Are You an Urbanist?

Urbanists and the Old Walls

The term, urbanist, originally meant someone who designed and built cities.  The term is an old one, and when it was introduced into English in the 16th century, cities were very different than now.  Many cities were walled, defensive, or religious centers.  The boundary and contrast between city and country was sharp and distinct.  In fact, urban is derived from the Latin, urbis, which means a walled city or town.  Gates and battlements were essential features of the city, and people whose presence was not desired in the secure city after nightfall, camped below the walls that excluded them.  They were relegated to the suburbs, literally, the place below the wall.

The walls of Marrakesh, 1990 (S.T.A. Pickett)

In the walled city, there was little space for nature.  Streets of such places were often narrow and hemmed in by buildings.  Perhaps the pleasant courtyards of the houses of the well to do had a few trees, flowering vines, or potted plants.  But streams, gardens, farms, and the threatening and dark forest, were all outside the walls.  Urbanists in the classical and original sense thus worked with stone and mortar, timber and plaster.  A philosophy developed from these practices that separated city and country.

Wall Street in New York City signals a distant memory of the defensive stockade that protected colonial New Amsterdam from the non-colonized remainder of Manhattan; the massive walls of Beijing were demolished under Mao to signal the break of modern China from the imperial, feudal past; the walls of Paris are now traced by Haussmann’s boulevards – itself a term derived from the French word for the defensive constructions we know in English as bulwarks.

Beyond the Walls

A New Orleans courtyard

So urbanists – those concerned with the form and processes of dense, heterogeneous human settlements – are no longer hemmed in by walls.  Nor must they neglect urban nature due to a lack of space, or due to a philosophical dialectic between nature and city.  Contemporary urban form is manifestly inclusive and diverse.  

City-Suburban-Exurban Systems: The Expanded Territory of Urbanists

Baltimore City and part of Baltimore County.

In BES, we often use the term “urban” to stand for the entirety of porous urban regions.  A neologism we have introduced is CSE, or city-suburban-exurban, to stand for the spatially extensive systems that contemporary settlements often represent.  Throughout this diverse range of districts, neighborhoods, land uses, and densities of occupancy, planners follow the lead of pioneers such as McHarg (1969) or Spirn (1984) in recognizing the need for plans and designs to blend the built and the natural.  

This same inclusiveness supports our research strategy of addressing the CSE as a hybrid system comprising the built and the natural, the intentional and the incidental.  So, the term urbanist can include all of us who are concerned with the existing and potential structure and functioning of CSE systems.  Urbanists go beyond the “walls” and they see and value nature within the porous boundaries of CSE regions.

So, are you an urbanist?

References

McGrath, B. and S.T.A. Pickett. 2011. The Metacity: A conceptual framework for integrating ecology and urban design. Special Issue: Challenges in City Design: Realize the Value of Cities. Website: http://www.mdpi.com/si/challenges/city_design/  Guest Editor: Prof. Dr. Kongjian Yu. Challenges 2011, 2, 55-72 doi:10.3390/challe2040055

McHarg, I. 1969. Design with nature. Doubleday/Natural History Press, Garden City, NJ.

Spirn, A. W. 1984. The granite garden: urban nature and human design. Basic Books, New York.

Complexity: The Hidden Nugget in Jane Jacobs' Book

Well, perhaps it’s unfair to call it hidden.  It is after all the topic of the final chapter, entitled “The Kind of Problem a City Is.”  In that chapter, she explores the nature of cities as complex systems, stimulated by the work of pioneering cyberneticists as summarized by Dr. Warren Weaver[i].  But I have to admit that I missed it the first time around, back when I read Jane Jacobs’ Death and Life of Great American Cities in college.  (No, you may no ask what century that was!)  But I can perhaps be forgiven for the lapse, because the theory of complex adaptive systems, which has become a mainstay of ecological sciences in the past decade or so, was hardly well known back then.  (OK, it was around 1970 when I read Death and Life.)  Yes, some physical scientists and mathematicians were in on complexity, but it was not something that had sent its tendrils into many other disciplines at that time.  Now we have a journal of Biocomplexity, and the National Science Foundation has made grants in complexity and similar things, such as coupled natural-human systems, for over a decade. 

