Biodiversity

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GUEST OBSERVER
Enthusiasm for urban greening is at a high point, and rightly so.
Ecological studies highlight the contribution urban nature makes to the conservation of biodiversity. For example, research shows cities support a greater proportion of threatened species than non-urban areas. 
Green space is increasingly recognised as useful for moderating the heat island effect. Hence, this helps cities adapt to, and reduce the consequences of, climate change. 
Reducing urban heat stress is the main objective behind the federal government’s plan to set tree canopy targets for Australian cities. Trees are cooler than concrete. Trees take the sting out of heatwaves and reduce heat-related deaths.
The “healthy parks healthy people” agenda emphasises the health benefits of trees, parks and gardens. Urban greenery provides a pleasant place for recreation. By enhancing liveability, green spaces make cities more desirable places to live and work.
The increased interest in urban greening presents exciting opportunities for urban communities long starved of green space.
<h2>Unpacking the green city agenda</h2>
This enthusiasm for “green cities” stands in stark contrast to traditional views about nature as the antithesis of culture, and so having no place in the city. The traditional view was that the only ecosystems worthy of protection were to be found beyond the city, in national parks and wilderness areas.
We embrace the new agenda wholeheartedly, but also believe it’s important not to focus solely on instrumental measures like canopy cover targets to reduce heat stress. We should not forget about experiential encounters.
The risk with instrumental (and arguably exclusionary) approaches is these fail to challenge the divide between people and nature. This limits people’s connection to the places in which they live and to broader ecological processes that are essential for life. 
Instrumental targets in isolation also risk presenting urban greening as an “apolitical” endeavour. But we know this is not the case, as we see with the rise of green gentrification associated with iconic greening projects like New York’s High Line. Wealthy suburbs consistently have the most green space in cities.
Bringing nature into the city is one thing. Bringing it into our culture and everyday lives is another.
<h2>Understanding ecology in a lived sense</h2>
Urban greening provides an opportunity to recast the relationship between people and environment – one of the critical challenges associated with the Anthropocene.
To break down nature-culture divides in our cities, and in ourselves, we argue for the importance of embracing experiential engagements that develop a more deeply felt connection with the city places in which we live, work and play. 
We are advocating a focus that does more than just encourage people to interact tangibly in and with urban nature, by drawing attention to the way humans and non-humans (including plants) are active co-habitants of cities.
Such an approach works by recognising that human understanding of the environment is intricately wrapped up in our experiences of that environment. 
Put simply, green cities can’t just be about area, tree cover and proximity (though they are important). We need to foster intimate, active and ongoing encounters that position people “in” ecologies. And we need to understand that those ecologies exist beyond the hard boundaries of urban green space. 
Without fostering a more holistic relationship with non-humans in cities, we risk an urban greening agenda that misses the chance to unravel some of the nature-culture separation that contributes to our long-term sustainability challenges as a society.
Active interactions with nature in the spaces of everyday life are vital for advancing a form of environmental stewardship that will persist beyond individual (and sometimes short-lived) policy settings. 
<h2>No getting away from the politics</h2>
It is important to consider the policy and governance dimensions of urban greening. 
If the instrumental orientation prevails, our cities might be “more liveable” (at least for some, at particular locations and points in time), but our societies may not be more socially and environmentally just, or more sustainable.
We therefore emphasise the need to understand and critique the dimensions of the renewed interest in urban ecology. We have to consider whether this interest is associated with existing political economies, which embrace technocratic expertise to the exclusion of other voices, or whether urban greening can foster the emergence of a more transformative form of decision-making. 
We also ask how we can enhance the prospects for more deliberative and place-based responses. An experiential turn for urban greening may be one way to make green space planning and practice more democratic. 
By questioning who we might be greening for and how, we can open the way for the much-needed acknowledgment of Indigenous histories and participation in the making of urban space.
