Search Results

Human–animal relationships in the urban wild

Seth Magle

in Anthrozoology: Human-Animal Interactions in Domesticated and Wild Animals

As our planet continues to urbanise, an increasing abundance and diversity of wildlife find ways to persist within cities and towns. I summarise general patterns of urban wildlife and also describe ... More

As our planet continues to urbanise, an increasing abundance and diversity of wildlife find ways to persist within cities and towns. I summarise general patterns of urban wildlife and also describe common interactions between people and wildlife in cities. Some of these encounters are very harmful, including property damage, transmission of disease, or attacks against humans or their pets. However, urban wildlife also have positive impacts on cities and urban residents, by providing ecosystem services such as pest control, and by inspiring a feeling of connection with nature. I discuss the implications of human attitudes for long-term coexistence between people and animals in cities, and point to areas for future research. As the biodiversity crisis continues to worsen, and as the planet continues to be modified by humans at an unprecedented rate, it is imperative that we make a place for wildlife within and near to our cities.Less

Eco-Socialism and Green City Making in Postwar Vietnam

Christina Schwenkel

in Places of Nature in Ecologies of Urbanism

This chapter examines shifts in the meaning and use of green space in socialist housing blocks in Vinh City, Vietnam, a ‘model’ socialist city rebuilt by East Germany (GDR) after its destruction by ... More

This chapter examines shifts in the meaning and use of green space in socialist housing blocks in Vinh City, Vietnam, a ‘model’ socialist city rebuilt by East Germany (GDR) after its destruction by US aerial bombing. Unique to the eight-year project was the central role that ecological design played in urban reconstruction owing to financial and material constraints on the one hand, and ideological imperatives on the other. Green technology transfers served to radically transform the landscape with parks and cultivated green spaces that catered to the needs of workers and their families. These ‘eco-socialist’ practices, as I refer to them, constituted a fundamental effort on the part of GDR planners to rationally manage and order urban space that was deemed disorderly and too rural for the city. Yet utopian visions of urban modernity often came up short as they revealed more about East German lifestyles than about the pragmatic possibilities for recovery in postwar Vietnam. Ensuing struggles over the appropriate use of urban nature emerged at the center of the modernizing project and the creation of new socialist persons in Vietnam. Less

Urban Leopards Are Good Cartographers: Human-Nonhuman and Spatial Conflicts at Sanjay Gandhi National Park, Mumbai

Frédéric Landy

in Places of Nature in Ecologies of Urbanism

In Mumbai, the Sanjay Gandhi National Park is besieged by a sprawling urban agglomeration of 20 million inhabitants. The first part of this paper documents the dangerous and sometimes deadly presence ... More

In Mumbai, the Sanjay Gandhi National Park is besieged by a sprawling urban agglomeration of 20 million inhabitants. The first part of this paper documents the dangerous and sometimes deadly presence of leopards in and around the park. In the second section, it is argued that leopards in Mumbai are not only a matter of human-nonhuman conflict: the panther attacks reveal conflicts of other kinds, between human stakeholders, and in particular highlight graduated levels of citizenship. Lastly, the leopards also reveal (or generate) spatial tensions – though they are also efficient go-betweens to help solve these conflicts.Less

City as Ecosystem: Changing Form, Function, and Governance of Urban Socio-Nature

Lindsay K. Campbell

in City of Forests, City of Farms: Sustainability Planning for New York City's Nature

This 5,000 word chapter brings together the political, discursive, and material threads to consider the “city of forests” and “city of farms” as two different assemblages. It explores these pieces of ... More

This 5,000 word chapter brings together the political, discursive, and material threads to consider the “city of forests” and “city of farms” as two different assemblages. It explores these pieces of urban nature in the context of an early-21st century global city that has engaged in municipal long-term sustainability planning, investment in green infrastructure, and creation of food policy visions. It closes with conclusions and further probing questions about how, why, and for whom we create urban forests and farms. In examining what sort of nature we want to produce, the chapter explores possibilities for new governance arrangements, management practices, design strategies, and uses for urban land.Less

Where Chicagoans Found Nature: An Expedition with Leonard Dubkin, Urban Ranger

Colin Fisher

in Urban Green: Nature, Recreation, and the Working Class in Industrial Chicago

This chapter explores some of the well-known urban and peri-urban landscapes that can be found in and around Chicago with the help of naturalist Leonard Dubkin. It examines six major ... More

This chapter explores some of the well-known urban and peri-urban landscapes that can be found in and around Chicago with the help of naturalist Leonard Dubkin. It examines six major nineteenth-century pastoral parks, dozens of smaller neighborhood athletic parks, the Lake Michigan shore, and an abundance of forest preserves, including commercial groves, beer gardens, and amusement parks. These are the places where Chicagoans “found nature,” as many felt that they could escape the work, exhaustion, illness, and artifice associated with urban Chicago. The chapter takes note of how the farthest nature reserves and wildlife parks were mostly visited by affluent families during vacation and that working-class Chicagoans typically stayed home. However, this lack of means does not imply that these Chicagoans were far from nature as they found it from the green spaces in the city. A member of the working class, Dubkin wrote stories about his adventures with “urban nature.”Less

