Planning Wild Cities

Human–Nature Relationships in the Urban Age

Wendy Steele

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781317422082
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Sustainable Development
• Index: Economics

This book critically engages with the contemporary challenges and opportunities of wild cities in a climate of change.

A key focus of the book is exploring the nexus of possibilities for wild cities and the eco-ethical imagination needed to drive sustainable and resilient urban pathways. Many now have serious doubts about the prospects for humanity to live within cities that are socially just and responsive to planetary limits. Is it possible for planning to better serve, protect and nurture our human and non-human worlds? This book argues it is.

Drawing on international literature and Australian case examples, this book explores issues around climate change, colonization, urban (in)security and the rights to the city for both humans and nature. It is within this context that this book focuses on the urgent need to better understand how contemporary cities have changed, and the relational role of planning within it.

Planning Wild Cities will be of particular interest to students and scholars of planning, urban studies, and sustainable development, and for all those invested in re-shaping our 'wild' city futures.

1 Weather of mass destruction

Black summer

We woke to find Australia was on fire. My partner and I peered out from our tent into the red-black gloom, breathing thick, constrained, and wheezy in the fire-thick air. Most other campers had left during the night taking with them their children, bikes, surfboards, dogs, guitars, BBQs, beers, and bravado. With nervous eyes on the wind for any sudden changes, we bundled everything we had into the car and scuttled off into the smoke-filled haze. We were among the tens of thousands of residents and tourists evacuated during Black Summer.

We were the lucky ones.

Across Australia, bushfires ravaged the landscape. Fire tornadoes howled through the day and night. The sky turned black and with it, land, water, and settlements were covered in a thick ash. People lost everything, including their lives, and thousands of homes and businesses were destroyed. Tens of millions of hectares of land were ravaged, and an estimated 1 billion native and domestic animals were burnt alive – their charred remains scattered along the sides of roads where some had tried to seek refuge from the fire. They did not have a chance.

The bushfire danger index registered ‘Catastrophic’ (the highest rating possible) in many parts of Australia. Some fires were out of control not for days or weeks – but months. In all affected areas the mostly volunteer firefighters battled hot, windy conditions trying to contain the fires. The mood was one of dogged determination, and in some cases, tired resignation. As one fire service volunteer in Victoria explained, ‘I looked at my fire brigade captain, who’s been doing this for decades, and I could see in his eyes that this was not something we could fight.’²

What were we doing in this catastrophic bushfire area? The weather felt adversarial, angry, and unpredictable. It felt like we were all under attack. We, like many, retreated back to the ‘safety’ of the cities. But the fires came with us. The air quality across Australia that summer was recorded as hazardous, with levels of fine particles in the air categorized as ‘very poor’ by the Environment Protection Authority. Research shows prolonged exposure to bushfire smoke increases the risk of respiratory illness, smoke-induced stroke, and heart attack, particularly for those most vulnerable such as the elderly. Pregnant women were warned of the dangers of an early miscarriage due to hazardous smoke inhalation.³ For one day at least, Melbourne was reported as having some of the ‘worst air quality in the world’⁴ with heightened exposure to small particle toxicity. Trapped in an apartment or house at the end of a cul-de-sac surrounded by smoke-filled air, many people felt claustrophobic. ‘Nowhere to run to baby, nowhere to hide’⁵ – not even in the urban heartlands of Australia’s capital cities.

In previous summers, Russ and I had sea-kayaked together in the Nadgee Wilderness area on the south-eastern Australian coastline. It was blissful to experience this intimate relationship with nature and each other. Nadgee is part of Bidawal, Dthwara, and Monaroo Country, whose people have a long spiritual and cultural association with the area best known for its remote beaches, coastline, lagoons, and dunes. Nadgee Wilderness stretches from the town of Mallacoota in Victoria, to Disaster Bay in New South Wales, named for its shipwreck history. In the past, Nadgee was the perfect counterpoint to home and work in the suburban metropolis: our Christmas holiday rite of wild pilgrimage and passage. But where to go now?

