The Nature of Cities asks the question "Cities are typically a game of limited space and limited budgets. What could we do less of to make room for nature?". Cary's Steward Pickett contributes his unique perspective to the discussion.
The fierce may not be easy, but without vision, trade-offs that admit nature to cities ― or better, that admit that nature is a necessary part of cities ― will be impossible. It may be that some currently familiar visions of cities have been “naturalized” and limit our thinking about trade-offs. How we think about tradeoffs and who is in control of them may be a key starting place.
Let’s take one traditional view, which admittedly reflects my experience in the US. According to political economist Harvey Molotch (1976), cities are “growth machines.” Right up front, Molotch (1976:309) says, “A city … is conceived as the aerial expression of the interests of some land-based elite. Such an elite is seen to profit through the increasing intensification of the land use of the area in which its members hold a common interest.” Who constitutes this elite? Instantly, it is apparent that there is more on the table than space/nature conflicts. For example, elite control of space affects unemployment, differential property upkeep, prejudicial policing, redlining of financing, real-estate profiteering and speculation, gentrification, affordable housing, and educational resources. In the United States, the hegemonic elite has something to do with the ideology of white supremacy, access to capital, controlled business networks, and exclusionary arrangements for residence and amenities. This is all about who has the power to make decisions about and to benefit financially and psychologically from space allocation by the growth machine. Even in cities with Black officials in charge, the growth machine elite may have co-opted otherwise liberal leadership to achieve growth objectives (Byrnes and Gillis 2017).
How to get more nature in cities, and what to give up? Let’s start with the crumbs. There are traditions in both Europe and the US that understand the value of interstitial spaces where nature can insert itself (Pickett 2010). Because I was trained as a plant community ecologist, I have always been fascinated by the slivers and neglected spaces where volunteer plants can engage in years or even decades of relatively unfettered succession. I see hope in such “neglected” (for now) places. Christopher Brown, in his 2024 book entitled A Natural History of Empty Lots: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and Other Wild Places, reflecting his life in Austin, TX, and Matthew Gandy (2022), who in Natura Urbana finds wildness in Berlin and in British cities, would seem to agree. Gandy notes that Americans don’t have many terms for nature in cities as Europeans do, and most that do exist in this country are derogatory: brownfield, wasteland, vacant lot. In Berlin, however, there is a rich vocabulary of wild places in cities. But lawyerly passages in Brown’s book provided me with governance insights that were new to me, and which may be relevant to the trade-off problem.
Christopher Brown is both a lawyer and a science fiction author. (You read that right.) His book explores the wildness and industrial dereliction of lands associated with an urban river course in Austin. He ultimately decides to build a nature-welcoming house on an old industrial parcel, and that is a fascinating story in its own right, including his family’s various encounters with wild plants, invertebrates, birds (including vultures – rarely admired in urban nature writing), snakes, and mammals.
The thing that caught my eye was his statement that US cities are state-chartered institutions to govern land use. Here’s a quote: “Municipal governments ― as you learn if you try to influence their decisions ― do not function like democracies. They function like quasi-public companies, because that’s really what they are in the law: municipal corporations chartered by the state to govern local land use, infrastructure, and public safety” (Brown 2024:278). When you combine the growth machine concept of Molotch and the land-use corporation insight of Brown, we get a sense of the beast we are up against. If cities are growth machines and undemocratic tools chartered to advance the agendas of the “land use” elite, a social-political-real estate complex, we see why the powers-that-be want ordinary residents to buy into the zero-sum model that seemingly protects the properties everybody else owns or rents, too. And there is a certain logic: IF cities are spatial arenas in which all parcels are subject to profit maximization by an elite, THEN citizens can only imagine they are in control. Brown again (2024:276): “The members of the City Council and all their appointed boards were, and are, dominated by people funded by real estate interests.” And since the legal precedent for property ownership and control in the US rests on colonialization and displacement as fundamental to the process, and that jibes with individual householders’ concerns with their own wealth and freehold, getting beyond the zero-sum game will be difficult. It is made even more difficult because corporate consolidation means that few business, industrial, or institutional leaders will have a stake in YOUR city.
If changing our growth machine philosophy and legal frameworks seems Quixotic, maybe the practical near-term is to identify fringes, slivers, edgelands, and wastelands that have value for natural processes and provide access for city-dwellers to them. Every action to promote their cultural and human values is on the positive side. Perhaps as more and more of these are inserted on the docket of municipal procedures, benefits can accumulate. A small example from Baltimore is the change in the city’s definition of an urban forest from a minimum of 10 acres to a minimum of 5 acres. This simple step has alerted more communities to the natural resources in their neighborhoods and has broadened the base for urban forest protection and management in the city. What we can ― philosophically or politically ― do less of is to buy into the growth machine.
References
Brown, C. 2024. A Natural History of Empty Lots: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and Other Wild Places. Timber Press.
Byrnes, B., and C. Gillis. 2017. Black Urban Regime. In The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, 1–3. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. doi:10.1002/9781405165518.wbeosb029.pub2.
Gandy, M. 2022. Natura Urbana: Ecological Constellations in Urban Space. MIT Press.
Molotch, H. 1976. The City as a Growth Machine: Toward a Political Economy of Place. American Journal of Sociology 82. The University of Chicago Press: 309–332.
Pickett, S. T. A. 2010. The wild and the city. In State of the wild: a global portrait 2010, ed. K. H. Redford and E. Fearn, 153–159. Washington DC: Island Press.