Jane Jacobs (from http://www.whatwesee.org/)

Two recent reminders highlight Jane Jacobs’ insight that cities are complex problems.  In 2010, I was on a Martin Luther King Fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning.  My host, the ecologically savvy landscape architect, Anne Whiston Spirn[ii] mentioned to me one day that she had been horrified to have exploited the significance of Jacobs’ final chapter on cities as complex systems.  I went back and read that last chapter again.  It is a stunningly prescient piece.

The second reminder is in Witold Rybczynski’s Makeshift Metropolis: Ideas About Cities, published in 2010 by Scribner.  Rybczynski is one of America’s best known urbanists, and a writer whose work is easy to read.  In chapter 2, he reviews the three big ideas of urbanism from the early 20^th century[iii], and notes, among others, Jacobs’ critique of all of them.  His reminder came toward the end of the chapter, where he points to her assessment of cities as complex systems, and quotes some of her pithier insights into urban complexity.  Cities should not be approached as sets of separate problems to be solved individually.  They are complex wholes, but only because of the interaction of a plethora of communities and processes.

To be sure, Rybczynski (OK, I’m calling him WR from now on) has criticisms of Jacobs.  She was, after all, originally a journalist and not a trained urban scholar.  One important criticism is that she, like many other urbanists, has perhaps made a bit too much of physical characteristics such as density, diversity of use, and pedestrian vigilance.  WR notes that at the same time she was extolling the values of these characteristics based on her own experience, especially in New York City’s Greenwich Village, Lewis Mumford cited other New York neighborhoods possessing these same characteristics as notoriously unsafe and crime ridden.  WR also notes that some of her criticisms, such as the City Beautiful movement being only about civic monuments, and not about incremental improvement in neighborhoods, were incorrect.

These musings are relevant to the theme of the third phase of the Baltimore Ecosystem Study LTER: the transition from the sanitary to the sustainable city.  The sanitary city is merely complicated.  It is seen as a collection of individual problems to be individually solved.  In reality, the problems that cities have to solve are systemic.  They link across media of transport, such as air, water, and surface, across scales from households to regions, and across social and environmental realms, for example.  It is not sufficient to solve problems by discipline – parks for the trees, transportation for traffic flow, solid waste, storm water, sanitary sewers, etc.  Each of these issues has implications for the other, and in fact, each has energy or material flows that connect with others.  The sustainably city goal recognizes cities as complex systems and the solution of urban problems to be multifaceted and require integration across disciplines and existing bureaucracies.  Jane Jacobs was there in 1961.

My meanderings in this essay have three points.  First, Jane Jacobs was ahead of her time in proposing cities as something we would now call complex adaptive systems.  She called them complex problems.  Second, a re-reading of Jacobs is worthwhile.  Finally, Rybczynski’s new book on the Makeshift Metropolis should probably be the next BES Book of the Month.  I’d recommend it to all members of our program, and others interested in urban systems.

Dimensions of complexity (from Cadenasso et al. 2006)

There’s one more thing to say about Jane Jacobs as an exemplar for BES.  She took fine scale observation of the city seriously.  She did not approach the city with the goal of supporting a specific general theory of urbanism, but to understand how cities were structured and how they worked.  She was a consummate empiricist, and her insistent observations have contributed to new theories of the city. 

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[i] Familiar to ecologists through the Shannon-Weaver diversity index, which is based on information theory, one approach to complexity.

[ii] http://www.annewhistonspirn.com/

[iii] These are 1) the City Beautiful, 2) the Garden City, and 3) the Radiant City. 

References:

Cadenasso, M. L., S. T. A. Pickett, and J. M. Grove. 2006. Dimensions of ecosystem complexity: heterogeneity, connectivity, and history. Ecological Complexity 3:1-12.

Urban Ecology: Use and Abuse

In the first two decades of the 20th century, two new scholarly disciplines were being established in the United States. One was the biological science of ecology, and one was sociology. Although both had deeper European roots, and began to flourish in several American universities, there was one school that was a seedbed for both: the University of Chicago. Historian Jennifer S. Light examines the relationship of these two disciplinary schools and the decades long ramifications of that intellectual hybridization on American urban policy (Light 2009). Her book is much richer in insights about urbanism and the linkage of ecology and policy than can be represented in a brief essay, so I encourage people to peruse her work directly.

