Celebrating the Mundane: Nature and the Built Environment (original) (raw)

The “desire to have it all”: multiple priorities for urban gardens reduces space for native nature

2021

The majority of the world’s population now lives in cities, where reduced levels of native biodiversity, coupled with fewer opportunities for people to experience nature, are expected to result in an urban public increasingly disconnected from the natural environment. Residential gardens have great potential to both support native species and allow people daily contact with nature. Embracing the epistemological assumption that urban residents’ interactions with nature in their gardens and parks may be complex, unpredictable, contradictory, and context-dependent, we used an interpretative phenomenological analysis approach to explore the human relationship with urban nature in a New Zealand city. We conducted 21 semi-structured “go-along” interviews to facilitate a deeper understanding of participants’ personal experiences of nature in parks and gardens. Interviews revealed a tension between stated values and concrete actions affecting urban biodiversity in private gardens. This valu...

Of plants, high lines and horses: Civic groups and designers in the relational articulation of values of urban natures (2017)

This paper addresses three interventions into urban green spaces—a wetland in Cape Town, a post- industrial site in New York, and a park outside London. Through their different contexts, they help to grasp a wider phenomenon: the protection of urban nature through the development of protective narratives. We analyze these interventions as examples of “value articulation”, which we view as a relational and sociomaterial practice that requires the enrolment of people, plants, and things that together perform, spread, and deploy stories about why given places need protection. For each case study, we also highlight the moments when narrative practices move beyond mere protection and start to change the very context in which they were developed. We refer to these as projective narratives, emphasizing how novel values and uses are projected onto these spaces, opening them up for reworking. Our analyses of these successful attempts to protect land demonstrate how values emerge as part of inclusive, yet specific, narratives that mobilize and broaden support and constituencies. By constructing spatial linkages, such narratives embed places in wider geographical ‘wholes’ and we observe how the physical landscape itself becomes an active narrative element. In contrast to rationalist and external frameworks for analyzing values in relation to urban natures (e.g., ecosystem services), our ‘bottom-up’ mode situates urban nature in specific contexts, helping us to profoundly rethink planning and practice in order to (i) challenge expert categories and city/nature dichotomies; (ii) provide vernacular ways of knowing/understanding; and (iii) rethink the role of urban designers.

Enabling Relationships with Nature in Cities

Sustainability

Limited exposure to direct nature experiences is a worrying sign of urbanization, particularly for children. Experiencing nature during childhood shapes aspects of a personal relationship with nature, crucial for sustainable decision-making processes in adulthood. Scholars often stress the need to ‘reconnect’ urban dwellers with nature; however, few elaborate on how this can be achieved. Here, we argue that nature reconnection requires urban ecosystems, with a capacity to enable environmental learning in the cognitive, affective and psychomotor domains, i.e., learning that occurs in the head, heart and hands of individuals. Drawing on environmental psychology, urban ecology, institutional analysis and urban planning, we present a theoretical framework for Human–Nature Connection (HNC), discuss the importance of nurturing HNC for children, elaborate on the role of property-rights and the importance of creating collective action arenas in cities for the promotion of urban resilience b...

Paradoxes and Puzzles: Appreciating Gardens and Urban Nature

Contemporary Aesthetics, 2006

To explore our appreciation of gardens and urban nature, I propose a recursive definition of original or wild nature together with guidelines for discerning degrees of naturalness. Arguing (contra Robert Elliott) that nature can be restored as well as degraded, I characterize four varieties of urban nature interrupted, altered, constructed, and virtual. I build on Stan Godlovitch's comments about scale to suggest two modes of appreciation macroscopic and fine-focused. I close by discussing some particular examples parks, environmental art, gardens and drawing some conclusions for the appreciation of vernacular gardens.[1]

Pathways of Urban Nature: Diversity in the Greening of the Twenty-First Century City

