Understanding Metropolitan Landscapes 1138600873, 9781138600874

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UNDERSTANDING METROPOLITAN LANDSCAPES

Understanding Metropolitan Landscapes considers and reflects on the fundamental relationships between metropolitan regions and their landscapes. It investigates how planning and policy help to protect, manage and enhance the landscapes that sustain our urban settlements. As global populations become more metropolitan, landscapes evolve to become increasingly dynamic and entropic; and the distinction between urban and non-­urban is further fragmented and yet these spaces play an increasingly important role in sustainable development. This book opens a key critical discussion into the relational aspects of city and landscape and how each element shapes the boundaries of the other, covering topics such as material natures, governance systems, processes and policy. It presents a compendium of concepts and ideas that have emerged from landscape architecture, planning, and environmental policy and landscape management. Using a range of illustrated case studies, it provokes discussions on the major themes driving the growth of cities by exploring the underlying tensions around notions of sustainable settlement, climate change adaption, urban migration, new modes of governance and the role of landscape in policy and decision making at national, provincial and municipal levels. Andrew MacKenzie is a registered landscape architect and honorary senior lecturer at the Fenner School of Environment and Society, Australian National University, Australia (ANU). Andrew has a Master of Public Policy (specialising in Environmental Law) and a Doctor of Philosophy from ANU. He is the co-chair of the National Advocacy Committee for the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects.

UNDERSTANDING METROPOLITAN LANDSCAPES Andrew MacKenzie

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Andrew MacKenzie The right of Andrew MacKenzie to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-­in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-1-138-60086-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-60087-4 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-47054-7 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements Foreword

viii ix

PART I

Metropolitan trajectories

1

  1 Understanding metropolitan landscapes

3

Why landscapes?  4 Why metropolitan?  9 Conclusion  14 References  15

  2 Co-­evolution of the landscape and the metropolis The utopian vision  20 The plan  24 The first metropolitan landscapes  26 The garden city  28 The suburban landscape  31 Conclusion  35 Case study – London  36 References  38

17

vi   Contents

  3 Landscapes and the contemporary metropolis

40

The Anthropocene and the decline of neoliberalism  42 The compact city agenda  45 The green city agenda  48 Green infrastructure  51 Conclusion  54 Case study – Singapore  55 References  58

  4 Sustainability

61

History of sustainability  62 Interpreting sustainable development goals  68 Challenges for metropolitan landscape planning and sustainable development  73 Conclusion  75 Case study – Canberra and Ottawa  75 References  82 PART II

Metropolitan strategies

85

  5 Conceptualising and valuing metropolitan landscapes

87

Question of scale  92 Ecosystem services  96 Case study – Milan  100 References  105

  6 The role of governance Ecosystems management  109 Ecological footprint  110 Urban metabolism  111 Ecological wisdom  113 Landscape urbanism  114 Modes of governance  116 Adaptive governance  118 Conclusion  121 Case study – Greater Copenhagen  122 References  127

108

Contents   vii

  7 Regulating metropolitan landscapes

131

Regulating behaviour  132 Determining the appropriate mix of regulation  138 Applying the externality principle to developing landscape policy  140 Mobilising ecosystem services in metropolitan landscapes  143 Scenarios where excludability and rivalry are applied  145 Conclusion  148 Case study – New York City  149 References  153 PART III

Metropolitan imaginaries

155

  8 Landscapes and health

157

Environmental triggers  159 Policy approaches  162 Applying a framework  166 Conclusion  169 Case study – Beijing  170 References  174

  9 Landscapes and decarbonising the metropolis

177

Urban greening and urban cooling  178 Urban heat island effect (UHI)  182 Conclusion  187 Case study – Masdar City  188 References  192

10 New concepts of a sustainable metropolis

195

Imagining a resilient metropolitan system  196 From mitigating impacts to progressing a positive agenda  200 A landscape led approach to metropolitan policy  205 Embracing adaptive governance to transform the metropolis  206 Conclusion  207 References  208 Index

209

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book is a culmination of many years of research and teaching landscape ­architecture and planning. The book was inspired by my students first and foremost. I am indebted to those who continually challenged me to explain and contextualise their learning in a way that is applicable in practice and provokes meaningful discussion without losing the nuance of exploring the theoretical characteristics of landscape studies. Thank you to my generous colleagues from the academic and professional world that provided valuable feedback on chapters, especially Steve Dovers, Gay Williamson, Cecily Maller, Philip Hutchinson and Lauren Piko. Lastly, my eternal gratitude goes to Katrina for your total support and encouragement during the research and writing of Understanding Metropolitan Landscapes.

FOREWORD

In the “urban century”, where half and increasingly upward of that proportion of the human population live in cities; it is both surprising and dismal that our understandings of these vast constructs of human settlement are so fragmented. Our planning is fragmented, as is our pattern of urban development. Sadly, so too is our view through research, scattered across disciplines and professions. Transit planning does not connect to other infrastructure planning, open space plans are separate and subservient to economic plans; infrastructure plans ignore water and energy, and so on. Planners and architects speak to each other too rarely, let alone do we see fertile and constructive discussions across ecology, economics, demography, design and the several other key disciplines that might collectively explain the largest phenomenon in human history that is modern urbanisation. In Understanding Metropolitan Landscapes, Mackenzie provides an antidote to this fragmentation, and the key is in the simple term landscape. This resurrects a faded tradition in human geography of appreciating landscapes as a juncture of the human and non-­human, and does so with great effect. Most urbanists focus on one, or at best, a few aspects of the complex metropolitan space, and we plan and develop fragments at a time. Some seek to study urban systems through models of city metabolism and the like, and step us forward in terms of perceiving a more complex reality. But seeking to understand the metropolitan landscape forces us to comprehend more: the built environment, the systems of energy and material flow, human perceptions and values, institutional and governance processes, and above all natural and ecological systems. Core to the journey Mackenzie takes us on are a series of terms and powerful concepts that are very rarely encountered in standard urban texts – more’s the pity – such as green infrastructure, edges and boundaries (so more interesting than the more easily traced structures), common pool resources, health and energy. This book ranges widely for material that can enrich urban studies and does so convincingly. The

x   Foreword

themes in each chapter are explored through case studies of metropolitan planning instruments from around the world to demonstrate how governments have negotiated the challenges and leveraged the benefits of landscapes in pursuing sustainable development agendas. If more of those who individually and collectively, intentionally or accidentally make decisions that shape our future cities paid attention to Mackenzie’s thought under the topics of Resilience, Adaptability and Transformability, then we would all benefit. A secret: Andrew Mackenzie is not a planner, engineer or architect, or an urban geographer, although I might argue the latter: he is a landscape architect and landscape planner; one of the ones who get called in after the fact in the development process to green up and fill out the left over spaces. There is that snide joke about keeping the others away until the landscape architect scopes and sketches out the site, and then they can put the bits into the best place, in a properly envisaged and total landscape. This book demonstrates that the idea is no joke at all. Professor Steven Dovers

PART I

Metropolitan trajectories

The global challenges of resource depletion, land degradation and general environmental decline caused by urban migration have been played out in urban planning and policy discourse for over half a century (UN-­Habitat, 2016). In addition to the environmental cost of urban growth, the increasing prevalence of non-­communicable disease and declining mental health standards are more recent challenges facing urban societies (Giles-­Corti et al., 2014). In the twenty-­first century, feeding, transporting, housing and facilitating a fulfilling life for citizens is an ever-­present political and social dilemma. Challenges faced by urbanising nations are compounded by the impacts of climate change, new technologies, population growth and migration, and the declining faith in institutions to effectively govern in the face of such challenges. Government and civil society look to new technologies, policy approaches and growth strategies to effectively plan and manage our urban environments for current and future generations. The impacts of urbanisation are global. The range of international urban issues are well known and agendas are well established (UN-­Habitat, 2011). The world is now more urbanised than ever, with more than half the world’s population living in urban settlements and is expected to rise to 70 percent by mid-­century (Angelo & Wachsmuth, 2015). Understanding Metropolitan Landscapes asks how we identify, evaluate, plan, protect and enhance the landscapes in and around the metropolis of the twenty-­first century. It explores what the metropolitan landscape is and what role it plays in sustaining urban life for over half the earth’s population.

References Angelo, H., & Wachsmuth, D. (2015). Urbanizing urban political ecology: a critique of methodological cityism. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 39(1), 16–27. Giles-­Corti, B., Badland, H., Mavoa, S., Turrell, G., Bull, F., Boruff, B. & Thackway, S. (2014). Reconnecting urban planning with health: a protocol for the development and

validation of national liveability indicators associated with noncommunicable disease risk behaviours and health outcomes. Public Health Research & Practice, 25(1), 1–5. UN-­Habitat. (2011). State of the world’s cities 2010/2011: bridging the urban divide. UN-­Habitat. (2016). New Urban Agenda: Quito declaration on sustainable cities and human settlments for all.

1 UNDERSTANDING METROPOLITAN LANDSCAPES

The term “city” seems inadequate to describe the fullness of our experience of urban life and the role landscapes play. The landscapes that thread the built environment together are networks of spaces, systems and processes intimately linked to the functioning apparatus we call the metropolis, but with tentacles reaching far into the peri-­urban landscapes straddling the rural and the urban. They are worthy of critical investigation. They accommodate and support the socio-­technical systems and infrastructures designed for movement of goods, services, information, energy and people. Yet the landscape that supports the metropolis is also damaged by the metropolis. Urban growth is responsible for habitat fragmentation, species decline, altered biochemical cycles and changes in land use far beyond municipal boundaries (Waldheim, 2006). Metropolitan landscapes are managed by multiple overlapping political institutions, agencies, private companies, communities and individuals. They are not only shaped by the collective effort of citizens living within the city, but are profoundly impacted by the social, technical and environmental forces of change that transcend conventional urban settlement boundaries (Bosselmann & Ruggeri, 2007). This book argues the relationship between the quality of landscapes and the quality of urban life is closely linked at a range of scales. Therefore landscape quality should be examined and integrated into metropolitan policy formulation, and landscape planning and management. The premise of Understanding Metropolitan Landscapes is to explore the place of the landscape in urban governance and policy at a metropolitan scale. Policy is not typically a field of study for spatial design, planning and environmental science students. Often seen as the domain of economics, political science and management, policy can be abstract and seem unrelated to the practice of urban design and landscape architecture. However, policy, design and management share some fundamental concepts. Put simply, policy is problem solving, using tools to influence behaviour, allocate and regulate the use of scarce resources and direct investment.

4   Metropolitan trajectories

How then can design and planning professionals engage in debates and discussion about policy? Let’s consider that landscape architecture and urban planning approach a problem, scenario or brief by placing the issue in a spatial or conceptual context. We cognitively zoom in and out, examining the issue at a detailed scale and then placing it in the context of a broad scale. This thought experiment is equally applicable when considering the policy questions posed by this book. The twentieth century story about planning and urban design has zoomed out and in, from whole regions to public squares. In essence, the visions, treatise and plans of the past are paradigms reflecting the social, cultural, political and economic perspectives of the time. Think, for example, of the ambitious but often flawed planning schemes of the 1950s and 1960s USA and Britain that zoomed out to the metropolitan scale, whereas the post-­modern village logic of the 1990s’ “new urbanism” movement zoomed in to the human scale. Each era reflected the social desires, anxieties and ambitions of the time and mirrored in urban policy and decision making.

Why landscapes? This book examines the challenges that place landscape at the centre of policy problems in the twenty-­first century metropolis. Using case studies from around the globe, we explore programs and agendas where landscapes have featured in the formulation of metropolitan scale planning and policy. Decision makers generally recognise that the problems faced by an urbanising planet require new approaches to planning and management. However, while the problems seem universal, the responses are culturally and geographically contextual. Every metropolitan region is unique and suitable policies depend on the issues in question, the institutional arrangements, cultural attitudes and levels of citizen interest along with a range of other factors (Campbell & Corley, 2012). Likewise, cities have their own planning history that creates path dependencies and inertias which are difficult to undo (Wilson, 2014). This is instructive for landscape architects, planners and urban designers as we increasingly claim a greater role in solving problems created by the migration of the earth’s population into urban settlements and the multiple social and environmental challenges associated with global warming. The role of landscape and the agency of urban design and planning professionals seem to be intertwined in what seems to be a contest for legitimacy in the twenty­first century urban agenda. Politically, the last quarter of the twentieth century saw the resurrection of elements of the nineteenth-­century laissez-­faire approach to urban expansion in preference to the state planning systems that, with all their flaws, were established to promote orderly development and protect citizens from the deep social inequalities of the unregulated industrial city (Gleeson, 2006). Critics of centralised planning, led by the free marketeers, believed the deterministic mechanisms and technologically driven philosophy of post-­war architecture and town planning had failed the ambitions of the modern state. This, combined with the defunding of state planning authorities, and the devolution of planning power

Understanding metropolitan landscapes   5

to private interests under the guise of neoliberal reform has been largely responsible for the fragmentation and privatisation of planning responsibility in the West (Thompson, 2007). In a sense, the metropolitan landscape is a metonym for the planning profession, enduring fragmentation and privatisation in different forms over the past 40 years. Coinciding with the unwinding role of the state in planning, the urban policy agenda zoomed in to the hypothetical urban village, turning its back on the grand schemes of the post-­war era. Since the publication of the pedestrian pocket book (Kelbaugh, 1989), a new enthusiasm for a refocussed urbanism on the village scale took hold and continues today to refocus efforts around reconnecting planning and urban design with the human experience of urban life. Zoom out again and we can see that the recent declaration of the age of the Anthropocene is the most recent lens placed on our urbanising planet. Not specifically an urban paradigm as such, but encapsulating the anxieties about how we, as a species, have consumed resources during the great acceleration driven largely by rising wealth and global urbanisation (Steffen, Broadgate, Deutsch, Gaffney, & Ludwig, 2015). Central to the scientific case for this new epoch called the Anthropocene is the impact of the rapid production of goods and services and accumulation of waste. As decision makers, we need to comprehend the future role that urban living will play in perpetuating environmental decline and the effects on future generations (Hann, 2017). From the urban village to the Anthropocene, contemporary policy responses to urbanisation reveal the underlying tensions facing decision makers. Seemingly, built environment professionals are required to contend with scales of concern measured in square metres and epochs. Confounding the challenges facing planners and designers, we are asked to consider, simultaneously, the human and the planet’s needs. Taking a landscape example, how do we accommodate the demand for dense, village scale settlements in cities, while retaining enough vegetation to mitigate environmental impacts such as the urban heat island effect? How will landscapes most effectively feed us, keep us healthy, sequester carbon and help purify our air and rainwater? There is no single unifying definition of landscape that we can draw on to generate an absolute concept (Wylie, 2007) and this in itself presents challenges and opportunities that are discussed further in this book. In landscape architecture, metaphors are common literary devices used to explore the tacit and intangible attributes of landscape. Palimpsest, for example, describes how landscapes evolve over time and are episodically laid down as a “parchment” across the earth’s surface (Bailey, 2007). Palimpsest invokes thoughts of interacting processes and overlapping natural forces, rather than describing discrete physical characteristics such as trees, soil and water. It also inspires continuity, conservation and preservation. Palimpsest is sentimental and analytical at the same time. Landscapes, like palimpsest, are tangible and intangible, and this tells us something about the vagaries of defining and mobilising landscapes for policy and planning purposes. Nevertheless, coming to terms with the concept of a metropolitan landscape is necessary for exploring interrelationships between the landscape and the surrounding built environment at a

6   Metropolitan trajectories

range of scales. It is important to comprehend how this relationship affects and is affected by the spectrum of social, economic and environmental forces that shape our urban settlements. This is a recurring theme; however, for the purposes of this book, definitions are needed. The European Landscape Convention is perhaps the most comprehensive attempt to provide a unifying definition of landscape for the purposes of developing policy. Written for the convention, but inadequate for poetry, art and design, it does set out some key concepts. The European Landscape Convention articulates two broad and instructive definitions that are useful to this enquiry. Article 1a states that “ ‘Landscape’ means an area, as perceived by people, whose character is the result of the action and interaction of natural and/or human factors” and 1b describes “ ‘Landscape policy’ [as] an expression by the competent public authorities of general principles, strategies and guidelines that permit the taking of specific measures aimed at the protection, management and planning of landscapes” (Council of Europe, 2000). Taken together, these two definitions encourage us to think about the physical and political processes, flows and forces acting on and shaping the landscape and the role decision makers play in determining how landscapes should be valued, managed and enhanced through policies, strategies and actions for change. The landscape, it seems, is ubiquitous, indeed the metropolis itself can be considered a landscape given the variety of typologies, environmental contexts and cultural interpretations of the unbuilt spaces that make up the metropolitan landscape (Antrop, 1998). Matsuoka and Kaplan (2008) describe a range of different landscape typologies explored in a policy and development context. They range from rooftops, private gardens and residential neighbourhoods, to greenways, parks, urban forests, market gardens, intensive farms and regional catchments. This variety of landscape types presents decision makers with a spectrum of opportunities and challenges when thinking about how these spaces should be planned and managed to benefit the urbanising population. For decision makers, zooming in and out to explore these policy questions at a range of scales is a logical starting point. To further explore the metropolitan landscape question, we should consider how scale allows us to navigate an understanding of the issues and policy agendas that affect and are affected by the interactions between the built and unbuilt structures we call the metropolis. Scale is a recurring theme in this book and is considered in two subtly different ways. Spatial scale, meaning the area of land under consideration, is a more conventional interpretation with which planners and landscape architects are familiar. Spatial scale is tangible and measurable. We graphically describe scale in this way as a polygon on a map. We can measure and represent this scale with a high degree of accuracy. The second exploration of scale comes from Walker and Salt’s (2012) concept of “scale of interest” or “focal scale” (p. 15). Focal scale simply means the scale of a problem or question that most stakeholders comprehend and are concerned about. Unlike a spatial scale, the focal scale is characterised by the issues of concern and can be defined by a number of variables including, but not exclusively, land area. For example, decision makers who are concerned about urban food systems will have a different scale of interest to decision makers

Understanding metropolitan landscapes   7

concerned about potable water supply or urban heat island effect. Unlike spatial scale, the focal scale cannot be understood without appreciating the influencing factors from higher scale variables (such as national environmental policy) and finer scale influences (such as the role of community groups) (Walker & Salt, 2012). Focal scale is dynamic and overcomes the need for a singular definition, yet these two interpretations of scale need to interact to continue this line of enquiry. The spatial scale is used to most accurately graphically represent the focal scale and is essential for gaining consensus between stakeholders and arriving at a common understanding of how to frame a policy problem. This is explored in more detail in this book and is helpful when considering questions concerning the role of landscape policies in a metropolitan region. There is no doubt that regardless of the scale of interest, in creating settlements, there are strong interdependencies between the landscape and the urban citizens who enjoy the benefits afforded by the natural environment. When considering this relationship at a metropolitan scale, we can think of layers of interaction between institutions and systems. The physical layer, the metropolis and surrounding landscapes are a dynamic, fragmented mix of built and unbuilt structures (Antrop, 2004). This physical layer interacts with the social layer which includes institutions for governance and decision making. They are not necessarily bounded to a physical area, but rather to social organisations and networks. In considering the interaction between the physical system and the social system, we start to imagine that landscapes shift between these two domains, inscribing social and cultural values onto physical space like a palimpsest. Figure 1.1 is a theoretical description of the physical and social interactions and the interdependencies between the physical and social domains. In this model we can see that the landscape both supplies ecosystem services (e.g. clean air and water, food, shade, opportunities for recreation and social interaction, cultural enrichment) and constrains urban structures and processes (limited by climate, soils, topography, geology and plant communities). Likewise, social institutions shape the environment which in turn affects the metropolitan ecosystem functions and landscape processes. The interdependencies between built and unbuilt forms further complicate the landscape policy agenda as competing interests and priorities come into play in the political process. Urban greening is perhaps the most accurate ideology to describe how landscapes are mobilised in the formulation of sustainable development plans, policies and strategies and yet, as we will see in this book, even the word “green” is politically contentious. To further unpack the political nuances around the role of landscape policy, we can imagine how one might interpret the metropolitan landscape from a decision making perspective. Interpreting landscape, when thinking of planning and policy, can be broadly described as serving two seemingly opposing functions. A conservative interpretation of landscape function emphasises the protection of landscape values, spaces, types and heritage attributes, and by implication, the cultural practices and rituals of users that shape that landscape. This approach emphasises ­customary affiliations, informal associations and interactions between communities

8   Metropolitan trajectories

Figure 1.1  Mental

model of the landscape as a series of interactions between bio­ physical systems, socio-political institutions and cultural norms.

and the landscape (Olwig, 2005). Changes to these landscapes are characterised as loss of identity, diversity and coherence to the existing values. Such change threatens landscape stability, which is often associated with loss of ecological integrity, community, tranquillity and authenticity (Lowenthal, 2007). The second interpretation focuses on the performative aspects of the landscape, where the value is measured by indicators to improve certain performance measures of sustainable development. A report into the role of landscapes in Canberra, Australia’s National Capital emphasised this aspect. “Urban landscape[s] support biodiversity, sequestration of carbon; organic waste disposal, food production, regulating local and micro climate, purifying urban water and air, wildlife habitat, alleviating flood and managing water retention” (SGS Economics and Planning, 2009). Both these conservative and performative approaches seek to provide similar ecosystem services, but from seemingly different approaches. For example, biodiversity can be preserved by protecting existing ecologically intact vegetation or by creating novel ecosystems as part of a new landscape architectural project. Both are legitimate approaches but derive from very different ontological assumptions about how landscapes should serve the policy agenda. Consequently, the evaluation and translation of these ecosystem services into actionable policies is politically popular but problematic. This is discussed further in section two. To continue providing these services to a rapidly urbanising global population, landscapes must change; whether it is enhancing environmental processes through conservation and management of ecosystems or spatial reconfiguration through design that necessitates a degree of loss of continuity, practices and rituals. In essence, as cities come to terms with the pressures to meet the challenges of urbanisation, the landscape

Understanding metropolitan landscapes   9

is expected to simultaneously protect cultural values and perform essential environmental functions.

Why metropolitan? The holistic nature of landscape valuation does not lend to precise definitions and therefore defining spatial boundaries of metropolitan regions can vary greatly. For example, a bio-­regional approach uses geological or topographical characteristics to determine natural boundaries such as water catchments or other ecological thresholds such as vegetation communities, topographic and geological features. Bio-­ regionalism brings into focus the natural carrying capacity of urban settlements within a natural boundary, thereby focussing the attention of policy makers on carrying capacity themes. However, urban landscapes are subject to very different forces, pressures and demands to non-­urban landscapes. For example, one may consider that the stakeholders concerned about the metropolis can be millions of individuals who make decisions and actions that cumulatively shape the landscape, whereas a few thousand land managers and property owners usually manage non-­ urban landscapes in a region. Methods for engaging and incorporating stakeholders’ interest will vary greatly between urban and non-­urban landscapes. In thinking about who are the decision makers and what decision making processes are involved in shaping these landscapes, we should consider what defines the metropolis. The term “metropolitan” and its derivation, “metropolis”, originate from the ancient Greek meter (mother) and polis (town). The metropolis was the urban centre (the mother town) from which settlers (her children), destined for new territories, would depart. Metropolitanism describes the way the cities politically exerted influence over sweeping national agendas (Davis, 1985). Socially, economically and politically, the bigger the metropolitan region, the greater the influence it exerts on the national agenda. Therefore, metropolitanism invokes a pejorative term that has been mobilised over the twentieth century to steer broader social and political shifts towards the urban world view. Metropolis in the arts conjures images such as the 1927 Weimar expressionist film of the same name as a “complex aesthetic symbol of the modernist age and all that follows” (Enticknap, 2013, p. 423). Even Superman lives in Metropolis, a prosperous fictional mega-­city in the north-­west of the USA. Metropolitanism invokes complex and reciprocal interactions between expanding urban settlements physically sprawling over the surrounding productive landscapes and exerting political influence over the dispersed surrounding towns and rural communities. Metropolitanism helps us to understand how the twentieth century became an increasingly urban century and continues on this trajectory into the twenty-­first century. The metropolitan plan privileges the city rather than the wilderness as the real frontier of modern settler societies (Davis, 1985). Urban frontiers rather than wilderness frontiers symbolise the making of the modern nation state. This spatio-­political interpretation of urbanisation also opens up new readings around the forces unfolding in the rapidly growing Asian and African mega-­cities in the twenty-­first century.

10   Metropolitan trajectories

The intention of this book is not to privilege the metropolitan plan as the point of orientation for addressing future urban conditions, but rather to consider the scale at which we might be able to explore contemporary issues that affect and are affected by the urbanising landscape. Indeed the rate of informal urban growth in developing countries suggests that we may need to consider a scale of enquiry far greater than the metropolitan boundary (Davis, 2006). Nevertheless, metropolitanism is a process that is more familiar than we might imagine and it helps to explain the pervasive influence of urban life over national identity across the globe. Sometime between the late nineteenth century and the 1920s, the USA, Britain and Australia became nations of urban dwellers. That is, the population in the towns and cities exceeded that of the rural areas and this began “a long process of territorial transformation” (Rowe, 1991, p. 6). A result of this urban migration saw Western cities expand over the twentieth-­century landscape at a greater rate than any previous period in history. In the twenty-­first century, cities continue to experience this migration at a scale previously unimaginable to our ancestors, and presents problems that demand solutions yet to be conceived. A recurring landscape theme in grand utopic metropolitan schemes of the twentieth century was achieving the balance between communal urban life and country living. Landscape, in Howard’s Garden City, structured the urban dwellers relationship to work, leisure and nature, giving rise to the planned suburban settlements, now the dominant urban pattern in the USA, Canada and Australia. The themes of modernity and scale feature strongly in the advent of the twentieth-­ century metropolitan plan. In the West, it was a single unifying long-­term agenda to establish the orderly development of the modern suburban city (Freestone, 2010), designed to provide certainty and predictability about how a city would address fundamental issues of housing, transport, industry and commerce. The diverse characteristics and nature of landscapes in metropolitan regions are highly incompatible with the twentieth-­century planners’ orderly and structured understanding of the world. This was to become more fully understood with the oil shocks of the 1970s combined with the emerging environmental movement that forced planners to fundamentally confront the emerging ruptures to society. No longer could city planners, engineers and politicians ignore the environmental cost of urban growth (Morgado, 2013). In response to the emerging environmental crisis, metropolitan planning reoriented strategies toward preserving open space and mobilising landscape strategies to help mitigate the worst effects of environmental pollution and development. With the late twentieth-­century unwinding of the state’s role in urban governance and the perceived failure of centralised town planning, the metropolitan plan was replaced by the master plan. Designed to attract private investment and drive innovative solutions to urban problems, the ambition of the metropolitan plans remained, but the social and economic imperatives of the master plan changed to serve the interests of the entrepreneurial state. The trajectory of the metropolitan landscape, represented in utopian fervour or in sober spatial plans and underpinned by regulatory authority, hint at the tensions explicit in the competition for space between the built and unbuilt structures that make up

Understanding metropolitan landscapes   11

the city. Different political, social and urban agendas are reflected in how landscapes and cities (and their hinterland) interact. In tracing these trajectories, we can better understand how landscapes are mobilised today in negotiating urban life, uncertainty and change driving the associated challenges facing decision makers. Metropolitan plans today reflect a city’s and to a lesser extent the national social milieu, the cultural and physical geography and governance arrangements within and across jurisdictions (Bunker, 2012). Mobilising the positive values of landscapes through the generous encompassing view of the metropolitan scale provides us with new understandings of urban problems as part of a larger context (Donlyn, 2007). Today the increasing uncertainties resulting from global warming and the declaration of the Anthropocene reaffirms this need to recover and explore new methods of comprehending, decoding, managing and mobilising metropolitan landscapes. Pragmatically this book posits the “metropolitan” as the focus for examining this relationship between the landscapes and urbanising trajectories for the following reasons. “Metropolitan” is, by definition, a landscape scale description of urban settlement. Here the landscape scale is defined by broad ecological or topographical patterns such as a water catchment or a bioregion. While the definition is not precise and is contestable, it allows a level of urban policy thinking at a landscape systems scale. For many large cities, the metropolitan plan remains an overarching policy project for planning urban settlements. Despite its modernist origins, these plans encompass a broad range of urban settlement types and conurbations that provide higher order policy direction and long-­term visions under which more localised spatial plans can operate with degrees of flexibility. Historically, cities that consciously incorporated landscape objectives in their earliest metropolitan plans, a feature of many nation’s capitals, have structural similarities that provide interesting insights into the role of landscapes in addressing major social and environmental issues. Patterns of urban settlement vary greatly around the world, and the complexities associated with comprehending the different settlement patterns are confounding. Practically, the metropolitan plan provides an accessible and reasonably comparable scale of enquiry. Contemporary metropolitan plans still shape long-­term urban agendas, and are largely delivered and promoted as a product of government dialogue with other layers of government, the private sector and the community. A key to land use planning, the metropolitan plan’s regulatory authority allows the state to exert some control over the economic levers of the city and its surrounding regions. The metropolitan scale, therefore, is a framing device for this book to consider scales of space and forces of influence, not simply as a measure of land area, but as a means to explore the role landscape plays in a range of scenarios and case studies. In exploring these themes, this book is divided into three sections (metropolitan trajectories, metropolitan strategies and metropolitan imaginaries) to

12   Metropolitan trajectories

guide the reader through the different aspects of the questions raised within its pages. Case studies from around the world provide insight into how different societies have deployed landscape strategies to make cities more sustainable. It will help the reader to develop your understanding of the relationships between a range of policy agendas and the metropolitan landscape.

Metropolitan trajectories Metropolitan landscapes are ubiquitous; they surround and sustain us in different forms. For this reason these landscapes are also difficult to comprehend, evaluate and plan. One only has to fly over their own city in an aircraft, or virtually using Google Earth, to see that landscapes do not conventionally suit classifications that guide conventional planning and management regimes. Metropolitan trajectories explore the way social institutions have shaped the landscape over time. Taking an historical approach, it explores how ambitions for ideal urban life have preoccupied the minds of philosophers, utopianists and professional urbanists for millennia. The landscape has, in the territorial transformation of space, intertwined in the social, political and spatial theories of what constitutes a good urban life. Chapter 2 explores how real and imaginary urban environments and settlements have been comprehended since the earliest cities and how those conceptions influence the way modern planning emerged from this dialogue. In applying these themes, it explores how the landscape has contributed to shaping the modern metropolis. The chapter explores the concepts of “vision” and “plan” as forward looking ontological forces driving metropolitan planning and urban policy. It concludes with an examination of London’s most recent approach to metropolitan planning and how the city’s long history of planning has been informed by open space structures and how the role of landscapes has shifted over time. Chapter 3 looks more closely at the social and political forces that have shaped metropolitan planning and the urban landscape structures resulting from the paradigm shifts in the late twentieth/early twenty-­first century. It discusses the political challenges for metropolitan planning, largely centred on the legitimacy and authority of statutory bodies to exert influence over other levels of government, private interests and civil society in regulating urban growth. It considers the late twentieth­century global economic shift towards neoliberalism and how this led to the erosion of state power and a decline in the influence of metropolitan planning. The chapter concludes with an examination of Singapore’s novel approaches to balancing the competing needs of population growth and development to enhance the nation state’s economy, identity and international political ascendancy through focussing on landscape values. Chapter 4 explores how landscapes are incorporated into the sustainable development paradigms and how those landscape values are enacted as policies and strategies. It begins with a discussion on the differing theoretical positions on sustainable development. The chapter then explores how planning has negotiated the competing social, environmental and economic agendas through consciously revealing

Understanding metropolitan landscapes   13

the tensions and conflicts inherent in the urban sustainability agenda. It concludes with a comparative analysis of the different approaches that two national capitals, Canberra, Australia and Ottawa, Canada have reframed urban governance around sustainable development and the supporting role that established landscape systems have played in each city.

Metropolitan strategies Metropolitan strategies examine the role of the state, markets and civil society in the formation and regulation of metropolitan landscape policy. This balance can be immutable, culturally determined or more responsive to social, political and economic forces within and outside the municipal boundary. It investigates some of the socio-­political issues around access to and distribution of metropolitan landscapes. Chapter 5 presents the challenges and opportunities for incorporating landscapes into policies that don’t naturally fit into conventional landscape planning and management domains. It provides a summary of the ways landscapes have been conceptualised in theory and practice. It then identifies how landscape values can be mobilised in the decision making process. Concepts of scale are explored in more detail and how, for decision makers, landscape values may be framed in the context of addressing metropolitan policy problems. The chapter concludes with an examination of how the Milan metropolitan region has evolved over time in a continuous dialogue with the surrounding productive agricultural landscape. Chapter 6 explores the theme of governance in relation to planning and managing landscapes at a metropolitan scale. It asks you to consider the advantages and disadvantages of different forms of governance and what models are effective for planning and managing the metropolitan landscape. It draws on theories from ecology and ecosystems thinking to identify relationships between governance and management to explore the role landscapes play in sustainable urban development and change. The chapter then describes the roles of stakeholders in dealing with complex urban environmental problems. It concludes with an exploration of the Greater Copenhagen Plan and how it comprehends and incorporates landscape structures into the metropolitan planning agenda. Chapter 7 introduces the tools for deploying different forms of regulation in relation to protecting, managing and enhancing metropolitan landscape values. Using concepts from behavioural economic theory and applying them in the landscape context will allow you to consider the problems, challenges and opportunities for developing regulatory tools that will stand up to conventional policy analysis. It argues that regulation needs to take into consideration how humans access the values of the landscape and the forms of regulation that can support the production of ecosystem services to the benefit of the community. It concludes with an examination how New York and the greater tri-­state area have deployed different forms of government and private (self ) regulation to incorporate landscape values into decision making.

14   Metropolitan trajectories

Metropolitan imaginaries Metropolitan imaginaries explores how broader movements towards city greening, through theory and practice, have been shaped in the past (trajectories), are shaped (strategies) and will be shaped (imaginaries) in response to emerging global challenges. With a particular focus on urban policy responses to resource constraints, it brings together themes from the first two parts to explore future directions for metropolitan landscape planning and management by exploring contemporary urban agendas. Chapter 8 examines the urban health policy agenda from a metropolitan perspective and the potential of landscapes to mitigate some of the health challenges facing urbanising populations in the twenty-­first century. Apart from major social and economic imperatives to address global health issues, this chapter will pull apart some of the practical implications of addressing this multi-­layered and complex policy issue through the landscape lens. In proposing a policy framework, Chapter 8 considers how landscape policies address human health (and wellbeing) and what implications this has for collaboration within and across government, the private sector and civil society more broadly. The chapter concludes with an examination of the major and profound health related environmental pollution challenges for Beijing and looks to the city’s ancient landscape structure for deploying greening strategies to help improve the citizens’ health outcomes. Chapter 9 explores the interaction between landscapes and the flow of energy through metropolitan regions. In the context of a decarbonising global economy this chapter considers how metropolitan landscape policies can contribute to mitigating energy flows, offsetting energy consumption and supporting efforts to achieve carbon neutrality in metropolitan systems. The role of landscape policies in addressing the urban heat island effect is explored in detail. It concludes with a case study of Masdar City in the United Arab Emirates. Masdar is a product of a broader national policy for economic transition from fossil fuel dependence to a more diversified economy, driven by attracting research and development into green technologies and in anticipation of a decarbonised global economy. Chapter 10 weaves together the major themes explored in this book and proposes a framework around the concepts of resilience, transformative potentials and the future opportunities for metropolitan regions as we move towards 70 percent of the global population living an urban life by mid-­century. This chapter and the book conclude with propositions for the future green resilient city: what it would be like and what strategies will provide a point of orientation and focus for decision makers advocating for and deploying metropolitan landscape policies and strategies.

Conclusion In applying the lessons and drawing out the themes from the book we can consider how cities can mobilise landscapes to address some pressing challenges of urbanisation.

Understanding metropolitan landscapes   15

These three parts, each worthy of a book in themselves, examine the way we might progress to a more comprehensive understanding of a landscape oriented approach to planning and management at a metropolitan scale. These propositions can be framed broadly as questions such as: How do we maintain a healthy urban life? How do cities function in a carbon neutral economy? And how do cities build resilience in the face of global warming? By developing simple models and reflecting on case studies from around the world, it is hoped that this book will equip you with the knowledge, skills and confidence to argue the case for landscape led thinking about how the world’s citizens can live a healthy productive urban life in the twenty-­first century.

References Antrop, M. (1998). Landscape change plan or chaos. Landscape and Urban Planning, 41, 155–161. Antrop, M. (2004). Landscape change and the urbanisation process in Europe. Landscape and Urban Planning, 67, 9–26. Bailey, G. (2007). Time perspectives, palimpsests and the archaeology of time. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, 26, 198–223. Bosselmann, P., & Ruggeri, D. (2007). The future metropolitan landscape. Places, 19(1), 4–6. Bunker, R. (2012). Reviewing the path dependency in Australian metropolitan planning. Urban Policy and Research, 30(4), 443–452. Campbell, H., & Corley, E. (2012). Urban environmental policy analysis. New York: M. E. Sharpe. Council of Europe. (2000). European landscape convention. Davis, D. (1985). The “metropolitan thesis” and the writing of Canadian urban history. Urban History Review, 14(2), 95–113. Davis, M. (2006). Planet of slums: urban involution and the informal working class. London: Verso. Donlyn, L. (2007). Caring for places: memory, vision and metropolis. Places, 19(1), 3–8. Enticknap, L. (2013). Metropolis. Science Fiction Film and Television, 6(3), 422–428. Freestone, R. (2010). Urban nation: Australia’s planning heritage. Collingwood: CSIRO. Gleeson, B. (2006). Australian Heartlands making spaces for hope in the suburbs. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Hann, C. (2017). The Anthropocene and anthropology: micro and macro perspectives. European Journal of Social Theory, 20(1), 183–196. Kelbaugh, D. (1989). The Pedestrian Pocket Book: a new suburban design strategy. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Lowenthal, D. (2007). Living with and looking at landscape. Landscape Research, 32(5), 635–656. Matsuoka, R. H., & Kaplan, R. (2008). People needs in the urban landscape: analysis of landscape and urban planning contributions. Landscape and Urban Planning, 84(1), 7–19. Morgado, S. (2013). Towards a metropolitan design. Planum. The Journal of Urban Design, 27(2), 1–9. Olwig, K. (2005). The landscape of customary law versus that of natural law. Landscape Research, 30(3), 299–320. Rowe, P. (1991). Making a middle landscape. London: MIT Press. SGS Economics and Planning. (2009). The Territory Plan Urban Principles Review. Canberra.

16   Metropolitan trajectories

Steffen, W., Broadgate, W., Deutsch, L., Gaffney, O., & Ludwig, C. (2015). The trajectory of the Anthropocene: the great acceleration. The Anthropocene Review, 2(1), 81–98. Thompson, S. (2007). Planning Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Waldheim, C. (2006). Landscape as urbanism. In C. Waldheim (Ed.), The landscape urbanism reader (pp. 35–55). New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Walker, B., & Salt, D. (2012). Resilience practice: engaging the sources of our sustainability. Washington: Island Press. Wilson, G. A. (2014). Community resilience: path dependency, lock-­in effects and transitional ruptures. Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, 57(1), 1–26. Wylie, J. (2007). Landscape. New York: Routledge.

2 Co-­evolution of the landscape and the metropolis

The previous chapter introduced the concept that, in examining the interplay between the landscapes we live in and the institutions that govern us, we can begin to understand some of the forces that shape our cities (Figure 1.1). To do this, we must also understand how visions of the ideal city shape our institutions, our politics and even our understanding of our place in the world (Cosgrove, 2001). Exploring the historical interplay between the urban landscape and the institutions that shape the city helps us to understand the powerful embrace that urban imaginaries have held over political leaders, the bureaucracy and the citizenry throughout the ages. This chapter explores how real and imaginary urban environments, (towns, cities, metropolises and utopias) have been conceived over time and how those conceptions influence the way modern planning emerged from this dialogue. In applying these themes, we then explore how the landscape has contributed to shaping the modern metropolis. Consider the concepts of “vision” and “plan” as forward looking but subtly different ontological forces that have driven metropolitan planning and urban policy. Today we might consider a vision statement as a fundamental part of a metropolitan plan. Aspirational and with long timeframes, contemporary metropolitan plans distinguish themselves from detailed land use plans through retaining visionary elements of imagination derived from a utopian spirit. The “vision” inspires notions of imaginative and aspirational ideas about the future; whereas the “plan” provides incremental, practical and measurable targets and timelines. Visions of cities have excited philosophers and scholars since classical times. In thinking about the political and social forces that shape our cities, we should first consider how visions of urban life have influenced and been influenced by philosophy and utopian writings. We can consider how city visions have captured the imagination of philosophers and politicians since Plato’s Republic (c.380 bc), one of the first and the most influential works of political theory in Western doctrine. We can see that

18   Metropolitan trajectories

metropolitan plans today retain elements of the Platonic vision for a good civic life by nurturing a public sphere in which social activity is fostered for social and political purposes (Paden, 2001). Indeed the concept of a good public life is evident in the way we think about notions such as sustainability and liveability, agendas that drive urban theory and policy today. The focus of this book is how the concept of the “landscape” fits into the modern urban vision for a good public life and all that means in the face of climate change, population migration and disruptive technologies. In the previous chapter, the European Landscape Convention definition is used to establish a basis for understanding how the landscape is characterised in this book. To recap, landscape “means an area, as perceived by people, whose character is the result of the action and interaction of natural and/or human factors” (Council of Europe, 2000). To develop the concept of a “metropolitan landscape” using this definition also provides us with a starting point to consider how the ideas of the urban and the landscape overlap throughout time. First-­century historian Tacitus (ad 56–117) distinguished Roman civility in contrast to the barbarian tribes they conquered by observing the way the barbarians occupied and modified the landscape. To Tacitus, a pleasing landscape was one that showed signs of being formed by man’s “civilizing and fructifying mark”. In contrast, the tribal Germanic forests were “informem terres”, which meant both “shapeless” and “dismal” (Schama, 1995, p. 81). The contrasting observations of civilised and uncivilised landscapes made here by Tacitus are deeply political and in the tradition of the utopian writers who sought to influence political debate through symbolism and metaphor. To Tacitus, the landscape could only be pleasing if it were civilised by recognisable patterns of human endeavour and ownership which directly correlated to Roman methods of territorial occupation. Such “civilising marks” of human endeavour have become a consistent theme of urban and landscape manifestations since the early Roman Empire. The mathematical tools of the grid and the survey have been used to articulate the landscape ever since (Mitchell, 1994). The grid was a way of seeing the world which was accessible and communicable. It gave certainty in the way the landscape was ordered and named, affording property and ownership rights over the land. The grid and the map meant the organic landscape could be allocated or surveyed for future settlement (Cosgrove, 2001; Olwig, 2005). This codification of nature revealed the state’s moral imperative to impose its own vision and order in arranging the landscape into organised space. In effect, the use of the survey and the map was the most pertinent trace on the landscape of the West’s “territorial inscription” over the colonised world in the last 500 years. This method for surveying and converting unsettled space into land ownership drove the exploration of North America and Australia (Carter, 1987; Cosgrove, 2008). The 1785 township and range survey in the USA not only symbolised a democratic rationality, it inscribed reason over nature on a continental scale. The grid expressed democracy and prosperity, “dispensing space into equal portions to convert land into property” (Cosgrove, 2008, p. 174). This method of territorialisation provided settler societies a rational means for conceiving of and expanding urban settlements. Property and

Co-evolution of landscape and metropolis   19

landscape are essential bedfellows in the formulation of urban settlements occurring at an unprecedented scale across the planet today. Yet despite this characterisation, metropolitan landscapes are products of much more complex associations between nature, institutions and the cultural practices and rituals of those that depend on landscape for their very being. For new Anglo settler nations such as New Zealand, Canada, the USA and Australia, inscribing the landscape has not been characterised by the rigid class structure of Imperial Britain or Renaissance Western Europe; nor has it experienced the complete transformation of terrestrial space by a powerful land owning aristocracy as it was in Britain and France. North Amer­icans have not organised nature into park-­like scenery (although some isolated attempts have occurred). Despite the vastness of wilderness in the new occupied territories nature in the new world was politically tamed. The grid survey, carved into the urban landscape, was the principle method used to plan the structure of the post-­war suburban city. Blocks of land were laid out over the landscape in a formal or rectilinear pattern, regardless of site specific topographical and geographical features (Boyd, 1960). Like the particular English version of the picturesque aesthetic, the use of the grid to appropriate land has become the dominant, although not universal, mode of urban design and plan. In many cases, such layouts were imposed universally and, in their execution, often compromised opportunities for better environmental and social design outcomes. Critics of the modern suburban cities railed against the poor urban structure and low density built form. These were homogenising, uniform and isolating spaces that were socially and racially stratified, fermenting increased mistrust, and class and racial antagonism. Reacting to many of these mechanically minded approaches to the fragmentation and despoliation of urban and peri-­urban landscapes surrounding his home in Glasgow, Ian McHarg pioneered techniques for capturing the values that landscapes afforded an urbanising society. His seminal work Design with Nature (1969) popularised landscape modelling and became a precursor to the development of modern geographic information systems (GIS) in landscape research. McHarg’s work opened up the field of landscape analysis to increasingly complex and detailed understandings of landscapes that, with the advent of satellite technology, dramatically expanded the available tools for examining landscapes from an ecological as well as a geographic perspective. This approach, popular today in ecological and natural sciences, is deeply embedded in measurable data and relies heavily on computer systems and software design. However, this approach was not designed to interpret the experiential, affective and perceptual dimensions of landscape (Wylie, 2007). It seems ironic that toward the end of the twentieth century, the enduring image of Earth, from the Apollo moon flights between 1968 and 1972, showed a lonely planet floating in the vastness of space; an organic, biological and dynamic sphere, not a patterned geometric planet (Cosgrove, 2001). In the 1970s and 1980s, research flourished into the interpretive approaches to everyday aspects of landscape as a cultural practice. New representational and artistic interpretations of landscape helped to foster new theoretical understandings of our human/nature relationship.