Courts, Public Cultures of Legality, and Urban Ecological Imagination in Delhi

K. Sivaramakrishnan

in Places of Nature in Ecologies of Urbanism

Courts, Public Cultures of Legality, and Urban Ecological Imagination in Delhi Chapter abstract: This essay provides an analysis of the legal contests over the forests and groundwater in the city of ... More

Courts, Public Cultures of Legality, and Urban Ecological Imagination in Delhi Chapter abstract: This essay provides an analysis of the legal contests over the forests and groundwater in the city of Delhi over the last three decades. It examines the ways in which the iconic Delhi Ridge, which runs along a north to south axis through most of the city, is imagined and litigated as a natural resource, an environmental amenity, and a provider of ecosystem services for the national capital region of India. Based on research in courts and among litigators, with activists and technocrats, this study describes the formation of legal public spheres around environmental disputes and the rights of urban residents of all classes in Delhi. This essay identifies emergent environmental jurisprudence in India; even as it considers the material consequences of the biotic and sedimentary ecologies of the Delhi Ridge for urban environmental change in the national capital territory.Less

The End(s) of Urban Ecology in the Global City

Andrew Newman

in Landscape of Discontent: Urban Sustainability in Immigrant Paris

Chapter 4 looks at what happens when environmentalism --and urban sustainability in particular-- becomes part of a language of power (and logic for policy) in major global city such as Paris. I show ... More

Chapter 4 looks at what happens when environmentalism --and urban sustainability in particular-- becomes part of a language of power (and logic for policy) in major global city such as Paris. I show how urban greening has been incorporated as strategy of inter-urban completion between global cities more broadly, and I shed light on the fact that sustainable urbanism is leading to the dislocation and gentrification of immigrant communities in and around Paris.Less

Poets and Locomotives: Ecology and Politics on the Margins of Paris

Andrew Newman

in Landscape of Discontent: Urban Sustainability in Immigrant Paris

Chapter 1 examines how northeast Paris was historically produced as a distinct social, cultural, and even ecological zone in the city. As I show, even before becoming strongly identified as immigrant ... More

Chapter 1 examines how northeast Paris was historically produced as a distinct social, cultural, and even ecological zone in the city. As I show, even before becoming strongly identified as immigrant area, it was always a marginal zone associated with the “soiled fog” of railroad yards, the noxious domain of slaughterhouses, and even the charnel ground as it was the location of one of the largest municipal funeral homes. When the area become predominately North African and West African, the discourse of cultural belonging took on an ecological tinge.Less

Early Childhood

Victoria Derr, Louise Chawla, and Illène Pevec

Alex Russ and Marianne E. Krasny (eds)

in Urban Environmental Education Review

This chapter examines successive schools of thought in early childhood education that have encouraged the exploration of urban environments by young children. These traditions have pursued similar ... More

This chapter examines successive schools of thought in early childhood education that have encouraged the exploration of urban environments by young children. These traditions have pursued similar aims, from creative self-expression and democratic decision making to collaborative learning among peers and multiple generations, communication skills, and a deepening of children's experiential, place-based education. The chapter explains how these aims can be achieved in cities through a variety of approaches such as participatory planning and design, mobile preschools, greening the grounds of schools and child care centers, gardening, and forest and nature schools in metropolitan areas. It looks at examples from both resourced and poorly resourced schools and child care centers in the Global North and South and shows that urban environmental education facilitates children's contact with and learning about urban nature and the built environment.Less

Space, Style, and Grassroots Strategy in the Éole Mobilization

Andrew Newman

in Landscape of Discontent: Urban Sustainability in Immigrant Paris

Chapter 2 tells the story of group of activists who successfully fought to transform a brownfield into a 27 million dollar, 4 hectare city park that was Paris’ first sustainable green space. The ... More

Chapter 2 tells the story of group of activists who successfully fought to transform a brownfield into a 27 million dollar, 4 hectare city park that was Paris’ first sustainable green space. The chapter argues that movement didn’t simply demand a park, but used the language of French gardens and nature to articulate a wide variety of urban and social ills. It also examines how the fortunes of mobilization of Paris’ emerging Socialist Mayor become intertwined.Less

Cultivating the Republic?: Parks, Gardens, and Youth

Andrew Newman

in Landscape of Discontent: Urban Sustainability in Immigrant Paris

Chapter 3 examines how ideas of about nature and the environment infuse the way that citizenship is talked about, lived, and contested in northeast Paris. I focus on urban parks, urban gardeners and ... More

Chapter 3 examines how ideas of about nature and the environment infuse the way that citizenship is talked about, lived, and contested in northeast Paris. I focus on urban parks, urban gardeners and youth activists to show how the “nature” of cultural belonging in France is one that is not only expressed but reinvented through the idiom nature and environmentalism.Less

