Design with Nature: Ecological Cities and the Myth of Sustainability

Kevin M. Anderson Ph.D.

Austin Water Center for Environmental Research

American Urban Nature

The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I have been preparing to
say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the world. Every tree sends its fibers forth in
search of the Wild.
The cities import it at any price.
-Henry David Thoreau, Walking

Narrative of Redemptive Urban Nature

This narrative presupposes the framework of iterative natures with preserves, parks, and gardens
established for urban landscapes of wild first nature and pastoral second nature.
The further presupposition is that the urban industrial second nature is degradation in need of redemption.
The narrative of redemptive urban nature is the story of nature which is deliberately imported at any price
into urban design as a tonic for body and spirit.
Space for nature is created to provide recreation for physical health and to allow contact with officially
sanctioned nature for mental health.
Peter Schmitt Back to Nature: The Arcadian Myth in Urban America 1969

Narrative of Redemptive Urban Nature

Design with Nature 1969 Ian McHarg
Ian L. McHarg ( 1920 - 2001 ) was born in Clydebank, Scotland and became a landscape architect and a
renowned writer on regional planning using natural systems.
He was the founder of the department of landscape architecture at the University of Pennsylvania.

His 1969 book Design with Nature pioneered the concept of ecological planning. It continues to be one of
the most widely celebrated books on landscape architecture and land-use planning. In this book, he set
forth the basic concepts that were to develop later in Geographic Information Systems.

Design with Nature Ian McHarg and the Ecological Inventory

Overlays of factors to reveal spatial patterns of intrinsic suitabilities for diverse land uses

Design with Nature Ian McHarg - The Ecological Inventory

With the publication of Design with Nature in 1969, McHarg
formalized a design practice that prioritized incorporating nature
throughout the urban landscape and promoted landscape
architecture as the instrument of environmentalism.
McHarg insisted that urban design should find its rules in nature and
those rules emerged from the scientific study of nature where
ecologists provide not only an explanation, but also a command.
1.It is based on a scientific, mechanistic manipulation of nature for our
own ends to produce green space

2.Nature as process
3.Humans as the great disrupters
I invented ecological planning in the 60s

Nature as process and Humans as the great disrupters

George Perkins Marsh 1801 1882
This remarkable text engendered worldwide awareness of the ill-effects
of human agency, along with efforts to repair the damage and conserve
the fabric of nature. Most noteworthy was Marshs stress on the
unforeseen and unintended consequences, as well as the heedless
greed, of technological enterprise.

1864
"Man is everywhere a disturbing agent. Wherever he plants his foot, the
harmonies of nature are turned to discord"
"...Man, who even now finds scarce breathing room on this vast globe,
cannot retire from the Old World to some yet undiscovered continent,
and wait for the slow action of such causes to replace, by a new
creation, the Eden he has wasted"
Man has too long forgotten that the earth was given to him for
usufruct alone, not for consumption, still less for profligate waste.
Nature has provided against the absolute destruction of any of her
elementary matter... But she has left it within the power of man
irreparably to derange the combinations of inorganic matter and of
organic life.

The Garden City Movement

A method of urban planning that was initiated
in 1898 by Sir Ebenezer Howard [1850 -1928]
in the UK.
Garden cities were intended to be planned,
self-contained communities surrounded by
"greenbelts" (parks), containing proportionate
areas of residences, industry and agriculture.
Inspired by the Utopian novel Looking
Backward, Howard published his book Tomorrow: a Peaceful Path to Real Reform in
1898 (which was reissued in 1902 as Garden
Cities of Tomorrow).
His idealized garden city would house 32,000
people on a site of 6,000 acres , planned on a
concentric pattern with open spaces, public
parks and six radial boulevards, 120 ft wide,
extending from the center.

The Garden City Movement

The garden city would be self-sufficient and
when it reached full population, another
garden city would be developed nearby.
Howard envisaged a cluster of several garden
cities as satellites of a central city of 50,000
people, linked by road and rail.