20   Metropolitan trajectories

These more qualitative approaches, that were developed alongside the GIS-­based methods, remained quite separate, in all but their shared commitment to working in the field, until the end of the twentieth century (Antrop, 2000). During the early twenty-­first century, remote sensing and satellite imagery technology introduced landscapes to ecological researchers at a finer grain urban scale, more the domain of cultural geographers and other social researchers. The landscape impact of urban settlement on rural and other non-­urban landscapes has gained more interest from the political class. However, it is the overlapping of the discrete research fields of ecology and cultural heritage in the context of urbanisation, uncertainty and climate change that provides the most interesting theoretical developments that inform urban policy. The competing social and political forces of territorial transformation impacting urban, suburban, peri-­urban and non-­urban land uses in the era of climate change dominate landscape scholarship in the twenty­first century. By exploring some of the themes presented here, we can better understand how we have arrived at this point in our collective urban history. The next section of this chapter returns to the urban imaginaries and the utopian visions for a good society.

The utopian vision The imaginary city has held a powerful place in political literature for centuries and utopian thinkers laid the philosophical foundations for modern metropolitan planning to emerge in the late nineteenth century (Akkerman, 2001). Thomas More (1478–1535), an English philosopher and statesman during the reign of King Henry VIII, produced the satirical work of fiction Utopia (1516), to describe a mythical island city state. More coined the term by combining the Greek word topos, meaning “place”, with the prefix for “non”, eu. Utopia (or “non-­place”) expresses both the imaginary and the ideal and has since become an adjective in the English language to describe a work of fiction that predominantly, but not exclusively, centres on how an urbanised society should function. Though playful, More’s Utopia is an intensely earnest depiction of an island, populated with cities evenly distributed across it and the principles that govern them (Figure 2.1). There are fifty-­four cities in the island, all large and well built, the manners, customs and laws of which are the same, and they are all contrived as near in the same manner as the ground in which they stand will allow. (Thomas More, 1516, in Burnet, 1901) Significantly, More’s Utopia establishes the relationship between the spatial organisation of a city and how the city (and its citizens) should be governed. Other classical examples of utopias include New Atlantis (1627) by Francis Bacon and The City of the Sun (1639) by Tommaso Campanella. Part philosophical treatise and part political theory, these Utopias used the city as a powerful literary device. In fiction, these works of political science “proposed a universal theocracy, depicting the city

Co-evolution of landscape and metropolis   21

Figure 2.1   Illustration

from the 1516 edition of Utopia, showing distribution of settlements on an unspoilt island.

Source: by permission of the British Library.

as a metonym for how a state or empire should govern its citizens” (Cosgrove, 2001, pp. 168–169). Utopianists were concerned with solving the problems of the city. Philosophically grounded and transcending the everyday problems of their inhabitants, the utopian plans, unlike utopian architecture, were neither beautiful nor practical (Paden, 2001). Literary and graphic depictions of utopian life introduced possibilities concerning how society should be spatially and morally organised. The purpose of Bacon’s New Atlantis was to reinterpret the Platonic myth of a fictional society, Bensalem, to instil hope in the reader that Plato’s “golden age” could be recovered and civic excellence restored. Whereas Bacon’s Bensalem was allegorical, Campanella’s City of the Sun contained very detailed and prescriptive accounts of the urban plan (Figure 2.2). Campanella’s utopian treatise was written

22   Metropolitan trajectories

Figure 2.2   Campanella’s

City of the Sun (1607).

Source: by permission of Project Gutenberg.

during the first period of urban planning in the Western imagination. By the end of the Middle Ages, up to 1,000 Mannerist (planned) new towns were founded in central and Western Europe (Akkerman, 2001). The flourishing of these planned new towns in France and Germany during the renaissance became a pivotal force in the rise of modern philosophy and science which embody the “mechanistic adeptness” that typically informs much of urban planning today. Campanella’s City of the Sun contained detailed descriptions of spatial hierarchy and order. It was so detailed that LeNôtre’s design for the Palace and Gardens of Versailles used key elements of Campanella’s treatise, perhaps the first significant architectural translation of an urban vision. Commissioned by Louis XIV, Versailles was designed to “symbolize [in] his divinely appointed person and to project through his royal authority France’s position as the intellectual leader of the modern western world” (S. Rogers, 2001, p. 26). Campanella’s imaginary city was “divided into seven large circular areas, named after seven planets, and the way from each circle to the next is along four roads and through four gates which face the cardinal points of the compass” (Campanella, 1981, p. 124). Le Nôtre, inspired by Campanella’s work, spatially projected Louis XIV’s absolute power through the landscape (S. Rogers, 2001). René Descartes (1596–1650), the father of modern scientific philosophy, also lived in and visited the Mannerist new towns. Designed on geometric principles these new towns “led him to the vision of a single, unified science in which philosophy and all knowledge would be interconnected” (Akkerman, 2001, p.  144).

Co-evolution of landscape and metropolis   23

Descartes was inspired by the contrast between the irregularity and messiness of Gothic townscapes and the clarity and predictability expressed in the geometric plans of streets and squares. In outlining his scientific methodology, not only was Descartes inspired by the planned urban environments he travelled through, his writings on “dessien” laid the foundations of twentieth-­century scientific origins of town planning (Fishman, 1982). Utopian treatises were political manifestos, projecting the power of the author and their patrons to exert influences over the growing mercantile urban population. While More’s Utopia established a spatial order to a mythical island as a literary device to justify the political intentions behind his ideas on governance of civilised populations, Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis gave the fullest statement of his political theory. Transforming the philosophical quest from the search for the heavenly city to the formulation of a well governed country (McKnight, 2005). The modern imperative to realise the utopian vision of the socially just space was also expressed in the deployment of the grid, laid over the organic forms and processes of the urban landscape, to create parks, squares and plazas and eventually suburbs. The use of the grid was a persistent theme of both the utopia and the cities it was designed to improve. As a result, a tension existed between the right to property, community identity and notions of social justice through the imagining of ideal spaces in the urban landscape. Therefore we can consider here that the city and the landscape were shaped by similar forces of territorialisation and Euclidean spatial organisation that inspired modern philosophy and science during the Renaissance. The utopian vision for the city continued throughout the twentieth century. Most notably, Le Corbusier’s Radiant City and Lloyd Wright’s Broad-­acre City sustained the debate on utopian and urban philosophy for much of the last century. Henri Lefebvre, towards the end of his life, had some trepidation that society viewed itself as “beyond utopias”. To modern planning, utopias were either products of naïve optimism or they symbolised the many failures of authoritarian ideals associated with failed totalitarian states (Pinder, 2005). Yet successful spaces could not be discovered without experimentation of which utopias was one of those modes of practice. Lefebvre lamented that, without a utopian spirit, we no longer plan the ideal city, but tolerate the adequate city (Lefebvre, 1996).

When you read the Vision for a metropolitan plan, think about the ideas behind the words. Is it a product of naïve optimism? Does it have roots in the utopian spirit for a good city life? If visions are about the future ambitions of a community, what is the essence of the message the vision is offering future readers? While you think about these concepts and ideas you need to also consider the substantive subject, the plan itself.

The next section of this chapter delves into the origins of the metropolitan plan and its place in the formation of the modern city.

24   Metropolitan trajectories

The plan Utopian visions, along with the cartographic surveys founded on political and philosophical beliefs concerning social and spatial organisation, bring together the essential elements of the modern metropolitan plan. Utopianists were deeply influential in progressing political and scientific thought. Their ideas inspired local powerful elites to spatially organise the rapidly expanding global cities of Britain and Europe during the early Renaissance period. Like the Utopian vision, the survey of the city has a long tradition in the Western imagination. During the seventeenth century, such artistic and cartographic plans were produced for more commercial than practical reasons. For example, London has been recorded in cartographic and panoramic illustrations by commercial publishers and print shops since the early sixteenth century. Plans following the Great Fire of London in 1666 signalled a shift from illustration to survey. In 1652 Wencelaus Hollar, an artist and etcher from Prague, began a project to depict every important building in London using an artistic but detailed perspective (birds-­eye view) projection. Following the Great Fire and under appointment from King Charles II, Hollar’s contemporaries completed his plan of London with accompanying panoramas (Figure 2.3), although they didn’t sell well (Paden, 2001). The panoramic view was making way for the scientifically scaled and measured plans that signalled a new era in city survey. In 1676, a map of London supervised by John Ogilby and published by William Morgan was offered for sale. The map,

Figure 2.3   Hollar’s

plan of London before the 1666 Great Fire.

Source: by permission of the The Wencles Hollar Collection, University of Toronto.

Co-evolution of landscape and metropolis   25

consisting of 20 sheets, scaled at 1:1200, was the first reliable survey of the city offering a degree of confidence to citizens regarding their claim to tenure and property rights (Figure 2.4). These two plans largely produced before and after the Great Fire are symbolic of the shift in social attitudes to embrace more empirical approaches to understanding the city. Cartographers working around the same time as Bacon recorded not only the spatial trajectory of London around the time of the Great Fire but also, in the spirit of Bacon’s influence, were graphically depicting the shape of the modern global city in an accurate, objective record determined by survey and scientific method. These selective historical examples serve to illustrate the point that metropolitan plans are more than instrumental economic products of twentieth-­ century state control of urban development. They contain essential elements dating back to classical Greek and Roman times that symbolise the relationship between civil societies, the state (historically the church and the crown) and a vision of civilised urban life. Living in nature, for utopianists such as More, Campanella and Bacon, was synonymous with morality. McKnight (2005) argues that “Bacon’s instauration [restorative treatise] is a program for rehabilitating humanity and its relation to nature, guided by divine providence and achieved through pious human effort” (p.  75). Whereas the utopian treatise expressed political agency, the cartographic grid and the survey expressed urban democracy (Cosgrove, 2008). As cities rapidly expanded in the early industrial era as people migrated into densely packed urban areas looking for work, the landscape became an antidote, part utopian (or Arcadian) vision and part strategy, in the form of public parks.

Figure 2.4   Ogilby

and Morgan’s Plan of London 1677.

Source: by permission of the British Library.

26   Metropolitan trajectories

The first metropolitan landscapes Western cities expanded and became industrialised during the eighteenth and nineteenth century due in large part to the Industrial Revolution. Population growth and internal migration saw cities such as London reach one million around the end of the eighteenth century. Pressures to accommodate, feed, employ and transport citizens around the city placed enormous pressure on London’s urban and peri-­ urban landscapes. This recurring tension in reaction to the loss of landscape spaces manifested in the nineteenth century through the emergence of the parks and gardens movements in the UK and the USA. These movements were largely established to combat declining health standards in the crowded industrialised major cities. As cities expanded to accommodate workers migrating from the countryside, parks were promoted as necessary to alleviate the cramped housing located adjacent to the factories that polluted the air and water (Thompson, 2011). The earliest parks in London were constructed in response to a desperate need for open space for the working poor to access. Although the earlier parks in London were segregated along class lines, Birkenhead Park in Merseyside, in England’s north-­west, the first publicly funded park, was opened in 1847. Breaking the model of segregation, Birkenhead Park was to become an influential model for public parks around the Western world (E. Rogers, 2001). New York, like many Western global cities of the nineteenth century, was experiencing rapid growth from migration and a booming industrial manufacturing economy. Similar to European cities, New York also suffered environmental effects from overcrowding, pollution from factories and poor sanitation. Soon after the opening of Birkenhead Park, the Mayor of New York proposed that the city also create a public park to improve the standards of health for the city’s workers. The ongoing deliberations about the funding and design of a city park were led by a small group of wealthy entrepreneurs, who justified the building of a park on the grounds that it would enhance the productivity of the city by improving the physical and moral health of its citizens (Hutchinson, 2017). To a great extent, the design of Central Park by Fredrick Law Olmsted was influenced by Joseph Paxton’s design for Birkenhead Park. Unlike Birkenhead though, the drive to build Central Park came from motivated and powerful individuals privately funding the development rather than public revenue. Regardless, the parks in London and New York served the same public purpose, providing spaces for recreation and social gathering. Large public parks, a creation in response to industrial overcrowding, are now a key feature of major metropolises around the world today. Parks were not the only influential landscapes driving the development of cities in the nineteenth century. The earliest versions of the modern suburban estates mimicked the architecture and layout of large estates in the rural areas close to England’s largest cities. These estates allowed wealthy merchants to live close enough to the city to commute, but in the countryside so that they might benefit from the virtues of a non-­urban lifestyle. Such estates were inspired by eighteenth­century English landscape gardeners who were known for producing picturesque

Co-evolution of landscape and metropolis   27

park-­like scenes more consistent with the tradition of landscape painting. This landscape manifestation literally reconfigured the English landscape through the influence of eighteenth-­century landscape designers such as Lancelot “Capability” Brown (1716–1783) and Humphry Repton (1752–1818). The contrived landscape settings typified the treatment of landscape as a romantic construction of nature and retelling the heroic ancient narratives of empire (Olwig, 2002). Strong connections existed between improvements to one’s estate and the ability to govern in imperial Britain. The political dimension of land reformation around the allocation of property rights displaced peasants as they lost their access land to produce their own food through the enclosures act (Macarthur, 2007). The territorialisation of the landscape through the allocation of property rights at the expense of a “good public life” gave certainty and authority for the powerful land owning class to expand cities that continues today. The tension between the public’s right to access and the state’s desire to allocate property rights over landscapes drives many policy decisions today, in particular how we finance and manage public landscapes. This theme will be explored in section two.

Figure 2.5   London’s

Greenbelt Plan, April 1962.

Source: Ministry of Housing and Local Government (1962).

28   Metropolitan trajectories

The late nineteenth-­century rapid expansion of industrial cities into the English landscape inspired several associations such as the Garden Cities Movement to pressure governments into preserving countryside landscapes by establishing urban growth boundaries. Early twentieth-­century architect and town planner, Patrick Abercrombie (1879–1957), insisted on democratising access to the landscape and in doing so he pioneered open space planning. Abercrombie developed the use of green belts in London, providing open spaces for recreation and regulating urban growth. Following ideas advanced by Henry Wright and Clarence Stein the Greater London Regional Planning Committee published a report on London’s open spaces in which the green belt scheme devised by Abercrombie was promoted. In 1938 the scheme became law with the passing of the Green Belt (London and Home Counties) Act 1938 (see Figure 2.5) (Morgado, 2013). Abercrombie’s Greater London Plan offered solutions to London’s rapid and sprawling growth during the interwar period. Inspired by the need to improve housing conditions, address traffic congestion and connect citizens to a public open space network of parks and forests, this plan set the agenda for metropolitan planning in the UK and these themes remain as relevant today as they were 80 years ago (van Roosmalen, 1997).

The garden city The idea of the green city is not new, Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City of To-­Morrow (1902) was a pivotal treatise on the modern city and seminal in formalising urban and regional planning as a profession (Fishman, 1982; Freestone, 1989). Garden Cities of To-­Morrow (1902) represented a shift in utopian writing from philosophy and experiment toward a general theory of planning (Fishman, 1982). Howard describes his general theory through a series of diagrams based on his three magnets model, graphically describing the attraction (hence the magnet metaphor) of town and country living as seen in Figure 2.6. Significantly Howard provided a blueprint for spatial organisation in sufficient detail to guide planning of new towns based on his model. Figure 2.7 conceptually describes connected urban nodes around a central city. Micro-­cities (or garden cities) are organised on a constellation of transport corridors. Each garden city contained a central garden and rings of development interlaced by fields and farms. In effect the Garden City Movement was not only reacting to the vices and poor living conditions of the industrial city, it was also coming to terms with rapid suburban sprawl following transport corridors extending way beyond the city centre. Garden Cities of To-­Morrow outlined what Howard hoped could be achieved, and as such fits the description of a utopian text (Fishman, 1982). The term “Garden City” was used to explain many variations on Ebenezer Howard’s vision, of which he believed Letchworth Garden City in Hertfordshire, England was the only example that had, in part at least, paved the way for solving key social problems such as housing, public health and transport. The design and development of Letchworth compromised many of Howard’s ideas from the beginning. The architects Richard Parker and Raymond Unwin won a competition to interpret Howard’s

Co-evolution of landscape and metropolis   29

Figure 2.6   Howard’s

three magnets model.

Source: Howard (1902) Garden City of To-Morrow.

vision, but disagreed with Howard’s overtly utopian master planned approach. They preferred to think of the residents living a “small corporate life”, where individuals would share common interests and co-­exist in a semi-­rural village landscape. Howard was more deterministic and demanded a design arrangement that organised a whole view in which resident behaviour and social norms were influenced by rational holistic layout and structure. Howard wanted the suburban form to express “notions of organic unity and cooperation that looked back to traditional design and the example of the medieval village” (Pinder, 2005, p. 42); however, Parker and Unwin were less deterministic. The architects preferred to “create a synthesis of visual and social elements so that the view could again induce a feeling of order” (p. 43). Many of the changes were

30   Metropolitan trajectories

Figure 2.7   Howard’s

depiction of a typical garden city layout.

Source: Howard (1902) Garden City of To-Morrow.

in reality pragmatic; reducing costs to maintain the confidence of the financial backers. The architects’ conservative, anti-­urban view reflected the legacy of their English preoccupation with the scenic landscape movement as if the provision of landscape could once again overcome the ills of the city. Unsurprisingly, Letchworth (Figure 2.8) and other garden cities were watered-­down versions of Howard’s vision; responding to the demands of capitalist modes of development rather than becoming urban vessels for social change (Pinder, 2002). Despite the erosion of Howard’s vision, the mixing of landscape elements and urban structure in Letchworth was a hallmark of the early Garden City movement. Despite the apparent achievements of Letchworth, the problems of housing provision, efficient transport and public health remained the greatest challenge for growing cities during the twentieth century. Other early experiments in urban development focussed on planning to improve the quality of life for urban residents. In the USA, Raymond Unwin and Clarence Stein’s Radburn was praised with equal enthusiasm as Letchworth. In both urban experiments, the proponents sought to provide a setting that consciously incorporated urban landscape elements into the design, a feature not seen since the European Mannerist towns of the seventeenth century. Advocates of the Garden City movement also sought to overcome the laissez-­faire

Co-evolution of landscape and metropolis   31

Figure 2.8   Letchworth

Plan by Parker and Unwin (1904).

Source: Parker and Unwin (1904).

approach to urban governance through providing a plan that endured and inspired the virtues of planning for social good. While the Garden City reshaped ideas around modern urban living in the early twentieth century, it was the growth of the suburb that most profoundly shaped the metropolitan landscape.

The suburban landscape The suburb originally represented subordinate space on the edge of a town, it was a space occupied by people who were neither rural nor urban. The pre-­nineteenth century suburban dwellers were subordinate. They did not constitute a group who had political agency or identity. The pre-­suburban town shaped the body politic of citizenship and being a good townsman was the condition of fellowship under which local laws and conventions were constituted (Olwig, 1996). The advent of the suburban settlements not only marked a separation of the residential and commercial precincts – it also reshaped the modern city. New technologies and modern modes of production saw the emerging urban middle class place unprecedented demand on infrastructure and land to accommodate a growing demand for detached houses on private lots of land surrounded by private gardens that became synonymous with modern suburban life. Unlike the Garden City movement, the earliest conceptions of the suburban city emerged independently of the state and had very little to do with social justice, equity or satisfying the housing demand of the middle class (Jackson, 1985). The early versions of modern suburban communities were not

32   Metropolitan trajectories

subordinate, but rather exclusive domains for the wealthy seeking a more wholesome life, and at the time when the writings of Emerson and Thoreau in the USA popularised ideas of living in nature. By the early twentieth century, both in the USA and England, the modern suburb was well formed in the minds of developers and city officials (Jackson, 1985). Improved transport, manufacturing and construction methods meant that large scale residential estates very quickly became the preferred means of housing provision for the wealthy and then the emerging middle class. The rapid suburbanisation of Western cities created development patterns that closely followed the development of road and rail infrastructure. The suburbs replaced the rural landscape on the edges of cities, beginning an era of sprawling twentieth-­century cities. It was the intersection of the railway suburb and the car-­ dependant suburb that modernised the Garden City model to accommodate the impending competition for space between pedestrians and vehicles. In effect the development of the US garden city experiment of Radburn, New Jersey (Figure 2.9) was an endorsement of the car dependant community, but also a response to the need for social as well as physical planning (Lee & Stabin-­Nesmith, 2001). To overcome the conflict between the car and the pedestrian, the Radburn model introduced the superblock, the cul-­de-sac and pedestrian links connecting parks with pathways through the suburb. These weren’t just physical planning responses to the challenge of integrating the car into the suburban environment but also social ideas to foster interaction and community formation. As with the Garden City model, there was some expectation that citizens would give up some right to private space in order to facilitate the provision of public open spaces, and this trade-­off was seen as key to good community formation. At the same time, these new suburbs themselves became the subject of criticism. Lewis Mumford (1922) was most notable in his objection to the idealised utopian thinking behind master planned communities. He saw mistakes being made in the theoretical and the practical expression of ideal ways of living (Mumford, 1922). Mumford highlighted the superficiality of creating a one-­size-fits-­all approach to community formation. He lamented: “These utopias were so concerned to alter the shell of the community’s institutions that they neglected to pay attention to the habits of the creature itself ” (Mumford, 1922, p. 252). Mumford argued the creation of new suburban communities was as much about the reorganising of labour, streamlining of manufacturing processes, improvement in prefabrication technology and a general move toward a Fordist approach to construction, as it was about the democratisation of property ownership. The rapid expansion of cities on the urban fringes was also a product of innovations in transport and the desire of those that could afford to live away from the industrial core. Cheap land could be developed to meet the demand for housing of the emerging middle class while the car liberated homeowners from the restriction of access to trolley, tram and train networks, leading to the dismantling of public transport networks in favour of highways (Jackson, 1985). Today those same tram and train networks are being rediscovered and reincorporated

F2.9   A

typical closed-end street detail of the Radburn Plan.

Source: by permission Cornell University Library.

34   Metropolitan trajectories

into urban structures in an attempt to alleviate congestion and reduce air pollution caused by private motor vehicles. As the motor car became more affordable, living the commuter life become more desirable. Prior to the twentieth century, the suburb was still the domain of relatively few, however, with the mass production of the motor car, the suburb served as a means of increasing ordinary peoples’ right to property ownership, and so politically, the suburb represented a level of autonomy that had never been available before (Gans, 1988). In Anglo Western democracies such as Australia, the USA and UK, these phenomena were to fully realise their potential after the Second World War. As the motor car became affordable, so too did access to a suburban home, and developers became very attune to this emerging market. Mumford viewed this sort of development as deeply concerning. The developers of one of the first post-­war suburban estates in the USA were aware of the emerging critical appraisal of their developments. William Levitt and Sons, the developers of Levittown in New Jersey in the 1950s, were particularly sensitive to criticisms of their previous developments by Mumford. He argued that developments such as Levittown were expressions of an organisation’s rather than an ­individual’s vision, and that the planned suburb was a product of institutions which operated to modify behaviour. “The changing nature of these institutions, politics, education and the church, would change the perception and understanding of the community affected” (Mumford, 1968, p. 248). Such debates brought into question: who were the clients in such a mass-­produced master-­planned development, and how could such a deterministic approach to development respect the needs and aspirations of the residents buying into their little piece of America, or quarter acre dream as it was known in Australia? The spatial control in Levittown revealed a burgeoning desire to control the residents’ own concept of community. Levittown, like many new private suburban estates enshrined discriminatory policies, restricting access based on race. The lease agreements originally stipulated that “the tenant agrees not to permit the premises to be used or occupied by any person other than members of the Caucasian race” (Kushner, 2009). The race provision was later struck down as unconstitutional, however, the Levitt brothers continued to enforce racial homogeneity by rejecting potential buyers from non-­white backgrounds. The social and environmental impacts of suburbia contributed, along with highway development, to a radical rethinking of planning theory, architecture and urban design. Social activist, author and critic Jane Jacobs (1961) challenged planners and architects to understand what the fundamental principles were that constituted a good city rather than focussing on how the component parts of the city fitted together. She argued cities should not operate to provide a list of services but rather facilitate social interactions, and through those connections, neighbourhoods were formed. Jacobs’ contributions to theories on social formation in suburbia were significant. She argued neighbourhoods should be defined by the “fabric and the intricate cross use they generate, rather than by formal boundaries” (p. 138). She argued that many suburban developments were “cures irrelevant to the disease”

Co-evolution of landscape and metropolis   35

(p.  156) because suburbs generated spaces that were intermittently occupied. They were vacated during work hours and did not provide a sufficient and reliable supply of consumers to make social life meaningful, let alone commercial and retail operations viable.

Conclusion The metropolis–landscape relationship emerged from the same utopian spirit of the mythical cities such as Campanella’s City of the Sun. The straight avenues and streets, commonplace in Mannerist new towns of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, along with the geometrisation of the landscape by designers such as Le Nôtre, laid the foundations for the spatial logic that gave rise to the modern suburban metropolis. Tension between built form and landscape in cities emerge at least symbolically at this time. Empirically grounded, the built environment (buildings, roads, bridges and other infrastructures) could be surveyed and accurately depicted and to scale, whereas landscapes were messy, replete with organic forms. Landscapes of the garden city were contrived on a Euclidean grid (streetscapes, gardens and formal parks) and therefore made sense to the decision maker when geometrically reconfigured, whereas natural landscapes were difficult to survey and reproduce in the plan view. In contrast to the cartographers’ survey, the utopianists depicted the relationship between built form and the natural landscape in verse and sketch and with poetic clarity. So what does this reading of the emerging metropolitan landscape tell us about metropolitan planning today and the role landscapes play? In the era of virtual connection and online global communities, the ability to experience through touch, feel and smell, are ever increasingly precious (Ascher, 2007). It is too simple to suggest the modern utopia (dystopia) reflects a general decline in the social value of landscapes. Rather a complex relationship between urban governance, finance, densification and privatisation, along with a myriad of other cultural and social trends combine to incrementally reconfigure the metropolis. Yet the proliferation of todays “hypertext” communities doesn’t necessarily cause the demise of traditional physical sites of social engagement, instead it generates new places and urban configurations. The city’s DNA can be detected in its structure. Like a palimpsest, new renderings are overlaid on older iterations of the city. This is not to suggest nostalgia for traditional forms of recreation and social gathering exists in the movement to preserve public green spaces, but rather the landscape is very accommodating of evolving forms and modes of social engagement. One’s ability to share Facebook posts, use Instagram or Snapchat, potentially enriches the range of experiences landscapes can offer. The next chapter takes a more contemporary look at the underlying forces acting on the morphology of the metropolis. It examines the tenuous role landscapes play in the context of global urban consolidation and urban greening. These seemingly opposing forces create new types of spaces within the increasingly dense urban fabric. In an effort to reconnect the human and non-­human, many

36   Metropolitan trajectories

planners and urban designers respond to the fragmentation caused by low density suburban areas by restructuring based on modern interpretations of village models. It is an illusion to think that new dense urban forms can facilitate a community rediscovery of village lifestyles, where all activities take place within five minutes from your door step. The next chapter continues the story of metropolitan reform and the pursuit of consolidation policies in favour of more compact urban forms. However, the legacy of suburban development profoundly shapes the metropolitan landscape of cities today. The private gardens, streetscapes, parks and reserves support diverse novel ecological communities that provide essential ecosystem services. The role of these landscapes in the future of our cities will play an important role in terms of how cities adapt and respond to the effects of climate change. We ask to you consider the present condition in the next chapter in order to avoid simply returning to the past in reaction to the present.

Case study – London The London Plan is the strategic spatial plan for the greater London area. In effect, it is not a single plan but a continuously revised series of documents including spatial maps reflecting the agendas and priorities for London as interpreted by the responsible state agencies, namely the Mayor of London’s office, the 32 London boroughs and the City of London corporate entity (London Plan 2017). The regulatory enforceability of this plan comes from the Greater London Authority Act 1999 (as amended). The Act sets out the obligations of agencies responsible for keeping the plan under constant review, which may result in alterations, additions or complete replacement of incumbent versions. The plan should also only address strategic issues that are of importance to the greater London area. The intent of such a directive is to allow for over-­arching principles and policies to be established that do not unduly inhibit lower levels of government and civil society from planning and managing issues of local importance. The London Plan does retain authority over the more local planning instruments as superior legislation. This essentially means that other plans, prepared by lower levels of government, cannot devise or implement any actions that are inconsistent with the London Plan. For example, the development codes prepared by local borough councils and neighbourhood plans developed by local community organisations are required to be “in general conformity” with this overarching metropolitan plan. It is relatively easy to develop a sense about how the London Plan evolves over time. When considering the role of landscapes in the formulation of each new version you can see how the broad themes and agendas described in this and the previous chapters are reflected in the way landscapes are conceived and incorporated in text and maps into each version. I expect that many of you reading this will have access to versions of the London Plan not published at the time of writing this chapter. Our focus here is the landscape lens of the plan. One approach to this is to undertake a quick word search, identifying terms such as landscape, green, park,

Co-evolution of landscape and metropolis   37

garden, forest, farm, agriculture. We can also drill down a little further and identify key concepts that provide descriptive policies reflecting landscape qualities. (It might be worth going back to the European Landscape Convention definition to help you decide what is landscape). Terms such as open space, green belt, and green infrastructure are used in the 2018 version. Further still we can see how these terms and concepts relate to other policy agendas such as health, transport and environmental quality. By doing this we can get a picture of how landscapes are mobilised to support the strategic agenda of the time. We can also see how some of these applications of landscape are relatively new (e.g. adapting to climate change) and some are hundreds of years old (e.g. improving the health of citizens). Searching for the relevant terms used in the London Plan is a relatively blunt instrument to determine how landscape features in the thinking of the strategic planners, policy makers and politicians concerned, however it does provide a snapshot across a range of themes. For example, the foreword in the December 2017 draft version of the plan written by the Mayor at the time, Sadiq Khan, refers to both these examples. On page XV he states the Plan will be “a more inclusive, greener and safer city that supports the health and wellbeing of all Londoners” (London Plan, 2017), reflecting consensus among researchers that urban greening improves health and wellbeing in the same way Birkenhead Park was promoted in the mid-­nineteenth century. Further the Mayor is more explicit in describing what he means by greening and how landscape (by definition) can contribute to addressing more contemporary challenges. Khan writes: “I envisage London as a greener city, with high quality open spaces, parks and commons, and one where we lead the way in tackling climate change by moving towards a zero-­carbon city by 2050” (p. XVI). Today’s London Plan contains elements of creative (utopian) visions, empirical analysis and survey. Like the plans of the past, today’s London Plan provides a snapshot of the social, political and technological realities of the time (www. london.gov.uk/what-­we-do/planning/london-­plan). Identify and discuss the social, environmental and economic challenges that have been contemplated in the conceptualisation of the current version of the London Plan. What role does landscape play in addressing the future challenges for cities? What elements of the most current plan are visionary? What is the political context under which these visionary statements are made? What elements of the plan are instrumental and objectives? How do you know? How is the landscape described in the plan?

38   Metropolitan trajectories

References Akkerman, A. (2001). Urban planning in the founding of Cartesian thought. Philosophy & Geography, 4(2), 141–167. Antrop, M. (2000). Holistic aspects of suburban landscapes: visual image interpretation and landscape metrics. Landscape and Urban Planning, 50, 43–58. Ascher, F. (2007). Landscapes of capital: multimobility, multispeed cities. Places, 19(1), 36–41. Boyd, R. (1960). The Australian ugliness. Melbourne: Penguin. Campanella, T. (1981). The City of the Sun (trans. A. M. Elliot & R. Miller). London: Journeyman. Carter, P. (1987). The road to Botany Bay: an essay in spatial history. London: Faber and Faber. Cosgrove, D. (2001). Apollo’s eye: a cartographic genealogy of the Earth in the western imagination. Baltimore: JHU Press. Cosgrove, D. (2008). Geography and vision. New York: I. B. Tauris. Council of Europe. (2000). European landscape convention. Fishman, R. (1982). Urban utopias in the twentieth century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le Corbusier. Cambridge: MIT Press. Freestone, R. (1989). Model communities: the Garden City movement in Australia. Melbourne: Nelson. Gans, H. (1988). Middle Amer­ican individualism: the future of liberal democracy. New York: Macmillan. Hutchinson, C. (2017). Exploring the connection between landscape and biopolitics: the story of Freshkills Park. Landscape Review, 17(1), 219–234. Jackson, J. (1985). Crabgrass frontier: the suburbanisation of the United States. In B. Nicolaides & A. Wiese (Eds.), The suburban reader, 26–330. New York: Routledge. Jacobs, J. (1961). The death and life of great Amer­ican cities. New York: Random House. Kushner, D. (2009). Levittown: two families, one tycoon, and the fight for civil rights in America’s legendary suburb. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing. Lee, C., & Stabin-­Nesmith, B. (2001). The continuing value of a planned community: Radburn in the evolution of suburban development. Journal of Urban Design, 6(2), 151–184. Lefebvre, H. (1996). Writings on cities (E. Kofman & E. Lebas, Trans.). Oxford: Blackwell. Macarthur, J. (2007). The picturesque: architecture, disgust and other irregularities. London: Routledge. McHarg, I. (1969). Design with nature. New York: Natural History Press. McKnight, S. (2005). Francis Bacon’s God. The New Atlantis Journal of Technology and Science, Fall, 73–100. Mitchell, W. T. (1994). Imperial landscape. In W. T. Mitchell (Ed.), Landscape and power, 5–34. London: University of Chicago Press. Morgado, S. (2013). Towards a metropolitan design. Planum. The Journal of Urban Design, 27(2), 1–9. Mumford, L. (1922). The story of utopias (2nd edn). Boston: Gloucester. Mumford, L. (1968). The urban prospect. London: Secker and Warburg. Olwig, K. (1996). Recovering the substantive nature of landscape. Annals of the Association of Amer­ican Geographers, 86(4), 630–653. Olwig, K. (2002). Landscape nature and the body politic. London: University of Wisconsin Press. Olwig, K. (2005). The landscape of customary law versus that of natural law. Landscape Research, 30(3), 299–320.

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Paden, R. (2001). Values and planning: the argument from Renaissance utopianism. Ethics, Place & Environment, 4(1), 5–30. Pinder, D. (2002). In defence of utopian urbanism: imagining cities after the “end of utopia”. Geografiska Annaler, 84B(3–4), 229–241. Pinder, D. (2005). Visions of the city: utopianism, power and politics in twentieth century urbanism. New York: Routledge. Rogers, E. (2001). Landscape design: a cultural and architectural history. New York: Harry N. Abrams. Rogers, S. C. (2001). Anthropology in France. Annual Review of Anthropology, 30(1), 481–504. Schama, S. (1995). Landscape and memory. New York: Vintage. Thomas, D. (1963). London’s Green Belt: the evolution of an idea. The Geographical Journal, 129(1), 14–24. Thompson, C. (2011). Linking landscape and health: the recurring theme. Landscape and Urban Planning, 93(3), 187–195. van Roosmalen, P. K. (1997). London 1944: Greater London Plan. In K. Bosma & H. Hellinga (Eds.), Mastering the City: North-European Town Planning 1900–2000, 258–265. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers. Wylie, J. (2007). Landscape. New York: Routledge.

3 Landscapes and the contemporary metropolis

Metropolitan planning has been a project of ongoing reform through ambitious long-­term agendas to improve the quality of urban life and the economy of an urban society. The spirit of urban reformers of the nineteenth century was to combat the ill effects of poor planning and urban industrialisation. This metropolitan reform agenda has constantly shifted in response to changing societal and economic paradigms brought about by technological advances during the twentieth century (Scott, 2007). This chapter looks more closely at the social and political forces that have shaped our approach to metropolitan planning and the resulting urban landscape structure emerging from these paradigm shifts in the late twentieth and early twenty-­first century. The political challenge for metropolitan planning has largely centred on the legitimacy and authority of statutory bodies to exert influence over municipal authorities to regulate urban development so as to distribute the benefits across the socio-­economic spectrum. Such agendas don’t happen in a territorial bubble; shifts in global politics, macroeconomics and cultural trends also contributed to these contemporary challenges. One of the most significant political impacts on metropolitan planning in the last half of the twentieth century was the free marketeer’s reproach to the bureaucratic state, popularised by the Chicago School of economics and led by Milton Friedman. Maynard Keynes, the modern founder of macroeconomic theories, emphasised the role of governments in stabilising markets, had challenged the orthodoxy of classical market economic theory following the great depression in the 1930s. The Chicago School by contrast was libertarian and laissez-­faire at its heart. It rejected Keynesian theories of governments managing economic demand to promote growth. Friedman believed spatial planning should not play a role in the market economy. Technocratic and objective in its reasoning, he argued planning wasn’t able to address the failings of nineteenth-­century capitalism and offered no reasonable alternatives to unleashing the will of the free market (Gleeson & Lowe,

Landscapes and contemporary metropolis   41

2000; Pennington, 1999). Neo-­classical economists such as Friedman were not the only critics of the centralised autocratic nature of post-­war planning; environmentalists, feminists and communitarians believed the top-­down autocratic approach was, above all, an attack on the liberty of the individual. However these groups held different views about the potential value of professional planning once it was liberated from the bureaucracy. Environmentalists believed planning could help manage and protect environmental amenity. Urban scholar, Lewis Mumford, had argued this point in the 1930s, long before organised environmental groups emerged (Mumford, 1938). Feminist scholars primarily criticised the authoritarian nature of planning as a white male view of the world but saw great potential in correcting structural inequalities caused by industrialisation which essentially condemned women to low paid or unpaid labour (Sandercock, 1990). Post-­war planning authorities had focussed on urban economic development with varying degrees of service delivery and planning success. In theory, only the state could create planning agencies with the skills and vision to deliver a coordinated well serviced metropolis and few examples, such a Canberra’s National Capital Development Commission, existed. However, the reality of post-­war immigration and uncontrolled urban growth occurred without the necessary funding and skills to pursue such a coordinated approach. Consequently, the poor planning and delivery of services, rather than state controlled planning strategies, compounded the unregulated sprawl of post-­war cities in Europe and the West (Troy, 1996). The most persistent critique of the planning system was the failure of the bureaucracy to implement plans without corruption, ineptitude and duplicity (Pennington, 1999). The common thread of these critiques centred on the state’s inability to “liberate the plethora of community values and interests that had been either ignored or actively suppressed by rational instrumental forms of planning” (Gleeson & Lowe, 2000, p.  106). Consequently, the global economic shift towards neoliberalism in Western governments compounded the erosion of state power and a decline in the influence of metropolitan planning in the late twentieth century. What began as a utopian intellectual program following the exhaustion of the post-­war social contract, neoliberalism became aggressively politicised by the Anglocentric global leaders Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s before maturing to become the more technocratic and normative forms that we are familiar with today (Peck & Tickell, 2002). These forms include competitive globalisation and international competition for financial capital and urban entrepreneurialism facilitated by the market-­friendly restructuring of the state. Like globalisation, neoliberalism discourse has proven to be so compelling because together they represent “the world of market rules as a state of nature” (Peck & Tickell, 2002, p. 382). These terms are so ubiquitous, that they have become self-­ actualising and monolithic conceptions of the late twentieth-­century global economy. Yet neoliberalism cannot be characterised by internal dynamics between institutions or polities because it exists and transforms itself as a global regime of routines and rules (Peck & Tickell, 2002). For example, since the 1990s urban

42   Metropolitan trajectories

entrepreneurialism has had pernicious neoliberal disciplinary effects on public spending in cities across the world, locked in battles for international private finance (Harvey, 1989). As a result, multi-­sport events, elite corporate partnerships and signature urban renewal developments, often subsidised by citizens, in turn subjugate genuine local alternatives for economic development. The failings of state-­controlled planning have been exposed and protested by the likes of Jane Jacobs in the USA and Patrick Abercrombie in the UK since the 1930s and 1940s; yet it wasn’t until the end of the post-­war economic boom in the 1970s, combined with the oil shock and rise in unemployment, that the neoliberal view of planning and urban development gained momentum. The objectives of metropolitan planning had shifted from long-­term detailed planning promoting orderly land use, urban expansion, economic development and the provision of services to facilitating private investment to improve the competitive advantage of cities in attracting global financial capital (Hubbard, 1996). The rise of the entrepreneurial state in the 1980s resulted in the concentration of large scale iconic development projects around city centres to make visible the relationship between government and the private sector in fostering the accumulation of private capital (Osborne, 1993). Today the interaction between the state and the market in planning is controlled by the power of private developers to attract capital and the mobilisation of public– private partnerships in infrastructure finance, procurement and management. At the beginning of the twenty-­first century metropolitan planning has, in collaboration with very large private infrastructure and housing firms, returned to a more top-­down predict and deliver shareholder model, but with a diminishing role for civil society in the formulation of metropolitan strategies (Sinclair & Bunker, 2012). Yet the renewed interest in metropolitan planning also coincides with a groundswell of opposition to neoliberal market reforms and demands to address the rise in inequality caused by the failure of trickle-­down economics (Gleeson, 2014). This renewed enthusiasm for metropolitan planning will need to adapt to the rapid social changes caused by internal migration and immigration while providing long-­term strategies to address urban inequality and cope with the impacts of climate change.

The Anthropocene and the decline of neoliberalism More than a decade after the global financial crisis (GFC), the global political landscape is still shifting. While it is not the focus of this book, the currents of change in the environmental and social global agendas are worth a brief mention. Our interest here is the role of landscapes in reshaping the modern metropolis. By foregrounding the discussion with a brief summary of the rise of the Anthropocene and the decline of neoliberalism, we can place into context the urban agendas reshaping the metropolitan landscape. This is by no means a comprehensive analysis, as students of landscape architecture, planning and management it is important to understand global agendas, however, it is worth considering this unusual intersection and what it means for future of landscapes in and around our cities.

