Urban Environmental Education Review

Alex Russ, Marianne E. Krasny, Alex Russ, Marianne E. Krasny

• Publisher: Comstock Publishing Associates
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781501712784
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Science & Technology

Urban Environmental Education Review explores how environmental education can contribute to urban sustainability. Urban environmental education includes any practices that create learning opportunities to foster individual and community well-being and environmental quality in cities. It fosters novel educational approaches and helps debunk common assumptions that cities are ecologically barren and that city people don't care for, or need, urban nature or a healthy environment.

Topics in Urban Environmental Education Review range from the urban context to theoretical underpinnings, educational settings, participants, and educational approaches in urban environmental education. Chapters integrate research and practice to help aspiring and practicing environmental educators, urban planners, and other environmental leaders achieve their goals in terms of education, youth and community development, and environmental quality in cities.

The ten-essay series Urban EE Essays, excerpted from Urban Environmental Education Review, may be found here: naaee.org/eepro/resources/urban-ee-essays. These essays explore various perspectives on urban environmental education and may be reprinted/reproduced only with permission from Cornell University Press.

Part I
URBAN CONTEXT

1

ADVANCING URBANIZATION

David Maddox, Harini Nagendra, Thomas Elmqvist, and Alex Russ

Highlights

• Cities are human habitat—integrated systems of people, infrastructure, and nature—and are key to human-nature relationships and global sustainability.
• We need cities that are resilient, sustainable, livable, and just.
• Urban environmental education can help debunk common assumptions: that cities are ecologically barren, nature is only in wilderness, and city people don’t care for or need nature.
• Telling the story of “advancing urbanization”—both the global acceleration of urbanization and the promise offered by urbanization—is an essential role for urban environmental education.

Introduction

Cities—their design and how we live in them—will be key in our struggle for sustainability, indeed our future. As cities grow, as they are newly created, and as more and more people choose or require them as places to live, our decisions about urban design and city building will determine the outcomes of long-term challenges related to resilience, sustainability, livability, and justice. Rather than being the essential cause of the global environmental dangers we face, cities will be central to success in overcoming these dangers. Such success will be based on science and policy, but also on widespread public engagement with and understanding of both the challenges and the potential solutions found in building cities. Environmental education can play a critical role in fostering public engagement through clarifying and transmitting the challenges, values, actions, and methods for achieving sustainable, resilient, livable, and just cities.

What Is Urban?

At their core, urban spaces are human settlements of various sizes, densities, and physical arrangements. Major urban centers, cities, towns, and even organized collections of populated zones that make up metropolitan regions are “urban”; that is, “urban” comprises a diversity and continuum of types of spaces, not one form. The dense and compact European city surrounded by rural land is one form. Classic American cities and their sprawl is another model. Garden cities, clustered townships, and other urban forms all have characteristics in common.

What are the unifying features of these diverse urban forms? People—and their communities—is one. Buildings, streets, and other gray infrastructure is another. And nature is a third. By including nature as a key characteristic of cities we do not mean nature as an idealized or hoped-for feature. Nature is an attribute of every city, both within its borders and as a connection to the wider landscape, because while cities are social and infrastructural spaces, they are also ecological spaces. They are social-ecological spaces of functioning ecosystems of living and nonliving things. In this sense cities are essential human habitat.

Acknowledging that cities are themselves ecosystems that exist along gradients with surrounding periurban and rural areas has deep implications not only for the humanity and livability of the world’s urban zones, but also for global sustainability more broadly. Urbanization is advancing throughout the world. Urbanization as a positive concept for the good of the Earth is also advancing around the world among thoughtful scholars and within progressive city leadership. It is also advancing in the hands of people on the streets who are building better cities, block by block, through community gardens, street tree plantings, parks, and embedded natural areas, and who are engaging in participatory decision making. Telling the story of this advancement—both the global acceleration of urbanization and the promise offered by urbanization—is an essential role for an emerging urban environmental education.