Patrick Geddes 1854-1932

Geography and Sociology

Family, Place, Work
Organism, Environment, Function [Spencer]
Social Theory and Evolution
Great influence on Lewis Mumford

McHarg relies on the functional narrative of urban ecology

Narrative of Functional Nature
Urban Ecology
The metabolic requirements of a city can be defined as the materials and commodities needed to sustain the
citys inhabitants at home, at work and at playThe metabolic cycle is not completed until wastes and
residues of daily life have been removed and disposed of with a minimum of nuisance and hazard.
-Abel Wolman The metabolism of cities Science (1965)

The narrative of functional urban nature that emerges from the study and practice of urban ecology is an
account that does not necessarily start with a list of good and bad nature (or native and non-native nature).

The Environment and Sustainability

Barry Commoner 1917-2012

20th Century: A Century of

Growth

The Closing Circle 1971

Commoners 4 Principles

1.Everything is connected to everything else.

2.Everything must go somewhere.

3.Nature knows best.

4.There is no such thing as a free lunch.

He had a long-running debate with Ehrlich and his followers, arguing that they were too focused on
overpopulation as the source of environmental problems, and that their proposed solutions were
politically unacceptable because of the coercion that they implied, and because the cost would fall
disproportionately on the poor.
He believed that technological, and above all social development would lead to a natural decrease in both
population growth and environmental damage

The Environment and Mass Culture

Earth Day April 22, 1970

The idea came to Earth Day founder Gaylord Nelson, then a U.S. Senator
from Wisconsin, after witnessing the ravages of the 1969 massive oil spill
in Santa Barbara, California.
Senator Nelson announced the idea for a national teach-in on the
environment to the national media; persuaded Pete McCloskey, a
conservation Republican Congressman, to serve as his co-chair; and
recruited Denis Hayes as national coordinator. Hayes built a national staff
of 85 to promote events across the land.

As a result, on the 22nd of April, 20 million Americans took to the streets,

parks, and auditoriums to demonstrate for a healthy, sustainable
environment in massive coast-to-coast rallies.

Sustainability Defined
Our Common Future, also known as the Brundtland Report, from the
United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development
was published in 1987.

Sustainable development is defined in the report as: "development that

meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of
future generations to meet their own needs.
Environment Economy Equity

In the middle of the 20th century, we saw our planet from space for the
first time. Historians may eventually find that this vision had a greater
impact on thought than did the Copernican revolution of the 16th
century, which upset the human self-image by revealing that the Earth is
not the centre of the universe.
From space, we see a small and fragile ball dominated not by human
activity and edifice but by a pattern of clouds, oceans, greenery, and
soils. Humanity's inability to fit its activities into that pattern is changing
planetary systems, fundamentally. Many such changes are accompanied
by life-threatening hazards.
This new reality, from which there is no escape, must be recognized and managed.

New Narrative - Restoration of Urban Nature

Ecologists provide not only an explanation, but also a command.
McHarg and the urban designers that he has influenced seek to restore
nature in urban space as a response to degradation of the original
ecosystem upon which the city was built.
Using the ecological inventory, this indigenous ecosystem is remembered
and restored as functional green space amidst urban space.
In this design with nature version, the restoration privileges native flora
and fauna as the authentic nature to restore in the city.

In so doing, a new narrative of urban nature emerged focused on restoring

ecological function to the damaged urban ecosystem by including nature in
urban design.

Narrative of Degraded Urban Nature

Perceptions of American Biologists, Ecologists, and Environmentalists
A weedland community of inappropriate nature
(Urban growth) replaces the native species that are lost with widespread weedy nonnative species. This
replacement constitutes the process of biotic homogenization that threatens to reduce the biological
uniqueness of local ecosystems.
Michael L. McKinney, Urbanization, biodiversity, and conservation. Bioscience 52(10), (2002), 883890.