Landscapes and contemporary metropolis   43

Neoliberalism is an ideology distinguished by fiscal and social policies, forms of governance and agendas that promote individual self-­interest, unrestricted flows of capital, destabilisation of labour and a sharp retraction of the public sphere in decision making (Lipman, 2011). While neoliberalism has ruled as the uncontested ideology of capitalist democracies since the 1980s, the merits of such a free market capitalism are increasingly in question (Ostry, Loungani, & Furceri, 2016). Recent consensus suggests that, since the 2008 global financial crisis, neoliberalism is in decline in Western democracies and likely to be usurped by new forms of governance (Denniss, 2018). Regardless of how this period of global political transition is defined, it will have significant impacts on the way we plan and manage our urban settlements (Gleeson, 2014). This will be particularly significant in terms of the way we manage the landscape, as market-­based mechanisms play a less dominant role in the way we value resources. So what can the rise of the Anthropocene at this time of socio-­economic change tell us about the metropolitan landscape agenda? Although it is widely acknowledged that humans have profoundly shaped the surface of the earth for millennia, the scale and intensity of human interactions with Earth’s systems has rapidly accelerated since the mid-­twentieth century (Steffen, Grinevald, Crutzen, & McNeill, 2011). Despite global efforts to mitigate human-­induced climate change, the combination of increased wealth and expanding population will likely see increases in environmental impacts from our collective interactions with the environment for the remainder of the twenty-­first century. The observed and predicted changes in physical, chemical and biological processes in soils, water and the atmosphere are now so great that the concept of a new epoch, or geological age known as the Anthropocene is now widely discussed within the scientific community. Scholarship on the Anthropocene has flourished since the case was made formally for its declaration in 2011 (Steffen et al., 2011). In 2018, Google Scholar returned approximately 74,000 listings for the search term Anthropocene. In September 2013 a scholarly journal, Anthropocene, was launched to expand knowledge in this emerging field of research. In the context of this discussion, the Anthropocene is both widely accepted beyond the scientific community and continues to be debated (Chin, Beach, Luzzadder-­Beach, & Solecki, 2017). As such, it serves a useful purpose here to reflect on humanity’s response to the contemporary ecological crisis. Since the 1960s, key events and moments have cumulatively defined the nature of the environmental problem. These moments, including publications, and discoveries, have added another perspective to the problems associated with the depletion of the Earth’s natural resources, systems and processes (Lovelock, 2000). The declaration of the Anthropocene is the most recent of these moments. Like many moments before, the authors’ intention has been, through the authority of a scientific revelation, to shake the world order into action; to leave no possible alternatives other than the recommended course; to correct the mistakes of the past (Latour, 2017). However, in downsizing the challenge to the metropolitan scale (from a planetary scale), we should be wary of how such a declaration supports or inhibits the development of a

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sustainable metropolis. While the declaration has focussed the attention of decision makers regarding global environmental challenges, the Anthropocene risks obscuring the existing influence of neoliberalism and the role it has played as a pivotal agent in contemporary urban environmental change (Gandy, 2015). The risks here are that, like many moments before, this declaration has been met with a globally underwhelming response precisely because it doesn’t fit neatly into a market-­based model for development. Advocates will naturally object to the reasons for inaction from the moment of publication and few critics will interrogate the shortcomings inherent in the declaration itself; not as sceptics, or denialists, but rather compatriots with shared concerns, but hoping for a more disciplined and convincing argument. Latour (2017) argues that the very notion of the Anthropocene represents a neoliberal view of selfish calculation, utterly unable to account for the internalisation of something so massive as a change in the earth system itself, nonetheless claims adamantly that you should stick to this accounting mechanism to fathom the intricate existence of all earthly beings. In reflecting on the permeability between politics and biological systems, Latour (2017) argues that the global biological icon Gaia (Lovelock & Margulis, 1996) has been appropriated to invoke powerful narratives and uncritical investigations for political ends. The Anthropocene, Latour argues, is the latest icon to emerge that says more about our nascent desire to perpetuate our wayward spirit to heal the planet and perpetuate humanity’s capacity for self-­delusion. It therefore stands to reason that, in parallel to the flourishing of Anthropocene literature, there is a counter-­perspective, developed through critical analysis that provides thoughtful context about the problems inherent in such a declaration. In other words, the scales of time and space that the Anthropocene signifies are simply too large to make sense of in the formulation of metropolitan policy, and yet the declaration is pervasive and needs to be considered in the context of this book. The effort then should be to explore new methods to reveal the nature and context of the problem rather than, as is the case with the Anthropocene, rediscover ways to assert empirical power to re-­represent the already known phenomena of climate change. Indeed, the challenge for any reaction to the known environmental challenge is to avoid the emerging critique that the Anthropocene declaration is little more than a “thoroughly ambiguous and thoroughly political” schema (Davison, 2015). As landscape architects and planners, we should avail ourselves of the global agendas such as the Anthropocene; however, take care not to overstate the efficacy of the solution. The role of landscapes is too often subject to such overstatement to its detriment in policy analysis and implementation. This is discussed in more detail in Part II. The next section zooms in from the globe to the metropolis to explore forces acting on twenty-­first-century cities in the context of this discussion and examines two persuasive urban agendas that are reshaping cities across the world. The compact city agenda seeks to reorganise urban landscapes around clear hierarchies of built form and in tension with the inevitable decline in open spaces

Landscapes and contemporary metropolis   45

caused by urban densification. The second agenda, urban greening, mobilises landscape values, along with new green technologies, to support cities in adapting to climate change. Both these urban agendas are having a profound impact on the spatial organisation of metropolitan landscapes.

The compact city agenda As mentioned previously, the significant shift in development trends instigated by changing political and economic circumstances were largely defined by the broad acceptance of consolidation policies and the reduction in the state’s role in planning and development (Gleeson, 2006). Consolidation became attractive to municipal authorities as it reduced, or at least delayed the cost of public infrastructure associated with new housing and appeased the increasingly vocal voices in urban environmental movements. The merits of consolidation and containment are well documented on social, economic and environmental grounds. Our interest here is to unpack some of the political and social processes that have given rise to the compact city and the subsequent intersection with the green city that gives rise to new forms of metropolitan landscapes. As with any new design movement, the compact city and its variants, including new urbanism and the smart city, have been promoted as the new way to design with all the positive outcomes espoused by advocates. Yet like all movements before, the compact urban form is, in part, a response to consumer demand and a product of strategic and coordinated responses to economic pressures and market opportunities by politically influential and powerful organisations engaged in urban development. The emerging environmental movement in the 1960s in part created the demand for a more compact city and this desire to improve environmental outcomes created a renewed interest in local environmental activism and accountability of local authorities to ensure environmental justice was seen to be pursued (Gleeson & Lowe, 2000). As a result, the environmental debate became oversimplified and served to diminish broad scale planning. Large housing construction companies also advocated for a reduction in centralised planning control and supported a free market approach to improved environmental outcomes in urban planning and development. From the mid-­1970s, consolidation was considered the most desirable means for achieving these environmental and economic goals in cities across the USA, Western Europe, UK, Australia and Canada (Smith, 1997). As a result, development codes for building setbacks, verge widths and provision of parks and public open space were pared back under political pressure to achieve sustainability and efficiency targets. This resulted in the construction of new greenfield estates on the urban periphery that are surprisingly similar in structure and form across the world. Narrow streets (often without street trees), minimal public open space and small private yards with reduced setbacks to accommodate larger houses feature on the edge of contemporary Western cities. Despite this proliferation of “greenwash”

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developments by the private sector, free market environmentalists insisted the use of scarce resources was far better disciplined by the market than the planning authorities (Pennington, 1999). This promotion of free market environmentalism put faith in the market to allocate environmental values to prevent both the exhaustion of resources and the collapse of ecological systems. This view also sat comfortably with the neoliberal political thinking of the time. The absence of empirical evidence proving the success of such consolidation strategies created an uneasy partnership between environmental planning and the neoliberal “anti-­planning” views. Without a powerful state planning authority, many new developments continued to sprawl into the surrounding peri-­urban landscapes while paying lip service to achieving environmental targets. Closer to the urban centres, increasing land values and gentrification of downtowns has resulted in much higher density developments. The change in planning focus to favour consolidation highlights some of the conflicting social and political pressures to meet demand for new housing through the redevelopment of cities. Consolidation advocates promised an alternative to suburban low density development and in doing so wanted to solve many of the resulting problems associated with sprawl. Yet the advocates of consolidation focussed on a spatial reorganising of the city instead of addressing the core infrastructural shortcomings caused by poor resourcing of planning agencies and poorly coordinated service delivery. In other words, the reorganising of cities was not accompanied with the same emphasis on the restructuring of transport, land use, employment nodes and food systems. Many cities now are retrospectively addressing these structural deficiencies in response to congestion, air and water pollution, and social isolation among many of the problems resulting from poorly coordinated consolidation policies (Pickvance, 2009; Wiesel, Freestone, Pinnegar, & Randolph, 2011). The change in language accompanying this shift has also contributed to the normalising of the language used and promoted by consolidation advocates. Terms like “village” and “community” draw references from the neo-­traditional influences of new urbanism (Ellis, 2002). Emerging in the late 1980s and popularised by architects and planners such as Peter Calthorpe, Andrés Duany, Ellen Dunham-­Jones, Elizabeth Plater-­Zyberk and Douglas Kelbaugh, new urbanism captured the political mood for privatisation, containment and consolidation. Defined largely by what new urbanism rejected, it was a response to the “rapid depersonalization and fragmentation of suburbia with a model that relies upon mass transit, higher density development and quality public space” (Calthorpe & Kelbaugh, 1989, p. 22). Seaside in Florida is the most complete interpretation of the new urbanism model, although thousands of developments based on new urbanism have since been developed. Seaside, an 80-acre new town in Florida came into being in 1980 when the land owner aimed to transform the beachside property into an old-­fashioned beach town, with traditional wood-­framed cottages common in the Florida Panhandle. Seaside is privately owned, and therefore the municipal government did not have planning jurisdiction. The planners employed by the developers were able to create their own zoning rules. The

Landscapes and contemporary metropolis   47

Figure 3.1   Early

plans for Seaside (Leon Krier).

Source: by permission University of Notre Dame School of Architecture.

design concept of Seaside (Figure 3.1) emphasised walkable neighbourhoods and mixed residential and commercial uses and became the template for the new urbanism movement (Trudeau, 2013). The success of new urbanism was to propose a specific urban response to demands for more efficient use of land and better coordination between sectors such as transport, open space, housing and employment. The resulting effort to overcome siloed approaches to development and evolving out of new urbanism was transit oriented development (TOD). Whereas new urbanism emphasised the need to reconnect the urban form with a human scale experience, TOD more explicitly targets movement and transportation as a point of orientation to improve the urban experience. These two movements are part of the decade long move away from the post-­war car dependent suburban metropolis. This is a legacy of a long held view that the twentieth-­century suburban city was a social and environmental pariah, in part because of proliferation low density sprawl. Chermayeff & Alexander (1965) recognised this tension when they argued that the density of the city was a result of millions of people reconciling their desire for space and their desire for access. The late twentieth-­century shift toward compact cities and containment would suggest that the community’s desire for access has replaced their desire for space. It is, of course, much more complex than a simple binary between two competing forces. Yet it is in this context that we consider the role of landscape in the twenty-­first century metropolis.

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This twenty-­first century metropolis is increasingly viewed as both the source of and solution to the major global challenges associated with resource depletion, pollution, waste management and global warming. Urban development and urban life provide a rich tapestry of benefits to humanity, but also conceal and externalise the negative urban impacts on planetary systems (Birkland 2008). These negative impacts, including harm to human and environmental health, food and water security, and fossil fuel dependence are not inevitable. Yet the loss of urban landscapes due to densification is occurring worldwide, especially in Asian and Australian cities (Haaland & van den Bosch, 2015). The ongoing project towards a more sustainable future means that cities are more sensitive to the need to manage urban ecological systems. The role of the landscape, put simply, is to provide ecosystem services, including the protection of ecological communities and productive agricultural landscapes; to improve the assimilation of waste and the protection of catchments for potable water supply and to enhance the quality of urban ecosystems more generally. Landscapes also enrich our experience of urban life, improving our health and wellbeing. Urban migration and population growth will continue to place cities under pressure to consolidate further, increasing in density, while at the same time needing to address the environmental pollution and loss of ecological resources caused by dense forms of urban development. From a landscape perspective the challenge for cities will be to balance the compact city and the green city agendas. While not necessarily opposing forces acting on the urban landscape, the tensions arising from the intersection between the two are worth examining.

The green city agenda The urban environmental crisis came to the attention of decision makers during a period of activist publications that tapped into the consciousness of the broader public, including Silent spring (Carson, 1962) and Death and life of the great Amer­ican city (Jacobs, 1961). Yet the contemporary green urban agenda is a far more recent phenomenon, only taking hold in the 1990s around the same time as new urbanism. This resurgent interest into research and urban greening results in part from interest in urban environments from ecologists. Indeed, urban ecology and its social derivative urban political ecology are relatively new fields of research (Swyngedouw & Heynen, 2003). These emerging fields, under the banner of city greening, bring new perspectives to broader concerns about the way landscapes affect and are affected by economic, political, technological and social forces. The twenty-­first-century green city is notably different from the early twentieth­century garden city. Largely in response to the social crisis resulting from the unregulated sprawl of the nineteenth-­century industrial city, the garden city movement was concerned with social reform. The garden city was planned to be an urban system where workers could be both productive and healthy by living and working in spatially organised communities that provided the benefit of both country and city living. Today’s green city is not so spatially determined, nor a

Landscapes and contemporary metropolis   49

reactive schism between old and new modes of living, but rather an emerging response to the unfolding environmental crisis that is a product of urban migration, technological change, economic liberalism and global warming (Haase et al., 2017). As a result, the landscape has become coopted into an urban greening agenda defined by new technologies and reconceptualising of urban structures through transit oriented development, green infrastructure, food security and health policy, to name just a few. In essence, the metropolitan landscape has become more policy relevant across an increasing number of sectors. It is in this context that we consider how a metropolitan landscape approach to urban policy can address many contemporary urban challenges. Ecology has become ubiquitous in urban planning and environmental policy, so much so that the structures of ecological theory are evident in a wide range of urban policies. Urban ecology as an emerging sub-­field within biological sciences has drawn attention to and raised a number of policy questions about how to manage the spatial and system dynamics of non-­human nature (Gandy, 2015). The resulting urban greening research and practice has many variants, including ecological urbanism, biophilic cities, landscape urbanism and green infrastructure, each with their own emphasis on urban environmental interactions and indicative of the flourishing interest in the role of landscapes in cities. It is not surprising that the urban policy discourse for the foreseeable future is intertwined with a renewed green city agenda. The following summary of city greening agendas provides a snapshot of the main city greening movements.

Landscape urbanism Landscape urbanism has since the early 2000s attempted to address the relationship between cities and landscape but recently has expanded to examine whole regions. It was developed by a group of US and European landscape architects and researchers largely led by Charles Waldheim and James Corner (Waldheim, 2006). The theory of landscape urbanism essentially asserts that the best way to organise a city is around its landscape. Equally popular in schools of architecture and planning, landscape urbanists attempt to make sense of how metropolitan (and regional) territories are reconfigured through economic policies, political decisions, social and cultural norms, and engineering solutions. The value of landscape urbanism has been to more rigorously incorporate landscape concepts into the urban development discourse by influencing research and thinking about city greening more generally. However, much of the work of landscape urbanists has not translated into concrete urban policy (Livesey, 2009). Interestingly one of the most vocal criticisms of landscape urbanism comes from one of the earlier protagonists for new urbanism, Andres Duany (Tully, 2013). This in part can be attributed to the perceived threat that landscape urbanism promotes ecological processes over built environment solutions to address environmental problems. This ecosystems approach, it is argued, serves to perpetuate or indeed reinvigorate interest in low density development contributing to a new era of urban sprawl (McMahon, 2012).

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While this concern remains relatively unfounded, landscape urbanism will pose an epistemological challenge to metropolitan plans that advocate high density development. Chapter 5 provides a more detailed account of landscape urbanism.

Ecological urbanism Ecological urbanism is a more recent variation of urban ecology that focusses on human ecological relationships at a metropolitan scale. It evolved out of landscape urbanism to expand the concept of a landscape oriented resolution to projects and sites that encompass a much broader field of inquiry (Mostafavi, 2010). In covering a broader spectrum, ecological urbanism signaled a shift in green policy from the technical performance of building towards catchment wide planning. In doing so, it repositioned landscapes as a critical element of urban greening at a systems scale (Gandy, 2015). In essence it answered the questions left unanswered by landscape urbanism. Rather than a design, problem focussed paradigm, ecological urbanism’s scale and scope of enquiry leads to examining systems at a metropolitan or bio-­ regional scale. In broadening its scope beyond design and planning, ecological urbanism seeks to synthesise a wider range of professions such as economics, engineering, law and health into addressing the needs of citizens (Steiner, 2011; Tully, 2013). It is worth considering that ecological urbanism attempts to bridge the ecology–urban design divide by synthesising urban and ecological processes into a coherent paradigm that incorporates cognate discourses such as ecological restoration, urban rewilding, ecological architecture and others. However, critics argue that despite the ambition and scope, its application remains similar to landscape urbanism in that it can only be experienced as discrete projects or programs within the wider dynamics of fading neoliberal and capitalist urbanism (Gandy, 2015). Other issues related to environmental justice should also be considered in the development of ecological urbanism. For example, the role of landscapes in mitigating the effects of urban heat island (UHI) is well established and discussed in detail in Chapter 9. However, to be effective, UHI mitigation policies should take into consideration notions of environmental justice. In other words, effort needs to be directed towards improving the lives of people who stand to benefit the most from intervention. Unsurprisingly, cities, or sections of cities that too often disproportionally benefit from green policies, are those that are already green with established parks and streetscapes. Likewise, the citizens that benefit the most from greening policies are the least vulnerable to the effects of UHI. They are the same citizens who are most likely to engage in a participatory planning processes and influence policy to their advantage (Cidell, 2009). While such citizen engagement may mitigate risks through the incorporation of local knowledge, it cannot resolve the more fundamental inequities. In the end ecological urbanism hasn’t overcome the priorities and actions that drive decision making and remain fundamentally political decisions affecting the planning and management of landscapes (Pölzler, 2015).

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Biophilic urbanism Biophilic urbanism is the most recent theoretical development attempting to address the persistent and durable social and environmental challenges facing cities. Put simply it seeks to apply the term “biophilia” to planning. Popularised by E.  O. Wilson, biophilia describes our innate affinity with nature and the value of bringing natural systems back into cities (Beatley, 2011). Practically, biophilic urbanism seeks to introduce a diverse range of landscapes into urban settings, onto buildings, roads and waterways and other infrastructures (Newman, 2014). In some respects it differs from previous urban greening agendas as it acknowledges the messiness and uncertainty inherent in both landscapes and cites by offering more of an optimistic ideology rather than a policy prescription for change. In doing so, biophilic urbanism has quickly developed a broad appeal with a number of books emerging (see Beatley, 2011; Kellert, Heerwagen, & Mador, 2011). As a derivation of earlier ideas around city greening, biophilic urbanism adds another dimension for decision makers to actively consider the role that non-­humans play in the conception and assemblage of urban landscapes (Whatmore, 2006). The questions about the relationship between humans’ and non-­humans’ agency in fabricating a new landscape are beyond the scope of this book. However, biophilic urbanism does provide a potential policy agenda that will more seriously factor biodiversity into urban policy. Rather than focussing on the abundance of green space in metropolitan plans, biophilic urbanism more explicitly evaluates biodiversity as a measure of success. Biodiversity depends on a high diversity of potential habitats and niches rather than an abundance of landscapes, making such an approach more appealing to dense cities. In some regards this approach overcomes the contest between urban densification and urban greening as all vertical and horizontal surfaces can provide a range of habitats and can be appropriated by plants and animals for renaturing. Singapore is held out to be the success story of biophilic urbanism. As a high density Asian city, Singapore has, with the benefit of a favourable climate, demonstrated the potential benefits of urban renaturing (Newman, 2014). So where does this leave us as decision makers in contending with the social and political challenges of urban consolidation and urban greening.

Green infrastructure Increasingly metropolitan landscapes are planned, managed and protected from development according to what the landscape contributes to the functioning of the urban socio-­economic system. In a neoliberal market-­based system of governance, these attributes are classified and measured to reflect their economic value to the community. Discursively, landscapes have been reconceptualised as green infrastructure (GI), active in the constitution of systems and networks constantly under urban renewal. Landscapes are repositioned as green infrastructure in order to coopt doctrines of ecological modernisation to attract private or market capital to create and fund

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the ongoing incorporation of urban landscapes in the urban renewal agenda. Yet as a form of infrastructure capital, green infrastructure is the least successful form of infrastructure to attract private finance, largely due to the lack of apparent short- or medium-­term financial return to the investor. This inability to internalise the externalities apparent in the values promoted by green infrastructure present both a revenue and a policy problem for decision makers advocating for the urban greening of cities. At present green infrastructure advocates continue to pursue forms of state regulation to incentivise private investment or direct public investment. Landscape architects are often at the forefront of landscape intensification but also occasionally facilitate community recovery of landscapes associated with the declining quality of urban settings. In a capitalist system, the investment in development demands a return in the form of a renewed or recovered landscape that adds “value” or a return on investment in the form of improved land values or enhanced opportunities for more consumptive forms of recreation.

Green infrastructure is an asset class that performs certain functions in the same way other forms of infrastructure contribute to the functioning of larger systems. A bridge is part of transport infrastructure that facilitates the movement of people and goods necessary for the city to function. The bridge performs a role (traversing a river, harbour, railway or road) as part of a broader transport network of roads, railways, cycle and pedestrian paths and information systems such as signals, signs, barriers and livestreaming traffic information. This is an example of grey infrastructure. Alternatively, a constructed wetland is part of infrastructure that captures and retains stormwater and, over time, removes excess suspended nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorous along with inorganic pollutants and heavy metals. The wetland performs other roles beyond improving water quality. It affords habitats for a range of organisms from bacteria to birds, reptiles and mammals, enhancing biodiversity. The park that hosts the wetland also provides educational and recreation opportunities, encouraging positive mental and physical health outcomes for users. In this case the system is an example of green infrastructure. From a policy perspective, green infrastructure should not be thought of as a thing (a tree, a wetland, a park or a garden). Rather it should be treated as an asset class that interacts with a range of urban networks (transport, stormwater, ecological communities) that perform certain functions and provide ecosystem services that contribute to the operation of the metropolis.

Developing a GI definition The European Environment Agency identifies a broad range of GI applications implicating a number of discipline areas that have coopted the term to meet their

Landscapes and contemporary metropolis   53

own objectives. These agendas include: biodiversity conservation; climate change adaption and mitigation; urban water management; food security and production; recreational and cultural benefits; and land values (EEA, 2011). While there is broad application of GI in policy agendas, it lacks a coherent definition based on the development of theory. This definitional problem raises the risk of increased uncertainty over its application that potentially undermines the ability of GI to demonstrate effective outcomes (Sussams, Sheate, & Eales, 2015). The question remains how GI, as an umbrella concept, can effectively deliver on one or a combination of these agendas. To explore this further, we need to consider how the multidisciplinary nature of urban environmental problems is addressed by GI, and what are the challenges to policy makers’ and practitioners’ understanding of GI components, the priorities in application and their disciplinary interactions in operation (Sussams et al., 2015). By definition, the holistic, landscape scale, multidisciplinary nature of GI also uncovers disciplinary conflicts that reveal institutional barriers to a system-­wide formulation of a GI strategy. In some regards GI planning is counter-­intuitive to conventional land use planning that distributes land and resources based on a balance of social, economic and environmental goals. GI mobilises many more variables and raises many issues to do with hierarchies and politics and in doing so challenges siloed thinking, but contributes few solutions to these problems (Haase et al., 2017). The informal and networked structure of GI governance leaves the concept susceptible to under-­investment due to unclear remits and a lack of holistic oversight in metropolitan scale landscape planning and management (Sussams et al., 2015). Notwithstanding these challenges, exploring the potential of GI to achieve its aims through metropolitan scale landscape management and planning is promising. Understanding the effectiveness of GI at a range of scales is necessary for developing an advocacy strategy to promote the adoption of GI targets and encourage GI planning in cities. Early definitions of GI tended to list instances and specific benefits of incorporating networks of natural systems into human systems (see, for example, Benedict & McMahon, 2006; Sandstrom & Ulf, 2002). The European Commission EEA (2011) definition is a more recent attempt to refine GI as a policy objective. This definition is less specific, emphasising GI’s broad objective of delivering ecosystem services at a range of scales. GI is defined by the EEA as “A strategically planned network of natural and semi-­natural areas with other environmental features designed and managed to deliver a wide range of ecosystem services” (EEA 2011). This definition affords two concepts that help us to understand how GI can be applied in policy and planning. First, it aligns with an ecosystems approach that advocates for environmental solutions operating at a landscape scale, transcending land use types and ecosystem boundaries. Second, the definition identifies ecosystem services as quantifiable benefits that GI applications can be measured against. Applying a large range of ecosystem services is a persuasive political method to advocate for adopting a GI planning approach. However, in practice, GI design and application is often constrained by the quality of spatial and statistical data available to decision makers (Eastwood et al., 2016).

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GI in planning and urban design GI planning and design adopts a biological “green structures” approach to support ongoing efforts to enhance the connectivity of landscapes and advocate for the multifunctional benefits of urban nature. It can be said that GI emerges out of policy attempts to counter and repair the fragmentation of landscapes caused by twentieth-­century rapid urbanisation and conventional grey infrastructure. Likewise, the success of GI strategies is highly contextual and dependant on the historical development of the city and its surrounding metropolitan region (Madureira, Andresen, & Monteiro, 2011). From a planning and urban design perspective, GI potentially shifts thinking from the classification of green spaces, to the holistic incorporation of metropolitan “green structure” strategies to enhance the delivery of ecosystem services. Ranging from city greening to mitigate the effects of urban heat island in urban cores, to enhancing habitat connectivity through suburban street trees and reserving agricultural land on the peri-­urban fringe, incorporating GI strategies in metropolitan plans should be comprehensive. Comprehending how site specific GI projects fit into a broader landscape scale system of urban greening will become as important as the practitioners’ skill in advocating and evaluating the ecosystem services benefits of discrete urban projects.

Conclusion City governments around the world generally recognise the problems faced by an urbanising planet. Planners and decision makers implement policies and plans that reflect broader national agendas captured in regulations at all levels of governments. However, two key features of city governance (to be discussed later in Part II) significantly impede progress on achieving sustainable development goals. The first lies in the regulatory tools that depend too much on the imagination of the market to capture the benefits of internalising the environmental externalities. Largely dictated by neoliberal approaches to city governance, the distributional impacts of neoliberal policies have increased inequality and jeopardised sustainable growth (Ostry et al., 2016). The second problem, relating to the first, is the use of trade-­offs to protect discrete environmental or social assets by permitting unsustainable forms of development to continue in order to satisfy the immediate financial interests of private developers (Birkeland 2008). This give-­and-take mentality has resulted in a triage approach to city development, limited by resource and financial constraints as the state retreats from financing infrastructure and services. In the context of cities, “green” by itself carries many seemingly contradictory meanings and applications (e.g. rooftop solar power and roof shading trees serve to reduce the consumption of non-­renewable fuels). Alternatively, cities occupy a spectrum of greenness (e.g. Masdar City in the United Arab Emirates and Canberra in Australia). Similarly, policy approaches to greening cities have turned their attention to reconfiguring urban assemblages and morphologies, particularly in relation to addressing challenges such as air and water pollution, urban heat, biodiversity

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and the impacts of climate change. Collectively, these green urban imaginaries invoke both utopian and dystopian futures with little reference to the past or how to achieve the intended policy objective. As a result, regulatory tools often focus on the symptoms rather than addressing the underlying causes. These causes can only be addressed by examining the long-­ term existential questions about how we want to live in cities and our conceptions of wellbeing (or living well in the Platonic sense). This book does not seek to answer or interrogate these questions, but rather to explore the opportunities that open up new approaches to metropolitan planning and policy through a landscape lens. It hopes to harnesses the imagination of decision makers to invigorate new ways of addressing some of the biggest urban environmental and social challenges of our time.

Case study – Singapore Singapore presents a compelling case study for examining the role of landscapes in the planning and management of the metropolis, or in this case, the island nation. As an almost entirely urban population living in a very dense city with very limited land resources, the challenges of conserving landscapes are significant. Despite this, Singapore has actively pursued policies to enhance urban biodiversity for social, environmental, economic, reputational and political advantage. Novel approaches have been deployed by the Singapore National Parks Board to balance the competing needs of population growth and conservation to enhance the island nation’s landscape values. As a result Singapore has developed its own methods of landscape governance, advocacy, planning and management, to be recognised today as one of the most biodiverse and green cities in the world (Newman, 2014). So how did this relatively young South Asian nation transform itself into a highly liveable city in the past half century and what role has the landscape played in that transformation? By the end of the nineteenth century, Singapore had been mostly deforested. Despite efforts of the British colonial government to gazette parts of the island as reserves, less than 10 percent of the original forest cover remained at the time of independence in 1965. Early efforts to preserve landscape values included the creation of the Nature Reserves Ordinance in 1951. The Nature Reserves Board was formed to become responsible for the protection and administration of nature reserves. However, the board exerted insufficient authority and reserves became fragmented and shrank due to encroachment (Chia, Rahman, & Tay, 1991). The shift in attitude towards preserving natural assets came slowly, but with significant political support. Founding Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew, promoted the idea that greening the city would have social and economic benefits. The Prime Minister observed that the rapid urbanisation occurring in other developing Asian nations was leading to general environmental decline. He instinctively believed that, by adopting a city greening strategy, Singapore would be seen as an attractive place for foreign investment. A clean, efficient and pleasant garden city would project an equally efficient government and society (Lee, 2000). Tree planting became the key

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part of the greening strategy in the 1960s with a target of 10,000 trees to be planted each year, with 5,000 additional trees to be planted annually in new developments along road verges and in public places such as schools. By the 1970s, long before green walls became fashionable, developers and citizens were encouraged to plant vines, herbs and flowers on walls and fences and on high rise buildings. In the 1990s, 23 new parks were constructed to meet the recreational needs of the city (Lee, 2015). The success of the city greening program was attributed to the powerful Garden City Action Committee established by the then Prime Minister. It was funded to focus on city greening for the purpose of attracting foreign workers and investment and providing recreation for the public as the city grew. However, the more established Nature Reserves Board, set up in 1951, continued to be undermined by development interests resulting in a sustained decline in the integrity of the reserves system by the encroachment of urban development. Redress came in the formation of a single authority in 1990 to create a National Parks Act which included the formation of the National Parks Board. The conventional approach to urban greening over the latter part of the twentieth century helped Singapore to mitigate extreme heat generated by the dense built environment in a tropical climate, but achieved little in enhancing biodiversity as the plant selection and landscape design was parklike and picturesque in approach, and paid little attention to the creation of urban habitats. The tree planting program, however, was different with extensive use of native species. Many years later this mature urban forest became critical to the city’s biodiversity program as the established trees provided a green skeleton that supported the connectivity of parks and reserves, laying the foundation for a coherent urban biodiversity conservation strategy. With increased funding and autonomy, a new department was established with a mandate to increase the total land area for reserves and avoid further fragmentation of existing landscapes. In a country with such intense land pressure, the National Parks Board set about developing a culture of innovation and risk taking to develop plans for achieving their biodiversity goals. Significantly, in 1996 the Parks and Recreation Department and the National Parks Board merged into a single authority to oversee the management of all public open spaces (Lee, 2015). In 2000, for the first time since British settlement, the total area of nature reserves started to increase. Today the National Parks Authority is responsible for managing the streetscape greenery, the parks and nature reserves, promotes research and oversees nature conservation in Singapore (National Parks Board, 2018). Bringing the management research and advocacy functions for biodiversity and nature conversation and open space management under one authority has resulted in an exceptionally high level of coherence for landscape planning and management that has heralded in a new era of biodiversity conservation. Rather than seeing bio­ diversity conservation as a regulatory burden, developers, other government agencies and financiers recognise the social and economic benefits of collaborating with the National Parks Authority to achieve biodiversity conservation goals (Lee, 2015). Bringing together landscape management and biodiversity conservation under one state agency has allowed for a holistic and coordinated approach.

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In 2010, Singapore took on a major rebranding strategy. The City in a Garden brand promoted the city as a seamless interconnected matrix of parks, gardens and greenery (National Parks, 2018). As part of the brand promotion, National Parks developed a new focus based on the belief that the residents’ quality of life could be enriched by having close encounters with nature and that Singaporean biodiversity was a draw card for tourism and set the city apart from many other urban greening programs worldwide (Lee, 2015). The gardens by the bay, a $1 billion (US$750 million) 100 hectare nature park on reclaimed land, including the cloud forest trees (Figure 3.2), are now major tourist attractions that are testament to this sustained political support for greening and biodiversity conservation. Politically the city greening strategy has reaped benefits and enhanced Singapore’s reputation on the international stage. Singapore’s efforts in biodiversity conservation were crucial to negotiations with the USA in 2000 as part of a bilateral free trade agreement. The inclusion of language around environmental protection in the agreement meant that multinational corporations seeking to operate in Singapore took environmental protection seriously in helping the nation to maintain its good track record (Lee, 2015). Singapore has also shown leadership in advocating for urban biodiversity. In 2008, a Singapore delegation presented to the Convention on Biological Diversity conference of the parties (COP 9) meeting in Bonn, a biodiversity conservation model based on the evidence collected by national parks researchers. Essentially the delegation wanted to show how such a dense, urbanised land deprived nation could achieve such high levels of biodiversity. Based on the

Figure 3.2   The

cloud gardens by the bay development, Singapore.

Source: Creative Commons.

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work by the delegation from National Parks, the city biodiversity index (known as the Singapore Index) was developed and endorsed by the subsequent COP 10 meeting. The conceptualisation of landscape management in Singapore has evolved from legislating land reserves, to greening of streets and buildings to a more holistic vision of a biophilic city (Newman, 2014). The Singapore Master Plan (www.ura.gov.sg) guides the city’s development in the medium term. How does this plan embody the concept of biophilia in the implementation and coordination of development in the city? What key principles of this Plan could be adopted by other cities to enhance biodiversity in their own plans?

The extreme land constraints and densely populated islands have meant that Singapore cannot rely on peri-­urban buffer zones or low density suburban settlements on the edge of the city to protect landscape values. The leadership and foresight from the colonial administration and the founding prime minister has meant that, in the face of rapid urbanisation, the loss of natural assets over the twentieth century has been reversed. Enhancing Singapore’s landscape structure through targeting biodiversity has reached across sectors of the economy that otherwise would not be typically concerned with the role of landscapes in formulating policy. As early as the mid-­twentieth century, trees were planted to reduce the effects of urban heat island effect. Today, biodiversity influenced building design codes, tourism and branding strategies and is used as leverage in bilateral negotiations.

References Beatley, T. (2011). Biophilic cities: integrating nature into urban design and planning. Washington, D.C.: Island Press. Benedict, M., & McMahon, E. (2006). Green infrastructure: linking landscapes and communities. Washington, D.C.: Island Press. Birkeland, J. (2008). Positive development: from vicious circles to virtuous cycles through built environment design. London: Routledge. Calthorpe, P., & Kelbaugh, D. (1989). The Pedestrian Pocket Book. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Carson, R. (1962). Silent spring. New York: Pergamon Press. Chermayeff, S., & Alexander, C. (1965). Community and privacy: toward a new architecture of humanism. New York: Doubleday. Chia, L., Rahman, A., & Tay, D. (1991). The biophysical environment of Singapore. Singapore: Singapore University Press. Chin, A., Beach, T., Luzzadder-­Beach, S., & Solecki, W.  D. (2017). Challenges of the “Anthropocene”. Anthropocene, 20, 1–3. Cidell, J. (2009). A political ecology of the built environment: LEED certification for green buildings. Local Environment, 14(7), 621–633. Davison, A. (2015). Beyond the mirrored horizon: modern ontology and amodern possibilities in the Anthropocene. Geographical Research, 53(3), 298–305.

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Denniss, R. (2018). Dead right: how neoliberalism ate itself and what comes next. Quarterly Essay 70. Sydney: Black. Eastwood, A., Brooker, R., Irvine, R. J., Artz, R. R. E., Norton, L. R., Bullock, J. M., … Pakeman, R. J. (2016). Does nature conservation enhance ecosystem services delivery? Ecosystem Services, 17, 152–162. EEA (European Environment Agency). (2011). Green infrastructure and territorial cohesion: the concept of green infrastructure and its integration into policies using monitoring systems. Retrieved from www.eea.europa.eu/publications/greeninfrastructure, accessed 24 April 2019. Ellis, C. (2002). The new urbanism: critiques and rebuttals. Journal of Urban Design, 7(3), 261–291. Gandy, M. (2015). From urban ecology to ecological urbanism: an ambiguous trajectory. Area, 47(2), 150–154. Gleeson, B. (2006). Australian Heartlands making spaces for hope in the suburbs. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Gleeson, B. (2014). The urban condition. London: Routledge. Gleeson, B., & Lowe, N. (2000). Revaluing planning: rolling back neo-­liberalism in Australia. Progress in Planning, 53, 83–164. Haaland, C., & van den Bosch, C. K. (2015). Challenges and strategies for urban green-­space planning in cities undergoing densification: a review. Urban Forestry & Urban Greening, 14(4), 760–771. Haase, D., Kabisch, S., Haase, A., Andersson, E., Banzhaf, E., Baró, F., & Wolff, M. (2017). Greening cities – to be socially inclusive? About the alleged paradox of society and ecology in cities. Habitat International, 64, 41–48. Harvey, D. (1989). From managerialism to entrepreneurialism: the transformation in urban governance in late capitalism. Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 71(1), 3–17. Hubbard, P. (1996). Urban design and city regeneration: social representations of entrepreneurial landscapes. Urban Studies, 33(8), 1441–1461. Jacobs, J. (1961). The death and life of great Amer­ican cities. New York: Random House. Kellert, S. R., Heerwagen, J., & Mador, M. (2011). Biophilic design: the theory, science and practice of bringing buildings to life. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons. Latour, B. (2017). Why Gaia is not a god of totality. Theory, Culture & Society, 34(2–3), 61–81. Lee, K. Y. (2000). From Third World to First: the Singapore story 1965–2000: memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew. Singapore: Singapore Times Media Private Limited. Lee, R. (2015). Biodiversity: nature conservation in the greening of Singapore. Singapore: Cengage Learning Asia. Lipman, P. (2011). Contesting the city: neoliberal urbanism and the cultural politics of education reform in Chicago. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 32(2), 217–234. Livesey, G. (2009). A look at landscape urbanism. Canadian Architect, 11(9), 45–47. Lovelock, J. (2000). Gaia: a new look at life on earth. Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks. Lovelock, J. E., & Margulis, L. (1996) L’atmosphere est-elle le systeme circulatoire de la biosphere? L’hypothese Gaia. CoEvolution, 1, 20–31. Madureira, H., Andresen, T., & Monteiro, A. (2011). Green structure and planning evolution in Porto. Urban forestry & urban greening, 10(2), 141–149. McMahon, S. (2012). Urban design. In S. Thompson & P. Maginn (Eds.), Planning Australia: an overview of urban and regional planning (2nd edn). Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Mostafavi, M. (2010). Why ecological urbanism? Why now? In M. Mostafavi & G. Doherty (Eds.), Ecological urbanism (pp. 12–53). Basel: Lars Muller.

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Mumford, L. (1938). The culture of cities. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. National Parks Board. (2018). National Parks Singapore. Retrieved from www.nparks.gov.sg, accessed 13 March 2019. National Parks Board. (2018). Our city in a garden. Retrieved from www.nparks.gov.sg/ciag, accessed 13 March 2019. Newman, P. (2014). Biophilic urbanism: a case study on Singapore. Australian Planner, 51(1), 47–65. Osborne, D. (1993). Reinventing government. Public Productivity & Management Review, 16(4), 349–356. Ostry, J., Loungani, P., & Furceri, D. (2016). Neoliberalism oversold. Finance and Development, 53(2), 38–41. Peck, J., & Tickell, A. (2002). Neoliberalising space. Antipode, 34, 380–404. Pennington, M. (1999). Free market environmentalism and the limits of land use planning. Journal of Environmental Policy and Planning, 1(1), 43–59. Pickvance, C. G. (2009). Choice or coercion: dilemmas of sustainable social housing. A study of two developments in Kent. Local Environment, 14(2), 207–214. Pölzler, T. (2015). Climate change inaction and moral nihilism. Ethics, Policy & Environment, 18(2), 202–214. Sandercock, L. (1990). Property politics and urban planning. London: Transaction Publishers. Sandstrom, D., & Ulf, G. (2002). Green infrastructure planning in urban Sweden. Planning Practice & Research, 17(4), 373–385. Scott, J. W. (2007). Smart growth as urban reform: a pragmatic “recoding” of the new regionalism. Urban Studies, 44(1), 15–35. Sinclair, I., & Bunker, R. (2012). Planning for rural landscapes. In S. Thompson & P. Maginn (Eds.), Planning Australia – An Overview of Urban and Regional Planning. New York: Cambridge University Press. Smith, S. (1997). Urban consolidation: current developments. NSW Parliamentary Library. Steffen, W., Grinevald, J., Crutzen, P., & McNeill, J. (2011). The Anthropocene: conceptual and historical perspectives. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, 369(1938), 842–867. Steiner, F. (2011). Landscape ecological urbanism: origins and trajectories. Landscape and Urban Planning, 100(4), 333–337. Sussams, L. W., Sheate, W. R., & Eales, R. P. (2015). Green infrastructure as a climate change adaptation policy intervention: muddying the waters or clearing a path to a more secure future? Journal of Environmental Management, 147, 184–193. Swyngedouw, E., & Heynen, N. C. (2003). Urban political ecology, justice and the politics of scale. Antipode, 35(5), 898–918. Troy, P. (1996). The perils of urban consolidation: a discussion of Australian housing and urban development policies. Sydney: Federation Press. Trudeau, D. (2013). New urbanism as sustainable development? Geography Compass, 7(6), 435–448. Tully, P. (2013). On landscape urbanism. In P. Howard, I. Thompson, & E. Waterton (Eds.), The Routledge companion to landscape studies, 438–449. New York: Routledge. Waldheim, C. (2006). Landscape as urbanism. In C. Waldheim (Ed.), The landscape urbanism reader (pp. 35–55). New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Whatmore, S. (2006). Materialist returns: practising cultural geography in and for a more-­ than-human world. Cultural Geographies, 13(4), 600–609. Wiesel, I., Freestone, R., Pinnegar, S., & Randolph, B. (2011). Gen-­X-trification? Generation shifts and the renewal of low-­density housing in Sydney’s suburbs. Paper presented at the State of Australian Cities, Melbourne.

4 Sustainability

This chapter explores sustainable development, its origins and potential application to metropolitan landscape policy. It considers how landscape values are incorporated into the sustainability agenda, and how those values are enacted as policies and actions. The goal of this chapter is to help you develop your own position on the role of landscapes in enacting sustainable development policies. Establishing a position helps you to advocate your own perspectives consistently and to argue the case for your choices and decisions. Such ethical positions do not exist in isolation; they derive from your education, life experiences and personal values. However, decisions that affect potentially millions of citizens are not made based solely on your own perspectives. To begin, you should consider the broader debates around sustainability. This seems to be self-­evident within the planning and development professions, however sustainability means many things to many people. Despite the diffuse nature of sustainability, it has not been usurped by new concepts and ideologies. Instead, it endures and remains a necessary consideration in policy formulation (Andersen & Skrede, 2016). Conceptually, sustainable development interrogates how, on a global scale, societies can develop within the resource limits of the planet (Holden, Linnerud, & Banister, 2014). The goals of sustainable development, it can be argued, aim for incremental (although increasingly radical) change through interventions and changed practices that lead towards a more sustainable future for a city, nation and ultimately, the Earth (Wheeler, 2000). These goals can be framed in a number of ways using a range of theories and models that question the efficacy of planning and development policies and associated laws and regulations. For example, how can cities become net positive contributors to a sustainable planet (Birkeland, 2008)? When considering the application to metropolitan landscape planning, we can accept that sustainability and sustainable development are essentially interchangeable in the metropolitan context (Holden et al., 2014)?