Conclusion

Andrew Newman

in Landscape of Discontent: Urban Sustainability in Immigrant Paris

The conclusion not only synthesizes the major points about, but argues that urban anthropology (and urban ethnography more broadly) has hitherto neglected the symbolic and practical importance of ... More

The conclusion not only synthesizes the major points about, but argues that urban anthropology (and urban ethnography more broadly) has hitherto neglected the symbolic and practical importance of environmental issues. Not only will addressing urban ecology reconnect urban ethnographers with issues facing residents (and those being addressed by policy makers) but a focus on nature in the city offers a way to reconceptualize the meaning of both ideas, which are falsely imagined as opposites. Finally, on a somewhat different note, the book uses the example of the Jardins d’Éole to propose that the key to maintaining a socially, culturally, and politically vibrant urban space lays concept of a commons, which should remains somewhat unpredictable: not quite chaotic, but beyond any one group’s monopolistic control. The book demonstrates how spaces like the Jardins d’Éole show how promising—and ephemeral—such places can be.Less

Social Aspects of Urban Nature

William G. Wilson

in Constructed Climates: A Primer on Urban Environments

This chapter first explores what it means to value something, then examines how people value vegetation, and finally investigates whether people gain social and psychological benefits from ... More

This chapter first explores what it means to value something, then examines how people value vegetation, and finally investigates whether people gain social and psychological benefits from vegetation. The development of an agrarian lifestyle subjected various plants and animals to artificial selection through their value as food and resources. A recent effort finds environmentalists pushing the idea of valuing nature for the economic benefits it provides humans through “ecosystem services.” The pursuit of itemizing ecosystem services primarily involves the economics and values of marketable goods that can be bought and sold. This market valuation gained recent favor as a response to lawsuits involving environmental damage, but also as a result of several presidential “directives” that required the analysis of costs and benefits when instituting new environmental regulations. Urban nature also gets shaped by values of another sort, so-called nonmarket goods, things that can't be easily packaged and sold.Less

Healing the Urban Wild

Gavin Van Horn

in Wildness: Relations of People and Place

This chapter explores negative and positive connotations for the term wildness through conversations with crew members from Greencorps Chicago, a program of the City of Chicago that specializes in ... More

This chapter explores negative and positive connotations for the term wildness through conversations with crew members from Greencorps Chicago, a program of the City of Chicago that specializes in contractual landscaping and ecological restoration work and whose participants are typically ex-offenders from the South and West Sides of Chicago. In conservation circles, wild is a kind of shorthand for healthy. For people in Greencorps Chicago, the word wild suggests lawless humans, as well as the chaos and disorder of life on the streets of Chicago. While wildness carries these negative connotations for many Greencorps participants, their work in and increasing familiarity with the forest preserves often leads them to regard these natural areas as places of peace, serenity, relief, fascination, and clarity of mind—places that are safe not wild. This chapter explores these divergent views as well as themes of mutual restoration between people and place, and suggests that a more inclusive form of wildness can be cultivated as attention is given to the land’s needs amidst, alongside, and with human enterprise.Less

To Watch and Be Watched: Urban Design, Vigilance, and Contested Streets

Andrew Newman

in Landscape of Discontent: Urban Sustainability in Immigrant Paris

Chapter 5 examines how group of various groups concerned citizens are increasingly adopting the surveillance and watching role traditionally used by state authorities. Such vigilance is a ... More

Chapter 5 examines how group of various groups concerned citizens are increasingly adopting the surveillance and watching role traditionally used by state authorities. Such vigilance is a double-edged sword, as it can lead to disempowerment of fellow residents (especially immigrant origin youth) or itself be a way to maintain and inclusive space. Ultimately, gentrifying cities such as Paris reveal themselves to be spaces where middle-class resident’s “right to the city” rests on their willingness and capacity to keep watch of their neighbors. I argue this form of surveillance society, though decidedly low-tech is far more insidious than the more widely publicized imposition of surveillance camera’s and other technological forms of control.Less

The Political Life of Small Urban Spaces

Andrew Newman

in Landscape of Discontent: Urban Sustainability in Immigrant Paris

Chapter 6 rethinks the political important of public spaces in cities. Instead of past approaches, which see public space as important as stage for free speech by social movements, this chapter cites ... More

Chapter 6 rethinks the political important of public spaces in cities. Instead of past approaches, which see public space as important as stage for free speech by social movements, this chapter cites various types of evidence (the analysis of protests, interviews with park guards, and participant observation with neighborhood groups) to show, first, that “public” space does not always “free or just” and “private” does not equal enclosure or lack of democracy. I show that in urban politics, residents seeks to control the definition of private and public more than simply fight for more access to public space. Instead of public space as concept for urban politics, I develop the idea of the urban commons, as a space that seemingly belongs to no one and everyone, and therefore provides a sight for social, cultural, and political creativity. I show how the Jardins d’Éole has veered in and out of being an important commons since it was a vacant lot.Less