Of Texas - a Citizen Science Program to Detect and Report Invasive Species

Invaders of Texas website was created by the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center as a tool for mobilizing
the public against non-native invaders and the website employs the rhetoric of war and a resistance
composed of citizen scientists defending the homeland
The Invaders of Texas Program is an innovative campaign whereby volunteer "citizen scientists" are trained
to detect the arrival and dispersal of invasive species in their own local areas.
The Invaders of Texas program provides training and materials to volunteers who find, track, describe and
photograph invasive species and report occurrences to a centralized database on the texasinvasives.org
website. The anticipated outcomes of this citizen scientist program include a statewide network of
volunteers contributing to our knowledge of the distribution of invasive species in Texas and increased public
awareness of the dangers imposed by invasive species and what steps citizens can take when they encounter
them; and reduced spread of invasive species through more timely control and eradication.
- www.texasinvasives.org
Chinaberry
But not Monk Parakeets

Narrative of Restorative Urban Nature

Restoration ecology developed out of conservation biology as a
proactive technique not to just conserve remnant habitats and species
but to actively restore degraded ecosystems.
In the retrospective version of the narrative of restorative urban nature,
cities must be restored to former landscapes degraded by the city.

The most controversial of these aliens are invasive species identified

as non-native species introduced by humans. These transgressive weeds
must be eradicated in order to bring back lost native landscapes.

Narrative of Restorative Urban Nature

This narrative of restoring American urban nature are preoccupied by a retrospective
longing for lost pristine nature and native habitats.

The rhetoric of warfare with invasive non-native species combines with a vision of urban
landscapes as weedlands resulting in a bleak picture of urban ecosystems in America.

Degraded Nature
Urban Nature - Not a Real Ecosystem
John Tallmadge The Cincinnati Arch: Learning from Nature in the City (2004)
Urban nature is not sublimeTheres too much sterility in the form of roofs and pavement, and, oddly
enough, theres also too much wildness, too many weeds and wooded borders and tangled banks, not to
mention vacant lots going to brush.
Of course, wilderness wont do to describe such landscapes either. Despite the degree of wildness,
theres too much human impact, too many alien species, too few large animals to meet the legal and
cultural criteria.

The fact is that urban landscapes are just too mixed up, chaotic, and confused to fit our established
notions of beauty and value in nature. Maybe its not really nature at all, not a real ecosystem, just a
bunch of weeds and exotics mixed up with human junk.

Maybe its not really nature at all

Beautiful flower in your garden
But the most beautiful by far
Is the one growing wild in the garbage dump
Even here, even here, we are
Song by Paul Westerberg, Even Here We Are (14 Songs, 1993)

The High Line New York

The High Line in New York City

Ruinous Attractions Social Space

Many waste places have these ruinous attractions: release from control, free play for action and fantasy,
rich and varied sensations. Thus children are attracted to vacant lots, scrub woods, back alleys, and
unused hillsidesthose screened, marginal, uncontrolled places where people can indulge in behavior that
is proscribed and yet not harmful to others are regularly threatened by clean-ups and yet are a necessity
for supple society.
- Kevin Lynch Wasting Away (1990) p. 26.

The paradox of meddling

These habitats are accidental from our perspective, but they are deliberate expressions by urban flora and
fauna.
As we impose our expectations of nature on this urban nature, we decide which organisms are allowed to
remain. Nonhuman planning for these sites is rejected by human planning, and the ruinous attractions
created by nonhumans can undone.
The urban planning ideas of filling vacant land with development or greening it with parks and gardens
displaces this kind of nature. In this contest between human and nonhuman intentions, these particular
ruderal nonhumans lose.

The High Line in New York City

In the United States, the foundational narratives of Nature that

we celebrate are wilderness and pastoral arcadia.
They are the foundational metaphors of American nature from
which we assess the value of nature in America.

However, we are now predominately a country of urbanites who

have only occasional contact with wilderness or pastoral nature.

Our understanding of what constitutes sanctioned urban nature

in cities is shaped by culturally dominant metaphors of nature.
These metaphors valorize urban nature that is either
deliberately cultivated in parks and gardens or formally
protected as remnants of native landscapes obliterated by the
creation of the city in preserves, sanctuaries, and refuges.

In American cities, we perceive nature in the urban landscape filtered through concepts that prejudge
its ecological and cultural value.
By restricting our discourse of nature to these traditional concepts, we fail to come to terms with a
new kind of nature that has emerged in the city.