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History of sustainability Sustainability is not a new concept. Sustainable practices were described by forest managers 300 years ago in Europe (Blewitt, 2005). Contemporary interpretations emerged as part of the environmental movement of the 1960s. The environmental and social problems resulting from twentieth-­century rapid urbanisation and the reorganisation of Western cities around the motor vehicle inspired new demands for better solutions to arresting urban environmental decline. Reactions to and protests against environmental pollution, social fragmentation and inequality contributed to a rethinking of planning theory, architecture and urban design. By questioning the narrow economic focus of urban development, a few antagonistic voices from planning and landscape architecture argued for a more integrated approach to planning to avoid the risks associated with the technocratic thinking applied to planning. Long before the environmental movement flourished, Gerard Eckbo (1950) was advocating for a better harmony between humans and nature through the application of landscape values in town planning. As previously discussed in Chapter 2, Ian McHarg emphasised the importance and the need to incorporate ecological principles in urban analysis, design and development (McHarg, 1969). During the 1960s and 1970s, the affirmation of environmentalism as a social movement resulted in legislative actions under pressure from community activism, academics and a renewed liberal order. The emerging environmental movement also saw a maturing of the professional self-­responsibility toward protecting the urban environment among architects and planners (Wang, Palazzo, & Carper, 2016). In practice, however, barriers to implementation along with political and cultural apathy towards urban nature meant that landscape values remained stubbornly peripheral to the main urban agenda for another 30 years. Despite this resistance to change, new environmental pollution laws in the USA were coming into effect, changing the policy agenda to one more sympathetic to the concerns of the environmental movement. The first legal reference to sustainability comes from the US National Environmental Protection Act in 1969. This bill marked the beginnings of modern US environmental policy, including the emergence of sustainable development legislation for cities. The preamble to this Act contained directives around issues of equity, resource limits and participatory decision making that today reflect the broad scope of sustainable development policy across the world (Birkeland, 2008). Sustainability gained wider public attention with the publication of the 1972 report Limits to growth, authored by members of the European environmental collective, The Club of Rome. The report identified the importance of understanding how different global systems interacted and raised concerns about the limits of the Earth’s capacity to support population growth, accommodate urban expansion and assimilate waste. The issues arising from the report focussed public attention on questions about how much development should be tolerated at the expense of broader environmental degradation. At the time, urban development was seen to

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be compatible with economic growth and prosperity, but at odds with preserving environmental values. This tension, though widely recognised today, remains one of the great challenges faced by an urbanising global population. During the 1980s, a number of global organisations, including the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (1980) and the United Nations World Charter for Nature (1982), developed principles that sought to reconcile the competing forces of development and conservation. These early approaches focussed on conserving natural resources, maintaining biodiversity, habitat protection and ecological processes. However important these goals were, they were silent on the social and political implications of sustainability, especially in the context of addressing poverty caused by population migration and urbanisation (Holden et al., 2014). More recent interpretations of sustainable development have sought to address the social and political dimensions of urban development while re-­emphasising the broader ecological goals giving rise to more recent urban greening movements (Moore, 2016). For example, social sustainability is not just about the social qualities of a city in the present, but also sustaining or creating structures that ensure these qualities are afforded by future generations. In practice this means developing policies and programs that produce improvements for the lives of individuals as well as communities as a whole. To achieve this, focus is placed on the qualities of places (e.g. place making), and emphasising community engagement and partnering with the voluntary sector (Trivellato, 2017). The challenges revolve around achieving a balance between the responsibility of the state and the individual in achieving positive change. Today, the key drivers of the sustainable development movement remain globally oriented through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) under the auspices of the United Nations that has fostered a cooperative international commitment to mitigating the effects of climate change (UN-­Habitat, 2011). The annual conferences of parties (COP) to the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change drove global targets and commitments to improving environmental policies of participating countries. Interestingly the framework itself makes no specific mention of principles or goals for urban areas. The Habitat conferences, launched in 1976 and hosted by the United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development provide a similar platform to the COP meetings, but specifically targeting issues of rapid urbanisation and rising urban inequality (see, for example, UN-­Habitat, 2011, 2016). Debates about the merits and impacts of these UN lead agendas are well documented, and while the merits of the UN efforts are not the subject of this book, it is worth considering the role of international bodies in the evolution of sustainable development. Sustainability and sustainable urban development have endured as concepts for the past 40 years in spite of a lack of consensus about the meaning of the terms. Despite no political or scientific agreement, these concepts remain persistent ideologies (Meadowcroft, 2007). The lack of broadly accepted definitions, while presenting challenges in designing urban policies, has allowed for consensus to evolve in support of the idea that it is morally wrong to treat the world as an inexhaustible

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resource. In other words, sustainability is accepted because to enact unsustainable policies would be deemed intolerable (Daly, 1991). It is also worth considering that the rhetorical power of the concept comes from its lack of a precise definition. In the case of the metropolitan setting, sustainability cannot be precisely defined because urban systems are too complex, communities are too varied and the applications are too diverse (White, 2013). Instead we can arrive at a shared understanding that can inform policies and actions. For this reason, we can discuss and debate what is sustainable in a robust manner. Decision makers may not always agree on the best course of action, but the consensus among policy makers remains that the goal of achieving sustainability is a shared one.

The WCED definition The most widely recognised definition of sustainable development came from the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development report Our Common Future (WCED, 1987). With a focus on sharing resources within and across generations, the Bruntland definition, as it is commonly known, opened the opportunity to explore compatible notions of development and conservation within the context of human need and the corresponding environmental limits to meeting those needs. The questions being asked were no longer about the contradictions inherent in development and environmental goals, but rather how development could be achieved sustainably (Lele, 1991). The introduction to the report by Gro Harlem Bruntland (Norwegian Prime minister 1981, 1986–1989 and 1990–1996) and Chair of the UN World Commission on Environment and Development (1983–1988) summarised the purpose of the report as a global agenda for change. “It was an urgent call by the General Assembly of the United Nations: to propose long-­term environmental strategies for achieving sustainable development by the year 2000 and beyond” (WCED, 1987, p.  6). In doing so, the term “sustainable development” was widely adopted in global policy literature. Article 49 of Our Common Future states that “Sustainable development seeks to meet the needs and aspirations of the present without compromising the ability to meet those of the future” (WCED, 1987). Far from requiring the cessation of economic growth, it recognises that the problems of poverty and underdevelopment cannot be solved unless there is a new era of redistributed growth in which “developing countries play a large role and reap large benefits” (WCED, 1987, p. 39). This definition was a clear departure from conceiving development as only a third­world problem and recognised the need for the redistribution of the benefits of global economic growth.

Sustainable development and its shortcomings Sustainable development has been used interchangeably with other terms that semantically seem incompatible. Ecologically sustainable development, sustained

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development and sustained growth were varying applications of the term that draw on the differing ways that growth had been coopted into this contemporary development paradigm. Consider the central theoretical criticisms of sustainable development following its expanding popularity as an urban policy objective and how the concept has evolved in response to those concerns. The main policy formulations of sustainable development, emerging largely from the application of the WCED definition, suffer from conceptual weaknesses that affect metropolitan policy today. Generally the term is so malleable that it can mean different things to people and organisations with different agendas without requiring commitment to specific policies, yet intriguingly the terms hegemonic potency endures (no one dares to suggest we reverse direction and pursue an unsustainable future). Notwithstanding this contradiction, Lele (1991) identifies the following issues: • •

•

•

It fails to adequately address the problems of poverty and environmental degradation in informal urban settlements. It is ambivalent about the role of institutions in preventing inequality. Institutions should play a role in enhancing access to resources for people who are not otherwise able to access those resources. It is weak on the conceptualisation of the objectives of development, sustainability and the role of participation. While public participation is necessary and desirable, it can’t be seen as a substitute for equity (as defined in WCED) and social justice. In other words, operationalising participation is not a guarantee of success. Stages of participation, including decision making, implementation, benefit distribution and evaluation (Cohen & Uphoff, 1980) are rarely articulated, instead the simple correlation that involving local communities in decision making will increase a development’s chances of success. Without detailing how the phases of engagement will contribute to project success, the relationship between sustainability objectives and participation should not be assumed. It is weak in the face of incomplete knowledge and uncertainty. Concepts of sustainability are poorly articulated, making it difficult to determine the nature of the sustainability objectives that a development project is seeking to address. This is particularly the case in metropolitan scale planning agendas when seemingly competing goals (densification, environmental and flows, congestion) seem to address different, often competing sustainability objectives.

In order to progress beyond the shortcomings of sustainable development, we should consider not only what needs to be addressed, but how these challenges can be mitigated and by whom. Pennington (1999) argues that while sustainable development as a planning goal is laudable, its origins as an instrument of government to determine urban environmental policy focuses too much on correcting market failure to achieve sustainable development outcomes. As a result policy makers do not adequately address the causes of government failure or consider the role of the

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market in enacting sustainable development goals. Specifically he argues that the default positon that the state maintains control of planning policy is premised on the assumption that “any attempt to achieve “strategic coordination” must require some central political authority to make subjective planning decisions, a position which would seem at odds with the supposed goal of “empowering” local communities” (Pennington, 1999, p.  46). Pennington argues that the market can provide the best means for allocating resources within and across communities. Though highly contested for its inability to address common pool resource exploitation and market failure, Pennington’s paper on free market environmentalism is worth reading to gain a better understanding of a neoliberal approach to environmental management. More importantly, understanding the role of the state and the market in sustainable development policy is fundamental to developing urban policy and these concepts are discussed further in Chapters 6 and 7. To further explore the roles of the state and the market in addressing sustainable development the next section briefly considers the ideological positon that gave rise to ecological modernisation. Consider the WCED definition of sustainable development in the context of ecological modernisation to further examine the political challenges in developing metropolitan landscape policy. Though not originating as a conceptual approach to sustainable development, ecological modernisation emerged as a technology focussed, market-­led response to achieving sustainability goals. In an attempt to implement targets set by governments, ecological modernisation provided a flexible market-­based ideology for businesses to achieve sustainability goals set out in legislation. Unlike sustainable development, no defining manifesto such as the Bruntland declaration exists (Weale, 1992). Instead, it is a pluralistic concept that encompasses both new technological approaches and innovative policy settings to achieve environmental targets (Langhelle, 2000). Originating in Germany as a market-­based method of implementing environmental policy, ecological modernisation attempted to overcome the problems of the failed command and control approach to environmental regulation that merely displaced rather than solved urban environmental problems. Advocates of ecological modernisation do not see that a zero sum game exists between economic activity and environmental protection as some would interpret the WCED limits approach. Rather, it is an ideology that perceives environmental pollution and accompanying regulations as a source of economic opportunity and growth (Langhelle, 2000). Ecological modernisation substantially informs today’s green economy, where mitigation of environmental waste constitutes an end goal for improving economic efficiency. The state’s role, consistent with the flourishing neoliberal paradigm of the 1980s, was to facilitate rather than dictate environmental improvement through fiscal incentives and other soft policy measures (Gunningham & Sinclair, 2002). From an urban greening perspective, ecological modernisation presents a challenge when considering the role of landscapes in achieving sustainable development outcomes. In urban development, the ecological modernisation agenda is most visibly expressed in the design and deployment of green building ratings systems such as LEED (US Green Building Council), BREEAM (UK) and Green Star Certification (Green

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Building Council of Australia). Green building certification neatly conforms to the ambitions of ecological modernisation in that it has become an industry in itself, and the objectives of reducing waste (material and energy) are economically profitable. However, as a driver of green economies, green ratings schemes involve re-­presenting green technologies in the built environment as achieving green urban development (Hagerman, Clark, & Hebb, 2007) but do not delve too deeply into how ecological conservation and social justice issues are addressed (Cidell, 2009). For example, new green building codes can increase housing costs, while perversely reducing the overall amount of green space as density targets are met. Similarly the market nature of green certification is consistent with the goals of energising green economies in professional fields such as architectural design and engineering, but is weak or silent on the role and value of adding or enhancing ecosystem values provided by landscapes. Similar to the tensions identified in the previous chapter about the role of landscapes in the compact city movement, ecological modernisation potentially illuminates where landscape resists and comes into conflict with contemporary greening agendas. The WCED definition, on the other hand, includes the precondition of equity. Therefore environmental improvement is not the only goal of sustainable development, but it places limits on development based on the carrying capacity of systems to provide the same quality of life within and across generations. For example, the Bruntland report states that “sustainable development must not endanger the natural systems that support life on Earth: the atmosphere, the waters, the soils, and the living beings” (WCED, 1987, p. 44). Sustainable development therefore includes spatial and temporal thresholds that inform metropolitan policy, whereas ecological modernisation depends on future technological advancements to achieve sustainability targets without inferring limits to standards of living or growth more generally. This “fragile ecology” argument that underpins the WCED definition (Folke et al., 2002), however, has come under scrutiny as further development of ecosystem resilience theories have reframed how ecological systems interact and respond to shocks and disturbances (of which urban development is a major vector). Resilience theory provides an operational method for applying sustainability goals to development. Walker and Salt (2006) propose a landscape scale resilience theory for environmental managers and land owners in a non-­urban context. They define resilience as the capacity of an environmental system to absorb disturbance and reorganise during disruption while retaining essentially the same identity (Walker and Salt 2006). This definition does allow for systems to cross thresholds and defines landscapes as possessing different qualities that contribute to different levels of resilience. The argument here is that in a system, certain types of natural capital (ecosystem services) can be substituted for human capital (technology, innovation) without changing the essential functions of a system. This approach, while accommodating the objectives of ecological modernisation into a sustainable development paradigm, is still poorly understood in the metropolitan landscape planning context. The emphasis here is to consider how metropolitan landscape systems may interact with development and how those interactions contribute or undermine the

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goals of sustainable development. Sustainable development theories have spawned a range of idioms and agendas that place the landscape at the centre of the urban design and development debate. As briefly outlined in the previous chapter, biophilia, ecological urbanism, landscape urbanism and green infrastructure all argue the case for achieving sustainable urban development through achieving ecologically sustainable development. Sustainable development remains high on the international agenda more than 30 years since the WCED coined the term, because achieving sustainability goals is still important to governments and societies. Focussing on the goals of sustainable development, rather than the definition, allows us to consider how we might operationalise the concept into practice. Pragmatically, triple bottom line accounting (Elkington, 1998) has provided policy makers with the armature to design their own sustainable development strategies that are largely in use today.

Interpreting sustainable development goals A commonly accepted and widely used evaluation method for sustainable urban development is the triple bottom line (TBL) (Elkington, 1998). Variations of the TBL model exist, however the basic premise requires decision makers to consider and balance the social, environmental and economic impacts of urban policy in order to achieve sustainable development. Early iterations of the triple bottom line are represented by three identical overlapping circles (Figure 4.1). The centre

Figure 4.1   Triple

Bottom Line model developed by Elkington.

Source: Elkington, 1998.

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describes a theoretical sustainability state as the equal balance between social, economic and environmental factors. Countless variations on this model have emphasised the underlying tensions and power structures that, in practice, place one domain (circle) above the others. While early models strove to emphasise equal weighting between environmental, social and economic indicators, proponents of TBL were often criticised for placing economic factors over all others. Today the triple bottom line model is widely applied semantically in the application of sustainable development objectives. References to social, economic and environmental objectives are commonplace in the wording of metropolitan planning objectives and principles, yet the triple bottom line method is rarely tested to determine whether it actually achieves sustainable development outcomes. The application of TBL assessment highlights the point that assessing sustainability depends on the category, number and weighting of indicators that are selected to evaluate sustainable development objectives. However, choosing too few (e.g. a single composite index such as the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change’s Inclusive Wealth Index) or too many (e.g. 96 indicators in the UN commission on sustainable development) simply leads to the definitional challenges. Therefore deciding the number of indicators for definitional and practical reasons is important. Nevertheless, the goal remains the same, to define what constitutes sustainable development assessment. Discussing what constitutes sustainable development in the context of metropolitan planning should open up debate about the role of economic development in the formulation of policy alongside social and environmental concerns. Holden et al. (2014), in applying the WCED definition of sustainable development, argue three primary dimensions should be evaluated. These dimensions include: safeguarding long-­term ecological sustainability; satisfying basic human needs; and promoting intragenerational equity and intergenerational equity. Applying these dimensions of sustainable development would suggest that while economic growth is necessary, it is not a precondition of sustainable development (Holden et al., 2014). In other words, the economic component of triple bottom line is contingent on the social component (satisfying basic human needs, and promoting intragenerational and intergenerational equity), and the environmental component (safeguarding long-­term ecological sustainability) being satisfied first. Using this particular line of argument would suggest a different model is needed to more accurately evaluate sustainable development. Figure 4.2 is an alternative model that more accurately reflects Holden’s line of argument. There is of course not one answer to how a sustainable development is assessed, nor is there a correct attribution of economic, social and environmental priorities. This examination simply serves to illustrate that a commitment to sustainable development requires a defensible analysis of what definition is deployed and what framework is used to assess the plan. Holden’s argument would be considered radical in contemporary planning practice as the role for economics is typically far more central to decision making than this analysis would suggest.

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Figure 4.2   An

alternative TBL model.

Source: Lederwasch & Mukheibir, 2013.

Applying sustainable development goals to metropolitan planning From a metropolitan landscape perspective, we care about the environment precisely because it surrounds and sustains us. Therefore net positive environmental change should be an aspirational objective of sustainable urban development (Birkeland, 2008). Yet the urbanisation of the landscape is far more complex and the future direction of a city is largely dependent on historical factors. The twenty-­ first-century cities are path dependant products of eras throughout time; the most recent, the urban-­industrial society, cannot simply be dismantled in favour of a new more sustainable version. Despite significant advances towards decarbonising the global economy, our economic system still relies on CO2 emissions as an indicator of prosperity, making the decoupling of fossil fuel from economic growth a more complicated task than is currently technically and politically feasible (Kropp, 2018).

The role of planning in achieving sustainable development Campbell (1996) critically identified the role of planners as one in tension and in conflict generated by the three competing domains. Diagrammatically and conceptually, the triple bottom line assessment, conceived by Elkington, contrasts with Campbell’s planner’s triangle (Figure 4.3). They share the same goal but address the tensions in application very differently. Applying Elkington’s model requires a planner to include requirements for reporting on how a city weights its relative social, environmental and economic performance in order to achieve a form of sustainable equilibrium. Alternatively, Campbell’s planner’s triangle makes explicit the conflicting goals for planning that identify sustainability as a desirable but elusive goal to aim for. The planner’s triangle reframes sustainable development as a contest “not only of conflicts, but also the potential complementarity of interests” (Campbell, 1996, p. 297), opening

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Figure 4.3   The

Planner’s Triangle.

Source: Campbell, 1996.

new interpretations of how planning, focussed on social and environmental issues, mobilises the economic opportunities afforded by development. This “close contest” framework developed by Campbell is insightful as it reframes sustainability thinking in cities and reasserts the role of planning at a time when governments are coming to terms with the failings of the neoliberal approach to urban growth. Landscapes, thought of in this way, are contesting for policy attention alongside other urban functions, rather than being conceived of as nature and non-­urban, to be experienced in reserves and parks adjacent to, but not in the urban areas. Consequently the struggle to reconcile these competing values has inspired a renaissance in research and advocacy for new forms of metropolitan planning in the first decades of the twenty-­first century (Fertner, 2012; Gleeson, Dodson, & Spiller, 2010).

Planning for sustainable development requires planners and policy makers to deal with the conflicts between competing interests by discovering and implementing complementary solutions. However “it is one thing to locate sustainability at the centre of the triangle, but it is another to reorganize society to get there”( Campbell, 1996, p. 301). The planner’s triangle describes the tensions as follows.

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The three priorities describe how a decision maker might perceive how to explain trade-­offs between differing agendas. •

•

•

The economic priority sees the city in competition with other cities for resources and finance. Space (including landscape) provides for the efficient allocation of financial resources and infrastructure capital. The environmental priority sees the city as a consumer of resources and producer of waste and the city is in competition with “nature” for scarce resources. The environmental priority emphasises the ecological functioning of green spaces, waterways, providing ecosystem services and the provision of natural capital. The social priority sees a competition for distribution and access to resources among different social groups within the city. Social spaces are for communities to support the formation of social and cultural capital.

The three axes describe the tensions planners must contend with in decision making. •

•

•

The property conflict. The allocation of property rights brings into conflict the mechanisms of growth through development and fair access to property. The democratic capitalist society defines property as a private commodity, but relies on state intervention to ensure social benefits are distributed through controls on development and land use. The resource conflict. Developers and businesses resist the regulation of their use of the environment for extraction resources and waste disposal, yet require the same regulation to overcome tragedy of commons scenarios (all individuals act independently according to their own self-­ interest and behave contrary to the common good by collectively over-­ exploiting natural systems). The development conflict. How to provide greater economic opportunity to the most vulnerable, while at the same time mandating minimal environmental protections that result in limiting the opportunity for the most vulnerable (who are more likely to be resource dependant) to improve their economic opportunity, thereby exacerbating economic inequity.

Moving towards a carbon neutral economy is necessary and ultimately inevitable and will require considerable positive and negative disruption to urban settlements (Goodchild & Walshaw, 2011). What this means for planning and the role landscapes play in sustaining the trajectory toward carbon neutrality will depend on how existing structures, practices and rules change over time. While urban theorists argue for radical changes to the way we live in cities, the practice of reinventing the modern metropolis in the image of green, biophilic and zero-­carbon metropolises

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require transformations that are, in our current economic and political environment, highly improbable, unimaginably disruptive, politically and economically implausible. Nevertheless, the utopian spirit driving many green urban agendas helps to progress theories of sustainable development and advance genuine positive change.

Challenges for metropolitan landscape planning and sustainable development The material nature of biological green as landscape reflects the origins of the idea of the green city going back to Ebenezer Howard. However, green technology has, to some extent, pushed the green city away from urban nature towards a material and technological response. Instead, city greening, driven by the political and ideological motivations behind ecological modernisation, obfuscates and confuses the presence of biological green in the formulation of sustainable development policy. The goal of achieving a more sustainable urban form is a clear objective of metropolitan planning authorities. Mobilising technology to improve the performance of buildings has been the vanguard of sustainable development. This has not only emerged from the global environmental urgency to reframe how we live, but it also presents a significant business opportunity for the design and construction industry to improve their reputation through green credentials. Ecological modernisation has, with the efficient rules of market capitalism, played its part in championing green buildings and replacing the landscape as the metonym for green cities. Green rating tools provide a social license to continue to live the way we always have because the environmental credentials of the home are substantially determined through the theoretical values prescribed by the energy efficiency rating scheme rather than the environmental cost of living in them. Therefore living sustainably is defined by the number of green stars on the buildings we live and work in rather than the environmental costs of living in and moving between the home and the office. This is a form of ecological modernisation that reduces the communities’ approach to living sustainably as a “form of reductive ecological functionalism” (Meyer, 2008, p. 14). The emergence of the global environmental urgency to live more sustainably diminishes the role of landscapes in the compact city as green buildings replace green landscapes. As a result, planners, designers and the wider community are “urged to accept a united, if ill-­defined, agreement on landscape value as land value and to cede all argument to those who have been entrusted with finally determining it” (Russell-­Clarke, 2010, p. 5). Why then should we, as professionals concerned with the role and function of metropolitan landscapes, consider the role of governments in planning and managing landscapes? While there is a broadly accepted view that urban greening is desirable, the practical challenges of planning for landscapes in densifying cities exemplifies the conflicts and tensions associated with achieving sustainable development. The agendas that have driven policy and decision making, particularly in the last quarter

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century, reveal a desire to see landscapes perform restorative functions and provide ecosystem services to help preserve our standard of living (MacKenzie & Williamson, 2015). Formulating policies to protect metropolitan landscapes will at some point impinge on the property rights of some individuals. In capitalist economies, such an approach is politically counter-­intuitive and deeply unpopular. However, the case for intervention by governments is built on the premise of both a market and a moral failure of individuals to act (Pölzler, 2015).

Future challenges in managing metropolitan landscapes for sustainable development While landscapes play a central role in achieving sustainability objectives, pressure to reduce the cost of managing urban open space has resulted in both a perceived and real transferal of access to public spaces toward the private sector. This transfer of control creates community apprehension about a growing acceptance by the state to accept undue private sector influence and loss of public accountability in managing metropolitan landscapes (Sandercock, 2005; Young & McPherson, 2013). More collaborative approaches, through devolving the management of landscapes to non-­government organisations, are a positive way to preserve metropolitan landscapes. However, regulation has not kept pace with the need for specific guidance on how these spaces can be more collaboratively managed. Local planning authorities have not deployed practical approaches needed to overcome the challenges of managing a range of seemingly competing services provided by the diverse landscapes that make up the metropolis (Bergeron, Paquette, & Poullaouec-­Gonidec, 2014). However, there is a growing recognition of the value contributed by non-­government stakeholders to the management of public landscapes such as parks and reserves. Conservancies (non-­profit organisations that raise private capital for landscapes such as the Central Park conservancy, New York) and private sector finance (such as developer contributions) are well established examples. However, participation by private citizens in decision making about the management of metropolitan landscapes too often meets community engagement program objectives under the assumption that any form of engagement is positive without robust evaluation of the most effective management approaches (Roe, 2013). More recently, the evaluation of landscapes at a metropolitan scale has focussed attention on the adaptive capacity of urban landscapes to cope with increased intensity and frequency of climatic variation (Tonga et al., 2007). Similarly, the flourishing of green infrastructure research reveals that the wider implications for landscape management are not clear due to competing interests and priorities compounded by restrictive planning policies in many countries. In response, and at a local level, decision makers are beginning to develop novel and practical approaches achieving legislated landscape conservation targets while retaining amenity values (Ives & Kelly, 2015).

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Conclusion Sustainable development, at its heart, needs to overcome competing objectives inherent in urban consolidation and containment policies. Despite a clear and established political and community desire for protecting and enhancing landscape values in urban development, landscape conservation and urban development are treated as different ideologies, competing for resources to serve different purposes with objectives that are often at odds with each other (Wang et al., 2016). To overcome this, planning and urban design need to introduce other methods and approaches to achieve sustainable development outcomes. The evolving theories that help to refine sustainable development objectives have overlapping themes and trajectories that place the landscape in tension with other infrastructures and built forms. For example, built environment policy agendas advocate for denser, more compact developments with a mix of uses that generally displace landscapes (including private open space and nature strips) with inferior alternatives such as green roofs. Likewise, more efficient and improved green building design hasn’t resulted in citizens living closer to nature or experiencing the benefits of landscapes. The general change in attitudes towards the urban outdoors has seen many informal recreation spaces replaced by consumptive forms of recreation (e.g. café strips, outdoor malls) that privilege wealthier individuals with disposable income. At the same time, landscapes are becoming infrastructure providers (or enhancers) to existing built environment systems. The most significant gains to improving sustainability it seems may have little to do with landscape planning. However, the natural processes afforded by metropolitan landscapes are increasingly important for governments to protect in order to achieve sustainability objectives. The challenge is to ensure those landscapes provide cultural, spiritual, recreational and social values while, at the same time, providing other ecosystem services such as clean water and air and protecting biodiversity.

Case study – Canberra and Ottawa Landscapes have played a central role in the structure of Canberra and Ottawa’s respective metropolitan plans. These two case studies identify how landscapes were consciously incorporated into metropolitan planning in the formative years preceding post-­Second World War expansion. This is not unique to Canberra and Ottawa; other cities such as Stockholm, Washington and Copenhagen also exhibit a metropolitan landscape structure that has endured waves of development. The first iterations of metropolitan plans paid attention to the function and value of landscape for aesthetic, ceremonial and symbolic reasons, as well as providing recreation spaces and access to nature for residents. For example Canberra and Washington preserved their respective landscape structure to create a symbolic and ceremonial setting deserving of a nation’s capital. The designers of Canberra described the topography as a natural amphitheatre, insisting that the hill tops provide vantage points towards major institutions and to admire the geometric

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layout of the city. Copenhagen and Ottawa protected the landscapes surrounding the city to ensure an ongoing supply of food and timber for residents while restricting urban expansion. In each case the basic metropolitan structure has endured although the reason for protection has evolved. Similarly, the role of governance in land management and the way that landscape values are measured and incorporated into contemporary plans have changed. Concepts of sustainability and sustainable development were non-­existent in planning when these metropolitan plans were formulated, yet they provide a key element to contemporary planning of these cities and their metropolitan regions today. These case studies detail how landscapes shaped the way their respective metropolitan plans evolved over time.

Canberra’s national capital plan The place of the landscape in Canberra’s metropolitan structure was assured from its inception because of the city’s particular planning history. It was a product of a vision resulting from Australia’s Federation, and through them the Australian people who embodied the idea of a national capital that expressed the symbolic union of the states to form the Commonwealth in 1900 (Freestone, 2010). Key to the vision of a new capital was an aspiration to locate the new metropolis in the Australian landscape and expressed through the winning design by Walter and Marion Griffin (Headon, 2003). Similarly the government planning framework secured the landscape structure for the city during the interwar years in preparation for the urban development that occurred after the Second World War (Freestone, 1989). Between 1958 and 1988, the Australian Capital Territory’s (ACT) strategic planning, design and construction of public infrastructure were all under the direction of the National Capital Development Commission (NCDC). The bestowing of city planning and building to the NCDC allowed this organisation, on behalf of the federal government, to implement progressive and contemporary planning theories for the time. The legacy of the NCDC continues to have a profound effect on Canberra’s metropolitan structure and reflects the community’s strong association with “landscape” and “place” manifest in the colloquial term for Canberra, “the bush capital”. This planning legacy is most visibly expressed by the hills surrounding the valley that are free from development and the city is interwoven with low density suburbs nestled into the landscape of established street trees and parks. In 1988, the Australian Government granted self-­rule to the ACT as a “gift” to the Australian people to recognise the bicentenary of British settlement. Being the territory of Australia’s National Capital, the Commonwealth reserved the right to ensure Canberra was planned and managed according to its national significance. This transferred the financial responsibility of managing Canberra’s landscape system to its own provincial government, while ensuring the Commonwealth had control over strategic development, effectively retaining federal government planning control over three-­quarters of the ACT. The major debates between the different levels of government revolved around division and transfer of land management responsibilities (Reid, 2002). At the time, the community was

Figure 4.4   The

National Capital Open Space (NCOSS) Plan, Canberra – each of the six towns and the city centre are surrounded by landscapes.

Source: Image supplied courtesy of the National Capital Authority.Commonwealth copyright. All rights reserved.

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concerned about the apparent mismatch between the emphasis on infrastructure planning and development at the expense of Canberra’s public landscapes, containing high value ecological and scenic assets. Central to this debate was the role of the metropolitan landscape in sustaining both explicit and tacit landscape values held to be important to the community and as part of the city’s planning legacy. The planning authority continued to investigate how the landscape could be managed and classified to reflect a range of ecosystem services to meet the city’s commitments to sustainable development. At this time, the geographical spread of the city and the generous, but now ageing urban infrastructure posed significant tangible and opportunity costs to Canberra’s sustainability. Of note were persistent tensions regarding the spreading housing estates on the fringes of the towns and the challenges faced by land managers responsible for maintaining public open spaces. In response, the territory government prioritised the planning for and adaptions to existing towns to produce a more compact urban form. In doing so it applied a “city limits” planning approach, using the existing landscape structures (vegetation, topography and hydrology) to limit the further spread of the city. In the early part of the twenty-­first century, many Canberra citizens considered the planning system to be under too much influence from private sector interests with inadequate protections for the landscape values and threatening the city’s open spaces and urban quality. In 2002 the local left-­leaning Labor Party was elected to the ACT provincial government on a planning platform to address this decline. Once elected, the government undertook a number of actions. It commenced the first comprehensive strategic planning review and introduced a consultative neighbourhood planning program. Despite this, community resistance to redevelopment continued, along with growing concerns for a loss of landscape values and reduced accessibility and environmental amenity of the landscape structure of the city. For the ACT Government, the costs of maintaining, let alone further investing in, Canberra’s extensive landscape infrastructure, including the urban open spaces and streetscapes, was becoming more critical given its limited sources of revenue. In a bid to canvas these issues and the community’s concern for Canberra’s environmental amenity, the ACT Government, before reviewing its strategic policies, undertook two key community consultation projects. The Sustainable Future project (2009) brought together key stakeholders to consider the issues and potential responses to managing Canberra’s landscape values. Following this, the consultation project, “Time to Talk: Canberra 2030” canvassed the wider community. This consultation delivered back to ACT Government key messages. Central among them was the notion that the city should increase in density but not at the expense of the quality of the landscape or threaten the integrity of metropolitan landscape structure. History shows that through conscious incorporation of the landscape in metropolitan planning since the city’s inception, the landscape has been sustained, largely unchanged and strongly linked to the original plan. However, the landscape has, more recently, been coopted to perform essential functions contributing to the

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City’s sustainable development agenda. In preparing the 2012 ACT Planning Strategy, the ACT Government undertook an assessment of the vulnerability of the metropolitan structure to climate change. This work established the importance and the value of the metropolitan landscape with regard to ameliorating extreme weather conditions. Further analysis also identified the importance of these metropolitan landscapes for the migration of species, as well as for improved psychological and physical health. This work reinforced the value of the landscapes in the urban structure and the impact it has on the urban form.

Ottawa greenbelt plan Ottawa is an intimate, human scaled city that emerged organically like many other North Amer­ican forestry towns. Unlike Canberra, Ottawa’s urban structure and form is less geometric. Whereas Canberra was designed around the ornamental Lake Burley Griffin, urban growth in Canada’s capital fanned out from the Ottawa River in a more organic fashion (Erickson, 2004). Despite humble origins, Ottawa grew rapidly after the Second World War, compelling the Prime Minister Mackenzie King to develop the city’s first metropolitan plan in the late 1940s. Like Canberra, the landscape was consciously incorporated into the plan. Despite this, the pressure associated with low density urban expansion has been the dominant shaping force of Ottawa for most of the second half of the twentieth century. A key feature of Ottawa’s metropolitan landscape strategy is the national capital greenbelt to the south and Gatineau Park to the north (see Figure 4.5). It covers an area of over 50,000 hectares. The landscape is a mixture of introduced species and native forests, agricultural land and large infrastructure sites such as the Macdonald–Cartier international airport (National Capital Commission, 2011). Initially the Greenbelt was gazetted as part of the then Prime Minister’s commitment to formalise a metropolitan plan for Ottawa. The French architect and planner Jacques Greber, along with professional staff from the Federal District Commission, completed the city’s first plan for the capital in 1950. Consistent with garden city principles, popular since the turn of the century, the inclusion of the Greenbelt was a significant spatial element of the plan (Taylor, Paine, & Fitzgibbon, 1995). The planning of the Greenbelt was based on containing the urban boundary of national capital region and its associated infrastructure. Like Canberra, the size and shape of the Greenbelt was primarily to provide access to nature for recreation and to secure land for agriculture and forestry, rather than specifically the protection of natural systems or ecological resources. The boundary of the Greenbelt and, by definition, the extent of the urban footprint was determined as the most efficient economic and practical area that could be serviced by a municipal agency at reasonable cost (National Capital Commission, 1992). Within eight years of the Greenbelt gazettal, urban expansion was placing pressure on the urban edge. In order to protect these landscapes, the federal government bought an additional 15,000 hectares to add to the 20,000 hectares already in Federal ownership between 1958 and 1966.

Concept (Greenbelt Masterplan 2013).

Source: by permission, National Capital Commission, Ottawa, Canada.

Figure 4.5   Greenbelt

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In order to retain agricultural production close to the city, the Federal Government leased the land back to farmers. However, they were short-­term leases and the perceived lack of lease certainty has resulted in a lack of investment in infrastructure and a resulting retreat of farming from the area (Fung & Conway, 2007). Since then, the Greenbelt has been successful in providing a land reserve for government and institutional buildings, containing the city within the reserve boundary, and providing a range of landscape types from natural forests to pastoral open space accessible to residents. However, the Greenbelt has had limited success in containing urban growth or affecting urban densities. Satellite communities have expanded adjacent to the outer limits of the Greenbelt (Fung & Conway, 2007). The main contribution of the Greenbelt has been to separate the newer satellite communities from the old urban area adding further pressure to the transport system. While the Greenbelt has not contained Ottawa’s growth, it has significantly shaped the structure of the city. This was reflected in the Federal Government’s 2001 decision to retain the Greenbelt and add Gatineau Park in the amalgamation of the former Ottawa urban area, the regional government and ten other local municipalities to create the greatly expanded metropolitan region known today as the City of Ottawa. In 2011 the national and municipal agencies in the City of Ottawa partnered to prepare a long-­term plan for the National Capital Region. These agencies set a goal of developing a sustainable, resilient and liveable region. The National Capital Commission (NCC) and the City of Ottawa have now commenced separate, complementary strategic planning reviews. The NCC’s “Horizon 2067” is a review of the metropolitan structure that commenced in August 2011. The City of Ottawa embarked on “Building a Liveable Ottawa 2031” in January 2013. The NCC has a federally sanctioned statutory duty to prepare plans to assist in the development, conservation and improvement of the National Capital Region. However, the NCC has taken a more forthright role in the strategic planning. The NCC addresses, at the very broadest level, land use, public transport, employment, economic viability and quality of living – issues critical to urban growth – as well as national issues pertaining to heritage values, symbolism and promotion of the capital region. Horizon 2067 contains three objectives that specifically relate to the management of landscapes in the Greenbelt. These include: better integration of natural areas into the urban fabric; pilot projects focussed on ecological and sustainable agriculture; and new tools for evaluating and protecting valued ecosystems. In a similar vein to the ACT Government’s strategic planning exercise, Horizon 2067 has repositioned the landscape values of these open spaces to incorporate metrics to measure the performance of the landscape as part of its sustainable development agenda. Despite very little conscious collaboration between the respective planning agencies concerned with the review of metropolitan plans in Canberra and Ottawa, both capital cities have undergone similar processes of renewing approaches to metropolitan planning at both state and federal levels. The evidence from both case studies show that the environmental and cultural values contained in the metropolitan

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landscape continue to support the sustainable development agenda, underpinned by planning legacies and historical landscape values implicit in the open spaces. In addition, each city is looking for ways to incorporate more contemporary methods and understandings of landscape values underpinned by ecological function and ecosystem services. Canberra and Ottawa, like all cities, emerged around specific geographic patterns such as rivers, hills and forests; however, from their inception, the competition for land uses has necessitated the protection of landscape values through formal incorporation into metropolitan plans. The challenge for cities remains that modern planning is continuing to break the nexus between landscape and the urban structure. In the cases presented here, the notion of sustainable development unites the concept of the urban and the landscape, making separation of these planning functions impossible. Therefore the metropolitan landscape is central to the sustainability of these cities which implicates open space planning and management into metropolitan planning. In the case of Ottawa the landscape contains the city, whereas in Canberra it separates the self-­contained towns. However, this only partially ascribes a value; for while the respective federal and municipal plans attempt to articulate what is important about their landscapes, they do not go on to define the relative value of these spaces to the city. In order to achieve the goals of sustainable urban development, both cities need to comprehend the value of compact urban form while conserving the relative value of the metropolitan landscapes. These concepts are not mutually exclusive, but rather, combine to deliver a better outcome than what currently exists.

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Elkington, J. (1998). Cannibals with forks: the triple bottom line of sustainability. Gabriola Island: New Society Publishers. Erickson, D. (2004). The relationship of historic city form and contemporary greenway implementation: a comparison of Milwaukee, Wisconsin (USA) and Ottawa, Ontario (Canada). Landscape and Urban Planning, 68, 199–221. Fertner, C. (2012). Urbanisation, urban growth and planning in the Copenhagen Metropolitan Region with reference studies from Europe and the USA. Forest & Landscape, University of Copenhagen. Folke, C., Carpenter, S., Elmqvist, T., Gunderson, L., Holling, C. S., & Walker, B. (2002). Resilience and sustainable development: building adaptive capacity in a world of transformations. AMBIO: A Journal of the Human Environment, 31(5), 437–440. Freestone, R. (1989). Model communities: the Garden City movement in Australia. Melbourne: Nelson. Freestone, R. (2010). Urban nation: Australia’s planning heritage. Collingwood: CSIRO. Fung, F., & Conway, T. (2007). Greenbelts as an environmental planning tool: a case study of Southern Ontario, Canada. Journal of Environmental Policy and Planning, 9, 101–117. Gleeson, B., Dodson, J., & Spiller, M. (2010). Metropolitan governance for the Australian city: the case for reform. Issues paper, 12(1), 1–26. Goodchild, B., & Walshaw, A. (2011). Towards zero carbon homes in England? From inception to partial implementation. Housing Studies, 26(6), 933–949. Gunningham, N., & Sinclair, D. (2002). Leaders and laggards: next generation environmental regulation. Sheffield: Greenleaf. Hagerman, L. A., Clark, G. L., & Hebb, T. (2007). Investment intermediaries in economic development: linking public pension funds to urban revitalization. Community Develop­ ment Investment Review, 3, 45–65. Headon, D. (2003). The symbolic role of the national capital: from colonial argument to 21st century ideals. Canberra: National Capital Authority. Holden, E., Linnerud, K., & Banister, D. (2014). Sustainable development: Our Common Future revisited. Global Environmental Change, 26, 130–139. Ives, C. D., & Kelly, A. H. (2015). The coexistence of amenity and biodiversity in urban landscapes. Landscape Research, 41(5), 495–509. Kropp, C. (2018). Controversies around energy landscapes in third modernity. Landscape Research, 43(4), 562–573. Langhelle, O. (2000). Why ecological modernization and sustainable development should not be conflated. Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning, 2, 302–322. Lederwasch, A., & Mukheibir, P. (2013). The triple bottom line and progress toward ecological sustainable development: Australia’s coal mining industry as a case study. Resources, 2(1), 26–38. Lele, S. (1991). Sustainable development: a critical review. World Development, 19(6), 607–621. MacKenzie, A., & Williamson, G. (2015). Reconciling competing values of urban open space in two national capitals. Historic Environment, 27(1), 102–111. McHarg, I. (1969). Design with nature. New York: Natural History Press. Meadowcroft, J. (2007). National sustainable development strategies: features, challenges and reflexivity. European Environment, 17(3), 152–163. Meyer, E. K. (2008). Sustaining beauty. The performance of appearance: a manifesto in three parts. Journal of Landscape Architecture, 3(1), 6–23. Moore, S. A. (2016). Testing a mature hypothesis: reflection on “Green cities, growing cities, just cities: urban planning and the contradiction of sustainable development”. Journal of the Amer­ican Planning Association, 82(4), 385–388.

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National Capital Commission. (1992). The future greenbelt: recreation trends and the greenbelt. CEDRO, University of Calgary. National Capital Commission. (2011). Horizon 2067. Ottawa. Pennington, M. (1999). Free market environmentalism and the limits of land use planning. Journal of Environmental Policy and Planning, 1(1), 43–59. Pölzler, T. (2015). Climate change inaction and moral nihilism. Ethics, Policy & Environment, 18(2), 202–214. Reid, P. (2002). Canberra following Griffin: a design history of Australia’s National Capital. Canberra: National Archives of Australia. Roe, M. (2013). Landscape and participation. In P. Howard, I. Thompson, & E. Waterton (Eds.), The Routledge companion to landscape studies, 335–354. New York: Routledge. Russell-­Clarke, J. (2010). A dilemma for landscape architecture: suburbs and utopias (PhD thesis). RMIT, Melbourne. Sandercock, L. (2005). The democratization of planning: elusive or illusory? Planning Theory and Practice, 6(4), 32–56. Taylor, J., Paine, C., & Fitzgibbon, J. (1995). From greenbelts to greenways: four Canadian case studies. Landscape and Urban Planning, 33, 47–64. Tonga, C., Feagin, R., Lua, J., Zhang, X., Zhu, X., Wang, W., & He, W. (2007). Ecosystem service values and restoration in the urban Sanyang wetland of Wenzhou, China. Ecological Engineer, 29, 249–258. Trivellato, B. (2017). How can “smart” also be socially sustainable? Insights from the case of Milan. European Urban and Regional Studies, 24(4), 337–351. UN-­Habitat. (2011). State of the world’s cities 2010/2011: bridging the urban divide. London: The United Nations Human Settlements Program. UN-­Habitat. (2016). New Urban Agenda: Quito declaration on sustainable cities and human settl­ ments for all. London: The United Nations Human Settlements Program. Walker, B., & Salt, D. (2006). Resilience thinking: sustaining ecosystems and people in a changing world. Washington: Island Press. Wang, X., Palazzo, D., & Carper, M. (2016). Ecological wisdom as an emerging field of scholarly inquiry in urban planning and design. Landscape and Urban Planning, 24(1), 100–107. WCED (World Commission on Environment and Development). (1987). Our common future. Weale, A. (1992). The new politics of pollution. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Wheeler, S. (2000). Planning for metropolitan sustainability. Journal of Planning Education and Research, 20(2), 133–145. White, M. A. (2013). Sustainability: I know it when I see it. Ecological Economics, 86, 213–217. Young, R., & McPherson, E. (2013). Governing metropolitan green infrastructure in the United States. Landscape and Urban Planning, 109, 199–223.

PART II

Metropolitan strategies

The first part of this book, “Metropolitan trajectories”, has explored the relationship between the landscape and the metropolis from a theoretical and historical perspective, a relationship that has endured from the Persian gardens designed into the fabric of settlements 5,000 years ago to the smart city agendas of today. The chronology in Part 1 helps you to appreciate how landscapes have shaped the minds of urban thinkers and in turn shaped cities themselves. The case studies illustrate the interactions between the landscape structure, the environmental benefits afforded to urban citizens and the institutions that shape and manage the metropolis. Metropolitan trajectories established the role of landscapes in underwriting the sustainable development agendas shaping urban policy today. This part explores how landscapes are analysed, represented and mobilised for developing and implementing metropolitan scale policies. Scholarly enquiry into landscape as a concept is substantial and many excellent books have been written on subjects that are worth further exploration. The development of landscape theory has traditionally resided in the arts and the social and natural sciences. More contemporary theoretical developments have examined the place of landscapes in the broad and growing field of information technology and the ever-­increasing volumes of data available to planning and landscape architecture professionals. In contrast, the intersection between landscapes and political science is a relatively small and emerging field leading to new developments in urban landscape theory that are finding traction in areas such as urban political ecology, urban geography and ecological economics. This book, while oriented towards practical applications, contributes to the development of landscape theory and the governance of metropolitan open spaces in particular.

