Urban Ecology: Knowing or Making?

Our friend and colleague, Alex Felson, of the Yale School of Architecture and the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies has a unusual perspective on what urban ecology is and does.  Trained as a landscape architect, urban designer and as an ecological scientist, his perspective is quite unusual among urbanists.  You can find information about his work and laboratory here: http://uedlab.yale.edu/

He often argues that urban ecological science is about understanding the city, suburbs and exurbs, as a given.  Science seeks to determine the patterns, mechanisms, processes and dynamics that characterize existing urban ecosystems.  In contrast architects, planners, urban designers, landscape architects, and engineers intend to make the city-suburb-exurban system, in part or in whole, de novo or repurposed.  The big contrast is between knowing and making.

Such a contrast is useful in highlighting the range of stances about the city as a subject.  Alex emphasizes that working with designers – that inclusive community of people who design or change urban systems – forces ecologists to engage in the process of city making.  Bridging the difference between knowing and making is a significant opportunity for ecological scientists.  But there is a variety of ways to accomplish such bridging.

Individual people can be trained and practiced in both ecological research and the theory and practice of urban design (in the broadest sense – architecture, landscape architecture, engineering).  Currently, that is the rare bird.  There are not many people who are trained like that.

Alternatively, people who are trained as designers – the makers -- and those trained in ecological research – can interact through the design process as practiced in architectural firms, municipal planning departments, and sustainability offices.  Ideally, engagement of makers and researchers should be constant through the entire design process, from inception through construction, through assessment of performance of the built project.  Feedbacks between knowing and making should be a constant spiral of interaction and reflection. 

Thinking about designs as experiments, as both envisioned and built projects and as assessments of the performance of the projects, is a real advance (Felson and Pickett 2005, Felson et al. 2013).  This is a method and philosophy that Alex has promoted for a long time.  Makers and knowers can share hats.  Makers must know (as they do via site analysis and observing urbanistic successes and failures), and knowers can be a part of making.  The dichotomy is ultimately a false one.  In addition, monitoring should not be an optional after-the-fact activity, rarely funded or contracted, and thus rarely done.  Rather, knowing and making can be combined in an ongoing, seamless process. 

Urban ecology and urban design can both be improved by the union of knowing and making.  Many ecologists have always been interested in making – conservation, restoration, and management were passions of many of the founders of modern ecology.  For example, Frederic Clements (Clements 1935), the pioneering theorist of plant community dynamics, was deeply exercised by wanting to restore damaged prairie lands.  Other members of the first generation of American ecologists, such as Victor Shelford, were the instigators of such practically motivated organizations as The Nature Conservancy.  Contemporary expressions of the marriage of knowing and making are found in the Ecological Society’s Earth Stewardship Initiative, which calls ecologists to be engaged – along with other disciplines and making professions – in helping to shape sustainable futures (Chapin et al. 2010).

Urban ecology has much to gain from an smoother connection between knowing and making.  It may be time to retire the contrast, at least as a community, if not as individual renaissance-style polymaths.  As the world becomes increasingly urban, making and knowing can’t remain far apart.

Bibliography

Chapin, F. S., S. R. Carpenter, G. P. Kofinas, C. Folke, N. Abel, W. C. Clark, P. Olsson, D. M. S. Smith, B. Walker, O. R. Young, F. Berkes, R. Biggs, J. M. Grove, R. L. Naylor, E. Pinkerton, W. Steffen, and F. J. Swanson. 2010. Ecosystem stewardship: sustainability strategies for a rapidly changing planet. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 25:241-249.

Clements, F. E. 1935. Experimental ecology in the public service. Ecology 16:342-363.

Felson, A. J., M. A. Bradford, and T. M. Terway. 2013. Promoting Earth Stewardship through urban design experiments. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 11:362-367.

Felson, A. J. and S. T. A. Pickett. 2005. Designed experiments: new approaches to studying urban ecosystems. Frontiers in Ecology and Environment 3  549-556.

Natural Experiments of History

The title of this essay is the same as a book edited by Jared Diamond and James A. Robinson, published in 2010 by Harvard University Press.  The book explores the general method of natural experiments applied to human societies and history.  It was tempting to title this essay "Cultural Experiments," because the emphasis of their book is on inhabited places, social institutions, and human actions.  But the cognitive dissonance of natural, experiment, and history in one title is an appropriate mental stimulus for the message they present. 

Experiments are controlled comparisons deliberately set up to expose the effect on one or a very few variables on some structure or process.  Greatest confidence is afforded by laboratory experiments where all external conditions can be held constant, or field experiments where even the conditions outdoors are kept as constant as possible while varying the presumed cause.  A randomized comparison between a treatment and a control is still the statistically most unassailable approach.  However, even with this paragon of knowledge creation, great creativity must be brought to bear to ensure that the external conditions are indeed well known and no causative factors are left unaccounted for.  Furthermore, there is a trade off between rigor and realism in experiments.  The more controlled a situation is the greater the distance from messy reality.

Patterson Park, Baltimore

Experiments in Culture and History

What are researchers to do if they can't control the environment and vary one or two factors at a time?  After all, history can't be redone, and there are ethical constraints to manipulation in inhabited systems.  Many people have assumed that this means the power of experimentation is unavailable in such situations.  This would disadvantage those who are interested in complex systems, in much of human agency, and in historical causation.  What influence do the conditions of the past have on the outcomes in the present?  

This is the problem that Diamond and Robinson address.  They open and close the book with chapters outlining the issues and summarizing the successful strategies for dealing with found or natural experiments.  Indeed, the cultural and historical comparisons, and the comparisons of socio-ecological conditions that the book presents are far from some haphazard stumbling across a good comparison that has the hallmarks of an experiment.  Great care is taken in evaluating the similarities and differences among the control and the treatment historical or initial conditions.

In addition to the introductory and closing chapters, the book addresses several cases:

• ·         Polynesian cultural evolution,

• ·         Frontier boom/bust cycles,

• ·         Banking institutions and development,

• ·         Comparisons of environment and social controls on Pacific islands,

• ·         The consequences of the slave trade in Africa,

• ·         How colonial land tenure practices influences current public goods,

• ·         The role of the French revolution in speeding the transition to capitalism.

Baltimore: Boom and Bust on Frontier?

The chapters are written in a very approachable style while at the same time explaining the rigorous assessment of conditions to ensure the validity of the comparisons.  All repay attention.  However, perhaps of greatest relevance to the Baltimore Ecosystem Study, with our new emphasis on the transition from the sanitary to the sustainable city, is the chapter by James Belich on "Exploding Wests: Boom and Bust in Nineteenth-Century Settler Societies" (pages 53-87).  The chapter covers the American West, and the British "West" consisting of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa.  The transfer of human, financial, and material capital from an established metropolitan area to a frontier, with an associated increase in vectors of mass transfer; media and modes of communication; and booster institutions and businesses characterize booms.  The creation of local infrastructure during a boom is a major commitment.  Busts, crashes, or panics, on the other hand are characterized by reduced human population growth and reduced economic growth.  They can last for two to ten years, and generate by an economy dominated by new or increased exports.  The "conquest of distance" is a feature of successful export recoveries.

There are repeated cycles of boom and bust throughout the global, Anglo-American Wests.  What relevance does this kind of thinking have for the transition from the post-industrial, sanitary city to the sustainable city of the future?  It's a question we should consider.  And attention to the methodology of cultural or natural experiments in an urban LTER is also an important matter.  So this book has double relevance to BES.