Greening the City — Ecosystem Services Come To Town

Gary Grant on urban nature: how NGOs came to create nature reserves out of wasteland, and what city-wide greening does at neighbourhood and building scale.

Part of the New City reading list — the books Kyle worked through while building the The New City thesis. Indexed on that page.

Notes

• By: G. Grant
• Before the rapid growth in the size of our larger cities, brought about by the Industrial Revolution, people were rarely more than a short walk from the countryside. It seems unlikely that they would harbor the notion that they lacked contact with nature in the way many of our contemporaries do.
• One role for the new NGOs was to create urban nature reserves on wastelands — a difficult task when redevelopment was driven by both policy and commerce — and another was to bring wildlife back into sterile municipal green space. Although progress has been made on this latter task, the pace of change has been glacial and most municipal parks in Britain, 25 years later, still lack diversity of habitats and species.
• An example is that of Perth, Western Australia, where there are a number of open spaces, which constitute isolated fragments of Banksia woodlands with many endemic species. The encapsulated countryside of the Perth conurbation is particularly notable because of its location in a global biodiversity hotspot, but any remaining natural or semi-natural habitat which persist within urban areas, wherever it may be and even if it si relatively common in the region as a whole, form many of the core areas within actual or proposed urban ecological networks.
• Since 2006, the USDA Forest Service has revitalized interest in urban tree management with its i-Tree software suite, which helps city bureaucrats to put a credible monetary value on trees. To the credit of the Federal Government, this software is in the public roman, freely available and already in use throughout the world. Typically tree officers choose new and replacement trees from a list of candidates specifies that are developed on the basis of appearance, minimum nuisance and proven ability to survive the urban conditions. Whilst these are important considerations, the challenge now is to develop a more sophisticated approach that considers other factors, including ecological value and the creation of green infrastructure networks. As more and more tree pits are designed to receive surface water runoff there will be opportunities to increase the range of trees planted in the urban environment, including trees that will be planted in combination with shrubs and ground flora in rain gardens.