5 Conceptualising and valuing metropolitan landscapes

This chapter presents the challenges and opportunities for incorporating landscape theory into policies that don’t naturally fit into conventional planning and management domains. It provides a summary of the ways landscapes have been conceptualised in theory and practice. It then identifies how landscape values can be mobilised in the decision making process. The metropolitan landscape describes the various external places that contribute to the mix of built and unbuilt spaces that make up a metropolitan region (Antrop, 2000). For the purposes of this discussion, landscapes can be grouped into two broad land tenure categories of public and private ownership. Publicly owned landscapes include, but are not limited to, street trees and streetscapes, green spaces, green belts, parks, reserves and other open spaces containing vegetation and lacking, but not excluding, built form. Public landscapes typically have some vegetative cover and assemblage of natural features such as geological formations and water bodies. They are in public ownership and management responsibility primarily lies with public agencies. Access is not usually restricted and many spaces contain varying degrees of formal and informal amenities and facilities (Henderson, 2013). Privately owned landscapes refer to external spaces where individuals or groups exert a property right over that landscape. This property right, usually protected by legislation or convention, determines who can access and use the land and under what circumstances. These landscapes include, but are not limited to, private gardens, courtyards, private estates, commercial gardens and farms. There are variations of land tenure that do not neatly fit into this dualistic interpretation (e.g. community title, perpetual leases and informal settlements). Collectively these landscapes make up the morphology and physical character of the metropolis and in doing so, provide a range of ecosystem services to urban communities. In considering the different types of landscapes that make up the metropolitan region, decision makers should consider how landscapes are valued. This chapter explores

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the ways landscapes are conceptualised and evaluated in planning and development policies in order to determine their value. It explores some of the pitfalls of how landscapes are represented and what to look out for in developing programs that will stand up to policy evaluation. All metropolitan landscapes can be classified using a range of criteria, including the extent and agglomeration of built form, morphology and topography, functional characteristics or permitted land use, or population characteristics such as settlement size and density (de Groot, Wilson, & Boumans, 2002). Each criterion requires different types of data and depends on available information. For example, national statistical data may indicate population density indicating rural, semi-­rural, and suburban or urban landscapes. Spatial data can distinguish different land-­cover types such as vegetation and built forms. This type of classification is instructive and paints a picture of what is “on the ground”. The deployment of high resolution spatial imagery enables increasingly sophisticated and integrated evaluation and use of such information. Today such spatial data is freely available, dynamic and detailed. For example, the resolution of most Google Earth data is less than a metre per pixel on the ground and becoming finer resolution every year. Programs such as Google Earth provide free data that is widely accessible and embedded with vast amounts of user-­generated information. The applications for analysing landscape structure are incredibly diverse in scale and scope. This spatial data is a powerful tool for gaining new insights and enhancing our understanding of the shifting, heterogeneous, diverse and uncertain nature of metropolitan landscapes.

Figure 5.1 shows a graphic comparison of the distribution of vegetation and reflective surfaces (roads, roof and pavements) between 2002, prior to a major fire that destroyed over 200 homes and gardens, and 2006, three years afterwards. The multispectral images were used to identify different surface types by calculating the Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), a measure of the vigour of plant growth to distinguish between areas with a low reflective index in the near infra-­red spectrum. These areas are typically covered by perennial vegetation, such as trees and shrubs, as distinguished from areas covered by roof, pavement and other sealed surfaces with a high reflective index. Comparing the images, we can see that following the fires, the rebuilding of houses on the western edge of the suburb largely replaced much of the landscapes with larger homes and increased pavements. The implications for the suburb as a whole included increased flood risk from surface run-­off and increased localised urban heat island effect. Other possible effects include the reduction of habitat for protecting biodiversity and reduced recreation spaces in private gardens.

Data sharing through platforms such as GIS Cloud (www.giscloud.com) and the Australian Urban Research Information Network (www.aurin.org.au) facilitate

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Figure 5.1   High

resolution satellite imagery showing the changed distribution of vegetation between 2002 (on the left) and 2006 (on the right) for a fire affected community.

Source: MacKenzie, 2017.

evidence-­based research to inform policy. These platforms operate as either commercial or semi-­commercial entities to enhance the capability of data through user­generated information being shared among subscribers. Other free and open access tools provide another, finer scale representation of landscapes within a city and its surrounds. This expansion of open source software captures, re-­presents and provides millions of views, vignettes and perspectives of a near infinite number of landscape representations. This online phenomenon of digital representations of the globe indeed provides innumerable amounts of data which is fruitful for new explorations of the world we live in. The technical and computational potency of today’s information systems provide far more data than our ability to comprehend and analyse such information. Such volumes of data can also be confounding when developing an understanding of how to address an urban problem through a landscape lens. Developing a landscape approach to policy decisions at a metropolitan scale requires clarity about what it is you want to advocate for, evaluate and implement. The previous chapter provided examples of how landscapes can progress a sustainable development agenda. The benefits are easily articulated, yet the question of how the landscape affords measurable benefits to the metropolis requires some critical evaluation based on sound research. We should think about the relationship between how landscapes are conceptualised by ordinary citizens; and how landscapes are interpreted by institutions such as parks associations, municipal authorities and professional bodies. In other words, landscapes are not simply an assemblage of physical things in the environment that we can see. They are places that have often intangible meaning and emotional significance to different people for different reasons. As decision makers, we should be concerned about how these landscapes are experienced and what services and

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values they provide to the community. To progress this idea of framing what landscapes afford us, rather than what they look like, we now examine three potentially useful ways to conceptualise landscapes in policy making.

Landscape processes Landscapes are continuously made in and through human and non-­human interactions and physical processes. Understanding landscapes as a series of processes allows us to consider what interactions we want to encourage and how to direct investment towards protecting or promoting those values that sustain them. Landscapes are places that carry meaning for people. They are sites where daily rituals are practiced. These rituals can range from annual religious festivals to meeting friends and daily walks in a park. All of these processes and practices operate and overlap in urban landscapes and simultaneously contribute to the social and political life of the city. Each of these values contains subtly different social and political processes shaping these landscapes. With this in mind we should consider how people experience landscapes in order to protect those values that serve to benefit the community. Equally important is how people perceive the landscapes they live in.

Landscape representation The study of landscape representation from a cultural perspective in the Western imagination has concerned itself with making sense of and developing a narrative towards what can be seen in the landscape. This preoccupation with a scenic representation of the landscape determines what is valued by what can be seen from a particular view or perspective. More recent approaches have attempted to provide alternatives to the dominant scenic methods of representation in order to articulate a more diverse understanding of the relationship between society and landscape. Non-­representational methods of research have led to other examinations of human–nature relationships concerned with psychological and emotional responses (Cooper Marcus, 1979; Kaplan & Kaplan, 1989). Much of this work emerged from a shift in thinking among scholars in the late 1970s, rejecting positivists’ modes of enquiry, preferring critical perspectives. Known as the cultural turn, the focus of attention in landscape studies moved beyond what Mitchell described as a preoccupation with the consumption of “visual scenic” landscapes to understand how landscapes were produced in and through cultures and societies (Mitchell, 1994). Landscape representation is a widely researched field that evolves with the exponential growth of visual and technical data generated. The emerging field of data visualisation is a broad and growing professional practice spanning information technology, the digital humanities, urban design and art. In tandem with this professionalisation of data visualisation is a growing recognition that science is not alone in generating and analysing ever-­increasing volumes of information. In the future, new methods of representing landscape “data” will bring new challenges

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and opportunities for landscape architects to develop coherent evidence-­based techniques to inform landscape policy.

Landscape and aesthetics The planning and design of landscape spaces, by and large, is concerned with physical processes, social and economic impacts and local cultural considerations, yet aesthetics plays an important role in the way landscapes are experienced. Aesthetics has troubled landscape architects, planners and environmental managers, as it has often been unsuccessfully used to quantify individuals’ perception of aesthetic beauty for the purpose of allocating resources to manage the landscape (Meyer, 2008). Perhaps more than any other field of enquiry, research into notions of attractiveness and beauty has divided the landscape research community into positivist and post-­structuralist camps. The question, “Can aesthetics be measured?”, lies at the heart of this divide. Perceptual research into landscape aesthetics has relied on studying a visual response to external stimuli to determine aesthetic quality. However, this has corrupted the original meaning of perception as determined by psychology (Uzzell, 1991). While aesthetics has been used to evaluate intangible and subjective values ascribed to landscapes, it has also been used to explain the essence of a space, otherwise known as “genius loci” (Thwaites, 2001). Arguments about the legitimacy of landscape aesthetics are centred on debates as to whether beauty is intrinsic in nature or associated with a viewer’s emotional response (Meyer, 2008). In order to bridge the conceptual divide between aesthetics and physical appearance in the context of landscape planning and management, we can broadly accept that interpretations of aesthetics are subjective and that they are not important in themselves, however the ability of landscape to affect our experience of a space is valid and meaningful. From the metropolitan landscape perspective, experiencing beautiful landscapes can foster communities of interest and political support. Beauty can be essential to developing a sustained public support for social and environmental causes as much as it can be a distraction. For example, mobilising support for the preservation of particularly stunning and biologically diverse ecosystems is far easier than protecting a species of non-­descript insect regardless of its biodiversity value. If aesthetic appreciation of landscapes will have a role to play in the formulation of policy, new methods will need to be developed to negotiate how such values are conceptualised, represented, evaluated and incorporated into landscape plans and management strategies.

Landscapes as place Examinations of landscape and place are concerned with the way that users interpret the landscape and make sense of its value in the context of their own values, beliefs and identity. Understanding landscapes as “place” attempts to overcome some of the shortcomings of formal quantitative analysis and reclaim the experiential values of landscape in the same way that aesthetics has been deployed in formal

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analysis. Place is the connection or emotional bond between a person and a space (Lewicka, 2005). It is a complex concept, layered with meanings that are not immediately understandable, and requires skill in its interpretation. Understood as a cultural system, place gives meaning to life and allows us to position ourselves in certain definitive ways within society and its belief system. When we consider place as a cultural system defined by shared meanings and understandings, expressed in and through language, landscapes can foster a symbolic common ground between different groups where contested values, ideologies and beliefs can be negotiated (Armstrong, 2003). Belonging to place establishes boundaries around cultures by marking off those who potentially belong and those who don’t. This social construction diminishes the idea of the geographically bound landscape in the traditional sense (particularly for online communities of interest), however we still think of communities as if they depend on stable relationships with physical, rather than cultural boundaries. Landscape planning arguably reconciles the meaning of place on behalf of a community through an objective and rigorous form of interpretation of rules and guidelines such as planning codes. In the context of the metropolis, theories pertaining to place are most useful for examining how communities make decisions about what has collective value. The dialectic relationship between a person or community and their place addresses one conceptual approach to understanding how landscapes are valued, but how do we conceive of landscapes that are meaningful to hundreds, thousands or even millions of people. In other words how do we as decision makers consider questions of scale?

Question of scale Exploring the role and function of landscapes in cities, as this book endeavours to do, necessarily raises the question of scale. As briefly mentioned in the introduction, landscape architects and planners tend to zoom in and out by exploring an issue at a detailed scale and then the context of a problem at a broad scale. However, in developing policies that consider the role and function of landscapes, there needs to be some case presented as to why you might address a problem at a particular scale as we have in this book. We have also concluded in Chapter 1 that the word “landscape” evades precise definitions. Therefore addressing a policy agenda through a landscape approach and at a single scale becomes problematic. This dilemma in part explains the tendency of advocates to adopt other terms, such as landscape urbanism and green infrastructure (rather than the landscape per se), to argue the benefits of exploiting the virtues of landscapes in addressing policy challenges. The concept of a focal scale was briefly introduced in Chapter 1. Adopting the principle of a focal scale (or scale of concern) overcomes many of the problems associated with determining spatial dimensions for addressing such problems through a policy agenda. A focal scale is one which a group of stakeholders can agree upon. “It is the scale which represents the issues of concern and that the

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[landscape] system in question operates” (Walker & Salt, 2012, p.  36). Asking a group of stakeholders to define the landscape system in question will necessarily generate disagreement about the nature of the system and the appropriate scale to address the questions that are raised. By this we argue here that using a single spatial scale is inadequate to define a problem (water travels and biodiversity happens across a range of scales) and therefore it is important to accept that a landscape system cannot be understood and defined at a single scale. We do however need to define a system boundary, if not for any other reason but to arrive at a consensus about who the key players are and what level of institutional intervention is required. At first reading of this statement it may seem obvious that the scale of concern reflects the interests of the stakeholder group. For example, if you were examining the provision of recreation within a community, it stands to reason that the scale of interest lies within the local government area (LGA) of the recreation planners remit. However, there may be opportunities for stakeholder groups to collaborate with other jurisdictions that face the same issues. In this case, the scale of concern is defined by the similarity of issues faced. As practitioners you will become skilled at developing an understanding of what stakeholders value and how to conceptualise those landscape values. For example, policy interest in food security for urban settlements might consider the food system as global (e.g. food in the city comes from many countries around the planet), however the issues of concern (such as the provision of fresh produce) may define a much smaller scale (Budge, 2013). The most effective and affordable supply of leafy green vegetables may reduce the scale of interest to market gardens and farms within a 200 km radius from the city centre. For others it may be about education and the need for children to see where healthy food is produced. Alternatively it may be that food safety is paramount (as it is in many Asian cities), in which case the proximity to the consumer is secondary to the quality. When we consider an ecosystem type (e.g. a coastal landscape) rather than an issue-­based problem (such as provision of food), the problem definition and scale will be different. How far inland from the coast or outside the urban boundary area would a coastal planner need to consider or collect data to evaluate a problem? Again, it will depend on the stakeholders’ interest and the scale of concern, and the many variables that define the problem. Coastal pollution as an example can derive from upstream catchments many hundreds of kilometres away, but protection of coastal habitats from urban development is likely to focus attention much closer to the seashore. Practically, there needs to be agreement about the scale of concern from stakeholders to progress discussion and ideas (Walker & Salt, 2012). The principle here is that there is no single scale that can encompass all the issues. Consensus is more important than driving the agenda through an expert oriented approach where the problem is presented at a scale that is predetermined by technocrats but has little meaning to those affected or those most likely to provide meaningful input into the process. In essence being open to new concepts and ideas about how the metropolis functions as a system affects how we evaluate and assess the scale of the landscape policy issue in question.

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Edges and boundaries Regardless of the method of identifying and classifying landscapes within a metropolitan region, boundaries change over time as cities expand or contract. In many cities, the edge between the urban and non-­urban is diffuse and difficult to determine. The rural urban fringe can be relatively easily identified using spatial land use categories that define landscape types that are non-­urban (e.g. market gardens, other intensive agriculture, reserves and production forests). However, the same area can be classified using census data that paints a very different picture. Typically rural residential properties, that were once market gardens, support land uses that bear little relationship to more traditional non-­urban activities. Sometimes referred to as “invisible urbanism” (Sihlongonyane, 2008) these landscapes, that once provided the cities fresh produce, offer little productive outputs beyond recreation (such as horse riding) and accommodation for commuting urban professionals. The factors determining these changing landscape values from productive agricultural to recreational and amenity concerns are part of a post-­productive shift towards recreational and hobby farm landscapes often hundreds of kilometres away from metropolitan centres. These new landscapes are driving regional economies that consist of niche-­farm, hobby and non-­farm industries emerging in traditional farming areas; triggered by a complex range of factors including counter-­urbanisation, pluralism, and urban migrants conceptualising concepts of rural life and further blurring the boundaries of what constitutes a productive agricultural landscape (Argent, Walmsley, & Sorensen, 2010). The determination of the urban edge generates uncertainty as cities come to terms with the competing priorities of accommodating increasing populations and containing growth. The planning of metropolitan boundaries, for over a century, focussed on controlling urban edges while avoiding the fragmentation of agricultural, forested and natural landscapes. The ill effects of outwards expansion of the urban edge, known as sprawl, are well documented and preservation of landscapes through containment of urban boundaries is a policy aspiration for cities around the world. Similarly, large tracts of non-­urban land that exist within city boundaries are too often under managed and overused as a consequence of urban densification. Landscapes that are protected within urban boundaries face increasing challenges to accommodate the recreational demands of citizens, ameliorate the environmental effects of development and retain ecological values beneficial to functioning urban systems. How you define urban boundaries for the purpose of analysis will depend largely on the questions you are asking. Simplifying boundaries based on land use or cadastral maps may be useful in protecting or managing large scale processes such as sprawl, but unhelpful in determining policies for managing the rural urban fringe for food production, environmental protection, water quality or biodiversity conservation. The next section of this chapter explores some of the broader ideologies informing policy for metropolitan scale landscape planning and management. They present an overview of how landscape theories potentially inform decision making

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and present evidence for landscape led approaches to improving the performance of metropolitan regions.

Bio-­regionalism Bio-­regionalism is a subset of regionalism, a term emerging from the global renaissance of regional politics at the end of last century, particularly in the developed European and Anglo states. Regionalism is defined by the devolution of decision making from central governments to lower levels while local administrations concede some powers to a higher regional level authority. Largely a governmental interpretation of the principle of subsidiarity, the end result has seen a shift in the 1980s and 1990s away from government wealth redistribution towards a more hands-­off facilitation of growth and economic opportunity through more market-­ based mechanisms (Everingham, Cheshire, & Lawrence, 2006). Bio-­regionalism addresses the issue of defining regional boundaries for planning and ecosystems management. It is, however, complicated by the need for the political will and organisational capacity to solve problems and deliver reforms. Bio-­ regionalism uses natural boundaries to determine jurisdictional authority and to influence how communities access resources. For example, the most effective source of potable water supply is one that sits within an existing water catchment, therefore avoiding expensive and energy intensive methods of water relocation to urban areas from adjacent regions and across topographic boundaries. Therefore catchment management for a city may involve communities and local agencies from rural, peri-­urban and urban populations within a catchment boundary. Bio-­regionalism brings into focus the carrying capacity of urban settlements within a natural boundary, thereby directing the attention of decision makers to formulating environmentally sustainable development policies. Taking the WCED definition of sustainable development, we can see that levels of resource consumption and waste production would be determined by the needs of the community in question and without compromising future generations’ needs. However, understanding the carrying capacity of the planet is very different to that of a regional landscape. Interpreting bio-­regional sustainable development goals requires very different considerations. The arguments around a bio-­regional approach to sustainable development are complex and raise a number of social and environmental concerns; particularly in developing countries with limited access to resources or capacity to manage waste. Practically, a region cannot shut itself off from the global economy by effectively restricting cross-­border flows. Indeed such an approach could lead to inefficiencies that are no better than current practices. However, in considering the objectives of urban sustainability (Chapter 4) we can see how bio-­regionalism supports policy objectives that require a landscape led approach. For example, efforts to stop urban sprawl, reduce private car use and protect high value landscapes are policy agendas that operate at a scale larger than individual municipalities but smaller than state boundaries. The development of regional sustainability plans to address these cross-­boundary issues need to

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consider how effectively they might be delivered (Wheeler, 2000). A landscape governance model would benefit from a bio-­regional approach because landscape processes transcend arbitrary boundaries established by conventional plans. As decision makers, we should think about how to protect and enhance landscape values and what governance arrangements will support those goals.

Valuing urbanised landscapes The first half of this chapter introduced a very brief theoretical overview of how landscapes are mobilised to make sense of the world we live in. This is important to understand when making decisions that affect millions of people who access or benefit from the ecosystem services provided by the landscape. The inherently public nature of metropolitan landscapes means that as decision makers, you should be open to multiple interpretations in order to make sense of competing priorities and agendas from different groups. For example, landscapes of the same bounded area contain different values and can have different symbolic meanings for different groups that are not easily accounted for in land use zoning. Alternatively, and more insidiously, land that is not formally recognised or managed as open space with permitted land uses (green space, recreation space, sporting fields, urban agricultural lands, camping grounds) fails to be recognised in the protection and provision of these shared values. These are in-­between landscapes that contribute to much of the spatial character of the metropolis, operating under different regulations and often considered as residual or lost landscapes, susceptible to “improvement” through a capitalist mode of development and under the guise of renewal. The case study of the Milan metropolitan region at the end of this chapter is a good example of how planners contend with these residual landscapes. Some groups will consider these spaces as valuable landscapes, whereas others will consider them as dispensable or acceptable to transform for the sake of improvement. In effect they become “legitimate” if they can be value-­added through development. Therefore landscape values are highly contextual and contingent on the values of cultural groups. The concern is not so much about how to conserve residual landscapes in a densifying city but rather how the process of densification urbanises the landscape. In other words, how are different metropolitan landscapes “socially mobilised, economically incorporated (commodified) and physically transformed in order to support the urbanisation process” (Swyngedouw & Kaika, 2014, p. 463). From this critical perspective, the way landscapes are valued in the process of urban renewal is of primary concern.

Ecosystem services As mentioned in Chapter 1, interest in the value of landscapes has enjoyed renewed attention in urban planning and management in response to the flourishing of new concepts and paradigms such as urban greening (Muller, Werner, & Kelcey, 2010), urban ecosystem services (Elmqvist et al., 2013) and biophilic urban design (Beatley,

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2011). This resurgent interest has led to a number of policy advances towards protecting and enhancing metropolitan landscape values. Regardless of the increased interest in urban greening, the practice of landscape management tends to focus on the existing open spaces and the associated utility values that provide benefits to users (e.g. trees for shade or parks for recreation) rather than the potential for landscapes to improve the performance of the city more generally (Amati & Yokohari, 2006; Hansen et al., 2015). For example, land management practices can protect and preserve endangered ecological communities or productive agricultural landscapes. Similarly these same structures and assemblages, viewed through an ecosystem services lens, can be valued for the role they play in regulating water and air quality or providing psychological relief from the stresses of daily life. Policies that only focus on the physical landscape do not emphasise the benefit of ecosystem services to the economy and society more generally (Tzoulas et al., 2007).

Ecosystem services are the benefits people obtain from ecosystems. They are classified into four general categories (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005). 1

2

3

4

Provisioning services refers to the material outputs, including food, fibre and other raw materials and water supply. For example, well-­managed water catchments provide rainwater used for drinking and irrigation for agriculture as well as parks and gardens. Regulating services are the processes that regulate terrestrial and atmospheric systems. These include climate regulation, carbon sequestration, air and water quality regulation, erosion control, pollution reduction and crop pollination. For example, the urban forest canopy plays a crucial role in regulating surface temperatures of pavements and buildings thus reducing the heat island effect. Supporting services provide physical spaces for habitats and serve as the foundation for the maintenance of biodiversity, including species and genetic diversity. For example trees, gardens, parks and reserves protect biodiversity values within cities. Cultural services refers to the non-­material benefits that we gain from contact and interaction with ecosystems. These include: health benefits, such as mental and physical advantages from recreation and socialising; economic benefits, such as tourism and associated service industries; cultural benefits, such as aesthetic appreciation and cultural and spiritual connection to landscapes; social benefits, such as education and learning opportunities such as awareness raising and community sense of belonging (or sense of place). (Hansen et al., 2015; Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005)

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The application of ecosystems services to develop policy is a contested concept. Arguments against the use of ecosystem services are largely centred on the criticism that a price cannot be put on the value of nature, especially for the purposes of human benefit over other organisms (Schröter et al., 2014). Despite the shortcomings of using ecosystem services to attribute values to the metropolitan landscape and in the absence of a widely accepted alternative, it provides a framework for evaluating landscape values in policy (Daniel et al., 2012). As a framework we can articulate what is being valued and how these values should support policy development, especially the deployment of implementation strategies. No single framework can possibly capture the multitude of tangible and intangible, subjective and personal values that individuals attribute to the landscape. With this in mind we should consider how our limited understanding of metropolitan landscape values translates into strategies for action. In other words, how do we frame a case for the financing and resourcing of agencies, organisations and individuals to implement landscape led policies.

Co-­benefits Advocates for adopting a landscape approach to solving urban problems will often point to the co-­benefits that are afforded. For example, a new street tree program will provide habitat connectivity and food for local bird species as well as providing shade in summer by cooling pavements. It will also improve property values, encourage walking and cycling. The trees will improve air quality and sequester carbon from the atmosphere and be cost effective in the long run in achieving all these ecosystem benefits. It stands to reason that the simple act of planting street trees should be the most effective and efficient policy for improving a whole range of urban problems. Yet such solutions rarely receive the attention or funding of other more technological or regulatory regimes. The problem for advocates of landscape approaches is that such solutions often don’t stand up to policy evaluation. One of the reasons is because of how we articulate the co-­benefits of landscape policies. Co-­benefits are the ancillary benefits occurring as a result of a policy. In reality all potential advantages and disadvantages should be considered in making a decision. However, in evaluating the benefits to the landscape, not all variables can be measured. Likewise, the combined beneficial outcomes may be identified, but are also difficult to evaluate. Practically, agencies may not possess the skills, knowledge or budget to adequately evaluate co-­benefits or are subject to the criticism of double counting by economists (thereby overestimating the benefits). In other words, we risk over-­estimating the value of a landscape policy by simply listing all the benefits that might occur. From an advocacy perspective, the provision of multiple ecosystem services does provide a compelling but general argument that landscape policies are a key indicator of good sustainable development outcomes (Haaland & van den Bosch, 2015). However, listing these benefits without an adequate understanding of their effectiveness simply undermines the policy argument for integrating a landscape approach

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into policy development. The question then should be how and to what extent do landscapes provide co-­benefits that improve outcomes (such as health) in a metropolis? The design and implementation of policy relies on the presentation of evidence from data that allows decision makers to objectively weigh up the value against the cost of intervention. Many variables cannot be objectively measured, and estimates (or “guestimates”) (Campbell and Corley 2012, p. 88) are used. The social benefits (positive externalities) tend to be overestimated in the absence of data. As a result, advocating a co-­benefits approach is both tantalising and fraught when promoting a landscape led response to a policy problem. Fraught because co-­benefits are rarely used in decision making frameworks due to the lack of methodologies for quantification of impacts (Ürge-Vorsatz, Herrero, Dubash, & Lecocq, 2014). Tantalising because research has shown that indeed co-­benefits are afforded by landscape approaches. For example, good access to landscapes, together with well-­designed pedestrian and cycle networks offers a range of benefits, that together are politically desirable (Christiansen et al., 2016). As decision makers, you should advocate for the co-­benefits but also consider the method that you deploy to evaluate for landscape led solutions to policy issues.

Downstream effects Similar to co-­benefits, downstream effects seek to evaluate the long-­term benefits of a decision or action. Identifying relative downstream benefits as a policy tool is problematic when quantifying for longer timeframes between the decision and the perceived return on investment. For example, the benefits of street trees will change over time, but may take decades to accrue. The number of variables that contribute to establishing a benefit also make quantification difficult. As mentioned previously such a valuation tends to overestimate or double-­count the positives. The advantage of analysing the downstream effects of a landscape policy is particularly effective when considering how those benefits are distributed across different sectors of the economy over time. For example, Depledge, Stone, & Bird (2011) estimated the healthcare savings to the UK National Health Service over time by modelling the benefits of planning green spaces such as parks close to residential areas. Based on the analysis of five large cities in the UK, the team argued that if one in five people lived within two kilometres of a large park or green space and used the park for 30 minutes per day, five days per week, the annual health budget savings would amount to almost £20 million per year. From a planning perspective, improving access to large landscape spaces through development codes, or increasing accessibility to existing parks would be a relatively low upstream cost for the downstream benefit. Such findings makes for a strong economic and social argument for improving access to landscape spaces to help reduce healthcare expenditure. In the absence of a reliable and quantifiable valuation method, the policy makers can draw on such studies that provide a model to support the scenario in question. The orders of magnitude of the saving is almost impossible to quantify due to the

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range of variables; however, evaluating the relationship between the health indicators and the infrastructure that improves access to landscapes, from a health perspective, may be crucial to decision making.

Conclusion As cities renew, new landscape typologies will be required to provide more ecosystem services in less space as cities become denser. The impacts of climate change, such as extreme weather events (cyclones, flood and droughts), and increased environmental pollution will require a combination of technological, regulatory and biological (landscape) solutions. Advocating for the benefits of landscapes using the arguments set out in this book should be a relatively straightforward task. Indeed you will experience little resistance from the community about the benefits of access to a local park or a well canopied streetscape. The challenge is developing a framework that supports your case for particular landscape led strategies. On one hand, adopting a narrowly defined econometric approach will paint half a picture as the multitude of intangible, emotional and aesthetic attributes will be simplified as externalities that require a correction to market failure. On the other hand, without a basic understanding of economic principles that drive decision making, landscapes will remain peripheral to the decision making process. This chapter has presented a wide-­ranging analysis about how we comprehend, represent, embody, value and evalutate the metropolitan landscape. The tangible values derived from ecosystem services provided by the landscape should not be analysed in isolation from the intangible values and modes of representation set out in this chapter. The challenge for decision makers is to be able to adequately communicate, represent, analyse and evaluate landscape values in a way that benefits society but also speaks to the policy design and evaluation methods deployed by agencies. The next two chapters explore in more detail the tools available for regulating the use and enjoyment of landscapes. It draws on concepts from behavioural economics, with practical examples to help you develop a better understanding of the issues and opportunities for metropolitan landscape planning and management.

Case study – Milan Milan provides a persuasive case for adopting a bio-­regional approach, beyond the administrative urban boundaries and looking to the landscape structure to inform future planning and development of the metropoltian region. Milan is the second largest city in Italy and capital of the Lombardy region at the foothills of the Italian Alps. The city is an extended network of ancient towns and villages connected by boulevards and squares radiating out from the old centre. Beyond the administrative boundary of the city, the traditonal Italian urban pattern gives way to a patchwork of small acreage farms, forests, and residual patches of natural landscapes reoccupying abandoned industrial estates, intermingled with compact, inward facing villages and

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urban developments. This incremental, unregulated development has created a fragmented spatial pattern that covers a third of the Lombardy region (Figure 5.2) (Canedoli, Crocco, Comolli, & Padoa-­Schioppa, 2017). Milan grew through small but continuous modifications leading to a diffuse urban edge and a highly fragmented urban and peri-­urban landscape. Since the Enlightenment period, Milanese planning has involved decision makers from a broad spectrum of intellectuals, artists, industrialists and social scientists that have inspired multiple overlapping urban visions to proliferate, creating today’s variegated urban character (Orsini, 2017). Unlike many Western European cities, Milan has had to contend with very different urban dynamics resulting from mid-­century low density car dependent growth. Planning for much of the twentieth century has seen the expansion of housing and industrial activities in an incoherent manner and independent from local transport infrastructure, further contributing to the landscape fragmentation. Perpetuating this problem is the planning responsibility that has historically resided with parochial local municipalities, uncooperative and reactive to local land speculators. Today the dense urban fabric of the old city quickly gives way to mixed agriculture, forestry, natural and abandoned landscapes surrounding pockets of densely built up villages. On the positive side, Milan has avoided the wholesale development of business and industrial parks, peri-­urban gated communities and big box stores, resulting in a much more porous urban edge that presents both challenges and opportunities not afforded to other sprawling car dependent cities. The relationship between urban Milan and the diffused network of villages and towns interlaced with mixed agricultural and forested landscapes was the mainstay of the regional character since the Industrial Revolution. Milan’s regional landscape character differs depending on the direction from the city. The northern region of Lombardy is highly fragmented with a mix of different land uses and abandoned brownfield industrial sites. The east and west of the city are characterised by a more

Figure 5.2   The

Milan Urban Region (UR).

Source: Canedoli, Crocco, Comolli, & Padoa-Schioppa, 2017.

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historically typical pattern of mixed agricultural, forestry and compact traditional towns that have avoided excessive sprawl. To the south, agriculture is the major industry and gives the area its distinctive character (Canedoli et al., 2017). This variegation of landscape patterns has resulted in extraordinary flexibility for future growth. However, Milan faces significant threats to these landscapes as rural activities become less productive and encroached upon by expanding lower density settlements. These developments are beginning to break down the spatial relationships between these suburban settlements and the surrounding landscape, undermining the integrity of existing ecological and farming systems. Despite this uncoordinated approach to urban development for much of the city’s history, it did not inhibit Milan’s economic prosperity until the 2008 global financial crisis (Orsini, 2017). In response to the unfolding challenges of structural changes to the economy, the retraction of the urban environment and the threat to the region’s landscape character, the Mayor of Milan commissioned a new master plan called the Piano di Governo del Territorio, or Urban Development Plan (UDP), in 2011 (Bullivant, 2012). The project was unusual in its process of development, preferring a co-­design approach with stakeholders and the community and avoiding overtly prescriptive planning, thus allowing flexibility and new interpretations to occur over time. The UDP was also notable for the spatial strategy that was substantially driven by the landscape fabric of the city and surrounding region. The significance of this approach was not only that farming landscapes could be preserved, but that residual and unproductive landscapes needed to be managed and incorporated as a land bank for significant infrastructure projects rather than low cost real estate or mall developments (Bullivant, 2012). The impulse to plan Milan around its landscape structure has been a feature of a number of schemes throughout the late twentieth and early twenty-­first century. Although none were implemented in any substantive form they contributed to the structure of the UDP. The project “nine parks for Milan” carried out in the mid-­ 1990s proposed to repurpose brownfield sites and disused railway corridors to introduce pockets of green in outer neighbourhoods that would create biological and recreational networks. Two significant park projects emerged during this period of open space development. Parco delle Risaie and Parco Nord created in the latter part of the twentieth century form key structural elements to the UDP. Stefano Boeri’s scheme “Metrobosco” proposed a ring of forests around denser peri-­urban settlements and the city, but with new linear developments infilling spaces expanding into existing forests. This project was influential in catalysing a reforestation program that has seen the expansion of commercial forestry but at the expense of farming (Sanesi, Colangelo, Lafortezza, Calvo, & Davies, 2017). Another scheme by Boeri titled the “Green River”, similar to the nine parks program, proposed to rewild parts of Milan’s disused railway system to extend ecological branches into metropolitan areas, creating sequences of fields that could be used for parks, urban farms, sports fields and informal public spaces (Orsini, 2017). Just prior to the launch of the UDP project in 2011, landscape architecture firm LAND conceived a proposal for seven rays of environmental corridors, “Raggi Verdi” as

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it was known. The green corridors started at the Spanish walls of the old city and radiated out through the urban edge to connect future developments with the centre using cycle and pedestrian pathways (Bullivant, 2012). It seems logical that the UDP is a continuation of the popularity of comprehensive landscape inspired masterplans; born out of the circumstances of the 2008 recession and substantially informed by the landscape projects conceived in the decades before. In many respects, the UDP is typical of other metropolitan plans existing today. The UDP’s vision mixes economic opportunity with requirements to achieve ecological sustainability while improving liveability via a more mixed use compact urban form developed around infrastructure nodes (Bullivant, 2012). From a built environment perspective, UDP has attempted to revive a sense of unity with the deployment of typically Italian compositional elements, such as boulevards, squares and plazas, but with an uncritical approach. The deployment of these compositional devices by municipalities without a broader understanding of the landscape character is a missed opportunitny to engage with the fragmented and diffuse spatial logic of the city and surrounding metropolitan region (Orsini, 2017). This, however, doesn’t substantially detract from the primary role that landscapes play in the formulation of urban spatial strategy. While the master planning approach taken by the UDP is not substantially different from other European cities undergoing renewal, the attention paid achieving social sustainability principles in conjunction with a landscape strategy is unique to the consultation process. The emphasis on social sustainability is twofold. The first is the process of building a plan based on a co-­creation approach with citizens and other relevant stakeholders. The second is focussing on the future by creating structures that plan for current citizens but also guarantee the benefits for coming generations (Trivellato, 2017). Co-­creation here refers to the process of developing supportive and participative relationships between the public and private sector and interacting with citizens to bring projects into being (Bullivant, 2012). This social sustainability emphasis contrasts with many other economically driven metropoltian greening agendas (see Masdar City, Chapter 9). It is also instructive because the emphasis on the landscape structure is consistent with the plan’s social sustainability goals because open spaces are not set apart as a separate land use. Instead the landscapes have become an integral part of daily encouters with nature, agriculture and the community. The social sustainability approach to UDP includes the doubling of urban green space per person and establishing a rebalance between the historic city centre and the productive peri-­urban fringe. The urban development strategy is to build on the heterogenous nature of the landscape by mixing commercial and industrial precincts with parks and waterways surrounding clusters of houses. The forestry and agricultural landscapes will further add to the urban fabric through new development requirements for inclusion of green space in new projects (Bullivant, 2012). The challenge for UDP from a master planning perspective is how far it should go in terms of social engineering to achieve equitable outcomes without unduly restricting private sector creative input. At a minimum, the plan’s processes and outcomes are contingent on achieving social sustainability

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criteira coupled with a spatial integration of landscapes into the built structure and vice versa. The openness of the plan has also allowed precincts to develop their own design structure, for example, the City Life residential commercial and business district only a few kilometres from the old centre (Figure 5.3). In this way the UDP is less of a masterplan establishing rules but more of a hybrid metropolitan plan with significant landscape influences. The UDP in many regards is a model for how to achieve landscape infrastructure led metropolitan planning (Bullivant, 2012). The evolving approach to metropolitan planning in Milan reflects the city’s history going back to the late seventeenth century. Until relatively recently, Milan grew incrementally and with continuous expansion and contraction of the built environment. The combination of this unusual spatial fabric and the economic circumstances following the global financial crisis has presented an opportunity to reconceptualise the metropolitan area focussing on the landscape structure during a period of urban retraction. Milan has become extremely resilient to the profound social and political forces shaping the city today in spite of (or because of ) its uncoordinated planning and development history (Orsini, 2017). The most recent metropolitan planning strategy turns to the landscape structure of the region to enhance Milan’s resilience

Figure 5.3   Mixed

residential,commercial and business district blends contemporary and traditional design and architecture.

Conceptualising and valuing landscapes   105

in the face of economic distruption and decline. Since the global financial crisis, abandoned factories and warehouses have created a surplus of brownfield sites as the local economy moves away from traditional manufacturing to a more high-­tech and service economy. Planning authorities have turned this seismic restructuring into an opportunity to develop a more coherent plan to reintegrate many of the residual landscapes into an open space structure. This new landscape approach seeks to acknowledge and promote the evolving relationship between the city and peri-­ urban villages with the surrounding fragments of rural landscapes.

References Amati, M., & Yokohari, M. (2006). Temporal changes and local variations in the functions of London’s green belt. Landscape and Urban Planning, 75, 125–142. Antrop, M. (2000). Holistic aspects of suburban landscapes: visual image interpretation and landscape metrics. Landscape and Urban Planning, 50, 43–58. Argent, N., Walmsley, J., & Sorensen, T. (2010). Something old, something new, something borrowed, something …? Rediscovering the comparative advantage of the “New” pastoral economies of Northern NSW, Australia. In G. Halseth, S. Markey, & D. Bruce (Eds.), The next rural economies: constructing rural place in global economies (pp. 1–15). Cambridge, MA: CABI. Armstrong, H. (2003). Interpreting landscapes/places/architecture: the place for hermeneutics in design theory and practice. Architectural Theory Review, 8(1), 63–79. Beatley, T. (2011). Biophilic cities. Washington, D.C.: Island Press. Budge, T. (2013). Is food a missing ingredient in Australia’s metropolitan planning strategies? In Q. Farmar-­Bowers, V. Higgins, & J. Millar (Eds.), Food Security in Australia (pp. 367–379). Boston, MA: Springer. Bullivant, L. (2012). Masterplanning futures. London: Routledge. Campbell, H., & Corley, E. (2012). Urban environmental policy analysis. New York: M. E. Sharpe. Canedoli, C., Crocco, F., Comolli, R., & Padoa-­Schioppa, E. (2017). Landscape fragmentation and urban sprawl in the urban region of Milan, Landscape Research, 43(5), 632–651. Christiansen, L. B., Cerin, E., Badland, H., Kerr, J., Davey, R., Troelsen, J., & Sallis, J. F. (2016). International comparisons of the associations between objective measures of the built environment and transport-­related walking and cycling: IPEN adult study. Journal of Transport & Health, 3(4), 467–478. Cooper Marcus, C. (1979). Post occupancy evaluation. University of California, Berkeley, College Environmental Design. Daniel, T. C., Muhar, A., Arnberger, A., Aznar, O., Boyd, J. W., Chan, K. M. A., & von der Dunk, A. (2012). Contributions of cultural services to the ecosystem services agenda. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 109(23), 8812–8819. de Groot, R., Wilson, M., & Boumans, R. (2002). A typology for the classification, description and valuation of ecosystem functions, goods and services. Ecological Economics, 41, 398–408. Depledge, M. H., Stone, R. J., & Bird, W. (2011). Can natural and virtual environments be used to promote improved human health and wellbeing? Environmental Science and Technology, 45(11), 4660–4665.

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Elmqvist, T., Fragkias, M., Goodness, J., Guneralp, B., Marcotullio, P., McDonald, R., & Wilkinson, C. (2013). Urbanisation, biodiversity and ecosystem services: challenges and opportunities. London: Springer. Everingham, J., Cheshire, L., & Lawrence, G. (2006). Regional renaissance? New forms of governance in nonmetropolitan Australia. Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy, 24, 139–155. Haaland, C., & van den Bosch, C. K. (2015). Challenges and strategies for urban green-­space planning in cities undergoing densification: a review. Urban Forestry & Urban Greening, 14(4), 760–771. Hall, S. (2001). The spectacle of the other. In M. Wetherell, S. Taylor, & S. J. Yates (Eds.), Discourse theory and practice: a reader (pp. 324–344). London: Sage. Hansen, R., Frantzeskaki, N., McPhearson, T., Rall, E., Kabisch, N., Kaczorowska, A., … Pauleit, S. (2015). The uptake of the ecosystem services concept in planning discourses of European and Amer­ican cities. Ecosystem Services, 12, 228–246. Henderson, J. C. (2013). Urban parks and green spaces in Singapore. Managing Leisure, 18(3), 213–225. Kaplan, R., & Kaplan, S. (1989). The experience of nature: a psychological perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lewicka, M. (2005). Ways to make people active: the role of place attachment, cultural capital, and neighborhood ties. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 25(4), 381–395. MacKenzie, A. (2017). Planning for the redevelopment after a fire event. International Journal of Disaster Resilience in the Built Environment, 8(4), 344–356. Meyer, E. K. (2008). Sustaining beauty. The performance of appearance: a manifesto in three parts. Journal of Landscape Architecture, 3(1), 6–23. Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. (2005). Ecosystems and human well-­being: wetlands and water synthesis. Washington, D.C.: Island Press. Mitchell, D. (1994). Landscape and surplus value: the making of the ordinary in Brentwood, CA. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 12(1), 7–30. Muller, N., Werner, P., & Kelcey, J. (2010). Urban biodiversity and design. Chichester: Wiley­Blackwell. Orsini, M. (2017). Milan’s potential for a structured and interactive rurality. Architecture and Culture, 5(1), 115–134. Sanesi, G., Colangelo, G., Lafortezza, R., Calvo, E., & Davies, C. (2017). Urban green infrastructure and urban forests: a case study of the Metropolitan Area of Milan. Landscape Research, 42(2), 164–175. Schröter, M., van der Zanden, E. H., van Oudenhoven, A.  P., Remme, R.  P., Serna-­ Chavez, H. M., De Groot, R. S., & Opdam, P. (2014). Ecosystem services as a contested concept: a synthesis of critique and counter-­arguments. Conservation Letters, 7(6), 514–523. Sihlongonyane, M. F. (2008). Invisible urbanism in Johannesburg: a scourge for urban planning? Oxford: Oxford University Press. Swyngedouw, E., & Kaika, M. (2014). Urban political ecology: great promises, deadlock and new beginnings? Documents d’anàlisi geogràfica, 60(3), 459–481. Thwaites, K. (2001). Experiential landscape place: an exploration of space and experience in neighbourhood landscape architecture. Landscape Research, 26(3), 245–255. Trivellato, B. (2017). How can “smart” also be socially sustainable? Insights from the case of Milan. European Urban and Regional Studies, 24(4), 337–351. Tzoulas, K., Korpela, K., Venn, S., Yli-­Pelkonen, V., Kaźmierczak, A., Niemela, J., & James, P. (2007). Promoting ecosystem and human health in urban areas using Green Infrastructure: a literature review. Landscape and Urban Planning, 81(3), 167–178.

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Ürge-Vorsatz, D., Herrero, S. T., Dubash, N. K., & Lecocq, F. (2014). Measuring the co-­ benefits of climate change mitigation. Annual Review of Environment and Resources, 39, 549–582. Uzzell, D. L. (1991). Environmental psychological perspectives on landscape. Landscape Research, 16(1), 3–10. Walker, B., & Salt, D. (2012). Resilience practice: engaging the sources of our sustainability. Washington: Island Press. Wheeler, S. (2000). Planning for metropolitan sustainability. Journal of Planning Education and Research, 20(2), 133–145.