The biological ecologists at the University of Chicago had been instrumental in elucidating the patterns and processes of change in plant communities through time. Chicago’s Henry Chandler Cowles in 1899 had published a long, multi-part paper that described the succession of plant communities on the dunes at the southern end of Lake Michigan (Cowles 1899). As the land was still rising in elevation, rebounding from the weight of the thick glaciers that had melted away some 12,000 years previously, new sandy substrate was exposed at the margin of the lake. Cowles (pronounced like the stuff burned in a furnace) described the ever taller and more complex plant communities that occupied the bands of surfaces that were located farther and farther from the lake shore.

The kinds of patterns that Cowles described as one moves from the lake shore inland were generalized by Frederick E. Clements (Clements 1916). Clements generated a theory of succession, in which he proposed that plant communities experienced progressive trends of change, leading to a diverse, stable assemblage. He likened the temporal patterns of change in assemblages of plants in the field to the life cycle an organism. Communities of plants were said to go through phases of colonization, growth, and maturation (Pickett and Cadenasso 2005).

A version of Clements’ theory was enthusiastically adopted by he Chicago sociologists in their attempt to understand their rapidly changing metropolis (Light 2009). They saw the city as a series of rings surrounding downtown, in which new immigrants invaded near the commercial core, and through competition moved outward. Like the first theory of plant succession, the sociological explanation of spatial pattern was considered to be a set life cycle. However, one important difference was that the sociologists substituted a decadent, blighted community as the end point as opposed to the idealized diverse, tall, and spatially complex “climax” forest.

The sociologists were apparently unaware of problems that were emerging with the theory of succession in biology (Miles 1979). Cowles’ original assumptions had some problems – sites that had better developed plant communities on the lake shore transect in some cases turned out to be different in other ways than just age of the substrate. Furthermore, Clements’ grand theory of succession as the life cycle of an organism was ultimately found to too rigid and methodologically problematical. Succession actually involved much variety in the patterns of change, and the mixture of causes was much more contingent on history and the landscape context than the developmental biology of individual organisms. The progressive theory of succession formulated by Clements was in dispute as early as 1917, and alternative views of the causes and patterns of succession were being worked out by a number of plant ecologists, some elsewhere in Illinois (Gleason 1917).

Why were the Chicago School sociologists so enamored of the life cycle metaphor they took and modified from ecology? Chicago had doubled in population in the early years of the 20th century, and was absorbing massive numbers of migrants from the American South and from Southern and Eastern Europe. These migrants represented groups that had largely been absent from Chicago before. They saw the effects of these waves of migrants as a succession that led to blighted neighborhoods. Slums and social pathologies were identified as problems to be solved by identifying where a neighborhood was in its life cycle, and intervening to counteract any tendencies toward blight.

Several kinds of intervention were possible. One social intervention was exemplified by the work of “settlement houses,” which were intended to introduce new migrants to values held by the predominant antecedent culture of a city. Another intervention was to attempt to keep some neighborhoods from changing to accommodate new migrants. This was accomplished by discriminatory laws or discriminatory lending practices. A third was urban planning, which could in cases where blight had proceeded beyond tolerable limits, be employed to clear slums and install new housing and neighborhood layouts intended to promote desirable social interactions. Light documents the intellectual lineages, the persistence of the life cycle approach, and the pervasive effects of this perversion of ecological thinking on the form of late 20th century American cities.

What Does This Mean for BES?

One lesson for an interdisciplinary research program emerges from Light’s analysis. The ecology that was used by the Chicago School sociologists was a superficial metaphor. Communities changed through time, that change was driven by competition, and expressed itself in an inexorable life cycle. The real mechanistic complexity that was emerging from scientific research in biological ecology was not apparently known to the Chicago sociologists. The metaphor was established in sociology through reading of ecological texts, but apparently not through conversation with practicing bioecological researchers. The complexity, the controversy, and the alternative models of vegetation change did not become part of the toolkit of the social science deployed to understand rapidly changing cities. Nor were these features of understanding community and spatial dynamics available to those who shaped federal policy of urban life cycles – the policy that supported urban renewal.