Now Urbanism: The Future City is Here, 2015

Nature is a central component of the twenty-first century city. Beyond parks and open spaces, urban nature is implicated in strategies of economic development, climate change mitigation and adaptation, public art, biodiversity enhancement, local food production, health and livability, social justice, community identity, and more. 1 This " pluralization " of urban nature has come about in the last four decades as a result of the mainstreaming of environmental protection activities; the proliferation of knowledge about how natural systems support and maintain cities; a wide range of innovative and inspiring projects, policies, and technologies that feature urban nature; and a gradual shift away from cultural perceptions that nature and cities are diametrically opposed. Greening activities continue to be undertaken by environmentalists and community activists, but also include a broader array of stakeholders including private development interests, natural scientists, artists, social justice advocates, and others. The broadening of the urban greening agenda to a wide variety of actors and strategies is a welcome development but it can result in confusion due to a cacophony of voices and ideas on how and why we green cities. How can we make sense of the multiple ways that nature is being reworked in today's cities? The aim of this chapter is to propose a pathways approach to interpret the multiple ways that urban nature is being realized today. The notion of " pathways " has been used by a wide variety of scholars in the social sciences and the design disciplines to deal with the multiplicity of ways that sustainable development and design has been conceptualized and acted upon in a variety of contexts. Pathways are useful for identifying key actors and their perceptions of improved urban futures with an emphasis on the means by which they frame and enact their particular visions in particular social and physical contexts. It serves as a heuristic tool to structure and assess the various approaches to urban greening that are shaped by particular cultural and political pressures. I begin the chapter by defining the theoretical underpinnings and intentions of the pathways approach. I then use three vignettes of urban nature projects in Manchester, England, to demonstrate how the pathways perspective can be used to reflect upon and scrutinize urban green activities. I conclude by arguing that the greening of cities not only involves the introduction and rearrangement of nature in the city, but also has implications for how human societies are governed. In this way, we can understand the greening of cities as a deeply political process of reinventing the relations between humans and their physical surroundings. The Pathways Approach to Urban Development The pathways approach has been developed over the past two decades by scholars in architecture, planning, geography, sociology, anthropology, political science, and environmental studies to challenge positivist tendencies towards a single definition of sustainable development. Inspired by post-colonial, feminist, and post-structural critiques of modernity, these authors share a belief that sustainable development involves a plurality of logics and practices rather than one ideal approach. The notion of pathways rejects the predefined norms and universal assumptions that underpin the

The Importance of Nature, Green spaces, and Gardens in Human Well-Being

Comparing the nature encounters of Gerald Durrell with our current climate of 'stranger danger', health and safety neurosis, and the beguilement and blunting of the senses by technological advances presents a worrying picture of a new era of nature and culture deprivation. However, even in some of the most unlikely places, a rich engagement with nature can be rekindled. Central to such recovery is access to nearby nature that allows practical engagement rather than merely detatched on-looking. In my conclusion I outline examples where this has been made possible in the challenging settings of socially deprived urban areas.

The Instrumentalization of Landscape in Contemporary Cities

Today, cities are redefining their relationships with the natural world, spurring a new dynamic between the built environment, man-made landscapes, and nature. Nature is no longer seen as the antithesis of the city and civilized life, or as something simply to support urban dwellers’ social life, but also as a means of fighting challenges such as climate change, urban health and well-being within the city. This approach to landscape and nature in cities has evolved as a response to the human–nature crisis and the need to limit urban development in open areas of ecological importance. In terms of planning, this approach called for the preparation of pre-development surveys, including a comprehensive land survey that relates to climate, geology, hydrology, flora and fauna as means to better planing the built environment. In addition, and in parallel, to the discussion on the conservation of land resources outside urban space, there was also recognition of the need to address the natural systems in cities (Scheer, 2011). This recognition led to investigation of flora and fauna in the city and examination of the city’s ecosystems, which in turn led to new design strategies viewing landscape as a key component in creating new hybrid ecosystems (Mossop, 2006). At the beginning of the twenty-first century this ecological emphasis in cities is associated with two prominent concepts: landscape urbanism (Waldheim, 2006) which emerged from architecture and planning, combining design with ecological approaches, and urban ecology (Mostafavi and Doherty, 2016; Steiner, 2011) whose roots are in ecological positivist studies. Viewing landscape and nature as a means/tool that can ‘solve’ some of the major challenges of contemporary urbanization also contributed to their presence in our daily life. Recycling, greening and rehabilitating nature in the city have not been merely theoretical-utopian ideas but rather translated into practice through policy documents, designated campaigns, and legal initiatives. This condition contributed to the centrality of landscape in our daily city life and also, as suggested by W.J.T. Mitchell (2002), contributed to the use of landscape as a verb. As he further argues, landscape is not just an object to be seen, or text to be read, but a process by which social and subjective identities are formed; as such, landscape is not merely signifying power relations; it is an instrument of cultural power, perhaps even an agent of power that is independent of human intentions (Ibid., p. 1).