The Growth of Cities

The world is increasingly urban, interconnected, and changing. With current trends, by 2030 the global urban population is estimated to be 4.9 billion, nearly double that of 2000. During this period the total urban area is expected to triple. That is, urban land area is expanding faster than urban populations (Elmqvist et al., 2013). This massive change in where humans live on the planet will have inevitable local and global ecological consequences.

Indeed, more than 60 percent of the urban area of the 2030s has yet to be built (Elmqvist et al., 2013). In three areas—Sub-Saharan Africa, China, and India—the combined urban population is expected to grow by more than one billion people. By 2030, nearly one-third of the world’s urban inhabitants will live in China or India (Seto, Güneralp, and Hutyra, 2012). Africa will urbanize faster than any other continent; its urban population is expected to more than double, from 300 million in 2000 to 750 million in 2030. Around 75 percent of Africa’s total population growth is expected to occur in cities of less than one million. African cities are often settlements with weak governance structures, high levels of poverty, and low capacity in environmental management and science. Currently, more than 43 percent of Africa’s urban population lives below the poverty line, more than in any other continent, making socioeconomic development a priority. Generally weak state control, the presence of a feeble formal economic sector, and the scarcity of local professional skills will constrain responses to the complex environmental challenges posed by rapid urbanization. Even under current conditions, urban areas all over the planet are facing severe challenges, including shortages of natural resources, environmental degradation, climate change, demographic and social changes such as increasing income inequality and poverty, and inconsistent management of sustainability transitions that would reduce ecological impacts.

Climate change, increased migration of people, and ecological degradation will severely test societies and urban regions. The urbanization process also presents opportunities, however. That 60 percent of the urban area of the cities of the 2030s is yet to be built is a chance to avoid repeating the city-building mistakes of the past. The infrastructure we build in cities—where we put the roads and the buildings, and how we organize resource use—tends to be with us a long time. The immensity of new building now underway is a chance to get it right, both for people and for nature.

Values

What are the cities we want to create in the future, the cities in which we want to live, cities that work for both people and the Earth? What is their nature? A vision is needed for city building, one that is fundamentally built around goals and informed by values. Visions, goals, values, and actions, along with scientific data and experiential knowledge, are the essence of education, including environmental education.

Certainly the cities we need are resilient, so our cities will still exist after the next “one-hundred-year storm,” now occurring with increasing frequency. Certainly they are sustainable, since we need our cities to balance consumption and resources so they can last into the future. As we build this vision we know that cities must also be livable, because cities are now the places where most of us live. And justice must also be key to our urban environments. We have struggled to build just cities for a long time; largely we have come up short.

These are the key characteristics of the cities of our dreams: resilient, sustainable, livable, and just. What are the values that are foundations for these goals? They are, at a minimum, inclusiveness, equity, respect for people and knowledge, innovation, and conservation.

The United Nation’s Urban Sustainable Development Goals offer some guidance, a global consensus on what is important (United Nations, 2015). Among the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals approved in 2015 is one explicitly about cities, #11: “Make cities inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable.” This goal offers a road map to the operational values we should investigate, appropriate, share, and teach in the emerging urban world; the road map should include targets for open space, sustainable environmental management, and access to nature and its myriad benefits and services. At the center of the goal #11 and our general approach to cities, explicitly and implicitly, is nature, both as a literal feature of the cities we require for resilience, sustainability, livability, and justice, and as a metaphor for the kinds of cities we desire.

The Richness of the Urban Environment

Why should we care about the impacts of urbanization on ecosystems? In addition to the intrinsic value of nature, urban ecosystems are essential for human well-being and, ultimately, for urban resilience and sustainability. Because urban nature has explicit benefits, its availability to all people is a matter of justice. The environmental consequences of the rapid growth of cities—especially poorly designed and managed ones—is starkly apparent. Urban expansion has degraded and destroyed natural habitats in and around cities worldwide, transforming forests, coastal mangroves, lakes, and wetlands into vast expanses of concrete and polluted travesties of their former ecological vigor.

