More precise explanations are needed to better understand why public green spaces are diminishing in cities, leading to the loss of ecosystem services that humans receive from natural systems. This paper is devoted to the incremental change of green spaces&mdash ; a fate that is largely undetectable by urban residents. The paper elucidates a set of drivers resulting in the subtle loss of urban green spaces and elaborates on the consequences of this for resilience planning of ecosystem services. Incremental changes of greenspace trigger baseline shifts, where each generation of humans tends to take the current condition of an ecosystem as the normal state, disregarding its previous states. Even well-intended political land-use decisions, such as current privatization schemes, can cumulatively result in undesirable societal outcomes, leading to a gradual loss of opportunities for nature experience. Alfred E. Kahn referred to such decision making as &lsquo ; the tyranny of small decisions.&rsquo ; This is mirrored in urban planning as problems that are dealt with in an ad hoc manner with no officially formulated vision for long-term spatial planning. Urban common property systems could provide interim solutions for local governments to survive periods of fiscal shortfalls. Transfer of proprietor rights to civil society groups can enhance the resilience of ecosystem services in cities.
More precise explanations are needed to better understand why public green spaces are diminishing in cities, leading to the loss of ecosystem services that humans receive from natural systems. This paper is devoted to the incremental change of green spaces—a fate that is largely undetectable by urban residents. The paper elucidates a set of drivers resulting in the subtle loss of urban green spaces and elaborates on the consequences of this for resilience planning of ecosystem services. Incremental changes of greenspace trigger baseline shifts, where each generation of humans tends to take the current condition of an ecosystem as the normal state, disregarding its previous states. Even well-intended political land-use decisions, such as current privatization schemes, can cumulatively result in undesirable societal outcomes, leading to a gradual loss of opportunities for nature experience. Alfred E. Kahn referred to such decision making as 'the tyranny of small decisions.' This is mirrored in urban planning as problems that are dealt with in an ad hoc manner with no officially formulated vision for long-term spatial planning. Urban common property systems could provide interim solutions for local governments to survive periods of fiscal shortfalls. Transfer of proprietor rights to civil society groups can enhance the resilience of ecosystem services in cities. ; Urban Studio
It is often uncritically assumed that, when digital technologies are integrated into the operation of city functions, they inevitably contribute to sustainable urban development. Such a notion rests largely on the belief that Information and Communication Technology (ICT) solutions pave the way for more democratic forms of planning, and that 'smart' technological devices result in a range of environmental benefits, e.g., energy efficiency and the mitigation of global warming. Drawing on the scientific literature that deals with 'smart cities', we here elaborate on how both propositions fail to consider drawbacks that could be characterized as 'wicked', i.e., problems that lack simplistic solutions and straightforward planning responses, and which often come about as 'management surprises', as a byproduct of achieving sustainability. We here deal with problems related to public choice constraints, 'non-choice default technologies' and the costs of automation for human learning and resilience. To avoid undemocratic forms of planning and too strong a dependence on non-choice default technologies, e.g., smart phones, we recommend that planners and policy makers safeguard redundancy in public-choice options by maintaining a wide range of alternative choices, including analog ones. Resilience thinking could help planners deal more effectively with the 'wickedness' of an increasingly hyper-connected society.
Despite several calls in this journal of debating the rapid growth of the literature on "smart cities", such a debate has in large been absent. Smart cities are often un-critically launched as a sustainable way of developing cities. When cities become increasingly complex as its features are wired into the Internet, theories for their understanding is lagging behind. As it is prospected that a greater number of people and things will become connected by Information and Computer Technology, the complexity of urban systems will over time increase. Historical insights reveal that as complexity in societies increase, growth in energy consumption tends to follow. In this paper, we discuss whether complexity carried too far could lead to diminishing returns of energy saving and create unmanageable urban systems. As part of initiating such a debate, this commentary asks whether the smart cities development has a bearing on the issue whether a society can erode its capacity of sustaining itself? We pose this question against the backdrop that no one actually knows what type of society the smart cities model in the end will generate.