This new nature flourishes through its own agency in neglected urban wastelands and margins
like vacant lots, garbage dumps, sewage ponds, unmaintained roadway and railway verges, old
industrial tracts, abandoned buildings, overgrown urban creeks, crumbling walls, and other
urban waste spaces.

Agency of Nature
Non-humans do unexpected things and defy our expectations of what nature
should be and how non-humans should behave

Human Agency and the Agency of Nature

I like very much a little piece by Michel Callon which is about the problem with scallop fishing in Saint
Briene Bay. It seems like a very conventional piece of sociological analysis talking about the various
agents at work, until you come to the final agent, which is the scallops.
Now at that point most people freak out: they say scallops? Agents?! Now this struck me too at first as
strange, but then I thought, Yeah, hes right, hes dead right. I mean why do we say that the scallops
have no agency in this.
It does seem to me that one of the transgressive points that Donna (Haraway) feels very strongly about is
to try to dissolve that divide between nature and culture, and I think I would want to try to do that too,
although its extremely hard to do and this is where the language comes back and gets you again and
again. We dont have, as it were, the discursive strategies that allow us to talk freely about the
production of nature
I prefer to talk about socioecological projects in which its not simply the social thats the activating unit
but also, scallops and mice and all the rest of them.
Nature, politics, and possibilities: a debate and discussion with David Harvey and Donna Haraway, Environment and
Planning D: Society and Space 1995, Volume 13, p. 515.

Animal Geography Wolch, Philo, Whatmore, etc.

Perceptions of Non-Human Urbanites

Urban Wildlife Sanctioned and Unsanctioned
Urban fauna is judged favorably when it in some way fulfills our expectations of wild or pastoral
nature or condemned as pestilent when it fails to follow the narrative for good fauna in the city.
This narrative of urban wildlife declares that everyday non-charismatic house sparrows, grackles, and
pigeons are urban pests that further degrade the city

but nesting red-tailed hawks and peregrine falcons are redemptive wild additions to the urban scene.

Nonhumans and Urban Habitat

the individual nonhuman subject

actively creating its home in the
urban habitat

Pale Male the famous red-tail hawk

Performs wingstands high above midtown Manhattan
Circles around for one last pass over the park
Got his eye on a fat squirrel down there and a couple of pigeons
They got no place to run they got no place to hide
But Pale Male hes cool, see cause his breakfast aint goin nowhere
So he does a loop t loop for the tourists and the six oclock news
Got him a penthouse view from the tip-top of the food chain, boys
He looks up and down on fifth avenue and says God I love this town
But life goes on down here below
And all us mortals struggle so
We laugh and cry
And live and die
Thats how it goes
For all we know
Down here below
Pale male swimmin in the air
Looks like hes in heaven up there
People sufferin everywhere
But he dont care
But life goes on down here below
And all us mortals, struggle so
We laugh and cry
- Steve Earle, Down Here Below, song on Washington Street Serenade (2007)

Perceptions of Urban Nature

Ill learnem to steal my house! he cried. Ill learnem, Ill learnem!
Dont say learnem, Toad, said the Rat, greatly shocked. Its not good English.
What are you always nagging at Toad for? inquired the Badger, rather peevishly. Whats the matter
with his English? Its the same what I use myself, and if its good enough for me, it ought to be good
enough for you!
Im very sorry, said the Rat humbly. Only I think it ought to be teachem, not learnem.
But we dont want to teachem, replied the Badger. We want to learnem learnem, learnem!
And whats more, were going to do it, too!
- Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

Summary
In American cities, we perceive nature in the urban landscape filtered through concepts that
prejudge its ecological and cultural value.
By restricting our discourse of nature to these traditional concepts, we fail to come to terms
with a new kind of nature that has emerged in the city.

What emerges in this wasteland is a hybrid ecosystem both weedy and wild - the
unintended product of human neglect and Nature's unflagging opportunism, which I call
Marginal Nature.

Marginal nature in the urban landscape is neither pristine nor pastoral, but rather it is a
new kind of nature whose ecological and cultural meaning is an open question.

New Myth of Nature

Novel Ecosystems and Resilience Ecology
Holling, C.S. (1973). "Resilience and stability of ecological systems"

2005

2007

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2012

Applause