Back in the town of Mallacoota at the edge of the Nadgee Wilderness area, the largest maritime evacuation of Australian citizens in a natural disaster was taking place.⁶ With only one road in and one road cut off by fire, more than 4,000 people were stranded at the boat ramp with limited food, fuel, and drinking water. Locals and tourists alike had to be evacuated by navy boats and helicopters. People described the experience as ‘mayhem … like Armageddon’.⁷

As the bushfire encircled the now-deserted town of Mallacoota, folk huddled together under a blood-red sky while the houses on the edge of the town burnt. ‘Nature has spoken, and she is furious.’⁸

We are the wildfire

In ‘Diary of a Wildlife Carer’, Rachel Labeter describes her feelings of heartbreak and humility working with endangered and injured animals at the frontline of the Australian bushfire crisis:

We are all responsible for bearing witness to our age … It is warming up unseasonably of course. In the smoke haze from the bushfires, the mountains are faded water colours … Grey-headed flying foxes, a vulnerable species, are falling out of trees. Plants aren’t flowering and the ones that do bear little pollen or nectar … Someone tells me that this is just the beginning. I focus on the ash-smudged horizon, determined not to look away …⁹

The recent bushfires in Australia increased the likelihood of accelerated species extinction, particularly for those species already listed as extremely vulnerable. Unprecedented mass fish die-offs in New South Wales were experienced as heavy rain, washed ash, and charred debris flowed into the rivers after bushfires. In some sections of the Macleay River, thousands of dead, rotting fish were found along 70km of the riverbank, killed by the rapid drops of oxygen levels in the water as a result. As one local resident observes, ‘We’ve seen fish kills on the river after bushfires before, but never anything like this. It will take decades to recover from.’¹⁰

The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) has set up an urgent appeal across Australia to support koalas who lost up to 30 per cent of their habitat during the bushfires. It estimates nearly 10,000 koalas perished in the fires in New South Wales alone, and 50 per cent of the koala population on Kangaroo Island in South Australia perished. ‘Koala populations have declined by a staggering 42 per cent over 20 years and are at serious risk of becoming extinct in NSW and Queensland by 2050. We must act to protect them now, or they could disappear in a matter of decades.’¹¹

The toll on native Australian flora and fauna as well as other non-native plant and animal species can only be described as catastrophic (the highest possible rating). Reports estimate more than 1 billion animals died or have been placed in extreme risk because their habitats have been destroyed or they are unable to access food and shelter.¹² Critically endangered species such as the Southern Corroboree frog, the Regent Honeyeater bird, the Western Ground parrot and East Gippsland Galaxias fish all had their habitats further destroyed or severely damaged due to the bushfires, placing their prospects for long-term survival at severe risk.

When a population suffers a series of catastrophic weather events such as bushfires, tornadoes, drought, and floods, we often understand these disasters as ‘acts of nature’. Nature in this sense is ‘out there’, separate from us, capable of unleashing wild weather of mass destruction, which we seek to tame. Maria Kaika argues that the disasters are rarely if ever natural, and almost always related to human politics, activities, and impacts. Nature is not the executor, but the victim of the ways we (mis)manage our relationships with environment.¹³

By laying the blame on ‘nature’, we hide the devastation on other species, our own role in the disaster and all of the many ways we are complicit to the trauma that ensues. This is a destructive circular relationship as environmentalist Bill McGibbon observes in his book The End of Nature.

If the waves crash up against the beach, eroding dunes and destroying homes, it is not the awesome power of Mother Nature. It is the awesome power of Mother Nature as altered by the awesome power of man, who has overpowered in a century the processes that have been slowly evolving and changing of their own accord since the earth was born.¹⁴

Putting ourselves back into the picture of natural disasters as disaster protagonists rather than as victims is not easy. Arsonists who purposefully start fires or even thoughtless people who throw out a cigarette butt, which then starts a major bushfire, are castigated, reviled, and even exiled from our community through jail or punishment for the crimes they have committed and the harm they have caused. An aberration of humanity, these people, like nature, are not one of ‘us’. Yet how do we account for our everyday roles in warming the planet? We are creating the conditions that lay seed to the disasters such as bushfires, and in doing so we are harming many, including ourselves, our families, and communities.

This is the argument of the Extinction Rebellion global movement, which claims we are in the midst of an extinction of our own making and must act now to halt biodiversity loss and reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2025. They call on the state to declare a climate and ecological emergency, and to work with other institutions and community groups to communicate the urgency for change. ‘Our main po...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Weather of mass destruction
• 2 Finding Homo urbanis
• 3 Through the security glass darkly
• 4 Seeking the good city
• 5 We are the wild city
• 6 Planning in climate change
• 7 Can the wild city be tamed?
• Index