This article examines the role played by urban gardens during historical collapses in urban food supply lines and identifies the social processes required to protect two critical elements of urban food production during times of crisis—open green spaces and the collective memory of how to grow food. Advanced communication and transport technologies allow food sequestration from the farthest reaches of the planet, but have markedly increasing urban dependence on global food systems over the past 50 years. Simultaneously, such advances have eroded collective memory of food production, while suitable spaces for urban gardening have been lost. These factors combine to heighten the potential for food shortages when—as occurred in the 20th century—major economic, political or environmental crises sever supply lines to urban areas. This paper considers how to govern urban areas sustainably in order to ensure food security in times of crisis by: evincing the effectiveness of urban gardening during crises; showing how allotment gardens serve as conduits for transmitting collective social-ecological memories of food production; and, discussing roles and strategies of urban environmental movements for protecting urban green space. Urban gardening and urban social movements can build local ecological and social response capacity against major collapses in urban food supplies. Hence, they should be incorporated as central elements of sustainable urban development. Urban governance for resilience should be historically informed about major food crises and allow for redundant food production solutions as a response to uncertain futures.
This article examines the role played by urban gardens during historical collapses in urban food supply lines and identifies the social processes required to protect two crit- ical elements of urban food production during times of crisis—open green spaces and the collective memory of how to grow food. Advanced communication and transport technologies allow food sequestration from the farthest reaches of the planet, but have markedly increasing urban dependence on global food systems over the past 50 years. Simultaneously, such advances have eroded collective memory of food production, while suitable spaces for urban gardening have been lost. These factors combine to heighten the potential for food shortages when—as occurred in the 20th century— major economic, political or environmental crises sever supply lines to urban areas. This paper considers how to govern urban areas sustainably in order to ensure food security in times of crisis by: evincing the effectiveness of urban gardening during crises; showing how allotment gardens serve as conduits for transmitting collective social-ecological memories of food production; and, discussing roles and strategies of urban environmental movements for protecting urban green space. Urban gardening and urban social movements can build local ecological and social response capacity against major collapses in urban food supplies. Hence, they should be incorporated as central elements of sustainable urban development. Urban governance for resilience should be historically informed about major food crises and allow for redundant food production solutions as a response to uncertain futures. ; SUPER, ''Sustainable Urban Planning for Ecosystem Services and Resilience"
This chapter uses insights from resilience thinking in analysing a two-thousand-year period of ancient and modern Constantinople, addressing one of the great challenges of the Urban Anthropocene: how to nurture an ecologically sound urbanisation. One of the lessons is that Constantinople maintained a diversity of insurance strategies to a greater degree than many historical and contemporary urban centres. It invested heavily not only in military infrastructure but also in systems for supplying, storing, and producing food and water. From major granaries and at least four harbours the citizens could receive seaborne goods, but during sieges the trade networks broke down. At those times, when supplies ran dry, there were possibilities to cultivate food within the defensive walls and to catch fish in the Golden Horn. Repeated sieges, which occurred on average every fifty years, generated a diversity of social-ecological memories – the means by which the knowledge, experience, and practice of how to manage a local ecosystem were stored and transmitted in a community. These memories existed in multiple groups of society, partly as a response to the collapse of long-distance, seaborne, grain transports from Egypt. Food production and transports were decentralized into a plethora of smaller subsistence communities (oikoi), which also sold the surplus to the markets of the city. In this way Constantinople became more self-reliant on regional ecosystems. An additional result was that the defensive walls were moved, not in order to construct more buildings but to increase the proportion of gardens and agricultural land. In a comparison with Cairo, it can be seen that these innovations related to enhanced self-reliance in food production made it possible for Constantinople to bounce back from extreme hardships, such as extended sieges, without collapsing into chaos or moral decay. Transformed urban morphology of the city would simply remind residents, through the visual presence of a living garden culture, of the importance of the latter for food security. Without the gardens the long intervals between sieges would probably have been enough to dissolve living memory. Hence, the urban resilience of Constantinople was enhanced, promoting well-established old regimes and traditions of importance for producing ecosystem services to society while at the same time testing and refining new and successful regimes, or in other words through the interplay of memory and innovation. Currently, and even more so in decades to come, the mindsets of urban people hold power in a global arena. Questions related to how the loss of green space in metropolitan landscapes will affect worldviews are worrisome since it is the desires and demands of urban people that will affect future decisions and essentially determine the fate of the planet. People throughout the world, and not least in Western societies, need to be constantly reminded of our dependence on a living planet and stay motivated to support it. Social-ecological memories related to local food production have to be nurtured in urban landscapes as well, and an urban morphology is needed that strengthens ecological awareness across urban populations rather than the opposite. ; The Urban Mind
The disputed endorsement of inherited visceral and universal aesthetic preferences justifies the scientific validity of Alexander's living structure. Apart from implying a resource-efficient way to promote well-being through urban design, the premise favors a collective approach to human self-perception and social justice. To better understand the contributions of Alexander, this article explores current knowledge about visceral and universal aesthetic preferences for living structure and if and how the new kind of city science, a mathematical model describing living structure, can be used for further testing. It also elaborates on the social impact of living structure, including its premise, and the potential of the new kind of city science to support social sustainability. A literature synthesis on living structure, the new kind of city science, and the premise showed a positive link between well-being and exposure to living structure. Limitations in research design nevertheless precluded conclusions about the associated visceral and universal aesthetic preferences. The new kind of city science was found appropriate for further research by holistically representing living structure. Moreover, like the hypothesized biological origin, social learning and sociocultural transmission were found to theoretically support the premise of universality and a collective approach to human identity and social justice, with further societal implications. For the concept of living structure to support social sustainability, it must be coupled with the promotion of empowerment and community mobilization. Hence, the operationalization of the new kind of city science should align with Alexander's call for bottom-up approaches.