6 The role of Governance

Governance is not government. Though related, governance is the process of governing a state, organisation or other entities that function using formal structures such as rules, conventions and regulations. Related to management, governance essentially describes the structures that prescribe the authority and responsibility for implementing policy. These structures range from decisions made by individuals to regulations imposed by different layers of government. It involves the process of implementing, managing and evaluating policies and actions necessary to govern. Governing, on the other hand, is the process of continuous interactions between levels of government, non-­government organisations and private entities, operating at a range of administrative scales (Termeer, Dewulf, & Van Lieshout, 2010). This chapter explores the concept of governance in the context of planning and managing landscapes at a metropolitan scale. It asks you to consider the advantages and disadvantages of different forms of governance and what models are effective in planning and managing the metropolitan landscape. Metropolitan level governance refers to the institutional layers of government that emerged during the 1960s and 1970s in the USA and Europe to fulfil particular political functions that fall between higher (state or federal) and lower (local or municipal) governments (Erie, Kirlin, Rabinovitz, Liebman, & Haar, 1972). Although few metropolitan governments exist, rarely do you find a single level of government administering a metropolitan region. Locally elected councils usually deliver the municipal services for a defined locality, and state and federal governments deploy laws with metropolitan level organisations acting as mediators between different jurisdictional levels. Many metropolitan regions have special purpose government entities that are appointed rather than elected, and lack the fiscal, regulatory and service delivery capacity of local administrations (Briffault, 1996). The metropolitanising of governance inevitably results in the formation of new layers of administration through annexation or amalgamation of certain powers

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by a higher level of government over a municipal authority. Recent calls for the reinvigoration of metropolitan forms of governance have been promoted as a solution to the lack of strategic plan implementation caused by inevitable conflicts in funding and responsibility between municipal and state or provincial governments (Tomlinson, 2017) and the tendency for neoliberal forms of governance to step more or less in line with the demands of market capitalism (Harvey, 1989). New forms of metropolitan governance are not necessarily competitors to other layers; instead they can have a narrow and highly strategic remit of responsibility (Gleeson, Dodson, & Spiller, 2010). The arguments for and against metropolitanisation of governance largely lie in its capacity to effectively manage the interests of communities within their jurisdiction using the principle of subsidiarity. Subsidiarity determines that decision making should occur at the level most consistent with the impact of that decision. More specifically it determines that “a central authority should have a subsidiary function, performing only those tasks which cannot be performed at a more local level” (Oxford English Dictionary, 2019). So far in this chapter we have introduced the concept of governance at a metropolitan scale. In determining what can be achieved at this scale we now turn to theories from ecology and ecosystems thinking to identify relationships between governance and landscape planning and management. Conceptually and practically, we can gain insights from evaluation tools derived from ecology when we consider how to develop a metropolitan governance framework.

Ecosystems management In developing a framework for the governance of landscapes, we can look to similar management typologies that may help frame an approach. We have established that landscapes provide a range of ecosystem services and therefore we can examine the issues facing ecosystems management and apply to our thinking about the way landscapes should be governed. In developing an approach, you should consider the following. 1

2

3

Ecosystems, particularly in urban settings cannot be managed in a vacuum. Ecosystems, like landscape systems, do not respond to human intervention in a predictable linear fashion. Therefore it is better to think of human social systems and landscape systems as coupled and as responding to each other in complex and unpredictable ways (Campbell & Corley, 2012). Ecosystem management is most effective when decision makers focus on stakeholder engagement, cooperation between agencies, integration of social, economic and scientific knowledge, and the preservation of ecological processes (Koontz & Bodine, 2008). The most significant barriers to implementing management plans concern the integration of political, social and cultural issues into a broader analysis of the relative advantages and disadvantages. Inadequate attention is often paid to

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4

valuing communication between stakeholders and the nuances of adaptive approaches required to address uncertainty (Lennon, Scott, Collier, & Foley, 2016). Local communities often have unique insights, both social and scientific, about how a system functions. These insights should be taken into consideration when making decisions, particularly when knowledge of a system is poorly researched or information is inaccurate or incomplete.

Ecological footprint Ecological footprint (EF ) is a theoretical measure of the amount of land and resources that a population (city, province, state or nation) uses to maintain the standard of living for each citizen. It quantifies the extent to which a community is dependent on host ecosystems and the extent to which they are potentially vulnerable to resource shocks (Rees & Wackernagel, 1996). Put simply, when an economy extracts resources and produces waste well beyond the carrying capacity of the host ecosystem it is unsustainable in the long term and vulnerable to systems shock. The value of ecological footprint calculation from a policy perspective is the communication and accounting capability of the tool. EF calculations can be compared between individuals, communities or cities. Accounting for the productive biological resources consumed and the waste produced (e.g. carbon, pollution and solid waste) provides compelling evidence of the need for change and a persuasive tool for action to reduce and redistribute resources. In short, EF accounting attempts to answer the global question: “In a given year, how much of the biosphere’s regenerative capacity did human activities demand?” (Galli et al., 2016, p. 230). Related to EF, biocapacity reserve calculates the theoretical biocapacity per person (the biologically productive area needed to generate a continuous supply of renewable resources), minus the ecological footprint per person. Biocapacity reserve implies a surplus of biocapacity whereas a deficit indicates excessive ecological footprint. Politically, the persuasiveness of EF is the ability of decision makers to prioritise actions or communicate need for behavioural change based on a simple, easy to understand metric. The weakness of EF as policy tool is that too much confidence is placed in the accuracy of the accounting method. Most EF calculations concur that humans are exceeding the planet’s carrying capacity in what is termed ecological overshoot, indicating the need to reduce environmental impacts but offering little in terms of an approach. EF tools attempt to capture quantity and simplify a large range of biophysical and socio-­technical systems, complex phenomena and global impacts. EF tools are less useful for recommending detailed action due to their biases and simplifications based on their design (Blomqvist et al., 2013). The value of EF should also be placed in the context of the general problems of environmental accounting and representations of sustainable practices (Galli et al., 2016). Essentially sustainable development at a metropolitan scale is a complex process and impossible to represent in a single numerical value. Yet, while EF cannot indicate

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the sustainability of a metropolitan region, it can identify certain aspects of sustainable development that provide evidence for policy action. Landscape governance would need to take into consideration the extent that environmental indicators revealed in EF calculations can be improved through protecting landscape values. A simple example may be that protecting productive agricultural landscapes and increasing the production of fresh produce on the urban fringe can reduce the net importing of produce from further afield, thus reducing the total carbon footprint for food production in cities, which is a major contributor to carbon emissions in developed economies.

A report by the Institute for town planning and development, Ile-­de-France, in October 2015 concluded that the ecological footprint of Ile-­de-France (the region surrounding Paris metropolitan area) had an average of 4.8 global hectares per person (gha/p) in 2014, down from 5.58 gha/p in 2004 (IAU Ile-­deFrance, 2015). The political message here is twofold. First, the number 4.8 gha/p provides a measure of performance of a region compared to France (4.66 gha/p) and the global average (2.9 gha/p) and the global “carrying capacity” of 1.73 gha/p. In this case GF provides a relative measure to help determine the effort required to bring the region closer to the national or global ecological footprint average, depending on political will to reduce environmental impact. Second, the measure determines both the trajectory (downward) and the rate of change to gha/p in ten years (14 percent decline). The report goes on to identify the reasons for the relative GF size of Ile-­de-France compared to the national average and the policies that have helped to reduce the EF. These policies included increased spending on public transport. Consider how EF may be useful as a policy tool. www.footprintnetwork.org provides a comprehensive overview of the biocapacity of nations and a personal EF calculator. Try calculating your personal EF. Then compare your EF to the city you currently reside in. Think about some of the strategies you can adopt in your daily life to reduce your own personal EF. What would it take to match the EF of your city, nation or the global average EF?

Urban metabolism Urban metabolism is defined as “the sum total of the technical and socio-­economic processes that occur in cities, resulting in growth, production of energy and waste” (Kennedy, Pincetl, & Bunje, 2011). Similar to ecological footprint, urban metabolism quantifies flows of materials and energy for a given urban region. In contrast, it focuses on the inputs, throughputs and outputs more than impacts. Therefore the measurements used for an urban metabolism calculation are more diverse and compartmentalised to the materials in question, whereas the ecological footprint relies on a single aggregated measure that uses land area as a proxy. Urban metabolism

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measures stocks (the quantity of a given resource) and flows (the intensity of the movement of that resource through the urban system). Together, these two variables can be used to identify targets for achieving greater sustainability. For example, taking the ecological footprint as a headline indicator of performance and then modelling stocks and flows using an urban metabolic model, a city can develop more targeted strategies for improving performance. Put simply, a city can identify ways to reduce the overall inputs and move away from a linear metabolic system to one where throughputs are reused and thereby reduce outputs. The practical application of urban metabolism to metropolitan planning is better understood by examining the processes that are measured. For example, a study of the flow of two nutrients (nitrogen and phosphorous) through Stockholm, Sweden, provided a proxy to develop sustainability indicators for the city (Burstrom, Frostell, & Mohlander, 2003). Such an approach is significant in that this method explicitly incorporates landscape processes in evaluating Stockholm’s performance. Cities acquire inputs from within and beyond the metropolitan boundaries to function. Inputs that are more likely to be generated proximally close to the city include potable water and renewable energy. Developing cities are also more likely to use the local landscape to source fresh food, construction material and fuels such firewood within the metropolitan catchment. Inputs such as energy, food and water are more likely to come from further afield for developed cities. In other words, each society adopts strategies to acquire resources from the landscape depending on their economic and political capacity to exercise choice. Consequently, urban metabolism evaluations can provide an indication of landscape impacts that occur beyond the urban boundary; highlighting the issue that, as cities increase in wealth, they are acquiring inputs from further afield, which has regional and global consequences. Throughputs refer to the way cities use the resources they acquire and how these resources are transformed in the city (e.g. electricity is transformed into movement, light and heat). Many factors determine how a city uses these resources such as the local topography, climate, history and political relationships to higher levels of government. The path dependency of a city determines its physical structure, how it functions, and how it acquires and uses resources and disposes of waste (Wilson, 2014). Indeed the morphology of the city, its built form, infrastructure, and open space systems are a result of these interactions over time. Likewise, how these resources are managed influences a city’s social dynamics (e.g. distribution of wealth, access to services and transport systems). Indeed, many of the services we now enjoy (such as private transport) are relatively new in the history of urbanisation. Modelling based on urban metabolism helps us to comprehend the full costs of providing those services and the alternatives to potentially unsustainable services. Outputs are a consequence of the consumption of resources. The transformation of energy and material resources creates waste that can either be recycled or reused, stored within the metropolitan boundary or evacuated into another terrestrial system or into the atmosphere. Like inputs, outputs can have global impacts that are often poorly managed.

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Ecological wisdom There are a number of ways to look at the nature of the problem at hand. Following on from the previous discussion, we can think about how ecosystems generate knowledge and awareness of an issue. Ecological wisdom encompasses understandings of human relationships towards nature that transcend the mechanically minded approaches to environmental management (Liao & Chan, 2016). Ecological wisdom, a derivative of ecosophy, seeks to reconcile the divide between humans and nature, and between the spiritual and the physical (Naess, 1973). In practice, a decision maker would follow a process that leads to an ecologically wise resolution of a practical problem (Liao & Chan, 2016). As mentioned in Chapter 2, Ian McHarg’s thesis, Design with Nature, encouraged planners and designers to develop methods of operation to work with natural systems in a way that is sensitive to ecosystem dynamics (McHarg, 1969). In adopting such an approach, we should consider how to embody the aspirations of an ecologically wise approach. For example, ecological wisdom encourages a social awareness that values biodiversity protection (Wang, Palazzo, & Carper, 2016). In practice, this involves integrating infrastructure systems (e.g. housing, transport, agriculture and waste) with ecosystems by strategically designing infrastructure to be multifunctional and pay attention to how the flow of energy and materials respond to feedbacks in such systems. Designing systems that are circular rather than linear support relationships between elements that are symbiotic rather than parasitic. By increasing our understanding of the dynamics of ecosystem services that improve human wellbeing, we can deal with changes and respond to different interactions in a systematic way. Another approach is to consider the way questions are asked about how cities accommodate social, environmental and economic pressures. As suggested by Corner (2006), it is important to know how the growth machine in urban development works, both in terms of economics but also environmental amenity (e.g. environmental management and provision of public space). How do you negotiate the different rights and responsibilities of land owners and managers who are governed by land boundaries and property rights, regardless of aspirations for a more collaborative approach (Wyborn & Dovers, 2014)? Adaptive governance seeks to overcome some of these problems and provides a theoretical model that is instructive, but also raises as many questions as it answers. Regardless, we can start to imagine a governance approach suitable for metropolitan landscape planning and management. As decision makers, you will need a broad understanding about how different layers of government interact through the decision making process. Rather than focus on prescriptive measures or interventions, you may consider an ecologically wise approach to understanding the nature of the policy problem we are trying to address.

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Landscape urbanism In contrast to the other ideologies mentioned in this chapter, landscape urbanism does not address environmental issues from a specific scale, and it doesn’t provide an evaluation framework for determining sustainability indicators (i.e. ecological footprint and urban metabolism). It does, however, explore and explain the role of landscapes in advancing an urban agenda and in doing so provides another approach to developing a governance framework. Landscape urbanism emerged from scholarly writing on landscape architecture in the 1990s. It is a disciplinary perspective that argues landscapes, rather than built structures, are the basic building blocks for contemporary urbanism (Shane, 2006). The origins of landscape urbanism are relatively recent and in many respects contribute to the substantial canon of post-­ modern criticisms that reject the premises of modernist planning and architecture. The value of landscape urbanism to this discussion is limited but useful for gaining insights into methods for landscape governance. In his essay “Terra Fluxus” (2006), Corner proposes four themes that shift attention away from aesthetic qualities of landscape towards a more systemic understanding of the mix of built and unbuilt forms in the modern metropolis useful for this discussion (Antrop & Van Eetvelde, 2000; Corner, 2006). Although these themes resonate as a program for landscape architecture and a critique of contemporary interpretations of ecological design methods, they do provide means to look at potential governance models through a landscape lens. The four themes proposed by Corner (2006) are as follows. 1

2

Processes over time in essence bring an urban political ecological view to understanding urban dynamics (Swyngedouw & Heynen, 2003). In understanding the forces that shape cities, we need to gain an appreciation of the role of capitalism, deregulation and neoliberalism, and other global agendas that have a profound affect in determining how governance manifests in the contemporary metropolis. Corner does not underplay the role of planning and design in shaping urban forms as subservient to bigger agendas, but rather seeks to engage in a dialogue that explains the range of processes that shape the metropolis over time. The field of action engages the concept of scale in understanding these landscape processes. Rather than focussing on a particular scale, Corner is concerned with how different scales interact. This concept is similar to the complex interactions observed across ecological, economic and social domains and at different scales described as adaptive cycles by Gunderson and Holling (2001). Adaptive cycles are difficult to detect at a particular moment in time. It is important for practitioners to be aware of the concept and how it affects decision making, particularly when impacts occur over extended timeframes. Four key ideas form the basis of adaptive cycles; a b

There in no one system but rather multiple systems of differing scales. These systems are all nested; meaning the dynamics of one system affects all surrounding systems.

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c



3

4

Systems go through circuitous phases broadly described as: i Growth or exploitation phase that establishes the system’s identity and influences other systems. ii Conservation or consolidation is a stable phase where the system resists external forces in order to retain its established identity. iii Collapse or release occurs when the system is no longer resilient to external shocks and stability breaks down, forcing it to cross thresholds. iv Reorganisation or reshuffling allows for the establishment of new configurations and opportunities for the incorporation of entirely new identities into the system.

Corner uses the concept of the surface (which includes both building and land surfaces) to open possible interpretations about how physical structures interact within these adaptive cycles. Political and institutional cycles are equally important to consider here. Operation or working method reorients the decision maker’s mode of practice to explicitly confront the seemingly opposing ontological forces of utopian and strategic thought. Perhaps the most original aspect of Corner’s interpretation of landscape urbanism, he is concerned with how to synthesise the many competing forces that shape decision making in development. Corner advocates for contextually responsive, adaptive, and ecologically strategic approaches to design without losing the imaginary power of creative thinking. The final theme is the imaginary. Perhaps more of a synthesis of the three preceding themes, the imaginary speaks to the designer’s or planner’s creative sensibility. More importantly, he refers to the “collective imagination, informed and stimulated by the experiences of the material world” (Corner, 2006, p. 32) to emphasise the importance for decision makers to engage in the public project of urbanism rather than simply reacting and recreating what already exists. The imaginary is by definition a challenge to engage stakeholders in a way that respects diverse opinions and is open to creative potential.

This list is by no means complete, however it helps establish a context in which decisions can be made in terms of governance arrangements and the institutional levels at which decision making may occur. While it is instructive to look at the issues facing ecosystems management, landscape systems have a much broader range of functions and variables to consider (some of which are discussed in detail in Part III of this book). Whereas ecosystem function underpins the principles of ecosystem management, landscape systems potentially accommodate components of other systems that need to be considered. For example, transport networks may extensively interact with landscape systems through green corridors. Food systems may rely extensively on peri-­urban landscapes to be protected for the production of fresh produce. Planning policies (such as densification) may significantly affect the distribution and density of landscapes on private land. This chapter describes these different disciplinary perspectives to help you develop a mental framework

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about how we might evaluate and administer urban policies through a landscape lens. Practically we need to consider how governance structures are assembled and in order to do this the next section of this chapter explores how governments share and distribute authority.

Modes of governance This section describes four modes of governance and the roles of stakeholders in dealing with complex urban environmental problems (Lane & McDonald, 2005). Each type has advantages and disadvantages. The general consensus is that environmental resources are best managed at a level closest to the stakeholder who benefits from them (Adger et al., 2003; Bulkeley & Betsill, 2005; Kabisch, 2015). However different governance approaches suit different contexts and are worth exploring.

Government led governance Government led governance requires a single tier of government to be responsible for decision making authority and management responsibilities. Typically post-­war metropolitan planning responsibility resided with the state. As discussed in previous chapters, the criticism of state-­based planning and management fundamentally changed the nature of the planning profession in the 1970s and 1980s (Gleeson & Low, 2000). Although a government approach to governance has been out of favour in the recent past, there are some advantages to a single government approach. A single agency, properly resourced, has the ability to employ or contract in a wide range of experts, and with a single reporting line can foster the sort of multidisciplinary approach suited to metropolitan planning. Politically a single agency can also exert more influence over higher level decision makers and politicians responsible for budgets and passing legislation. However, single government approaches do not deal well with diversity. Imposing single standards and practices across a heterogeneous landscape and equally diverse community may achieve certain economies of scale in implementation, but at the risk of delivering largely ineffective policy outcomes (Hooghe & Marks, 2003). Problems will also occur when the size of an agency is either too big or too small, or when skills and knowledge gaps exist. Typically landscapes are managed by municipalities that are considered to be too small to develop governance capacity to address social and environmental problems (Termeer et al., 2010). Today, with the historically low levels of trust in governments across the developed world, it seems improbable that a single tier of government, concentrating decision making with experts, will become commonplace (Denniss, 2018).

Deconcentrated governance Deconcentrated governance describes the distribution of decision making authority and management responsibilities across different levels of the government. This

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typically describes the relationship between state or provincial governments and local councils. This strategy brings decision making closer to the affected communities while retaining a level of political influence at the higher level. Such an approach explains the flourishing of metropolitan authorities in the USA and Europe in the 1970s and 1980s, partly in response to reduced state funding and the increased calls for better community engagement (Wheeler, 2000). The premise of deconcentrated governance requires that different tiers can implement policy to mutually benefit the government and the community. However, local government is typically associated with the organisation and regulation of communities within discrete localities. The municipal authority not only establishes and enforces the rules and regulations in each locality, it also allows citizens to organise themselves into discrete politically prominent units to exert influence over decision making (Briffault, 1996). The challenge for metropolitan authorities in deconcentrating decision making is to manage the competing interests of local level organisations while maintaining the benefits of oversight (Wingo, 1972). This oversight, which is highly contingent on the level of power granted to local authorities under law, is particularly important in managing spill-­over consequences of local decision making. Spill-­overs occur when the actions of one jurisdiction impact negatively on citizens in another. For example, when managing water quality or protecting biodiversity, the higher level government can exert pressure on local authorities to meet their regulatory obligations across jurisdictions and without undue influence from vested interest groups. Today cities are not conurbations of discrete municipalities. Goods, services, information and people move across these boundaries far more than may have happened in mid-­twentieth century cities. More nuanced forms of governance now exist involving many more entities.

Delegated governance A delegated governance model ensures the decision making is delegated to semi-­ autonomous organisations, but ultimately these entities are accountable to a government agency. Usually these organisations have a great deal of discretion in decision making; however, political power is still held by the public authority. Delegation recognises, to some extent, the pluralistic nature of governance today. The principle design of a delegated governance model is to determine the extent to which one relinquishes authority and management responsibility. The primary strength of a delegated model is that it increases the opportunity for civic engagement by providing opportunities for individuals to participate in civic affairs. In this case, the role of the state is to provide oversight, not in a technocratic sense but more as a system of co-­responsibility according to the principle of subsidiarity (UNDP & German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, 1999). In practice, the success of delegation only comes from the willingness of the higher authority to relinquish actual power. At the local level, subsidiarity can also be seen as a panacea for empowering local communities. However, without the appropriate resources and skills, inevitably a high level entity will be asked to

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step into help. Similarly, the distributive effects of subsidiarity also results in the dispersal of funds to many small organisations with limited capacity to leverage grants beyond a funding period (Farnsworth, 2004).

Devolved governance Devolution occurs when governments devolve administrative responsibility and decision making authority to non-­government organisations. Devolution usually transfers responsibilities to semi-­government or private authorities that include a mix of stakeholders. As with delegation, the challenge is to work collaboratively to manage the impacts of urban development rather than simply devolving management authority to the lowest capable organisational level. Devolution can be broadly approached by one of two methods in seeking to achieve a balance between maintaining flexibility and ensuring standards are met. The first approach is to determine the level of management desired by the community and designing a governance structure to achieve this. The second is to determine the best governance structure to ensure local level organisations can achieve centrally determined and legislated standards set out in policy (van Stigt, Driessen, & Spit, 2016). Neither of these approaches uses the subsidiary principle in isolation. Instead they use an outcomes approach to determine how the most effective decision making should be devolved. While the broad consensus is that governance should be multi-­layered and subsidiarity should be applied, there is not as much consensus around how to design an effective, equitable and efficient governance system.

This chapter has presented a range of perspectives on governance. Understanding governance, in the context of practice, you should consider the following questions posed by Hooghe and Marks (2003). Should governance frameworks be designed with a particular community in mind or should they address specific policy problems? Should governance frameworks take advantage of specific competencies within participating organisations or should they target specific policy issues? Should decision making authorities be limited in number, or should they proliferate? Should jurisdictions be designed to last, or should they be flexible and evolving?

Adaptive governance The linkages between social and ecological systems are of key importance in developing a landscape governance model; multiple scales are essential to understanding

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to these linkages. In contrast to centralised and distributive governance approaches, scale is not limited to spatial and jurisdictional dimensions. Temporal, management, institutional, network, and knowledge scales are incorporated into an adaptive governance model (Termeer et al., 2010). Retrofitting adaptiveness into existing governance systems is one of the greatest challenges for managing metropolitan landscapes into the future. The distance between what currently exists and what we aspire to in achieving sustainable urban settlements is largely determined by the political, cultural and organisational constraints on agencies and other organisations seeking change (Wyborn & Dovers, 2014). Adaptive management and adaptive governance emerged out of ideas behind the earliest formulations of resilience thinking. By definition, adaptive governance is synonymous with resilience theory because it anticipates or responds to opportunities, unanticipated challenges or problems, and changes to governance structures and systems accordingly (Walker & Salt, 2006). This approach to governance is insightful because it allows for management to respond to and recognise the complexity and dynamism of landscape systems and ecosystem functions. Based on Folke, Hahn, Olsson, & Norberg (2005), adaptive governance should feature four overlapping aspects: 1

2

3

4

Knowledge creation and understanding of systems function and dynamics to allow for and respond to feedbacks. In other words, emphasising the need for good information and data to support decision making and the ability to change practices as systems change. Feeding new knowledge into adaptive practices to foster a learning environment. This requires governance approaches to be open to changes based on evidence (feedbacks) in a way that learning drives the change rather than compliance. Support flexible institutions and distributive governance arrangements that allow for adaption to occur. In order to overcome the inertias inherent in conventional forms of governance, new systems are needed to establish the most appropriate level of decision making. As previously discussed, this model seeks to identify what mix of governance is most effective to address a problem or take advantage of an opportunity. Foster a culture of coping with uncertainty, surprise and external influences beyond an institution’s control. In other words, an adaptive governance approach needs to demonstrate adaptive capacity and internal resilience.

Walker and Salt (2012) describe the characteristics of an adaptive governance system. Essentially mirroring the features of any resilient system, they argue that relatively small subunits should have considerable autonomy to experiment with different approaches. However, these units are nested within smaller and larger scale units so that learning from experimentation will feedback into other systems, affecting their function and allowing others to reflect on their own capacity to experiment and change (Figure 6.1). It is worth considering here that, in theory, any multi-­level governance system can apply an adaptive framework similar to Walker and Salt’s model to achieve greater resilience. Practically, the opportunities

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for landscape policy integration into a broader metropolitan agenda should be explored through small scale experimentation by decision makers seeking ways to enhance the metropolitan systems’ adaptive capacity (Ross & Dovers, 2008). As practitioners you should ask why this integration doesn’t happen more often. Returning to the theme of scales, we can consider how this framework operates. However it is worth recapping that landscapes are not all the same spatial scale nor do they produce the same intensity of externalities that hinder or benefit society (Ostrom, Tiebout, & Warren, 1961). Similarly, the scale of concern in question is usually linked to the jurisdictional scale and this relationship is central to many questions related to governance. Finally the long-­term challenges presented by climate change, urban migration and food security to name just a few demonstrate the importance of considering temporal as well as spatial scales in policy deliberations (Andersson, Gibson, & Lehoacq, 2004). The adaptive governance framework (Figure 6.1) has two fundamental ideas that govern the process of engagement. The first consideration is the scale of interaction and the second is the phases of transformation. To recap, the focal scale is the scale of greatest concern to the stakeholders (see Chapter 5). Higher level scales of interaction in Figure 6.1 usually refer to institutions such as industry groups, local or regional authorities, and state and federal governments and potentially international agreements. The lower level or smaller scale entities may include community groups, developers and individuals willing to experiment or innovate in the way they engage with the policy problem. The phases of transformation identify a process of systemic change over time and are described as follows:

F6.1   Adaptive

governance framework proposed by Walker and Salt (2012).

Source: Walker & Salt, 2012.

The role of governance   121

1

2

3

Getting beyond denial simply means to confront and challenge the business-­asusual approach to organisational culture in the face of difficult decisions or circumstances. Vested interests spend considerable effort and time resisting change to ensure business certainty. The key to breaking down this resistance to change is providing and promoting good quality evidence-­based information (feedbacks). Designing options for change means taking advantages of good information and willing advocates to develop scenarios that can engage stakeholders in a discussion about different futures. This is where supporting lower level experimentation and risk taking facilitated by a learning culture is critical to initiating and sustaining adaptive practices. Evaluating capacity to change is highly contingent on the support from higher institutional scales to allow and encourage change implementation. Societies with high levels of social capital (trust and reciprocity) along with other forms of capital (human, natural, economic and cultural) are more capable of embracing adaptive processes (Lin, 2001).

Essentially Figure 6.1 serves as a template, rather than an summary, of an adaptive governance approach. While in theory these concepts and ideas seem attractive, governments, just like cities, have certain path dependencies that take time to evolve. Agencies seeking to operationalise adaptive approaches are often constrained by higher levels of government changing priorities and undermining their right to govern in this way (Wyborn & Dovers, 2014). Likewise, such an approach is highly contingent on harnessing the potential contribution of stakeholders. In relatively low density non-­ urban environments, stakeholder engagement is highly probable. However, metropolitan regions contain millions to tens of millions of people making such engagement logistically impossible. Therefore, representative organisations play an essential role in speaking on behalf of the community. Pragmatically, adaptive governance should identify and anticipate uncertainty and unintended consequences inherent in competing proposals. It should adapt decision making to be open to learning and innovative processes (Kropp, 2018). However, there remains a persistent and normative assumption proffered by highly qualified and technically motivated experts that centralised decision making will deliver the expected results. Technocrats do not like policy experimentation by lay people who tend to contribute generalised statements and self oriented assessments of the situation to a policy problem (Pölzler, 2015). This brief description of adaptive governance serves as a thought provoking proposition about how governance of metropolitan landscapes is not just a subset of a larger political system, but rather a novel approach to urban governance more generally.

Conclusion This chapter has drawn on literature from a range of disciplines to explore the array of issues concerning the governance of metropolitan landscape systems. Broadly the

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theories and agendas of environmental design, planning, administration and management draw on common themes that concern the way the metropolitan landscape should be governed. Advocates for improved forms of governance point to the need for better collaboration, sharing of information and cross-­disciplinary cooperation. The questions to be answered by you as future decision makers and policy advisers are not about what needs to be done but how such changes can occur. For example, collaborative practices can be legitimised through the development of suitable enabling legislation that are enforced through subsidiary regulations, plans and operating procedures (Wyborn & Dovers, 2014). It is just as important to prescribe a method of change as it is to provide the compelling case for what needs to change. Walker and Salt (2012) offer a prescription for adaptive governance that provides us with a point of orientation rather than a recipe. Societies facing seemingly intractable and wicked problems are resistant to change and metropolises are conurbations of interrelated infrastructures, built forms, information systems and environments that resist change by their very nature (Troy, 2004; Wilson, 2014). The aim of this chapter has been to introduce you to concepts of governance that overlap and interact with theories pertaining to the metropolitan landscape. In drawing together the ideas here, you should consider the role of the state, non-­government organisations, the private sector, community groups and individuals in the ongoing project of metropolitan landscape governance. The next chapter explores in more detail the tools available for regulating the use and enjoyment of landscapes. It draws on concepts from behavioural economics, with practical examples to help you develop a better understanding of the issues and opportunities for metropolitan landscape planning and policy.

Case study – Greater Copenhagen This brief analysis of metropolitan planning in the Greater Copenhagen Area offers another perspective on the evolving concept of metropolitan landscape governance. Two moments in the region’s planning history define how it comprehends and incorporates landscape structures into the urban system. The 1936 Green Network Plan and the incorporation of the 1947 Fingerplan into legislation in 2007 coincided with the formation of the Capital Region of Denmark. Today, although Copenhagen is small compared to other European capitals, its influence reaches into the region and across national boundaries, and has developed into a city without limits (Fertner, 2012). Like other case studies in this book, the original purpose for structuring the city around the landscape has changed over time, and yet the legacy of this approach has served the current planning agendas of improving accessibility for citizens and attractiveness for investment (Copenhagen, 2014). This case study will provide a brief overview of the region’s planning history, the challenges maintaining the landscape values and the future aspirations of the metropolitan region. It shows that the goals set out in the most recent plan makes the most of the existing metropolitan structure in building a case for developing a transnational metropolitan plan for the Greater Copenhagen Area that extends across national boundaries.

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Copenhagen is the capital of Denmark, located on the east coast of the island of Zealand (Sjælland). The municipality of Copenhagen is relatively small with a population of around half a million residents. Greater Copenhagen includes the metropolitan area along with 34 surrounding municipalities and covers 3,020 square kilometres with over two million residents (Copenhagen, 2014). The Copenhagen metropolitan region is the major employment hub with a third of residents in the peri-­urban municipalities working in the central urban area (Olsson et al., 2016). These peri-­urban areas contain extensive landscapes, including nature reserves, forests, wetlands, and farmlands that have been protected from development in some form since the 1930s (Vejre, Primdahl, & Brandt, 2007). Within 100 years of settlement in the eleventh century, Copenhagen was fortified reflecting its growing economic and strategic importance and has been the capital of Denmark since the mid fifteenth century. From the mid seventeenth to mid nineteenth centuries, the population grew substantially, although the city itself didn’t expand due to fortifications. Following a cholera epidemic, the city walls were removed in 1856. By the turn of the twentieth century, electrification and the expansion of a tram network extended the urban boundary along fingers of development following the new transport system. In 1934 the suburban train lines were opened and the finger structure that is evident in the city today was consolidated (Vejre et al., 2007). The rapid population growth of the city in the early twentieth century along with the motor car placed pressure on the peri-­urban landscapes to accommodate new housing. The relatively unplanned development during the interwar period eroded the intact wedges of green space in between the radial fingers of development along the transit routes. In an attempt to regulate the expansion of the city the architects and town planners Bredsdorff and Rasmussen proposed a new vision for urban development called the Finger Plan (Figure 6.2) (Vejre et al., 2007). Although this plan largely established the urban boundaries, it was the longstanding commitment of various administrations to protect landscape resources along with natural barriers to development that set the urban pattern of the modern city. The 1947 Fingerplan was a regional strategy that reinforced the essential urban structure of Copenhagen. While it carried no legislative authority, it significantly influenced the development pattern. It wasn’t until 2007 that the Fingerplan was incorporated into a contemporary legally enforced regional development plan. This story of landscape planning and management on a metropolitan scale is one of legal protections that have been continually under threat and eroded over time, but the essential landscape structure has remained intact for almost 200 years. From as early as the 1800s the Forest Protection Act (1805) was one of the most effective landscape conservation measures to be implemented (Vejre et al., 2007). The large lakes and extensive wetlands surrounding the city also served as a natural barrier to urban development in the nineteenth century. Recognising the value of retaining these landscapes for recreation benefits and economic value, the Green Network Plan was established in 1936. This plan primarily sought to link urban residents to protected forests, lakes, coastlines and nature reserves. The significance of this

Figure 6.2   The

original sketch of the 1947 Fingerplan of Copenhagen. The palm is resting on the city centre. The fingers point in five directions, the shaded areas represent both existing and future cities.

Source: Bredsdorff & Rasmussen (1947).

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approach was the designation of high quality landscape corridors and spaces to encourage citizens to access and enjoy the surrounding nature (Vejre et al., 2007). Like Canberra and Ottawa, but half a century earlier, the Green Network Plan embedded an accessible, high quality landscape structure to the metropolitan plan. Accessibility remains a central concept in the metropolitan planning of the region today. Despite the early efforts to contain urban development through landscape protection measures, the city underwent further car oriented urban growth in the 1960s. In response, rural planning for agricultural production has been incorporated into the metropolitan planning system since the early 1970s. While the pace of urban sprawl declined from the 1980s onwards, the Greater Copenhagen area today has a high proportion of low density residential areas compared to other European cities. Following a period of densification and consolidation in the central areas, the peri-­urban regions have experienced growth, driven by the migration of wealthier families and retirees to the countryside, placing further pressure on landscape values (Fertner, 2012). The landscape has undergone substantial transformation, including the diversification of agricultural production along with an increase in part-­time, non-­commercial farming (Busck, Kristensen, Præstholm, & Primdahl, 2008). The traditional green structure of the Copenhagen area with its green wedges is again put under pressure from low density rural residential development (Primdahl, Vejre, Busck, & Kristensen, 2009). As a result, the total area of land used for agriculture in the Greater Copenhagen Area has decreased by over 7 percent since 1985 (Olsson et al., 2016). Peri-­urban agricultural landscapes are adapting to this decline by shifting to recreational and non-­productive land uses such as tourism and other urban oriented services (Primdahl et al., 2009). The natural landscapes are, in many cases, protected from incompatible uses, however, their close proximity to the city means their values are still threatened, and urban encroachment remains a problem (Busck et al., 2008). Today the principle land use regulation ensures that all activities or land use, changes other than those necessary for agriculture, require specific permission (Olsson et al., 2016). The goal is twofold: first, it reserves landscapes set aside for primary production; second, it has become a powerful tool for containing sprawl and protecting high value recreational and ecologically significant landscapes. Municipalities are also required to prepare land use plans for non-­urban landscapes, including ordinances for agriculture, recreation, conservation and other uses of the peri-­urban landscapes (Olsson et al., 2016). As a result of the planning system, urban expansion has been largely contained and the essential structure of the 1947 Finger plan remains intact (Vejre et al., 2007). The legacy of the Finger plan means that Copenhagen urban residents enjoy a very high level of access to open spaces with 85 percent of residents living within one kilometre of coastal, agricultural or forested open space (Byrne & Sipe, 2010). This combination of high access to public transport and nature from their places of residence supports the active lifestyles of citizens, evidenced by the 32 percent who ride bicycles and 26 percent who walk for commuting and non-­recreational trips

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(Copenhagen, 2014). This combination of high access and amenity has instilled a culture of active living in Copenhagen that many administrations around the world aspire to. This legacy is now driving the agenda of the latest metropolitan planning strategy. The current Metropolitan Plan for the capital region of Denmark presents an interesting multi-­level, transnational governance approach to achieving sustainable development goals. In doing so it raises questions about the nature of metropolitan planning in so far as the greater Copenhagen regional growth and development strategy traverses national boundaries. Greater Copenhagen is a metropolitan region that comprises Eastern Denmark and Skåne in Southern Sweden, joined by the Øresund bridge (Figure 6.3). The region was established in 2007 as part of municipal reform that abolished traditional counties and replaced them with five metropolitan regions. Not to be confused with the Finger plan which is a strategic plan for development of Copenhagen and the peri-­urban hinterland, the basis for the Greater Copenhagen Metropolitan Area is to advance the economic development of the region based on Copenhagen driving the growth. The plan’s guiding principles are to enhance the quality of urban life through improving mobility and environmental quality in order to attract and retain international investment and a high quality workforce. The vision for the plan, “A green and innovative metropolis with high growth and quality of life”, explicitly links the quality of and access to the physical environment with the economic potential of the region. A major thrust of the plan is to coordinate and expand public transport across the Øresund strait in order to create a single labour market and commuting corridor between Eastern Denmark and Southern Sweden.

Figure 6.3   The

Capital Region of Denmark.

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­ olitically, the success of the plan depends on the elimination of cross-­border barP riers that may prevent economic growth and development. Practically, to achieve the main objective of improving accessibility to Copenhagen from around the metropolitan region, the plan proposes a joint transport authority to coordinate the development of infrastructure across the region and traversing the two countries. In this regard, this plan is taking metropolitan planning to a new, transnational, dimension. Perhaps due to the cross-­jurisdictional nature of the plan the goals and objectives are of a high order with only a few specific infrastructure projects named in the investment sections of the plan. The main thrust of the plan’s infrastructure strategy is to make commitments to whole-­ofsector investments. For example, under the efficient and sustainable mobility framework, the plan proposes investments in transition technologies to reduce fossil fuel consumption, such as bicycle superhighways, light rail and electric buses powered by renewable energy sources. The plan includes two frameworks and four strategic growth areas that are designed to fulfil the vision (Copenhagen, 2014). The frameworks are predicated on the notion that connecting the regional areas around Copenhagen to improve access to jobs will attract and retain a high quality workforce and international investment. The success of this is highly dependent on facilitating the cross-­border flow of people from different regions and across the Øresund bridge. The four strategic growth areas more specifically relate to making Copenhagen itself an attractor for employment and investment. Copenhagen has been defined as a “city without limits” to describe its growing influence on the wider region (Fertner, 2012). The city’s borders may be clearly defined by the urban structure first encapsulated in the Finger plan, but consolidated by legislation dating back to the beginning of the nineteenth century. However its influence over the surrounding landscape and neighbouring south Sweden is made visible in the most recent metropolitan plan for the region. This relationship with the landscape imbues the active living culture of Copenhagen and plays a significant role in supporting the improvement of health outcomes for residents.

References Adger, W. N., Brown, K., Fairbrass, J., Jordan, A., Paavola, J., Rosendo, S., & Seyfang, G. (2003). Governance for sustainability: towards a “thick” analysis of environmental decision making. Environment and Planning A, 35(6), 1095–1110. Andersson, K., Gibson, C., & Lehoacq, F. (2004). The politics of decentralized natural resource governance. Sustainability: Science, Practice and Policy, 37(3), 421–426. Antrop, M., & Van Eetvelde, V. (2000). Holistic aspects of suburban landscapes: visual image interpretation and landscape metrics. Landscape and Urban Planning, 50(1–3), 43–58. Blomqvist, L., Brook, B. W., Ellism, E. C., Kareiva, P. M., Nordhaus, T., & Shellenberger, M. (2013). Does the shoe fit? Real versus imagined ecological footprints. PLoS Biol, 11(11), e1001700. Briffault, R. (1996). The local government boundary problem in metropolitan areas. Stanford Law Review, 48, 1115–1171.

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Bulkeley, H., & Betsill, M. (2005). Rethinking sustainable cities: multilevel governance and the “urban” politics of climate change. Environmental Politics, 14, 42–63. Burstrom, F., Frostell, B., & Mohlander, U. (2003). Material flow accounting and information for environmental policies in the City of Stockholm. Paper presented at the Trends and Perspectives of Research for Sustainable Resource Use, Wuppertal, Germany. Busck, A. G., Kristensen, S. P., Præstholm, S., & Primdahl, J. (2008). Porous landscapes: the case of Greater Copenhagen. Urban Forestry & Urban Greening, 7(3), 145–156. Byrne, J., & Sipe, N. (2010). Green and open space planning for urban consolidation: a review of the literature and best practice. Issues paper 11. Griffith University. Campbell, H., & Corley, E. (2012). Urban environmental policy analysis. New York: M. E. Sharpe. Cidell, J. (2009). A political ecology of the built environment: LEED certification for green buildings. Local Environment, 14(7), 621–633. Copenhagen. (2014). Greater Copenhagen: Regional Growth and Development Strategy. Corner, J. (2006). Terra fluxus. In C. Waldheim (Ed.), The Landscape Urbanism Reader, 21–34. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Denniss, R. (2018). Dead right: how neoliberalism ate itself and what comes next. Quarterly Essay 70. Sydney: Black. DiGaetano, A., & Strom, E. (2003). Comparative urban governance: an integrated approach. Urban Affairs Review, 38(3), 356–395. Erie, S. P., Kirlin, J., Rabinovitz, F., Liebman, L., & Haar, C. M. (1972). Reform of metropolitan governments. London: Taylor and Francis. Farnsworth, N. (2004). Subsidiarity: a conventional industry defence. Is the Directive on Environmental Liability with regard to Prevention and Remedying of Environmental Damage justified under the subsidiarity principle? European Energy and Environmental Law Review, 13(6), 176–185. Fertner, C. (2012). Urbanisation, urban growth and planning in the Copenhagen Metropolitan Region with reference studies from Europe and the USA. Forest & Landscape, University of Copenhagen. Folke, C., Hahn, T., Olsson, P., & Norberg, J. (2005). Adaptive governance of social-­ ecological systems. Annual Review of Environment & Resources, 30, 441–473. Galli, A., Giampietro, M., Goldfinger, S., Lazarus, E., Lin, D., Saltelli, A., & Müller, F. (2016). Questioning the ecological footprint. Ecological Indicators, 69, 224–232. Gleeson, B., & Low, N. (2000). Australian urban planning. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Gleeson, B., Dodson, J., & Spiller, M. (2010). Metropolitan governance for the Australian city: the case for reform. Issues paper 12. Griffith University. Gunderson, L. H. and Holling, C. S. (2001). Panarchy: understanding transformations in human and natural systems. London: Island Press. Harvey, D. (1989). From managerialism to entrepreneurialism: the transformation in urban governance in late capitalism. Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 71(1), 3–17. Hooghe, L., & Marks, G. (2003). Unraveling the central state, but how? Types of multi-­ level governance. The Amer­ican Political Science Review, 97(2), 233–243. IAU (Institut d’aménagement et d’urbanisme) Ile-­de-France (2015). Une amélioration continue de l’empreinte écologique moyenne des Franciliens. Kabisch, N. (2015). Ecosystem service implementation and governance challenges in urban green space planning: the case of Berlin, Germany. Land Use Policy, 42, 557–567. Kennedy, C., Pincetl, S., & Bunje, P. (2011). The study of urban metabolism and its applications to urban planning and design. Environmental Pollution, 159(8), 1965–1973. Koontz, T. M., & Bodine, J. (2008). Implementing ecosystem management in public agencies: lessons from the US Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service. Conservation biology, 22(1), 60–69.