Giving urban greening an experiential focus might also help open our eyes to the needs of the more-than-human. Rather than simply cultivating green spaces for a narrow set of anthropocentric benefits, we pose the question: who are the participants in urban greening? It’s a way of acknowledging that we inhabit cities with plants and other non-human lifeforms. 
An interesting area of policy development that may be productive for urban greening is the idea of the playful commons. This is an example of a governance approach that is more open to affective and experiential interaction – the community participates in negotiating, licensing and designing the use of public space. 
Applying this approach to urban greening might encourage more deliberative forms of governance that can deliver more environmentally just and sustainable cities for the long term, for both humans and non-humans.
Benjamin Cooke is lecturer, School of Global, Urban and Social Studies, RMIT University and author for The Conversation. He can be contacted <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/benjamin-cooke-300187" target="_blank">here</a>.
Brian Coffey is lecturer, School of Global, Urban and Social Studies, RMIT University and author for The Conversation. He can be contacted <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/brian-coffey-162907" target="_blank">here</a>.
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jchancellor-FAypfDUnLy

Why ‘green cities’ need to become a deeply lived experience

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GUEST OBSERVER
Perth is not known as a model for suburbia and its suburban condition is similar to that of developed cities the world over.
However, it does stand out in one respect: it sits in an exceptionally biodiverse natural setting. A strong, informed vision for this setting’s relationship with the city could help Perth become an exemplar for similarly positioned metropolises everywhere.
The greater Perth region has been designated the Southwest Australia Ecoregion (SWAE). This is one of only 35 “biodiversity hotspots” in the world.
Reconciling future growth with biodiversity is a key issue for urban design and planning this century. Indeed, if current trends continue, global urban land cover will increase by 1.2 million square kilometres(equivalent to half the area of Western Australia) by 2030. Much of this will happen in biodiversity hotspots.
This is important because it is estimated we will lose nearly half of all terrestrial species if we fail to protect the hotspots. We will also lose the ecosystem services upon which human populations ultimately depend.
“Ecosystem services” may sound like abstract jargon, but it’s actually a term used to describe the services nature provides – such as clean air, water and food, and heatwave and flood mitigation. Without these, human life would be extremely unpleasant, if not unviable.
Perth has a reputedly strong planning system and is comparatively wealthy. If it can’t control its city form to protect biodiversity – compact cities generally being recognised as the best model for protecting land for conservation – then city administrators elsewhere, particularly in the developing world, are likely to struggle.
Misreading the land
The current treatment of the Australian environment has its roots in the European annexation of Australia, which has been characterised by catastrophic misreadings of the land. Governor James Stirling, who was singularly responsible for the European annexation of Perth, was the kind of man who saw what he wanted to see rather than what was there. In The Origins of Australia’s Capital Cities, Geoffrey Bolton writes:
"…arriving at the end of … an uncommonly cool, moist summer, [Stirling was] misled by the tallness of the northern jarrah forest and the quality of the alluvial soils close to the river into believing that the coastal plain would offer fertile farming and grazing. It was, Stirling wrote, equal to the plains of Lombardy; and he persuaded himself that the cool easterly land breeze of these early autumn nights must originate from a range of snowy mountains."
The results of such misinterpretations of the land were generally less poetic. Stirling sited the settlement of Perth on a narrow, constrained strip of land between swamps to the north and marshy river edges to the south. These low-lying areas fuelled plagues of mosquitos and, once polluted, deadly typhoid outbreaks.
In time, due to a lingering discomfort with Perth’s “unsanitary” wetlands, more than 200,000 hectares – an area equivalent to 500 Kings Parks – were drained on the Swan Coastal Plain. These biologically productive areas directly or indirectly support most of the coastal plain’s wildlife, so the effects on biodiversity have been catastrophic.
Furthermore, a perception of the Banksia woodland and coastal heath on Perth’s fringes as unattractive and useless has seen much of it cleared for the expansion of the city. Between 2001 and 2009, suburban growth consumed an annual average of 851ha of highly biodiverse land on the urban fringe.