Although metaphor is a powerful bridge between disciplines, and from disciplines to application, substantive dialog between researchers and practitioners who know the frontiers of their disciplines is a sounder link. Analogy and metaphor are only tools for starting the dialog. Light provides a compelling analysis that will be of value to all urban researchers and practitioners.

References Cited

Clements, F. E. 1916. Plant succession: an analysis of the development of vegetation. Carnegie Institution of Washington, Washington.

Cowles, H. C. 1899. The ecological relations of the vegetation on the sand dune of Lake Michigan. Botanical Gazette 27:95-117,167.

Gleason, H. A. 1917. The structure and development of the plant association. Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club 44:463-481.

Light, J. S. 2009. The nature of cities: ecological visions and the American urban professions 1920-1960. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore.

Miles, J. 1979. Vegetation dynamics. Wiley, New York.

Pickett, S. T. A. and M. L. Cadenasso. 2005. Vegetation succession. Pages 172-198 in E. van der Maarel, editor. Vegetation Ecology. Malden, MA, Blackwell Publishing.

Photo by Brian P. McGrath.

BES Renewal Process

Planning for Renewal – BES-3

Planning for the renewal of BES will involve working meetings and white papers. A series of six meetings will be held before submission of the BES LTER renewal proposal in February 2010. Each meeting is envisioned to be a day long event. The Mid-Term Review of BES conducted in 2007 provides necessary background. The review team’s report and the NSF Program Officer’s letter are at http://www.beslter.org/internal/frame8-stuff.html (see heading “Renewal Material” and its subheading “2006 Mid-Term Site Review”).

Product – Each meeting will produce a white paper as a contribution toward the renewal proposal. The required content of the white paper is given after the descriptions of the meetings and schedule, below.
Participation – All Co-Principal Investigators, Post Docs, Graduate Students, and agency and partner Collaborators are invited and encouraged to attend the meetings.

Goals and Strategies – All meetings should:
1. Be primarily product oriented;
2. Result in a referenced white paper as input for the renewal proposal;
3. Employ a few synthetic presentations as stimulus for discussion;
4. Be designed to emphasize discussion rather than presentation;
5. Employ the LTER Network’s Integrated Science for Society and Environment feedback model template (Figure 1);
6. Seek to integrate social, and biophysical realms of research;
7. Identify and state the integrated theory motivating activities to be proposed for the renewal;
8. Articulate integrated modeling and quantitative approaches; and
9. Highlight opportunities for teaching and for educational research that emerge from the theme of each meeting.

Meeting Topics and Schedule

Individual Meetings with Agency Stakeholders. Three representatives of BES met with Baltimore City, Baltimore County, and Maryland State sustainability officers and other decision leaders in October 2008. We explored how to establish a regular communication to exchange information of mutual interest about research, projects, and policy. The insights from these meetings will be used to design an ongoing process for BES to identify shared concerns and opportunities for interaction with policy, management, and decision leaders in the Baltimore region. Leaders: Morgan Grove, Steward Pickett, and Mary Washington.

Meeting 1 -- October 14, 2008:
Scoping the Renewal Process.

The BES Steering Committee, consisting of all Co-PIs and BES Collaborators met to share thoughts on the five conceptual areas to organize the renewal proposed at the 2007 meeting. The feedback loop (Figure 1) that will be an important conceptual tool for planning and organizing BES-3 was also presented. The structure and goals of the white papers, and the consideration of teaching and education research opportunities in each planning meeting were reviewed. Attendees were asked to study the Mid-Term Review report and the notes from the 2007 Steering Committee meeting concerning components of new theory for BES-3, as well as the LTER Network’s model template for Integrated Science for Society and Environment (ISSE) to prepare for the Steering Committee discussion.

Meeting 2 -- January 23, 2009:
Environmental Change and Environmental Inequity.

The issues of global change is significant for Baltimore, as is the differential impact of current and future environments on different social groups. BES-3 must address climate change directly, and identify the ecosystem services that might be altered by changing climate. Measurement of those ecosystem services, and how they can alter environmental hazard and vulnerability, and consequently, environmental justice should be proposed. Explicit measures of each of these features of the urban ecosystem should be identified and justified. Leaders: Larry Band and Kirstin Dow

Meeting 3 -- April 16, 2009:
Land Change Scenarios and Locational Choice Modeling.