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Kropp, C. (2018). Controversies around energy landscapes in third modernity. Landscape Research, 43(4), 562–573. Lane, M., & McDonald, G. (2005). Community-­based environmental planning: operational dilemmas, planning principles and possible remedies. Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, 48, 709–731. Lange, P., Driessen, P., Sauer, A., Bornemann, B., & Burger, P. (2013). Governing towards sustainability: conceptualizing modes of governance. Journal of Environmental Policy and Planning, 15(3), 403–425. Lennon, M., Scott, M., Collier, M., & Foley, K. (2016). The emergence of green infrastructure as promoting the centralisation of a landscape perspective in spatial planning: the case of Ireland. Landscape Research, 42(2), 146–163. Liao, K.-H., & Chan, J. K. H. (2016). What is ecological wisdom and how does it relate to ecological knowledge? Landscape and Urban Planning, 155, 111–113. Lin, N. (2001). Social capital: networks and social resources. In N. Lin, K. Cook, & R. Burt (Eds.), Social capital theory and research. New Jersey: Transaction Publishers. McHarg, I. (1969). Design with nature. New York: Natural History Press. Naess, A. (1973). The shallow and the deep, long-­range ecology movement: a summary. Inquiry, 16(1–4), 95–100. Olsson, E. G. A., Kerselaers, E., Søderkvist Kristensen, L., Primdahl, J., Rogge, E., & Wästfelt, A. (2016). Peri-­urban food production and its relation to urban resilience. Sustainability, 8(12), 1340. Ostrom, V., Tiebout, C. M., & Warren, R. (1961). The organization of government in metropolitan areas: a theoretical inquiry. Amer­ican Political Science Review, 55(4), 831–842. Pölzler, T. (2015). Climate change inaction and moral nihilism. Ethics, Policy & Environment, 18(2), 202–214. Primdahl, J., Vejre, H., Busck, A., & Kristensen, L. (2009). Planning and development of the fringe landscapes: on the outer side of the Copenhagen “Fingers”. In A. van der Valk & T. van Dijk (Eds.), Regional planning for open space (pp. 21–39). London: Routledge. Rees, W., & Wackernagel, M. (1996). Urban ecological footprints: why cities cannot be sustainable – and why they are a key to sustainability. Environmental Impact Assessment Review, 16(4), 223–248. Ross, A., & Dovers, S. (2008). Making the harder yards: environmental policy integration in Australia. Australian Journal of Public Administration, 67(3), 245–260. Shane, G. (2006). The emergence of landscape urbanism. In C. Waldheim (Ed.), The Landscape Urbanism Reader, 55–68. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Swyngedouw, E., & Heynen, N. C. (2003). Urban political ecology, justice and the politics of scale. Antipode, 35(5), 898–918. Termeer, C. J., Dewulf, A., & Van Lieshout, M. (2010). Disentangling scale approaches in governance research: comparing monocentric, multilevel, and adaptive governance. Ecology and Society, 15(4), 29. Tomlinson, R. (2017). An argument for metropolitan government in Australia. Cities, 63, 149–153. Troy, P. (2004). The structure and form of the Australian city: prospects for improved urban planning. Griffith University, Brisbane. UNDP (United Nations Development Programme) & German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development. (1999). The UNDP role in decentralization and local governance: a joint UNDP–Government of Germany evaluation. van Stigt, R., Driessen, P. P. J., & Spit, T. J. M. (2016). Steering urban environmental quality in a multi-­level governance context: how can devolution be the solution to pollution? Land Use Policy, 50, 268–276.

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Vejre, H., Primdahl, J., & Brandt, J. (2007). The Copenhagen finger plan: keeping a green space structure by a simple planning metaphor. In B. Pedroli, A. Van Doorn, G. De Blust, M. Paracchini, D. Wascher, & F. Bunce (Eds.), Europe’s living landscapes: essays on exploring our identity in the countryside, 310–328. Leiden: KNNV Publishing. Walker, B., & Salt, D. (2006). Resilience thinking: sustaining ecosystems and people in a changing world. Washington: Island Press. Wang, X., Palazzo, D., & Carper, M. (2016). Ecological wisdom as an emerging field of scholarly inquiry in urban planning and design. Landscape and Urban Planning, 24(1), 100–107. Wheeler, S. (2000). Planning for metropolitan sustainability. Journal of Planning Education and Research, 20(2), 133–145. Wilson, G. A. (2014). Community resilience: path dependency, lock-­in effects and transitional ruptures. Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, 57(1), 1–26. Wingo, L. (1972). The logic and ideology of metropolitan reform. In S. P. Erie, J. Kirlin, F. Rabinovitz, L. Liebman, & C. M. Haar (Eds.), Reform of metropolitan governments (pp. 1-6). London: Taylor and Francis. Wyborn, C., & Dovers, S. (2014). Prescribing adaptiveness in agencies of the state. Global Environmental Change, 24, 5–7.

7 Regulating metropolitan landscapes

When a problem arises or has been identified and there is political will to address the issues at hand, a policy must be formulated (Campbell & Corley, 2012). Decision makers direct scarce resources (e.g. labour, money, land), based on available information, to achieve a politically acceptable, efficient and effective outcome. This chapter introduces the concepts and tools to develop policy arguments for introducing forms of regulation in relation to protecting, managing and enhancing metropolitan landscape values. Using concepts from behavioural economic theory and applying them in the landscape context will allow you to consider the problems, challenges and opportunities for developing tools that will stand up to conventional policy analysis. Regulation includes formal and informal tools for influencing the behaviour of individuals, organisations and institutions; and in turn constrains the decision makers seeking to achieve a particular outcome. For example, landscape architects often deploy design techniques and surface treatments to encourage users to behave in a particular way. Picnic tables and playgrounds encourage groups of people to congregate, whereas bollards, walls and paths direct users to move through spaces in a more predicable manner. Local councils may choose to deploy more formal methods such as signage, fees and penalties to encourage or restrict certain behaviours. In essence, regulating public space is primarily about regulating behaviour. This chapter introduces the concepts and tools available for decision makers to deploy in regulating the way people use the landscape. The intention here is not to  provide a recipe, but rather to equip you with language that you may find ­unfamiliar. In true interdisciplinary spirit, the chapter crosses the disciplinary divide to explore new approaches to addressing policy problems using a range of regulatory tools from a landscape perspective.

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Regulating behaviour Let us consider what policies set out to achieve. At one level, we can draw on empirical evidence from research to point to the need for action. For example, research that establishes a correlation between access to open spaces and levels of physical activity that can contribute to lowering incidences of non-­communicable diseases such as diabetes (Christiansen et al., 2016). The policy outcome in this case (to increase the community’s accessibility to open spaces) will determine the approach taken for regulating behaviour. Behavioural economic theory equips us with tools that seek to achieve two outcomes: to influence behaviour and to determine the most efficient and effective form of regulation. Figure 7.1 identifies six categories of policy tools available to the decision maker. Each tool comes with corresponding costs of enforcement with inverse capacity to influence behaviour. While this is a simplification, as a model it does provide guidance for achieving the policy objectives. At one end of the spectrum, legislation carrying a term of imprisonment or a fine already exists in statutes for the protection of public lands in most jurisdictions. For example the Federal Land Policy and Management Act 1976 [USA], section 303, part (a) states that The Secretary shall issue regulations necessary to implement the provisions of this Act with respect to the management, use, and protection of the public lands, including the property located thereon. Any person who knowingly and wilfully violates any such regulation which is lawfully issued pursuant to this Act shall be fined no more than $1,000 or imprisoned no more than twelve months, or both. (FLPM Act, 1976)

Figure 7.1   Categories

of regulatory tools to influence behaviour.

Regulating metropolitan landscapes   133

Local authorities may develop local policy instruments with the knowledge that enforcement creates a high incentive to comply. However, the cost of enforcement is high. Pragmatic issues such as an agency’s financial resources or capacity to formulate interagency agreements with enforcement authorities (such as Environment Protection Authority, the local Police Force) would need to be taken into consideration. Attention would also need to be given to the impact of the policy in terms of the number of people likely to modify their behaviour. In other words, a policy carrying penalties is only likely to require enforcement affecting a small portion of the population who are prepared to risk incurring the penalty. For example, a person illegally cutting down a tree to improve their view deems the benefit of the view to be greater than the risk of getting caught and being penalised, or the social consequences of suspicion from neighbours. Persuasion is at the other end of the spectrum. Information disclosure and education programs are relatively inexpensive to implement. Education in itself carries no enforcement obligations; therefore, no associated enforcement costs are incurred. The cost of information disclosure requires an organisation to make information publicly available, such as water quality reports. The cost is borne by the proponent and serves to induce behaviour change through making the information public. However, the capacity of information and education programs to regulate behaviour is lower than that of enforceable regulations, monetary incentives such as tax breaks, or payments. This is because the social cost of non-­conforming and the level of incentives to change behaviour are low. Therefore, the goal for policy makers in adopting education programs is to maximise the efficacy of the message. Research has shown that education programs are more likely to generate behavioural change if the message is clear, attracts attention, is memorable, comes from a trustworthy source and is provided at locations and times close to the point of decision making (Brewer & Stern, 2005). For example, well designed signage plays a very important role in the management of public open spaces. Figure 7.1 introduces the spectrum of regulatory tools and corresponding enforcement considerations that decision makers must address in designing and implementing policies. Combinations rather than single tools are more likely to be deployed in achieving policy outcomes. Therefore, it is worth considering the social objectives that you are seeking to achieve in managing the landscapes in question. These social objectives can be broadly classified using Salzman’s (2013) five P’s approach. Table 7.1 describes the five P’s in a table, their advantages and disadvantages. It provides the broad arguments for developing tools for achieving objectives. Importantly, you need to consider the practical and legal implications in developing a policy approach to achieve management objectives. Once you have a basic understanding of the tools available, you are then able to consider how those tools may be applied in a landscape context. In order to understand how regulatory instruments influence landscape planning and management decisions, we need to consider how the resources and values (ecosystem services) provided by the landscape are deployed. Critical to this discussion is that metropolitan landscapes include both public and private land; however, the values

Advantages Protects landscape values that are not protected through a properly functioning market. Provides a uniform approach to regulating behaviour. Protects and supplies ecosystem services that are not regulated through a properly functioning market. Incentivises innovation to supply ecosystem services more effectively in return for compensation to property owner. Ecosystem services or resources can be ‘leased’ for a period of time without necessarily excluding others from enjoying the landscape for complementary uses. A market can set the value of the permits.

Policy tools (see Figure 7.1)

Legislation carrying term of imprisonment. Legislation carrying a fine only penalty.

Legislation carrying term of imprisonment. Legislation carrying a fine only penalty. Taxes and fees.

Legislation carrying term of imprisonment. Legislation carrying a fine only penalty. Taxes and fees. Fee or tax deductions and incentives.

Instrument

1  Prescriptive regulation

2  Property rights

3  Tradeable permits1

TABLE 7.1  Salzman’s five P’s approach

Allocating property rights over a resource, you need to know if someone is making use of your resource (an issue of monitoring capacity) and be able to exclude others’ use. Public goods may not be distributed to create the most socially beneficial use of the landscape. Requires legislation to set tolerable levels of resource use. Allocation and the number of permits issued do not create the most socially beneficial use of the landscape.

Command and control is expensive to enforce, and is inefficient and unwieldy. Tends to reduce innovation and encourage compliance.

Disadvantages

Persuasion lacks enforcement power of regulation or pricing tools. Education and information dissemination approaches are used in the absence of political support to impose pricing or regulatory instruments, or when the latter are ill suited to the policy problem.

Reflexive approach suggests people’s behaviour can be changed by suggesting/encouraging/persuading them to think about the impact they are causing by publishing that impact (e.g. making environmental impact assessments publically available). Requirements to collect and disseminate information lead to significant changes in consumer behaviour in the absence of overt prescriptive regulation.

Voluntary targets. Information disclosure. Education.

5  Persuasion

Note 1  Prescriptive regulations can be combined with property rights through the use of tradable permits in environmental markets. They share the same characteristics as property rights but are allocated through market mechanisms.

Payments can create unintended consequences of perverse subsidies that cost government twice: first, when public funds are spent to account for the subsidy and, second, when the perverse subsidy causes unintended environmental damage.

Pricing rather than legislation can be used to regulate behaviour or control the consumption of resources. Government can deploy a strategy of payments to access and consume certain ecosystem services.

Taxes and fees. Fee or tax deductions and incentives.

4  Payments

136   Metropolitan strategies

provided by the landscape are public in nature and are therefore managed as a public good. The conundrum for policy makers in determining how to harness and protect ecosystems services lies in the public nature of landscape values. In other words, metropolitan landscape values and the ecosystem services they provide are largely free and accessible. Landscapes are therefore subject to congestion, at which point they demonstrate the characteristics of a common pool resource (CPR) and this presents particular management challenges.

Common pool resources (CPR) Common pool resources, by definition, provide benefits to a community. However as individuals pursue their own self-­interest by accessing these common pool resources for personal gain, the collective benefits to the community diminish over time (Ostrom, Gardner, & Walker, 1994). Otherwise known as the tragedy of commons, CPRs suffer from overexploitation in the absence of some form of formal or informal regulation. Some metropolitan landscapes demonstrate characteristics of CPR when congestion occurs. This can include excessive use of a park at certain times of day, competing access for a view of a landscape scene by property owners, or the exclusion of one group of users to the benefit of another. For example, both community gardens and dog parks cater to a specific user group usually at the exclusion of others. In each case, the landscape provides benefits to the community but some of those benefits flow to users differently. This depends on the services provided, and the way that users access them. Similarly, all landscapes provide ecosystem services to citizens beyond the individual or organisation that exercise a property right or management responsibility over the landscapes in question. As a decision maker, you should consider how landscapes operate in providing ecosystem services to users at the point of congestion, because it is at this juncture that the generation of externalities trigger a policy problem.

CPRs generate both positive and negative externalities Externalities describe the ecosystem services generated by the landscape that can be either harmful or beneficial but cannot be supplied or managed without some form of regulation. Air pollution is an example of a negative externality produced by human activity that requires some form of regulation to manage. Many of the ecosystem services provided by the landscape (such as shade, habitat, clean water and biodiversity) and many of the processes (such as waste assimilation and removing pollutants from water and air or decomposing organic waste) are positive externalities and this relationship is fundamental to the development of metropolitan landscape policies. In other words, ecosystem services provided by landscapes require policy interventions to correct the undersupply of positive externalities and the oversupply of negative externalities. Therefore regulatory tools are used to internalise the externalities.

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CPRs are susceptible to excessive use Congestion is a behavioural economics term that describes the threshold where one group benefits from ecosystem services at the expense of others, or the overuse of those services diminishes the ecosystem services over time. For example, a sport stadium reaches congestion when all tickets for seating are sold and spectators miss out if they have not managed to gain entry. In relation to landscapes, identifying the congestion threshold is not so simple. However, identifying congestion thresholds helps to determine the level of access to and enjoyment of landscapes and to manage the ecosystem services they provide. As a CPR, managers may direct resources to maintaining the landscape values during periods of congestion, or may seek to limit the number of users through entry fees and restricting access through design interventions. When a negative externality spills over to a third party (such as a neighbouring community), a regulating authority should act to minimise the associated problems through managing consumer behaviour or providing infrastructure and services in order to reduce congestion. For example, an urban wetland and detention pond may be developed in an established park that is in the receiving stormwater catchment of a new upstream housing development to reduce the risk of flooding caused by land use change and improve the quality of storm­ water passing though the existing residential area.

Rewarding altruistic behaviour Most of us would like to think that we behave altruistically some of the time. We volunteer on committees, help a friend build a garden in their home and donate to charity. From a policy perspective, we cannot rely on people’s altruism to manage CPRs. The management challenge lies in the ability of institutions to create incentives to limit the free rider effect and to harness “the assertive power of human morality under conditions of competition” (Gawel, 2016, p.  59) in rewarding altruistic behaviour. Without adequate institutional intervention, the allocation of CPRs provided by the landscape will be eroded by free riders who will exploit altruists willing to cooperate socially to protect common goods. This would then suggest that altruistic behaviour is beneficial for the management of urban landscapes. However, decision makers need to be mindful that without incentives, altruists behaving in a socially responsible way (either through volunteering or adopting certain behaviours) will lose the incentive to volunteer because they have no guarantees that others will behave in the same way. Similarly, those individuals and institutions face costs (in time or money) for their altruistic behaviour but the benefits are spread over time and to others in the community (Baddeley, 2017). In summary, the role of institutions in landscape planning and management is then to help individuals’ access support and information to determine the best

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course of action to meet their needs while meeting their obligations set out in rules and regulations. The focus then is not to unduly inhibit individuals’ use and enjoyment of landscapes, but rather to recognise and moderate the impacts of congestion through the design of incentives to reduce the cooperation (altruism) costs and to intervene when free riding threatens the potential benefits of successful community engagement. Identifying the positive externalities of metropolitan landscapes is relatively easy to do. The general consensus is that landscapes are good for society and the values (ecosystem services) they provide are essential for a healthy well-­ functioning metropolis to operate. Landscape architects, planners and environmentalists more generally can articulate what is valuable about landscapes to urban populations. Policy makers need to be skilled in articulating how those landscapes and the associated ecosystem services are then supplied.

Determining the appropriate mix of regulation The first question to ask is what levels of government intervention are needed? Starting at minimal intervention, the test is to determine whether the policy problems can be addressed through natural transactions between individuals and organisations, otherwise known as the provision of purely private goods and services in the market. For example, the market provides a range of services that encourage citizens to access open space. Personal trainers are examples of private providers offering a service to citizens (fitness and exercise) in return for money (fees for participating). While there is usually a range of rules around conducting a business in public space, the financial transaction between the service provider and the customer does not need to be regulated, nor should it be. The appropriate policy recommendation here is minimal intervention by government other than to enforce existing regulations concerning the use of public space (Campbell & Corley, 2012). The primary reason for not regulating pure private goods is the cost of enforcement. As mentioned previously, the highest level of intervention is not only likely to be the most costly, but will also provide the greatest incentive for individuals to comply. The lowest level of intervention may include an education program to influence behaviour of users. Such an approach, if well designed, could reach a large and targeted audience at a much lower cost. For example a local agency may want to raise awareness about the benefits of exercise for health by launching an advertising campaign and providing information about attractive environments for people to exercise. Alternatively, local authority could support individuals to establish personal training businesses by waiving fees or offering concessional loans. As mentioned previously, designing policy to change behaviour will include a mixture of intervention tools described in Figure 7.1. Continuing the example of the personal trainer, permitting the provider to set the price for the service (exercise) is both accurate and efficient. Accurate because the price is agreed by both parties (the trainer and her customer) and influences their behaviour (the trainer’s decision to run a fitness class and the customer’s decision to participate) and efficient because there is no cost to

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government in the operation of the contract between the private provider and her customers. The benefit, on the other hand, is that the provider is generating economic activity and the customer is improving their health, both of which, in theory at least, reduce the economic burden on the state. In this case, the service meets the definition of a purely private good. However, the physical space where the transaction takes place is public space and needs to be regulated for two reasons. The first is to compensate for the maintenance of the physical assets (e.g. mowing, fertilising and watering lawns, repairing and replacing park furniture) and the second is to regulate the number of users of the space to reduce congestion. Therefore, the physical space is a public good that potentially demonstrates characteristics of a CPR. Taking Table 7.1 as a guide, a decision maker may want to regulate the fitness trainer’s use of public land for private gain by balancing the benefits of the service to the community to the cost to the park management authority. Such regulation could include a licence to operate (fees) and potentially some sort of reporting obligations (information disclosure). In summary, the ecosystem services provided by metropolitan landscapes are neither purely private nor purely public goods, but rather sit on a spectrum and demonstrate varying characteristics of CPRs, and require some government intervention. Even landscapes on private property are subject to forms of regulation in many jurisdictions. The question for decision makers then is how to intervene, what are the most acceptable governance arrangements, and what is the desired outcome?

The following scenario describes how a single tree on a private property may provide a range of ecosystem services (shade, habitat, psychological relief, clean air). It also generates a range of positive and negative externalities. Mary buys a house with ocean views. In her front yard is a large ash tree which casts a shade over Terry’s house providing summer shade from the afternoon sun. Terry did not contribute to the cost of Mary’s property purchase, however Terry incurs a benefit from the tree’s shade through reduced energy costs to cool his house in summer. In this case Terry enjoys a positive externality. Mary’s other neighbour Charles, has over time witnessed the tree grow so large that it now obscures his view of the ocean. He now no longer enjoys an ocean view that he once took for granted and this means he incurs a negative externality. In this case, the same tree produces both positive and negative externailities depending on the circumstance. For this reason, it can be said that trees, regardless of whether they are on private or public land, can be common pool resources in cities and that local municipalities address externalities by enforc­ ing legislation to regulate the lopping or removal of trees within their muni­ cipal boundaries.

Scaling up this scenario, the positive and negative externalities of trees at a metropolitan scale incurs a greater set of policy challenges that cannot be simply addressed

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through tree protection legislation. We can consider how regulators should attempt to take into account all externalities in their decision making. In other words, the policy issues around trees at a metropolitan scale concern a range of social, economic and environmental considerations, many of which lie at the heart of addressing sustainable development agendas for governing authorities. Such issues affecting the management of trees in cities range from biodiversity values, property values, water quality, temperature regulation and even road safety. Regardless of the scale at which a problem is addressed, the policy issues here concerns the way governments restrict negative externalities that are oversupplied by the market, or stimulate positive externalities that are undersupplied by the market.

Applying the externality principle to developing landscape policy It is clear by now that the policy goal for managing CPRs is to internalise the externality by taking into consideration all costs and benefits in decision making. This can be achieved through a range of incentives to minimise the occurrences that individuals will over-­consume positive externalities or avoid bearing the cost of negative externalities; in other words, to minimise the number of free riders. Instruments available include the tools described in Figure 7.1 and the direct provision of infrastructure and services (Campbell & Corley, 2012). Indeed, the direct provision services provided by landscapes should take into consideration the level of positive externalities that may be created. For example, the decision to invest in managing parks, street trees and reserves either directly or through partnerships should consider the positive externalities at a metropolitan scale as a means for determining levels of contribution from different sectors of government and civil society. Returning to the question of scale, we should consider who should be involved and what strategies should be in place to distribute the costs and benefits afforded by the landscape at a metropolitan scale. As mentioned in Chapter 3, the direct provision of services by government has declined in favour of contracting out to the private sector. Notionally, private providers of common pool resources will do so as a for-­ profit contractual agreement. However, the role of private citizens, non-­government organisations and other voluntary entities should not be discounted in the provision of ecosystem services. In some cases, individuals can voluntarily finance the management of CPRs in order to enhance positive externalities. In this case, the government can broker agreements between privately organised groups to develop and manage an agreement to provide (or protect) ecosystem services; not necessarily for profit or personal gain, but rather to achieve outcomes that benefit a wider community (Ostrom, 1994). For example, the Central Park Conservancy is a voluntary organisation that jointly manages Central Park with the city of New York. The conservancy was established in the 1980s to provide ongoing maintenance following the fiscal crisis of the 1970s when park funding all but evaporated (Hutchinson, 2017). Today the Conservancy incudes a subsidiary group known as The Perimeter Association that

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“provides funding for the improvement and maintenance of Central Park’s six-­mile perimeter” (www.centralparknyc.org). The Association deploys an information disclosure strategy to help raise funds. On their website it identifies buildings adjacent to the park that donate funds for the specific task of perimeter management, thereby establishing a direct relationship between the financers and the positive externalities enjoyed by members without the need for government intervention. The nature of improvements goes beyond recurrent maintenance such as street sweeping and hedge trimming. Asset replacement and improvement works include restoring and replacing paving and curbing, installing new park furniture and pedestrian ramps. In this instance, the private sector has, through a form of informal behaviour regulation, voluntarily contributed to managing the CPRs and in doing so, internalised the positive externality to match the supply of services (maintenance and asset replacement) with the demand. In this case, an engaged and wealthy community has mobilised its collective resources to manage the CPR without privatising the space. The challenge for landscape managers is to expand their brief to consider how design can mobilise other communities in such a manner for the common good. We can look to behavioural economic principles to apply a framework for developing policy to achieve this at a range of jurisdictional scales from municipal to metropolitan. The next section examines how decision makers take into consideration the factors that may determine the success of a policy and how to minimise the chances of failure. Concepts such as risk and benefit applied to landscape policy are oversimplifications of the many complex and contested issues and agendas facing decision makers. However, this approach provides a starting point for developing arguments for intervention and provides a basis for simple policy analysis.

Risk The policy agenda concerning urban sustainability and associated concepts such as urban greening overwhelmingly focus on the positive externalities provided by the landscape. This book is populated with examples of the many benefits, in the form of ecosystem services that are provided by the landscape. Less emphasis is placed on the role of negative externalities. This is not a simple binary question where advantages and disadvantages are weighed against each other. The example of Mary’s tree shows that positive and negative externalities are very context specific. Another approach is to evaluate the risks associated with a particular policy. In adopting a risk approach, the policy goal may be to reduce the risk to a socially desirable level (Campbell & Corley, 2012). For example, rules concerning trees on private land will vary according to the environmental context. In a dense urban environment, tree protection legislation may prioritise tree retention for preserving habitat over preservation of views or solar access. In a fire prone peri-­urban environment, the same legislation may prioritise asset protection over preserving habitat. In each case, risk (likelihood of damage multiplied by the likely impact of damage) is taken into consideration.

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Benefit The literature concerning the benefits of landscapes in cities, as we have seen, is extensive. It would seem that developing policy for enhancing landscapes, supported by the overwhelming weight of evidence from research, would be unproblematic. Despite this, the greening of cities remains a significant challenge, in part because of the way benefits are perceived and translated into policy. As discussed in this chapter many of the benefits afforded by the landscape, defined as ecosystem services, are externalities and therefore not bought and sold in a market. The challenge is not just to define the benefit of landscapes to cities, but rather to determine how intervention by or on behalf of government can distribute these benefits at an acceptable cost to the community. Put simply, in the provision of ecosystem services, not otherwise provided by the market, we should determine policy in the context of a costs and benefits analysis but be mindful of the shortcomings of such an approach. In particular, the use of such analysis to support the neoliberal agenda of government retreat in favour of market solutions distort the provision of ecosystem services tends to benefit those who already benefit the most (e.g. the educated and wealthy living in high amenity areas). This has often occurred at the expense of funding more cost effective programs such as street tree maintenance and replacement in middle ring and poorer suburban areas. Formal cost benefit analysis (CBA) is a detailed field of economics and there are many good publications on the topic, however in order to further consider our policy options, we should briefly summarise the elements of a CBA. Campbell and Corley (2012) provide a good summary of three important issues for consideration in the formulation of a CBA. These are monetisation, standing and time.

Monetisation Monetisation is perhaps one of the most problematic aspects of CBA for metropolitan landscape policy. Monetisation occurs when an object or experience is converted into money, or property that can be exchanged for money. As mentioned previously, identifying the benefits that landscapes provide to cities is relatively straightforward, but monetising those benefits is far more difficult. A simple example would be to consider the value of Central Park in New York in the provision of ecosystem services against the real estate value of the land the park sits on. Monetising ecosystem services is vague and imprecise (Gómez-Baggethun & Barton, 2013); however, the exchange value of land in the real estate market is relatively accurate and easy (try the search query “How much is Central Park worth” and you will find hypothetical land valuations that are relatively consistent at around US$30 billion). One could argue that the cost of the land is zero because the city already owns Central Park. However, the true cost includes its “opportunity cost” which is the value that could be established in converting it to the next-­best use. This conundrum may explain why retaining existing landscapes in cities is a far easier (less costly) proposition than establishing new landscapes (i.e. converting one

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land use that has a precise value to another that is imprecise and undervalued). As mentioned previously, ecosystem services provided by the landscape are usually positive externalities and therefore undersupplied by the market.

Standing Standing is a legal term that requires decision makers to consider who is affected by a decision. Simple criteria for inclusion would be to consider all people (and animals) that bear substantial costs or receive substantial benefits regardless of physical or political boundaries. When thinking about standing with regards to landscapes at a metropolitan scale, the lines of inclusion become more complex, especially when considering the principle of sustainable development. Thinking about the WCED definition, we can see that there is potentially a great disparity between different social groups within a generation and who might have standing. Likewise, consideration should be given to future generations. In adopting a WCED sustainability position, one could argue that future generations should enjoy as much standing as the present generation. How this is considered as equally vague, although some attempts have been made in ecosystem management literature (Francis & Chadwick, 2013).

Time Time more explicitly considers the intergenerational issues concerning costs and benefits. For large landscape projects, such as Central Park, the original financiers incurred considerable cost compared to the benefit afforded to them. Today, citizens and tourists enjoy the benefit from the initial investment over 160 years later without incurring considerable costs. We can look to past examples to estimate how much cost should be incurred today in order to afford benefits to future generations. Determining future benefit remains problematic because we have no means to predict variables such as standard of living, technological change, or evaluating the preferences of future citizens. The final section of this chapter proposes a management framework that takes into consideration the concepts and issues identified in this chapter. It recognises that the demands for ecosystem services provided by landscapes are under pressure from rapid urbanisation, climate change and changing social and political attitudes to urban nature (Francis & Chadwick, 2013). Equally challenging is the retreat of the state in funding and managing metropolitan landscapes.

Mobilising ecosystem services in metropolitan landscapes Most public landscapes do not typically attract the level of philanthropy (private funding and management input) enjoyed by Central Park. They are usually in public ownership and management responsibility primarily lies with the state. Access is usually free and they contain varying degrees of formal and informal

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r­ ecreational opportunities (Henderson, 2013). Typically, planning policies define landscapes by broad land use classifications (urban, suburban, commercial, farming, horticulture, agriculture, open space or community) and associated permitted land uses. Theses land uses reflect the current or desired types of activities that a government, on behalf of its citizenry, consider appropriate. The intention is to reduce incompatible land uses and provide certainty for property owners or investors about how adjacent and surrounding landscapes will contribute to the quality of life for the affected community. For example, a suburban land use category may permit small parks, community gardens and nature reserves but exclude agricultural production. Similarly, an open space classification may restrict residential and commercial buildings but permit infrastructure such as power lines, solar farms and water towers. While the practice of allocating permitted land uses within zones (by definition excluding incompatible uses) provides intent and certainty to the community of interest (residents, developers and investors), it is silent on how landscapes can be managed for effectively delivering ecosystem services. In short, conventional land use planning is generally silent on the ecosystem services that landscapes provide to the metropolis (Ahern, Cilliers, & Niemelä, 2014). Yet, as discussed in Chapter 4, growing interest in how cities may become more sustainable through urban greening has gained significant attention. Despite the shortcomings of using ecosystem services to attribute cultural and community values to the landscape, this approach provides a framework for using the economic concepts of excludability and rivalry to develop landscape management policies (Campbell & Corley, 2012; MacKenzie, Pearson, & Pearson, 2018). This policy framework adds a layer of information in addition to land use planning and in doing so it is designed to develop a more detailed understanding of how users will consume (or produce) ecosystem services within the constraints of permitted uses that are set out in land use plans. The design of policy to affect behaviour considers the extent to which the service provided by the landscape is excludable or rival. Excludability and rivalry, in the context of this book, are defined as follows. Excludability classifies landscapes according to its capacity to generate ecosystem services that are consumed by users. From a user perspective, excludability detects and identifies the level of consumption of ecosystem services that are externalities (Schotter, 1997). At the extremes, purely non-­excludable ecosystem services exist when consumption cannot be restricted (e.g. biodiversity, air and water quality). Alternatively, excludable ecosystem services may include activities that require exclusive use of a space for a period to undertake an event or activity (e.g. organised sports or outdoor concerts). These excludable ecosystem services provided by the landscape may be internalised or monetised by the market. Rivalry identifies the extent to which multiple users can consume the ecosystem services provided by the landscape without affecting the accessibility, utility or enjoyment of other users (Grafton, Pendleton, & Nelson, 2001). Non-­rival ecosystem services exist when one user’s enjoyment of the landscape space does not affect other users’ enjoyment of the same space. This level of accessibility is ­non-­rival

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Figure 7.2   All

ecosystem services provided by metropolitan landscapes can be plotted on this spectrum.

because it does not reduce the utility value of the ecosystem services provided by the park to all users. A landscape space only becomes rivalrous when its use becomes congested (i.e. it excludes others from using the same space for a period). An example would be a cooperative of urban farmers leasing public land for urban agriculture but without restricting public access to the same land for other activities such as walking or education. The activity of farming, in this case, is partially rivalrous because the farmers’ activity restricts other uses of the land, however, educators can take advantage of the farming activity as an education tool. These concepts are simplistic and do not reflect the complex nature of ecosystem service provision by landscapes or patterns of consumption by users of these services. They do, however, provide a framework for decision making. Landscapes generate diverse ecosystem services, and therefore are rarely purely excludable or rival. Instead, they occur along a spectrum of excludability and rivalry as illustrated in Figure 7.2 and provide insight into how different landscapes could be managed.

Scenarios where excludability and rivalry are applied Applying the concepts of excludability and rivalry to landscapes allows decision makers to classify them according to the level of government intervention required to deliver ecosystem services to the community. In applying these concepts, four broad types of management typologies are described in Figure 7.3. At the extremes, excludable and rival activities (or purely private services) are most effectively managed through markets that directly link the production of the ecosystem services to the consumption of that service by a consumer. For example, scenic tours are most effectively provided by a private market that link the number

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Figure 7.3   Management

typologies placed on ecosystem services spectrum.

of tour operators and tourists to the demand and managed by pricing. At the other extreme, a non-­excludable and non-­rival (or purely public) service such as clean water requires government intervention to protect the values provided by the landscape (such as soil organisms and plants that filter nutrients and permeable ground that allows rainwater to percolate into natural ground water stores). Ecosystem services such as clean water should remain the responsibility of government because they are positive externalities that are inadequately supplied by the market due to no direct link between the production and demand for water of a particular quality (including drinking water as well as unpolluted water for environmental flows) (Whitten & Bennett, 2005). Ecosystem services can be further nuanced into common services, defined as rival in use but non-­excludable in production (e.g. playgrounds in parks) and club services that are non-­rival in use and excludable in production (e.g. running clubs). As with any model, there are exceptions, such as private sector funding for biodiversity conservation projects. However, this model is intended to provide a framework to promote regulation that is more effective. The challenge, as with all theoretical propositions, is to refine objectives in the formulation of policy.

The following scenarios describe how these management typologies overlay with the excludability and rivalry characteristics of ecosystem services provided. Discuss with your peers a range of scenarios where these management typo­ logies can be applied to a landscape management issue at metropolitan scale. Justify your answer using the spectrum presented in Figure 7.2.

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1  Market The “Central Park riding school” is a private business that operates in Central Park. The operators of the school lease a portion of the park for stables; they conduct three rides per day through the park on dedicated riding trails. The riding school owns the maximum allowable number of horses permitted under their lease. The contract between the park managers and the riding school determine the conditions of use of the riding trails for conducting riding activ­ ities. Once these agreements have been established (e.g. a lease of the pre­ mises and contract for park use) the riding school is permitted to conduct their business so long as they adhere to the contract (payment of fees, holding of insurance, adhering to contractual obligations and reporting). The govern­ ment no longer plays a role in the day-­to-day provision of the service. There­ fore, the service is provided by the market.

2  Club The Central Park Harriers running club host a weekly running race through the park. In order to enter the race, a runner pays a membership fee to the club and the club obtains permission from the park authority to conduct their activ­ ity. The race is conducted through the park on publicly accessible pathways. The club cannot prevent non-­members from joining in on the run, but non-­ members will not be given a recorded time or placing in the race unless they choose to sign up as a club member. The park managers may require the club to pay a fee for the use of the park including a temporary works permit for erecting a start/finish station for race days. They are unlikely to levy a fee to offset the maintenance of the running track as, unlike the riding trail, it is not purpose built exclusively for running and no exclusive right has been provided by the park managers for its use.

3  Common The Central Park Authority has completed the construction of a new adventure playground. The area had been neglected and some locals had previously built a BMX circuit that was removed to make way for the new playground. A number of community groups, schools and informal playgroups regularly use the playground, which is becoming very popular with the community. The park authority maintains the playground and enforces regulations concerning appropriate and safe use of the playground. The park does not charge a fee for the use of the playground but restricts use (BMX riders can no longer use the space) and deploys design techniques (design of play equipment, installation of a secure perimeter fence, surveillance cameras and signage). In doing so, the management authority limits the cost of management of the assets through informal regulation.

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4  Government The lakes in Central Park are some of the biggest attractions for tourists and locals alike. The lakes are subject to inflows of nutrient rich, polluted storm­ water. Elevated levels of nitrogen and phosphorous in spring have caused out­ breaks of blue-­green algae in mid-­summer, causing the temporary closure of some of the lakes to users. The Parks Department and the Central Park Con­ servancy devote considerable resources to managing complaints during algal blooms that place considerable pressure on the Park Management Authority to minimise disruptions and inform the community about the causes. The lakes are free to be enjoyed by users, including those who benefit from looking at or walking past without directly engaging in their use. The managers spend resources on maintaining the water quality to reduce the risk of illness to users and reduce complaints therefore reducing costs in time and money. In this case the water quality of the lakes is a government responsibility.

Conclusion Landscapes are a combination of physical elements, ecological and cultural interactions and human nature relationships. Therefore, regulation needs to take into consideration how humans access the values of the landscape and what forms of regulation of human activity can support the production of ecosystem services to benefit the community. This chapter has examined how the values provided by the landscape are incorporated into planning and management decisions through the deployment of policy tools, regulatory instruments and management typologies. Adopting this approach, we can see that landscape values, thought of as scarce resources, are subject to pressures that can result in congestion. As previously discussed in Chapter 1, metropolitan landscapes can simultaneously be regulated to protect spaces of cultural or heritage significance and by definition, the ritual practices, meaning and values held dear by those interacting with and shaping the landscape over time. They also produce ecosystem services for our benefit while performing functions such as carbon sequestering, food production and storm water management to name just a few. Understanding how we behave as individuals or collectively in accessing ecosystem services provides an impetus to think about what sort of regulatory approach is most equitable, effective and efficient for distributing landscape values across a metropolitan region. In applying the externality principle, we can see that a case can be made to mobilise ecosystem services for the provision (or protection) of values deemed essential to help metropolitan regions accommodate the demands of rapid urbanisation and adapt to the effects of climate change. Furthermore, we can use the principles of excludability and rivalry to develop a framework for allocating resources and distributing decision making responsibility.

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Case study – New York City New York City, unlike other case studies in this book, has a metropolitan planning history, largely driven by an explicit relationship between road transport and urbanisation patterns. New York is a product of the region’s geographic constraints, periods of rapid growth from migration and urbanisation and the high profile of private sector influence in planning and in land use control. The New York City skyline was being transformed in the early twentieth century by new construction materials and technologies, private capital and a rapidly growing and diversifying population. At the same time, the network of roads, bridges, subways and rail corridors adapted and expanded the region’s transportation system. Like many major Western twentieth-­century cities, New Yorkers fell in love with the car, particularly after the Second World War. The emerging middle class moved to suburbs in the Hudson Valley, Connecticut, New Jersey and Long Island and the metropolitan boundary sprawled rapidly from the 1920s with little oversight from state planning bodies (Wright, 2013). As a result, road transport has driven much of the metropolitan planning agenda in the USA during the twentieth century. Today, the New York Metropolitan Planning Area is established in accordance with the US department of transportation federal aid policy guide (Department of Transport, 2018). The purpose of this regulation is to support local counties to coordinate and access federal funds for transport infrastructure across the USA. The New York Metropolitan planning organisation includes ten counties from New York City, Long Island and the lower Hudson Valley (Figure 7.4). Sitting alongside the New York Metropolitan Plan is the New York Regional Plan that is a more conventional spatial and environmental planning instrument. The committee established for the development of the first regional plan of New York and its Environs was a private association, largely funded by the Russel Sage Foundation, a philanthropic organisation founded in 1907 by Olivia Sage to improve social and living conditions in the United States (Clayton, 1996). Earlier versions of the New York Regional Plan incorporated transport with housing, employment growth, environmental protection and provision of parks and open space. Led by business elites and professional leaders rather than technocrats, the first New York Regional Plan was largely an effort to survey and analyse the spatial and infrastructural characteristics of the New York Metropolitan Region (Wright, 2013). In the same spirit as the conception and development of Central Park, the first New York Regional Plan was founded on the notion that civic groups played a special role in developing and supporting the region on behalf of millions of residents and visitors. Whereas state-­run bodies exerted political influence over their respective cities such as Ottawa and Singapore, the privately convened regional planning association of New York produced the first metropolitan plans, thus avoiding undue influence from politics and reducing the need to respond to short­term demands generated by political cycles. As a result, the New York regional planning association was very successful in advancing its own long-­term agenda. The three major priorities of the association were transport and other infrastructure,

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Figure 7.4   The

Tristate trail network plan is indicative of the network of open spaces incorporated into the Fourth Regional Plan (2017).

Source: by permission of the Regional Planning Association.

urban development and environmental protection. These agendas were largely adopted and implemented through the various regional plans over much of the twentieth century (Wright, 2013). The first plan was the most comprehensive and detailed survey and plan of a metropolitan area in the world at the time (Wright, 2013). The plan was “metropolitanist” in its vision (Fishman, 1990). In essence the region was developing from a central core, with highest concentrations of density, activity and wealth in Manhattan and decreasing in activity further from the central business district. This approach perhaps locked in the primary concern for transport planning over other agendas as the city progressively spread along motorways to further afield greenfield developments compounding congestion while the public transport system declined. The link between suburban expansion and highway development set off a negative feedback loop in the 1960s where congestion caused by commuters drove more investment into transit systems for private cars at the expense of the rail system. Public transport lost further funding through declining patronage and the depopulation of Manhattan in favour of new estate developments such as Levittown. To counter this,

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the Metropolitan Transit Authority formed a single agency to address all transit infrastructures, resulting in the formation of today’s Metropolitan Transport Plans including New York and other metropolises across the USA. The second regional plan, developed in the 1960s, was in part a response to critics such as Jane Jacobs who challenged planners and architects to understand the fundamental principles that constituted a good city rather than focussing on how the component parts of the city fitted together (Jacobs, 1961). This second plan was ahead of its time. It called for what today we would understand as a mixed use, mixed income urban development (Wright, 2013). Of note, the Regional Planning Association acknowledged that the land pressures were intense and natural landscapes of high value needed to be acquired and protected to permanently preserve critical ecosystems. The 1960s’ “Race for Open Space” Environmental Protection Plan emphasised the urgency with which the preservation of landscape systems including the existing parks systems needed to be managed and preserved. At this time, the New York Metropolitan Area was broadly defined as extending westward 50 miles and comprising an area of 700 square miles, of which about 25 percent was urbanised. The Race for Space plan predicted that the rapid increase in population would place unprecedented pressure on these landscapes for formal recreation and greenfield development (RPA, 1960). The recreation focus was typical of open space development and planning at the time. By the mid-­twentieth century, most parks were transformed from passive, natural spaces to recreation machines supporting programmed sporting activities (Hutchinson, 2017). The second plan, however, did recognise the need to preserve remnant natural landscapes. In response to early ecosystems research, the plan identified and protected landscape types, including 88,000 acres of wetlands that provided important habitat values to manage water quality and to protect the city from water damage from storms, as demonstrated 52 years later when Hurricane Sandy struck in 2012. The plan also proposed the development of ten new regional parks, of which eight would require the acquisition of private land. The plan advocated for national parklands near urban areas leading to the creation of the Gateway National Recreational Area, a 27,000 acre park that became the USA’s first urban national park (Wright, 2013). Comprehensive in nature, the plan also made recommendations on comprehensive open space planning, restrictions from encroachment by development, parkland accessibility and financing development and management and private sector contributions (RPA, 1960). Despite the progressive nature of the second regional plan, suburban sprawl and associated highway development continued to erode the regions landscape values. The third plan developed in the 1990s sought to arrest this growth by redirecting development toward brownfield projects such as the renewal of redundant industrial areas and waterfronts closer to Manhattan (Yaro & Hiss, 1996). The plan advocated preserving three million acres of intact ecologically significant and productive agricultural landscapes by creating regional growth boundaries. As with many plans at the time the central thrust was to reorganise the city around denser cores and the provision of transit systems and open space networks to support a

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more compact city. Departing from the recreation planning approach, the goal for landscape planning and management was to revitalise existing urban parks and streetscapes and take advantage of underutilised urban waterfronts along the Hudson River and Long Island Sound. The efforts of this plan have largely succeeded in preserving the most important watersheds and ecologically significant habitats, while the development of new parks such as the High Line and the 2,200 acre Freshkills Park on Staten Island, along with the renewal of existing parks such as Battery Park (or “The Battery”) on Manhattan Island (Hutchinson, 2017). These and other open space strategies, while largely successful, will be needed to accommodate the additional one million residents predicted to live in New York according to the PlaNYC2035 initiative established by Mayor Michael Bloomberg in 2015. Wright (2013) argues that the fourth regional plan rediscovers its “metropolitanist” vision and reinvents the planning process along the way. The fourth plan, released in November 2017, has a 2040 horizon and addresses much more existential threats to the region that reflect the anxiety of the time. These include real progress towards repairing social divisions, restoring faith in institutions, preparing for and adapting to the already existing impacts of climate change and securing a safe and prosperous future (RPA, 2017). New forms of metropolitan amalgamations such as the New York Metropolitan Transport Council, largely driven by federal transport funding, are collaborating to expand their political influence while they develop and implement plans. At the lower scale, ancillary plans, such as the New York Parks Department’s framework for an equitable future provides more specific strategies for developing and managing the formal landscape values. The Parks Department Plan covers the five boroughs of New York City and, as a strategy, fits within the framework set out by the Fourth Metropolitan Plan. For example, it identifies the need for integrating green infrastructural elements in capital works but the recommendations are more practical, such as establishing community engagement initiatives, programs of management and building new parks (New York Parks, 2014). The current New York Plan, like the London Plan, recognises the potential of green infrastructure to mitigate urban heat island effect, improve stormwater and citizens’ health and wellbeing. Importantly it recognises the need to finance, through public funds, the development of integrated transit along with green infrastructure as an adaption strategy. Interestingly, the plan does not emphasise the role of parks, recreation or peri-­urban landscapes reflecting the more abstract integration of landscapes into metropolitan planning as “green infrastructure” that “proposes a new relationship with nature recognising (the) built and natural environments as an integrated whole” (RPA, 2017). This repositioning of the landscape reflects the increasing specialisation of metropolitan scale planning in the New York region as mentioned previously. Hutchinson argues: “Landscape has become intrinsically associated with administration of all aspects of life primarily through providing the space in a city for carrying out the disciplinary practices related to recreation and health” (Hutchinson, 2017, p. 105). Today parks such as Freshkills and High Line have extended landscape functions into metropolitan practices relating to waste

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management, climate change adaption, renewable energy and cultural reactions to terrorism, all of which impact on functions of the state in profound ways now and into the future.