The lesson from this experience is that any future growth in a biodiversity hotspot, or indeed elsewhere, has to be founded on the understanding that we cannot continue to bend nature to our will. We must learn how to work with it.
Within this humbling process, we need to recognise that working with the land is not an entirely pure or noble act; rather, it is imperative for humanity’s survival. As species and ecosystems become threatened and vanish, so too do the ecosystem services that support human wellbeing.
Perth’s Green Growth Plan
The release of the state government’s long-anticipated Perth and Peel Green Growth Plan for 3.5 million may herald a shift in the relationshipbetween the city and the biodiversity hotspot. The plan encapsulates two broad goals:
<ul>
<li>to protect fringe bushland, rivers, wetlands and wildlife in an impressive 170,000 hectares of new and expanded reserves on Perth’s fringe</li>
<li>to cut red tape by securing upfront Commonwealth environmental approvals for outer suburban development.</li>
</ul>
While ostensibly positive achievements, a question remains as to the implications of clearing a further 45,000ha (3% of the Swan Coastal Plain) of remnant bushland which is not protected by the conservation reserves.
Furthermore, the typically disconnected conservation reserves proposed in the Green Growth Plan lack overall legibility. This stymies the public’s ability to conceptualise the city’s edge, which leads them to care about it (like London’s greenbelt, for instance).
Finally, a question remains about how a plan that places restrictions on outer suburban development will accommodate the powerful local land development industry over time. This is a concern given the frequent “urban break-outs” – where urban development occurs outside nominated growth areas – between 1970 and 2005.
In 2003, the ABC asked revered Western Australian landscape architect Marion Blackwell, “Are we at home now in the land we live in?” She replied, “No, we’re not. We don’t know enough about it, and not enough people know anything about it.”
We still have work to do on our engagement with biodiversity in Western Australia, and Perth specifically, before we can become a model for future cities.
Julian Bolleter is research fellow, Australian Urban Design Research Centre, University of Western Australia and author for The Conversation. He can be contacted <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/julian-bolleter-292111" target="_blank">here</a>.
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Squandering riches: can Perth realise the value of its biodiversity?

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EXPERT OBSERVER
Australia’s urban areas contain disproportionately more threatened species than non-urban areas. In fact, recent research shows that 30 percent of Australia's <a href="http://www.environment.gov.au/epbc/about/epbc-act-lists" target="_blank">EPBC-listed threatened species</a>, or a total of 370 species, come from our cities and towns. These ﬁndings highlight and reinforce the global significance of planning, designing, procuring and managing urban landscapes to conserve and enhance biodiversity. 
21st century cities are awe inspiring in their complexity and scale, and in the context of climate change they can appear excessive, overwhelming and unmanageable. Climate change challenges the public’s capacity to make sense of the world, but for landscape architects who work between representation and reality, it’s our responsibility to make sense of the city. 
George Marshall in his 2014 book Don't Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change, emphasises the importance of creating proximity to help address this existential threat, “to design for the here and now, not for future threats, far away people and non-humans”.  
But the earth’s ecosystems are declining at rates unprecedented in human history, and species’ extinctions are accelerating, with potentially grave impacts for people around the world. One million of the world’s species are now under threat of extinction, according to the biggest-ever review of the state of nature on Earth - this is no longer a future threat, this is our here and now.  
For Marshall our sense of loss looks backwards not forwards; people are, it seems, more motivated to restore lost environmental quality than they are to improve current environmental quality. Through considered integrated planning and design at a range of scales we can use green or living infrastructure to restore these past losses. Living infrastructure incorporates biological systems to provide environmental, social and economic benefits and reduce harm to natural systems. 