River flooding and urbanization are processes of different character that take place worldwide. As the latter tends to make the consequences of the former worse, together with the uncertainties related to future climate change and flood-risk modeling, there is a need to both use existing tools and develop new ones that help the management and planning of urban environments. In this article a prototype tool, based on estimated maximum land cover roughness variation, the slope of the ground, and the quality of the used digital elevation models, and that can produce flood 'uncertainty zones' of varying width around modeled flood boundaries, is presented. The concept of uncertainty, which urban planners often fail to consider in the spatial planning process, changes from something very difficult into an advantage in this way. Not only may these uncertainties be easier to understand by the urban planners, but the uncertainties may also function as a communication tool between the planners and other stakeholders. Because flood risk is something that urban planners always need to consider, these uncertainty zones can function both as buffer areas against floods, and as blue-green designs of significant importance for a variety of ecosystem services. As the Earth is warming and the world is urbanizing at rates and scales unprecedented in history, we believe that new tools for urban resilience planning are not only urgently needed, but also will have a positive impact on urban planning.
Climate change and the coupled loss of ecosystem services pose major collective action problems in that all individuals would benefit from better cooperation to address these problems but conflicting interests and/or incomplete knowledge discourage joint action. Adopting an inductive and multi‐layered approach, drawing upon the authors' previous research on urban commons, we here summarize key insights on environmentally oriented urban commons and elaborate on what role they have in instigating climate‐proofing activities in urban areas. We deal with three types of urban commons, i.e., "urban green commons", "coworking spaces", and "community climate commons". We describe how allotment gardens, community gardens, and other types of urban green commons contribute to environmental learning that may boost understanding of environmental issues and which constitute important learning arenas for climate‐change mitigation and adaptation. We also deal with the newly emerging phenomenon of coworking spaces that share many essential institutional attributes of urban commons and which can work for climate‐change mitigation through the benefits provided by a sharing economy and through reduction of domestic transportation and commuting distance. Community climate commons represent commons where local communities can mobilize together to create shared low‐carbon assets and which hold the potential to empower certain segments and civil society groups so that they can have greater influence and ownership of the transformation of reaching net‐zero carbon goals. We conclude this article by identifying some critical determinants for the up‐scaling of environmentally oriented urban commons.
Climate change and the coupled loss of ecosystem services pose major collective action problems in that all individuals would benefit from better cooperation to address these problems but conflicting interests and/or incomplete knowledge discourage joint action. Adopting an inductive and multi‐layered approach, drawing upon the authors' previous research on urban commons, we here summarize key insights on environmentally oriented urban commons and elaborate on what role they have in instigating climate‐proofing activities in urban areas. We deal with three types of urban commons, i.e., "urban green commons," "coworking spaces," and "community climate commons." We describe how allotment gardens, community gardens, and other types of urban green commons contribute to environmental learning that may boost understanding of environmental issues and which constitute important learning arenas for climate‐change mitigation and adaptation. We also deal with the newly emerging phenomenon of coworking spaces that share many essential institutional attributes of urban commons and which can work for climate‐change mitigation through the benefits provided by a sharing economy and through reduction of domestic transportation and commuting distance. Community climate commons represent commons where local communities can mobilize together to create shared low‐carbon assets and which hold the potential to empower certain segments and civil society groups so that they can have greater influence and ownership of the transformation of reaching net‐zero carbon goals. We conclude this article by identifying some critical determinants for the up‐scaling of environmentally oriented urban commons.
