Unraveling Sustainability and
Resilience in the Built Environment (2017). Routledge, London.
Rumble et al, “Understanding and Applying Ecological
Principles in Cities,” Planning Cities with Nature: Theories, Strategies,
and Methods (2019). Ed. de Olivera, Fabiano and Mell, Ian. Springer, Cham.
Scheer, Brenda. (2001). The Anatomy of Sprawl. Places: A
Forum of Environmental Design. 14.
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