The changing structure of urban areas is a key topic for BES-3. A task before us is to develop scenarios for land cover and land use change. The relationship of land change scenarios to models of locational choices that households and firms might make, and the social and economic drivers of those choices will be identified and specific approaches identified and justified. How policy interacts with scenarios can also be explored. Leaders: Mary Cadenasso and Elena Irwin

Meeting 4 – June 23, 2009:
New Hydro-Ecological-Social Theory.

It is crucial to articulate a new generation of integrated theory covering the various major disciplines that constitute BES. Several areas should be considered as a framework for a new statement of the theory unifying BES-3: 1) An urban stream continuum theory; 2) Controls on ecosystem flux and retention; 4) New social theoretical framework; and 4) Theoretical and conceptual approachs addressing coupling and feedbacks between social and biophysical components of the metropolitan system. The mainly biophysical theory should, in cooperation with social scientists, articulate both the expected social-economic drivers and social-economic effects of urban stream continuum and flux theory, while the mainly social theory should, in cooperation with biophysical scientists, articulate the hypothesized biophysical drivers and effects. Here is where education theory that justifies education research or pedagogical methodologies should be articulated and related to the physical-ecological-social theory that emerges. Leaders: Sujay Kaushal and Austin Troy

Meeting 5 -- October 20, 2009:
Integrated Sampling Strategy

Integration across the multiple disciplines within BES can be enhanced by a clearly articulated sampling strategy that spatially and temporally relates the various social and biophysical samples. Options to be explored are the reconciliation of our current different sampling strategies, complementing the existing strategy by new spatial arrays, or articulating a sampling design essentially de novo. This meeting should produce a fully annotated map for one to several sampling strategies that take advantage of our existing data base while advancing sample integration in BES-3. How the sampling strategy can support teaching and education research should be explored. Leaders: Peter Groffman and Morgan Grove

Meeting 6 -- November 17-18, 2009:
Writing Team Working Meeting

A small group will take on the task of preparing the renewal proposal based on the insights from the planning meetings. The leaders of the previous five meetings and other key BES members will convene at the Cary Institute in Millbrook, New York, in order to draft an integrated proposal for BES-3. This meeting will be a focused, intensive writing session lasting two days. Leader: Steward Pickett

BES-3 Renewal Proposal White Papers

Each of the five preparatory meetings listed above will produce a white paper. The meeting conveners will be responsible for organizing the drafting of the paper, and will involve other contributors as needed and available. The papers should satisfy the following goals: 1) State a clear theoretical motivation for work to be conducted in the third phase of BES; 2) Identify clear relationships between social and biophysical topics; and 3) Suggest the key feedbacks between social and biophysical realms to be investigated.

The components of each white paper should be as follows:
1. Title. A conceptual orientation should be emphasized. Titles for these components of BES-3 should be phrased to engage potential reviewers.
2. Research Questions. What research questions have been addressed to date in BES? Briefly, what has been learned? What new questions or outgrowths of the previous questions should be addressed in the renewal? Where do these new or extended questions fit in the LTER social-biophysical feedback loop (Figure 1)?
3. Motivations for the Questions. What explicit theoretical, methodological, and practical motivations are there for each research question suggested? What well known and cutting edge literature supports the theory, methodology, or practical concern?
4. Key Variables. What are the key variables to be measured to answer the questions? How will scenario generation and future projections be supported by the variables suggested? How can the variables from social and biophysical realms be related?
5. Sampling Plan. What sampling plan supports the suggested research questions? How does this exploit the existing BES sampling array? What future changes to the sampling regime are required? How does this sampling plan support the integration of biophysical disciplines, different social disciplines, and the relationship of biophysical and social research? Draft maps of the suggested sampling regime must be included.
6. Anticipated Findings. What outcomes are expected? What theoretical advances are likely? What methodological advances can be served? What practical contributions can be supported? How does the plan contribute to quantifying the feedbacks in the LTER social-biophysical loop (Figure 1)?
7. Illustrative Material for the draft proposal, such as figures, conceptual diagrams, tables, and brief text boxes can be used to summarize and support key points of the argument of the white paper.
8. Executive Summary. A brief (ca. 200 words) abstract or bulleted summary should be prepared to assist the writing team.
The white paper for each meeting will be due one month after the meeting.