Yet cities are far from barren. In contrast, cities are often rich in biodiversity (Aronson et al., 2014). Cities can be key stopovers along migratory routes of birds. Some cities are biodiversity hotspots in their own right. They contain small but thriving pockets of biodiversity with native and nonnative (novel) species assemblages (Faeth, Bang, and Saari, 2014). Such assemblages of urban species and habitats provide a range of ecosystem services that are critical for the sustainability of cities, indeed for the life of cities. Wetlands clean water that has been contaminated with industrial pollutants and sewage; trees may clean the air of pollutants; and urban ecosystems provide important habitats for insects, birds, bats, and other pollinators and urban wildlife.

For humans, exposure to green spaces fosters physical well-being and psychological relief from stress. Urban green spaces include not only city parks, but also the wide array of macro- and micro-urban places, from wetlands and bioswales, to street trees, pocket parks, community gardens, and even biophilic workspaces. A diversity of people and communities work in and interact with nature in these spaces, including from civil society (e.g., civic groups, activists), government, and the corporate sector (Kazemi, Beecham, and Gibbs, 2011; Beninde, Veith, and Hochkirch, 2015). Parks, community gardens, sidewalks shaded by trees, and lakes and coastal beaches act as important nodes for people to congregate and strengthen social bonds among disparate urban residents.

Natural areas in cities also often hold an important place in the cultural landscape of residents and are sometimes considered sacred and worshipped in Asia, Africa, and elsewhere. In New York City, immigrants and other residents demonstrate care, stewardship, and spiritual practices in natural areas and parks (Svendsen, Campbell, and McMillen, 2016). Urban ecosystems also provide resources for foraging in cities, offering food and livelihood security for vulnerable communities through the provision of fish, herbs and vegetables, fodder, fuelwood, and other resources. Many urban ecosystems historically functioned as urban commons, providing collective resources for entire communities in times of scarcity and need.

In addition to enhancing individual and community well-being, urban natural areas provide a buffer against local and global environmental factors such as pollution and climate change. Similarly, through urban agriculture, urban green spaces buffer against economic and food insecurity of the urban poor. In short, green urban spaces are key to global sustainability and need to be recognized as positive forces in shaping human stewardship of the entire biosphere (Elmqvist et al., 2013).

That cities have dire environmental and biodiversity challenges is certainly true. That they are ecologically dead, or are the causes of all the world’s environmental problems, is false. Yet many cities are experiencing a crisis of green and open space, especially in the Global South. The lack of accessible green and open space contributes to desperately poor conditions for both people and nature (Wolch, Byrne, and Newell, 2014). Thus, having sufficient access to good quality urban green space is an issue of ecological and social concern that impacts quality of life and social justice. We must be vigilant to maintain such access for all citizens as cities restore their green spaces and build new green infrastructure; such urban sustainability initiatives often attract younger and higher-income residents, leading to exclusion of longer-term residents who can no longer afford housing, or so-called “environmental gentrification.”

Role for Education

In a world of advancing urbanization, urban environmental education can play a key role. The story of cities as ecological spaces needs to be told—both in cities and outside them—to adults and to the many young people who increasingly populate the world’s growing cities; to our leaders in government, business, and civil society making decisions about the built and natural environment; and to each other in our daily lives. Such stories will have a critical impact on the willingness of the inhabitants of the cities of the future to protect and care for—and create—their urban environments.

Thought leaders and educators can communicate the connection between the urban environment and human and global environmental health. They also can communicate that merely recording the presence of species in urban environments does not necessarily indicate their health; that actions such as the thoughtless use of pesticides and planting invasive species may deprive native fauna of feeding and nesting habitats; that the persistence of many species in urban environments, such as macaques, langurs, and birds of prey in Indian cities, can be attributed to cultural traditions of good will toward life; that local food production with diverse methods is central to local health; that all people, not just the rich, deserve access to ecosystem services; and that consumption and transport...