By designing living infrastructure, we can create new buildings, landscapes and infrastructure that combine nature and technology to create 21st century cities that capture the public imagination. By incorporating living infrastructure, we can foreground sensation to help people make sense of the world around them, drawing on our shared human affinity with nature not abstraction, and restoring our connection with each other and our environment. We can help to restore temperatures and reduce related morbidity and mortality; restore energy consumption levels and reduce costs; restore physical and mental wellbeing, and community cohesion, productivity and concentration; restore urban ecologies, habitat and hydrological systems and air quality and learn from <a href="http://www.nespthreatenedspecies.edu.au/news/connecting-victorian-kids-with-indigenous-culture-and-the-environment" target="_blank">indigenous culture</a> and “ways of viewing, interacting with and respecting nature.” 
Living infrastructure provides a strategic approach to conserving and enhancing ecological and biological functions across a range of urban scales from a suburb to a metropolitan region.
A living infrastructure strategy for enhancing biodiversity can support planning and land use decision making. Many challenges facing urban environments demand collaborative responses that are cross jurisdictional and cross disciplinary in nature. A strategic living infrastructure approach to evaluating, prioritising and resourcing actions and interventions is essential to conserving and enhancing ecological and biological resources. Living infrastructure helps to regulate and support the flow of water, energy, materials and organisms that maintain urban ecological functions.
Urban development generates high amounts of pollution, and according to <a href="https://oceanprotect.com.au/" target="_blank">Ocean Protect</a> 80 percent of ocean plastic comes from land-based resources, with the lack of stormwater treatment assets and the inadequate maintenance of those assets increasing this prevalence of plastic. By setting tangible targets and improving the design, installation and maintenance of stormwater treatment assets within urban developments, we can reduce the significant detrimental impact of urban development on marine biodiversity.
According to Sarah Bekessy, Professor/ARC Future Fellow at RMIT University, measuring biodiversity is difficult, but “critical to demonstrate value, for transparency and accountability and to monitor and evaluate outcomes”. Similarly Dr Arne Geschke, from the Integrated Sustainability Analysis School of Physics, Faculty of Science at the University of Sydney, recommends that we need to start to understanding the biodiversity footprint of our urban developments by assessing the expenditure of projects, linking those expenditure categories to the biodiversity supply chain framework and plugging that data into supply chain calculations.
Landscapes are an integral part of our networked cities whether for recreation, movement, habitat or a sense of place. The coalescence of private ownership and the existential threat of climate change demand the reconceptualization of urban development to unlock their true public value. Ecological systems don’t discern between public and private and no one government agency, private corporation or professional discipline can deal with this complexity. 
The evolution of planning mechanisms, whether codified or discretionary, incentivised or mandatory, have necessitated rigorous needs assessments across Australia. As we develop massive swathes of Australia we need to utilise these assessments to avoid, minimise and offset, in order to protect, maintain and advance biodiversity. International initiatives like Seattle’s Green Factor, China’s Sponge City and the London Plan illustrate how we can combine the diversification of public space with improvements to landscape character and ecological performance.
AILA is calling on the Australian Government to develop a living infrastructure strategy and strengthen its draft Australia’s Strategy for Nature 2018-2030 to set tangible, measurable targets for the protection and enhancement of Australia’s biodiversity. The Government needs to accelerate its work with state, territory and local governments, non-government organisations, tertiary institutions and community groups to ensure the resilience of our cities and our communities, and to further protect our native species habitat.
We can’t design our way out of massive uncertainty, but we can advocate, innovate and legislate to put the environment not just people, at the centre of place-making. We need to engage Australians in the fundamental decisions being made about our landscapes and in difficult conversations about the future of our cities.
Claire Martin is a Board Director of the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects, an Associate Director of OCULUS Landscape Architecture and Urban Design, a contributing editor of Landscape Architecture Australia, a member of the Office of the Victorian Government Architect’s Victorian Design Review Panel and RMIT University’s Landscape Architecture Industry Advisory Committee. 
 
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