Urban Nature: an Artifact of the
Industrial City
Stephanie Pincetl
Director California Center for Sustainable Communities, Institute of the
Environment
UCLA, February 25, 2013
Prepared for the National Academies of Science Workshop on Urban Ecosystem
Services.
The New Age
 Humans are now urban
 Humans shape many Earth processes
 We are in the era of the Anthropocene
 Raises questions about what it is to be human in an urban age,
how cities are built and grow and our “need for nature.”
 Cities are nature, inert minerals transformed by humans into
infrastructure.
 Where does living nature fit in?
A Bit of Perspective: Why Urban
Ecosystems Today?
 Until the industrial revolution, cities were essentially devoid
of living nature, except for elite gardens.
Sienna, Italy
There was a hierarchical order of civilization
out toward the wilderness
Civilization
Agriculture,
the
Countryside
Wilderness
Nature was feared and powerful
 Wilderness
 Wolves
 Bears
 Predators of all kinds competing for food
 Fires, floods
 Agriculture was a struggle against weather, weeds, animals,
soils, water supply, and trees.
Harnessing of fossil energy enables
industrialization and transforms the
human relationship to the planet
 Fossil energy enables dramatic transformations of nature,
enormous manufacturing productivity, the concentration of
humans in urban centers as never before.
 Nature is dominated.
 Rise of Industrial City – polluted, crowded, insalubrious
Lower East side
Enter the Industrial City
Globe Iron Works Ship Yard, Cleveland
But living conditions in cities were
abysmal
 Tree-lined streets and parks were seen as agents of change to make
cities more livable.
 Olmsted’s Central Park as the lungs of the city for the working
class : “A park is a work of art, designed to produce certain effects
on the mind of men.”
 Rise of landscape architecture and interest in the exotic, including
plants that were non-native.
 Reflection of a new cosmopolitanism, reaching far beyond the
local.
 Status.
 Andrew Jackson Downing promulgates landscape architecture for the
wealthy and budding middle class professional class.
Conjuncture of science, industrial despoliation
of the countryside and urbanization
 George Perkins Marsh – importance of trees for watershed
functions leads to preservation of forests still in the public
domain.
 Rise of Preservation movement – idealization of nature:
Painting (Hudson River School, luminists), Romantic and
Transcendentalist Mvts.
Nature as solace, repose and inspirational. A source of regeneration.
Bierstadt, Among the Sierra Nevada Mountains, 1868.
Tree Planting Movement in Cities
 Urban expansion west of the 100th meridian into the treeless
plains provokes deliberate urban tree planting, starting in
1870s in Nebraska with the founding of Arbor day.
 Citizen-based urban tree planting spreads (mostly in affluent
areas).
 Tree planting becomes a civic obsession. Association of virtue
with trees.
 In US emphasis was on neighborhood trees (planted by
individuals along streets).
Civic Boosterism and Trees
 Liberty Hyde Bailey and the Country Life Commission enlisted by
Pinchot to extol the virtues of trees in towns.
 Country churches source of tree stewards in cities.
 Pinchot advocated tree planting in towns for moral and
environmental reasons.
 There is early collaboration between the Forest Service and urban
tree planting efforts.
 Normalization of Eastern Seaboard, English aesthetic of a mesic,
green environment, a green leafy environment.
 Lands west of the 100th meridian caused great controversy about
how to manage (John Wesley Powell). Irrigate them, make them
like the mesic East.
Twentieth Century Sees Parks and
Open Space Become Normalized
 Parks and open spaces become normalized as part of urban
planning and design.
 They are seen as part of health of residents.
 With postwar prosperity leaps and bounds in urban
expansion.
Mid Twentieth Century (re)Rise of Concern
about Nature and the Environment
 Concerns about the preservation of nature.
 Rachel Carson sounds the alarm on chemicals.
 National Recreation Areas under Kennedy (Outdoor Recreation
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Review Commission (1964)).
Environmental movement.
1970s formal federal Forest Service assistance for urban tree
planting.
City Tree USA: U.S. Forest Service and National Association of
State Foresters, partly funded by USFS, cosponsored by US
Conference of Mayors and National League of Cities.
All quite apart from recent rise of interest in urban ecosystem
services.
Urban Sustainability of the 1980s
Forward
 Cities can be sites of their own pollution and impacts
remediation (Rees & Beatley).
 An urban nature can be developed to help in this endeavor, as
it can provide provisioning, regulating, cultural and possibly
supporting services.
 Trees become emblematic of urban ecosystem services in
cities across the country and million tree planting programs
become the rage – see Vibrant Cities etc. . .
But what is sustainable for whom
where? Do alleged services add up?
 Some parts of the country are naturally treeless and water
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restricted, planting trees requires water resources.
Trees require maintenance – they are living entities, this
requires funding.
Tree maintenance requires either specialized knowledge or
money; what if the city and residents have neither?
Not all people like trees.
Other ecosystem services like bioswales, water infiltration
trenches are also costly, even more so.
Also require fundamental changes in urban morphology.
Urban Ecosystem Services
Implementation
 Will require new forms of public administration and different rules to
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create new agencies, sharing of budgets, co-management of new
infrastructure (water and sanitation, for example with street services).
Needs new sources of funding.
Requires new skills to maintain “living infrastructure.”
Each region will have different climatic tolerances and ecosystem
services will have to be appropriate to the conditions.
Success will depend on public acceptance of a different looking city, and
willingness to lend their individual private property to the effort.
Requires public support and involvement – a deep shift involving public
stewardship, new ideas of property rights and obligations.
The sanitary city of the 20th Century needs to be retrofitted so natural
processes can work to help mitigate urban impacts, and to make for the
sustainable city of the 21st Century.
What are the urban benefits?
 Quantification of urban
ecosystem benefits difficult.
 Trees perform differently across
different ecosystems and in
different urban locations.
 And, does their performance
translate to the benefits claimed
like reducing the use of air
conditioning or GHG emissions
sequestration.
 How do you know? Trees are
brutally pruned, their ecosystem
service is severely curtailed. How
is this taken into account?
 They have costs as well as
benefits.
A typical street tree in LA
Pruning cycle: 60 years.
Value of the ecosystem
service???
Portland: how much did this cost? How many linear miles are
necessary to make a difference?
Lots of concrete here, what is the trade-off between the GHG
emissions of concrete vs. stormwater infiltrated for example?
Value of these urban ecosystem
services?
 Still unknown, largely a matter of faith.
 Represents the instrumentalization of nature. We have gone
from fear and vulnerability of nature’s impacts and processes,
to domination and pricing of its functions with meager
quantification compared to the complexity of what is being
proposed, and no effort to address the public administration
and land management changes necessary to implement the
changes proposed.
 Issues of beauty and wellbeing are unaddressed. Yet this
humans are now urban dwellers and our relationship with
nature has changed. Do we need it to be happy? To feel
good?