References Ahern, J., Cilliers, S., & Niemelä, J. (2014). The concept of ecosystem services in adaptive urban planning and design: a framework for supporting innovation. Landscape and Urban Planning, 125, 254–259. Baddeley, M. (2017). Experts in policy land: insights from behavioral economics on improving experts’ advice for policy-­makers. Journal of Behavioral Economics for Policy, 1(1), 27–31. Brewer, G., & Stern, P. (2005). Decision making for the environment: social and behavioral science research priorities. Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press. Campbell, H., & Corley, E. (2012). Urban environmental policy analysis. New York: M. E. Sharpe. Christiansen, L. B., Cerin, E., Badland, H., Kerr, J., Davey, R., Troelsen, J., & Sallis, J. F. (2016). International comparisons of the associations between objective measures of the built environment and transport-­related walking and cycling: IPEN adult study. Journal of Transport & Health, 3(4), 467–478. Clayton, O. (1996). An Amer­ican dilemma revisited: race relations in a changing world. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Department of Transport. (2018). Transportation aid policy guidelines. Retrieved from www. transit.dot.gov, accessed 26 April, 2019. Fishman, R. (1990). Metropolis unbound: the new city of the twentieth century. FLUX Cahiers scientifiques internationaux Réseaux et Territoires, 6(1), 43–55. Francis, R., & Chadwick, M. (2013). Urban ecosystems: understanding the urban environment. London: Routledge. Gawel, E. (2016). “Great transformation” towards sustainability and behavioral economics. In F. Beckenbach & W. Kahlenborn (Eds.), New perspectives for environmental policies through behavioral economics (pp. 127–145). Cham: Springer. Gómez-Baggethun, E., & Barton, D. (2013). Classifying and valuing ecosystem services for urban planning. Ecological Economics, 86, 235–245. Grafton, R., Pendleton, L., & Nelson, H. W. (2001). A dictionary of environmental economics, science and policy. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing. Henderson, J. C. (2013). Urban parks and green spaces in Singapore. Managing Leisure, 18(3), 213–225. Hutchinson, P. (2017). Exploring the connection between landscape and biopolitics: the story of Freshkills Park. Landscape Review, 17(1), 96–107. Jacobs, J. (1961). The death and life of Amer­ican cities. New York: Random House. MacKenzie, A., Pearson, L. J., & Pearson, C. J. (2018). A framework for governance of public green spaces in cities. Landscape Research, 44(4), 444–457. New York Parks. (2014). New York Parks: framework for a sustainable future. New York. Ostrom, E. (1994). Neither market nor state: governance of common-­pool resources in the twenty-­first century. Washington, D.C.: International Food Policy Research Institute. Ostrom, E., Gardner, R., & Walker, J. (1994). Rules, games and common pool resources. Chicago: University of Michigan Press. RPA (Regional Planning Association). (1960). The race for open space: final report of the park, recreation and open space project (Vol. 96). New York.

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RPA (Regional Planning Association). (2017). The Fourth Regional Plan: making regions work for all of us. New York. Salzman, J. (2013). Teaching policy instrument choice in environmental law: the five P’s. Duke Environmental Law & Policy Forum, 23, 363–376. Schotter, A. (1997). Microeconomics: a modern approach. New York: Addison Wesley. Whitten, S., & Bennett, J. (2005). The private and social values of wetlands. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Wright, T. (2013). The Regional Plan Association: a civic planning model for New York. The Urbanist, 526, 1–12. Yaro, R., & Hiss, T. (1996). A region at risk: the third regional plan for the New York-­New Jersey­Connecticut metropolitan area. Washington, D.C.: Island Press.

PART III

Metropolitan imaginaries

“Metropolitan imaginaries” explores how broader movements towards city greening, through theory and practice, have been shaped in the past (trajectories), are shaped (strategies) and will be shaped (imaginaries) in response to emerging global challenges. With a particular focus on urban policy responses to resource constraints, it brings together themes from the first two parts to explore future directions for metropolitan landscape planning and management by exploring contemporary urban agendas.

8 Landscapes and Health

Human health, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO), is “a state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity” (WHO, 1948). To apply this definition to a metropolitan context, a broad range of physical, spatial, biological, psychological and cultural factors need to be taken into consideration (Tzoulas et al., 2007). From a governance perspective, health is not typically considered as a single issue policy agenda controlled by a bureaucratic health agency but rather a multi-­layered and cross-­ sectoral governance issue. This chapter briefly explores the urban health policy agenda from a metropolitan perspective and the potential of landscapes to mitigate some of the health challenges facing urbanising populations in the twenty-­first century. Apart from acknowledging the major social and economic imperative to address global health issues, this chapter pulls apart some of the practical implications of addressing this multi-­layered and complex policy issue through the landscape lens. The WHO 2030 Agenda identifies the major environmental and social factors impacting human health in cities and emphasises themes of intragenerational and intergenerational equity reflecting the intent of the WCED definition of sustainable development (WHO, 2015). This WHO 2030 Agenda is significant in progressing the global sustainability doctrine because it explicitly incorporates human health as an outcome (or precondition) for achieving sustainable development goals. Thinking about a landscape approach to responding to the health policy agenda requires a sound appreciation of the layered and multidisciplinary nature of the problem. For example, when we consider the role of landscapes in addressing environmental and social problems related to human health, we should be mindful of the scale of the problem at hand. Consider the proliferation of informal settlements on the edge of mega-­cities in the developing world, such as Mumbai, Karachi,or Nairobi. It is worth thinking about the relationship between informal settlement patterns and the

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lack of infrastructure provision and how the urban structure compounds existing health problems. The social challenges regarding the provision and conservation of landscapes in rapidly growing cities such as Mumbai are further complicated by weak planning laws, corrupt municipal authorities, and the growth of informal settlements in parks erected by poor urban residents displaced from other parts of the city (Zérah, 2007). From a health perspective, the problems associated with poor governance are just as important to consider as the lack of infrastructure and planning for rapidly expanding cities. In order to further explore the role that a metropolitan landscape policy can play in mitigating major health issues associated with urban living, we need to consider what the major environmental triggers are and what capacity for transformation exists within an urban system to improve health outcomes. In considering these environmental triggers we explore how landscape architects, planners and environmental managers could advocate for the role of landscape in contributing to the health policy agenda. We conclude with a model for transformation at a metropolitan scale, based on Walker and Salt’s (2012) components of transformability described in Chapter 6 and explore the policy implications in adopting such an approach. To develop an understanding of the role of landscapes in supporting better health outcomes at a metropolitan scale, we can look at an example at a much smaller scale and consider how the drivers for good outcomes can be applied in a broader context. Take, for example, the long history of co-­locating hospitals in or near parks in cities. The use of gardens to enhance healthcare outcomes has prevailed across Asian and Western cultures for thousands of years (Ulrich & Parsons, 1992). Designed landscapes co-­located with healthcare facilities such as hospitals and clinics not only provide pleasant views of gardens, they can reduce stress, and improve clinical outcomes. However, given the very high costs of designing and building medical infrastructure, the value of landscapes in minimising health costs needs to be considered alongside the priority given to conventional infrastructure investment. To do this we need to think about what can be measured in terms of health impact. Access to the landscape provides patients with space to exercise and, in doing so, improves recovery times for certain injuries or illnesses. In addition, the visual access to the green space from the hospital itself may also improve a patient’s mental wellbeing, therefore aiding recovery and helping reduce hospital staff stress, thereby reducing mistakes (Ulrich, 2002). The local community may use the hospital grounds for exercise, which from a preventative perspective lowers the individual risk of illness further reducing demand on the hospital system. From a hospital policy perspective, the presence of landscapes could directly benefit financial performance by shortening patients’ stays and improving staff productivity. From a government policy perspective, it may increase the prevention of disease, reduce demand for health services and reduce overall health costs. Therefore, it would stand to reason that the preservation and maintenance of that landscape adjacent to the hospital generates immediate savings to the overall health budget. However, as previously discussed in Chapter 5, measuring co-­benefits is difficult due to the

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number of assumptions that need to be made (e.g. how much benefit is generated by the park, how the benefit is measured over time). Consider, then, that the hospital budget has blown out and the land upon which the park sits is valued from a real estate perspective. The sale of the park for development generates a revenue stream that is easily quantified and can be forecast into the future operating costs. How would you as a policy adviser to government build a case for retaining landscapes adjacent to hospitals? What policy tools might you use to incentivise the hospital to retain, rather than sell the land upon which the park is located? How can this example be scaled up to a metropolitan context? The challenges here are to devise a decision making framework that can build in co-­benefits (and ­costs) of decisions over time. In order to do this we need to consider the environmental triggers that exacerbate population health problems.

Environmental triggers In developing a policy framework for addressing health issues from a metropolitan landscape perspective, it is worth considering the factors that will be impacted by and potentially improved through the deployment of a landscape policy approach. These environmental triggers correlate with population health risks that impede a government’s ability to meet outcomes identified in sustainable development goals as defined by the WHO 2030 Agenda (WHO, 2015). An argument can be made here that in addressing the environmental triggers that impact on human health, the goal of meeting sustainable development targets are enhanced, and landscape policy has a role to play in this regard. For the purposes of simplicity, this chapter considers four broad environmental triggers affecting human health: increased pollution, rising temperatures, declining nutrition and reduced access to open space.

Increased pollution (air and water quality) The health impacts of poor air and water quality continue to be profound globally. According to the WHO (2018) health report card on the progress towards achieving sustainable development goals, the impact of poor water and air quality remain at chronically high levels. In 2015, less than three-­quarters of the global population has access to uncontaminated drinking water at home and less than half had access to safely managed sewage and sanitation infrastructure (WHO, 2018). In terms of air quality, the data is even more sobering. Over half of the global urban population are regularly exposed to air pollution levels at 2.5 times or greater than the safety standard set by the WHO and approximately nine out of ten people regularly breathe polluted air (WHO, 2018). The main indicator of air pollution levels in cities is PM2.5, which refers to particulate matter (PM) that is less than 2.5 μm (micrometre) in diameter. PM2.5 is a main pollutant category affecting human health as it carries heavy metals and sulphates into the respiratory tract and lungs. Long-­term exposure to PM2.5 is associated with increased rates of cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, and also leads to

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cancer and premature death (Wu, Xie, Li, & Li, 2015). A correlation exists between the persistence of PM2.5 particles and instances of asthma related deaths (Guarnieri & Balmes, 2014). Similarly, the likelihood of disease outbreaks such as cholera or dysentery correlates with the concentration of bacteria impacting water quality (Pandey, Kass, Soupir, Biswas, & Singh, 2014). The impact of air and water pollution is usually measured in financial terms, correlating health impacts to reduced worker productivity and direct costs to the health system. For example, the economic losses in 2007 resulting from air pollution in China was estimated at approximately 1.1 percent of national GDP, which in relative terms is equivalent to the entire GDP of neighbouring Vietnam (Xia et al., 2016).

Rising temperatures (extreme weather events, urban heat island effect) The Lancet countdown report that tracks progress on health and climate change evaluates eight indicators, of which three specifically relate to rising temperatures (Watts et al., 2017). This report is indicative of the evidence correlating the effects of temperature change on human health. For example, increasing temperatures (indicator 1.1) exacerbate existing health problems and introduce new health threats. More specifically, an extreme heat event (indicator 1.2) not only exacerbates existing conditions but also disproportionally impacts elderly and children. Urban heat island (UHI) effect further exacerbates the effects of extreme heat events. UHI, discussed in the next chapter, is broadly defined as the observed phenomena of increased night-­time temperatures in urban areas relative to adjacent rural areas (Coutts, Beringer, & Tapper, 2010). According to the Lancet report, 2016 recorded the highest number of exposure events, increasing the number of people to heatwaves above the long-­term average by 175 million. Although not directly a health impact from rising temperatures, indicator 1.4 (lethality of weather related disasters) measures the increased frequency of weather related disasters resulting from increased global temperatures. An average of 306 weather related disasters in 2016 represents a 46 percent increase in ten years. However, due to significant poverty reduction and health adaption programs, no discernible increase in deaths has been identified (Watts et al., 2017). Of note, however, was the increase in deaths occurring in developed countries, offsetting some of the decrease in deaths (particularly flood related) in developing nations.

Declining nutrition (urban food systems) The impact of climate change on urban food systems is difficult to determine due the complex nature of global food systems and the influence of social, technological and economic influences on food production. Regardless, undernutrition (resulting in both wasting and obesity) is one of the greatest potential health impacts of the twenty-­first century (Watts et al., 2017). Access to nutrition is highly localised and climate impacts, resulting in reduced yields, is one of many variables that affect individuals’ access to nutrition. Food deserts have been described as a major

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c­ ontributor to declining nutrition in the diets of urban populations. Food deserts are urban places that lack accessible and affordable fresh fruits, vegetables and meat. Dating back to the 1930s in the USA, food deserts are believed to be a product of the suburbanisation of cities and the reorganisation of shopping precincts into warehouses and away from local grocery stores (Deener, 2017). More recent work, however, argues that the research into food deserts not only simplifies the broader critiques of the food system but also questions the role of planning in excluding people from good nutrition. In fact, Alkon et al. (2013) argue that cost rather than access or awareness of nutrition is the primary barrier to nutritious food access. Regardless, declining nutrition is evident across all parts of the world for various reasons and the most vulnerable (the poor and elderly) are those who stand to benefit the most from accessing locally sourced food supplies (Watts et al., 2017). According to the WHO (2018) 51 million children under the age of five in 2015 were wasted (too light for their height) while 38 million children in this age group were overweight or obese. While malnutrition is normally associated with underweight children, it is increasingly observed in overweight children. This double burden of malnutrition is occurring in hot spots such as the Eastern Mediterranean (WHO, 2018). More broadly, obesity has nearly tripled in the past half century and over 650 million adults and over 340 million children and adolescents in 2016 were either overweight or obese. Similarly most of the global population live in countries where obesity kills more people than illnesses related to people being underweight (WHO, 2018).

Reduced access to open space (disease related to a sedentary lifestyle) Factors affecting individuals’ access to physical space, like the urban food system, are difficult to determine due to changes in urban form, the influence of social, technological and economic factors, as well as a myriad of changing cultural attitudes towards exercise, parenting, sport, recreation and sun exposure to name a few. Regardless, the decline in physical activity is believed to be responsible for up to five million deaths globally per year (Lee et al., 2012). The UN has made serious efforts to target physical inactivity as a means of reducing the global increase in non-­communicable diseases related to urban lifestyles. The UN has recommended improvements to the quality and accessibility of urban environments as a priority action (WHO, 2013). Physical inactivity is not exclusively an urban problem; however, the disease burden resulting from sedentary lifestyles is exacerbated by the increasing urban population and the increasing density of cities as they squeeze out accessible open spaces in order to accommodate rapidly growing populations, particularly in East Asia and Africa (WHO, 2018). Research into the relationship between the spatial configuration of the built environment and physical activity indicate that communities with densely populated walkable neighbourhoods with good street connections to shops, services, public transport and parks tend to be more physically active (Sallis et al., 2016). However, as with research into food deserts, the development of research methodologies has often

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been criticised for using case studies limited to developed Anglophone countries and relying on self-­reporting data. More comprehensive and sustained research through groups such as the International Physical Activity and Environment Network (www. ipenproject.org) have addressed many of the shortcomings of earlier research and have published comprehensive results. Initial findings from the IPEN program have shown, perhaps unsurprisingly, that combinations of urban environmental triggers explain more variation in physical activity rather than focussing on single variables (Christiansen et al., 2016). In other words, a comprehensive approach is needed to address physical inactivity. The role of landscape in improving access to open space therefore needs to be considered in the context of other social, technological, economic and cultural influences and factors.

Policy approaches A policy problem such as declining human health standards impacts many sectors of the economy and society more generally. As the global population expands, ages and becomes more urban, these problems will become more acute and funding for solutions more scarce. It is therefore not surprising that, in most countries, there is a broadly accepted political determination to address the issues at hand. The role of landscapes in health policy is therefore worth exploring. Policy approaches to addressing urban health problems include: 1 2 3

Regulation of economic activities (e.g. relocating industry or restricting vehicle use); Deployment of technology (changing energy systems, replacing combustion engines for electric motors); and The reorganisation of the built environment (making cities more conducive to active lifestyles).

Deploying these approaches to improve health outcomes should be comprehensive and address all the environmental triggers set out in this chapter. These are broad policy agendas that cross a range of disciplines and levels of government and civil society. Therefore in thinking about the role of landscapes in supporting efforts to improve population health outcomes, it is important not to focus on one of these at the expense of the others. It is also worth considering how effective a landscape policy will be in addressing a health related issue. Landscape policy will play a significant role in some areas, while in other areas, it will have less impact. For example, water and air quality are likely to predict instances of health related conditions at a population level and landscapes play an important but minor role compared to technological (engineering) and regualtory (behavioural change) solutions. From a landscape perspective, improving air and water quality outcomes through conservation and management of landscape structures (waterways, urban forests, greenways) should be encouraged and incorporated into long-­term strategic plans, but the limitations of such an approach should be also considered when directing

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efforts to influence the policy agenda. For example, landscapes play a relatively minor role in improving air quality (Pataki et al., 2011; Selmi et al., 2016). Therefore decisions about how to manage landscapes for improving health outcomes should, in the first instance, consider how effective those policies are and when such policies will result in the greatest improvement. From an environmental policy perspective, addressing air and water quality problems through landscape planning and management, while potentially beneficial as part of a broader policy mix in the long term, should not be overstated or send the wrong message about how critical human health problems can be solved (Pataki et al., 2011). In other cases landscape policy is critical to managing the quality of potable water supplied by dams. The quality of potable water fed by dams depends on well managed catchments to regulate the quality of inflows that supply drinking water to cities. Protecting these landscapes by restricting the land use and maintaining the vegetation cover reduces the chances of contamination and cost of treatment at the supply source. Typically a catchment management authority retains a high level of control over these catchments (although this is often not the case in developing countries) and is supported by strong legislation. Managing stormwater that flows through the urban catchment is far more complex and involves a much broader set of challenges in managing environmental water quality for health. For example, the effectiveness of urban landscape treatments to improve stormwater quality (urban wetlands, detention basins, rain gardens etc.) varies greatly from city to city and is largely dependent on long-­term management practices. Generally the success of water quality protection programs has been overstated due to high community expectations and underfunding of long-­term management (Liu et al., 2017). This is not to suggest that deploying landscape led approaches should not be part of the policy mix, but rather the role of landscape should be considered in the context of other approaches (such as regulatory and technology led solutions). The cautionary message here is that decision makers should avoid overestimating (double-­counting) the benefits of a landscape led approach to improving air and water quality. Xia et al. (2016) found that the most effective landscape policies in the Beijing metropoltian area varied according to seasonal factors. For example, autumn burning of dry matter by local farmers contributed to the air pollution. At other times of the year retaining dry matter had a positive impact in terms of cooling and covering bare soils thus preventing dust storms in spring. Similarly, the composition of urban trees and water bodies played an observable role in reducing localised air pollution in summer. Taking into consideration spatial and seasonal variation, decision makers in heavily polluted mega-­cities such as Beijing can use such data to develop tree planting programs, alter farming and land management practices and protect exisitng landscape structures. Related to air and water quality is the integrity of urban food systems and the impacts on human health specifically related to access and cost of fresh food for residents. The role of landscape policy in protecting productive agricultural land is discussed in Chapter 6 and the case study of Copenhagen provides some examples of the policy challenges. When considering how a landscape policy approach can help to improve health outcomes regarding food we can identify a number of

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­ olicies from subsidies to incentives to grow certain crops; using land use restricp tions such as covenants or even intergrating urban farming into parks and reserves to increase education and awareness. These and other policy ideas reflect the increasingly complex and interrelated agendas that planning agencies now attend to. Food issues reflect the need for decsion makers to access a broad range of skills and adopt a systems approach to achieving desirable outcomes. Food systems planning is a relatively new approach centred on the integration of food production, land use planning, environmental protection and allied agendas such as health policy (Magoni & Colucci, 2017). A systems approach does not solely rely on regulation to restrict land use in peri-­urban regions. Instead it seeks to create synergies between producers and consumers to make food production economically competitive while improving citizens’ nutrition literacy and awareness of social, cultural and economic benefits of localised food production. Key to this approach is to increase the competitiveness of local farmers through farmers’ markets, food cooperatives and other “gate to plate” initiatives while encouraging farmers to improve the quality of the peri-urban landscape. By fostering a culture of cooperative mutual benefit rather than land use competition based on land value, planners can encourage urban and peri-­urban communities to develop benefits that include improved health outcomes. The food systems approach described here requires a particular strategy of engagement with stakeholders to achieve the desired outcomes. However, there are also strategies, such as increasing physical activity, where a targeted approach is warranted.

Targeted approach Arguing for a targeted approach to address a policy problem is only a desirable strategy if you can support your argument with reliable data derived from high quality research to present a compelling case. In this case the link between high quality open space and increased levels of physical activity is well established. So too is the relationship between increased physical activity and improved health outcomes. Understood though the lens of the metropolitan scale landscape, we can build a strong case for targeting open space planning to address chronic health issues in urban populations. Our interest here is the role of landscapes in formulating such policy. In particular, how the characteristics of the landscape facilitate or inhibit such activity. In adopting a targeted approach we consider the arguments that underpin the case for explicitly correlating access to landscapes and improved health through increased physical activity (Astell-­Burt, Feng, & Kolt, 2014) and increased psychological relief (Matsuoka & Kaplan, 2008). Before we examine the evidence to support this notion of accessibility (here I am including physical and psychological access), we should consider how these benefits are evaluated in order to develop a sound policy argument. As we have previously identified in Chapter 5, evaluation and monetisation of landscape benefits are different concepts and equally difficult to quantify. However, it is important to conceptually understand how the benefits of landscape policy for improved population health should be framed.

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When we consider the role of landscapes in population health, we need to consider policies that are effective in producing the desired outcomes. Too often we will see city greening plans listing the benefits of landscapes for cities without adequate analysis. Developing sound landscape policy requires an evaluation framework that addresses the issue in question and provides outcomes that can be evaluated in the policy analysis process. In this case, a landscape led policy should adopt a targeted approach that confers the greatest benefits to addressing the health question at hand. As we have demonstrated throughout this book, such a framework is potentially complex. The evidence regarding the role of landscapes in supporting more active lifestyles is well documented (Sallis et al., 2006). Substantial research has established a correlation between the incidence of non-­communicable diseases such as diabetes and heart related illnesses and the type and level of physical activity undertaken by citizens (Mazumdar et al., 2016). Likewise reduced levels of stress also contribute to lowering incidence of mental illness (Arnsten, 2015). Even viewing landscapes from buildings has been shown to reduce stress that confers health benefits to a wider community (Kaplan & Kaplan, 1989; Van den Berg, Jorgensen, & Wilson, 2014). Promoting active living will require landscape led policies alongside a range of incentives, technical interventions and other regulatory instruments. It may be that landscape policies can drive a healthy living agenda, but it must occur in conjunction with other policies and actions. Landscape policies can draw on recent research that has broad application across a range of urban environments and cultures. For example, Sallis et al. (2016) reported significantly higher levels of activity where the urban character encouraged active behaviour. The study across five continents with almost 7,000 participants objectively identified the built environment attributes and the corresponding level of physical activity in a city. They describe four environments that are positively and linearly associated with higher physical activity. These include the number of public parks (free and open to all people) within 500 m from the place of residence, higher frequency and density of public transport options, higher number of street intersections that are accessible to pedestrians and a higher net density of residential buildings (Sallis et al., 2016). This type of evidence supports directing investment and planning for specific interventions into the urban fabric using a targeted policy approach to improve health outcomes. Despite the overwhelming evidence to support a landscape led approach to active living, the implementation still presents political and conceptual challenges. The promotion of active urban environments should be a core function of health agencies through working with sectors outside the public health arena. For example, monitoring and reporting on the quality of urban environments should occur alongside the monitoring of population health in general. As discussed in Chapter 6, such adaptive governance approaches are desirable. However, policies for the provision of public open space are diffuse and operate at different levels of government internationally and with little consistency in policy standards (Hooper, Boruff, Beesley, Badland, & Giles-­Corti, 2018). Similarly, the adoption of open space policies tend to draw on little research and further still, have no apparent association with health indicators.

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Therefore addressing how landscape policies are deployed requires careful consideration about how metropolitan governance facilitates or inhibits collaboration and cross-­disciplinary approaches to policy problems. The remainder of this chapter will discuss future options and approaches to policy development that includes landscape led approaches to addressing health issues. In proposing a policy framework, we may consider how landscape policies address human health (and wellbeing) and what implications this has for collaboration within and across government, the private sector and civil society more broadly (Tzoulas et al., 2007).

Applying a framework Developing a metropolitan scale landscape policy approach to improving health outcomes requires new forms of collaboration between different sectors of government and civil society. Put simply policy evaluation using cost-­benefit analysis for retaining, conserving or enhancing landscapes to improve health outcomes provides a starting point, but is inadequate in isolation. In Chapter 6 we explored how, in using an adaptive governance framework (see Figure 6.1), we can look at an issue at a particular scale of interest. In doing so, we could apply the same model for developing a landscape led policy in relation to health (Figure 8.1). However, in order to achieve the cross-­sectoral collaboration required (or desired), a new approach is needed to evaluate metropolitan scale policies In applying a framework we need to consider how to enhance the resilience of the metropolis and in doing so, support a more healthy community. Figure 8.1

Figure 8.1  An

adaptive governance framework for enhancing metropolitan health outcomes.

Source: adapted from Walker and Salt (2012).

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applies Walker and Salt’s (2012) components of a transformability model to develop an adaptive governance framework. The application of this model operates on the principle that resilience is neither a good or bad thing, but rather a description of the state of a system. Therefore the decision to change the identity (essential components and structures) depends on what your objectives are. In other words, a resilient system that delivers poor health outcomes (such as car dependent suburbs) will need to transform to benefit society. Another system, such as the Ottawa greenbelt, may need to be protected to enhance its capacity to continue to provide fresh food and recreation opportunities for the citizens of Canada’s capital city. An adaptive governance framework progresses though three stages. Remember this is not a linear process and that these stages may be revisited over time. Regardless of how such a process unfolds, these stages will need to be considered in the ongoing project of change.

Getting beyond denial This essentially requires a collective acknowledgement from stakeholders and the broader community of the need for transformational change. Drawing on a range of empirical and anecdotal evidence may help to provide the case for change. However, this needs to be widely understood and accepted to ensure broad consensus about what requires change (e.g. urban morphology, cultural inertia, regulation of food systems). As previously mentioned, any one of the environmental triggers mentioned in this chapter correlates with chronic health problems related to urban environmental quality. Take for example the evidence of declining nutrition related to obesity in developing and developed countries. The wealth of research and analysis in this area would suggest that to collect evidence at a metropolitan scale would be relatively straightforward. However, for advocates of change, education and awareness raising programs are necessary to raise consensus and focus broad community and political support for a commitment to change. Developing scenarios, such as health budget savings from increased physical activity or greater access to fresh foods are useful for demonstrating the rewards of change.

Designing options for change Essentially all change involves costs (either opportunity or direct) and therefore designing options for change should be a process of determining the tolerable social cost required to achieve change. Attempting to alter a metropolitan scale system (such as car dependent suburbs) may be too costly, impractical or socially unacceptable, and most certainly would incur unintended consequences. Therefore smaller scale experiments (e.g. new car-­free brownfield or greenfield housing developments) can foster new understandings and options for broad scale interventions over time. Such project-­based urban experiments occur in cities all the time, however the challenge is how to learn from these types of projects and incorporate this learning into practices and policies impacting urban forms over much larger

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scales of time and space. This is an ongoing process that adaptive governance seeks to encourage through experimentation at a “safe scale” (Walker and Salt, 2012, p. 97). To recap, adaptive governance encourages flexible institutions and distributive arrangements that allow for adaption to occur thus enhancing the system’s capacity for change.

Enhancing capacity for change The adaptive governance model requires institutions and organisations to be open to learning from experimentation. This is essential to enhancing capacity for change, but perhaps the most difficult to comprehend in practice; a decision maker needs to have a good understanding of how change occurs across the governance spectrum. For example, municipal level agencies may pride themselves in being progressive and open to new approaches to development. Private developers may see reputational benefit in adopting new methods and approaches. However, if state or even national level institutions are resistant to change or indeed favour a business as the usual model of governance, then the capacity for transformation will be limited. This conundrum perhaps more than any other explains why scaling up successful interventions is so difficult. The landscape architect, planner or environmental manager who spends their career changing attitudes at a political and institutional level may indeed do more for advancing the cause of their profession than the high­profile practitioner who is featured regularly in industry magazines. Applying this model to improving health outcomes for urban citizens in a developing city we can look at these three attributes necessary to achieve transformation and how they may be applied in a landscape context. This chapter has cited a number of studies undertaken at a range of scales, from single cases to aggregated data analysis at an international level; providing overwhelming evidence of the correlation between access to landscapes and health outcomes (see, for example, Hooper et al., 2018). Gaining broad public acceptance of the need for greater access to landscapes may be relatively easy to achieve. However, change always incurs costs that need to be considered and communicated. Developing scenarios and undertaking modelling to determine the best alternatives to achieve the necessary change may be required to help local agencies or developers adopt a business case to allow for experimentation. The role of research institutions is essential in developing such models. Designing options for change begins with the modelling of scenarios. Practically the key word here is experimentation. Landscape architecture typically does not apply formal evaluation methods to determine success because data collection required to establish baseline conditions, the analysis of changed conditions and measured outcomes based on a formal experimental design approach are not typically part of a design brief. Therefore the approach to experimentation needs to be rather more formal than is expected from a creative industry practitioner. Ecological research, on the other hand, is grounded in a more positivist construction of knowledge. From an ecological science perspective, researching biodiversity

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depends on asking a question derived from an identified problem and measuring a range of variables that lead to empirically sound findings based on experimental design. Urban planning is neither an experimental science nor is it necessarily a creative endeavour but rather sits somewhere between the two. Landscape architects seeking a specific outcome such as improved community health can draw on the empirical value of the experiment; however, the value of the experiment should not be simply to collect data for the purpose of illuminating scientifically legitimate findings. It must operate within the boundaries of what is acceptable to the community living with and supporting the generation of knowledge, a role that design of public places must always play. Therefore experiments in urban gardening, new forms of recreation, or improved access to open space for different cultural groups should, but rarely do, collect and analyse data in a way that is conducive to changing attitudes and practices in urban development, let alone in formulating policy. Enhancing capacity for change in developing new models of governance may include advocacy to government from professional organisations and sustained community education programs about the health benefits attributed to improving access to landscapes. However, sustained change over time involves changed practices, languages and cultural rituals (Hall 1997). Concerns about the impacts of climate change have been advocated since the 1960s and the first use of the term “global warming” appeared in 1975 (Broecker, 1975). Yet transformational change to the global economy has only started to accelerate in the last five years, as base load renewable energy projects along with the decarbonising of the global economy have started to occur, and is examined further in the next chapter. Landscapes have formed part of the fabric of cities for centuries, and continue to be in favour but for different reasons, as discussed in Chapter 2. As decision makers it is important to have a good understanding of the likelihood that sustained support for landscape policies may occur but the timeframes for achieving change may be lifelong, but worthwhile.

Conclusion The goal of this chapter has been to challenge your thinking about how landscapes can be integrated into policy around improving health outcomes for an urbanising global population. As advocates of good landscape planning and management policy, it is a relatively straightforward exercise to espouse the health benefits of urban greening. How to incorporate a landscape led policy is far more challenging and requires imagination in conceptualising and implementing adaptive governance frameworks. Understanding how landscape policy may be developed for improving health outcomes, particularly in reducing the incidence of non-­ communicable disease, is central to this approach. This chapter argues that in the case of pollution reduction, landscapes play an important role alongside more impactful strategies such as regulation of behaviour and the deployment of technologies; whereas increasing physical activity through access to landscapes should be a more targeted policy approach where behaviour change and technology support a comprehensive landscape led strategy.

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This targeted policy approach links evidence with options for change but acknowledges the need for a full spectrum of regulatory tools and infrastructure investment to address some of the most profound health challenges. In addressing the question of how to develop a landscape policy, this chapter proposes a framework for change that requires three stages of transformation and identifies how landscape policy can support good outcomes in each phase. The lesson here is that landscape policy, like any policy, should take into consideration its potential efficacy, equitability and acceptability to addressing a problem and in doing so should not be designed in isolation from a range of other measures. Lastly, any proposed framework such as the one suggested in this chapter, should take into consideration the financial implications and long timeframes when articulating the benefits of a landscape led approach.

Case study – Beijing The ancient city of Beijing was conceived using the traditional planning principles of eastern cosmology, governance and fengshui philosophy. The ceremonial central axis, developed during the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368), and expanded and consolidated during the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) dynasties, defines Beijing’s urban grid structure. Today, Beijing’s morphology can be seen in the network of gridded streets, alleys, hutongs (Figure 8.2), waterways and the relationship to surrounding natural landscapes (Zhan, 2015). During the early Communist period, much of the ancient defensive walls and waterways were demolished. Despite this destruction, the city’s landscape structure, particularly in the older centre, has been retained through the maintenance of a street trees and parks system based on the grid along the ancient north–south axis (Zhan, 2015). This landscape legacy structured around the hierarchy of streets remains one of the significant cultural elements supporting Beijing’s green fabric (Figure 8.3). Yet the rapidly expanding and poorly regulated new urban areas pose significant threats to residents’ health. China now has to contend with the profound environmental impacts of its relatively recent history of rapid urbanisation. The expansion of major cities such as Beijing has been an explicit policy of the central Chinese government rather than an unintended consequence of structural and social change. Ecological decline and associated deterioration of food and water systems along with public health impacts have created a development conflict for the central government since the end of the Mao era. In balancing the competing goals of economic development, primarily through industrialisation and the costs to the environment and society, urban environmental policy has endured a fraught relationship with an aggressive industrial economic growth policy (Huan, 2010). Following the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1978, class struggle was replaced by a growth economy centred on construction and industrialisation. The first goal of growth was to meet the basic needs of the people such as food and shelter. Air and water quality were secondary considerations and it took another 12 years before environmental protection laws were in place in Beijing (Matus et al., 2012). In 1989 the State Environmental Protection Agency was established by the Central

Figure 8.2  Hutongs

accommodate informal pockets of green space within Beijing’s dense urban core.

Figure 8.3   Central

Beijing’s street hierarchy accommodates a broad canopy of trees along roads, cycle lanes and pedestrian paths.

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Government. By the mid-­1990s Beijing had adopted an ecological modernisation version of sustainable urban development that means both economic growth and sustainability were necessary and compatible. This period also saw the rapid expansion of the state environmental protection agency with ministerial standing in the Central Government. In 2004, the secretary general of the Chinese Communist Party, Jintao Hu, refined China’s own version of an ecological modernisation agenda, where scientific development, quality and competitiveness would sit alongside environment-­friendliness (Salleh, 2008). Since the opening up of the Chinese economy, the political leaders have acknowledged the environmental costs of economic growth and developed policies to counter the effects, and yet the pace of development has meant that, no matter how well resourced the environmental protection agencies have been, they have not been able to keep a check on the declining air and water quality, especially in the mega-­cities like Beijing. Urban migration has driven Beijing’s construction and manufacturing economies that have been largely responsible for the environmental decline. Between 2000 and 2010 the city’s population grew by 44 percent. Today Beijing has a population estimated to be almost 22 million and some estimates expect that 50 million will live in the city by mid-­century. The resulting rapid urbanisation has fragmented peri-­urban landscapes and infilled interurban patches of farmland and forests as the city expands to meet the housing demand (Ma, Lu, & Sun, 2008). As the demands on planning authorities become more comprehensive, the challenge of effectively coordinating agendas across different sectors of government becomes more difficult. In the case of mega-­cities such as Beijing, how centralised metropolitan scale governments effectively deliver planning functions in the face of unprecedented urban migration and environmental pollution has become a major national political concern. In China, economic and development agendas are largely determined at a national scale due to the top–down nature of decision making. The Marxist political ideologies of state-­centric governance mean that industrial development and social housing are particularly suited to metropolitan scale governance in Beijing. Despite the opening up of the economy through economic rationalisation and marketisation programmes in employment, education, sustainability and health, the state retains significant influence in local decision making (Hacking & Flynn, 2018). Concepts of sustainability, while rhetorically central to the success of cities, may not be as meaningful for mega-­cities such as Beijing. The targeted and critical assessments of threshold issues such as air and water quality are more meaningful in attempting to address chronic environmental and social problems rather than poorly defined sustainability paradigms (Laquian, 2005). As Beijing struggles to improve the environmental quality of the urban environment, decision makers will need to look beyond the narrow mindset of economic aims and environmental trade-­offs to tackle these challenges. The economic reforms of the past 40 years have created environmental problems on a monumental scale and the state-­run planning system has needed to address a more comprehensive set of social and environmental challenges while supporting economic growth rates three time greater than Western economies. Beijing has had

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to deal with specific problems, such as the proliferation of informal settlements and poorly regulated small industrial developments, chronic traffic congestion and the resulting contamination of air, water and food systems, and the health and safety problems for citizens. These interrelated and systemic problems all need to be addressed in the context of rapid poorly regulated sprawl (Laquian, 2005). The challenges for the Beijing Municipal Commission of City Planning are fundamental. The municipal commission has a broad range of functions spanning, strategic planning, construction approvals and peri-­urban development. It is also responsible for drafting new laws, policies and standards and administering and evaluating the effectiveness of district planning and development strategies. The commission is also responsible for collecting and evaluating data and managing the GIS systems for rural and peri-urban land management activities. Rapid urbanisation has increased Beijing’s susceptibility to flooding and decline in water quality. In addition, poor sewerage infrastructure has not kept up with urban development. The impacts on water quality are profound. In 2015 almost two billion cubic metres of wastewater was ejected untreated into the water system rendering 40 percent of all water unusable. Beijing’s susceptibility towards flooding from more frequent and intense storm events endangers life, property and infrastructure and poses substantial threats to urban development. Furthermore, urban flooding risk will possibly intensify as a result of inadequate urban landscape planning and weather extremes, particularly in the context of global warming (Yao, Chen, & Wei, 2017). In response to the increasing number of severe pollution days when haze can reduce visibility to 50 metres, the municipal authority has deployed tree planting as a measure for reducing localised impacts of poor air quality (Wu et al., 2015). In highly urbanised areas of Beijing, urban planners are focussing more on optimising the coverage of green space through increasing the size of green patches through vegetation management. Figure 8.3 shows how the existing road easements can accommodate large trees that help to improve localised air quality (Li, Zhou, Ouyang, Xu, & Zheng, 2012). Due to the scale of the environmental challenges, the central government has made Beijing and other major cities the foreground for remaking the relationship between the state, the community and the urban environment. The tendency for the Chinese government to champion new eco-­city greenfield developments in lieu of their failure to cope with the profound pollution problems in established cities like Beijing reveals the many anxieties for the state to achieve a balance between sustainable urban development and economic growth (Pow, 2018). Perhaps in recognition of the limits of the state to solve chronic environmental problems, the Beijing municipal authority has changed its practices of governance and development. Increasingly citizen organisations are involved in decision making through the planning system. This new enthusiasm for participatory processes is linked to central government initiatives to include public participation in decision making (Hacking & Flynn, 2018). More recently the municipal authority has become more open to engaging with the local community and as a result has been

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changing its own attitude towards urban renewal. Typical of change processes in China, the national government recognised the value of creative industries and open spaces only after successful experiments on local levels (Zielke & Waibel, 2014). Today, disused industrial spaces are less likely to be demolished in favour of commercial or residential development, but are instead being preserved as public spaces, parks and heritage sites. Many of these sites are set aside as mixed creative precincts and much needed community green spaces.

References Alkon, A. H., Block, D., Moore, K., Gillis, C., DiNuccio, N., & Chavez, N. (2013). Foodways of the urban poor. Geoforum, 48, 126–135. Arnsten, A. F. (2015). Stress weakens prefrontal networks: molecular insults to higher cognition. Nature neuroscience, 18(10), 1376–1385. Astell-­Burt, T., Feng, X., & Kolt, G. S. (2014). Greener neighborhoods, slimmer people? Evidence from 246 920 Australians. International Journal of Obesity, 38(1), 156–159. Broecker, W. S. (1975). Climatic change: are we on the brink of a pronounced global warming? Science, 189(4201), 460–463. Christiansen, L. B., Cerin, E., Badland, H., Kerr, J., Davey, R., Troelsen, J., & Sallis, J. F. (2016). International comparisons of the associations between objective measures of the built environment and transport-­related walking and cycling: IPEN adult study. Journal of Transport & Health, 3(4), 467–478. Coutts, A., Beringer, J., & Tapper, N. (2010). Changing urban climate and CO2 emissions: implications for the development of policies for sustainable cities. Urban Policy and Research, 28(1), 27–47. Deener, A. (2017). The origins of the food desert: urban inequality as infrastructural exclusion. Social Forces, 95(3), 1285–1309. Guarnieri, M., & Balmes, J. R. (2014). Outdoor air pollution and asthma. Lancet, 383(9928), 1581–1592. Hacking, N., & Flynn, A. (2018). Protesting against neoliberal and illiberal governmentalities: a comparative analysis of waste governance in the UK and China. Political Geography, 63, 31–42. Hall, S. (1997). Representation: cultural representations and signifying practices. New York: Sage. Hooper, P., Boruff, B., Beesley, B., Badland, H., & Giles-­Corti, B. (2018). Testing spatial measures of public open space planning standards with walking and physical activity health outcomes: findings from the Australian national liveability study. Landscape and Urban Planning, 171, 57–67. Huan, Q. (2010). Growth economy and its ecological impacts upon China: an eco-­socialist analysis. In Q. Huan (Ed.), Eco-­socialism as Politics (pp. 191–203). Cham: Springer. Kaplan, R., & Kaplan, S. (1989). The experience of nature: a psychological perspective. New York: Cambridge University Press. Laquian, A. A. (2005). Beyond metropolis: the planning and governance of Asia’s mega-­urban regions: New York: Johns Hopkins University Press. Lee, I. M., Shiroma, E. J., Lobelo, F., Puska, P., Blair, S. N., & Katzmarzyk, P. T. (2012). Effect of physical inactivity on major non-­communicable diseases worldwide: and analysis of burden of disease and life expectancy. Lancet, 380, 219–229. Li, X., Zhou, W., Ouyang, Z., Xu, W., & Zheng, H. (2012). Spatial pattern of greenspace affects land surface temperature: evidence from the heavily urbanized Beijing metropolitan area, China. Landscape Ecology, 27(6), 887–898.

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Liu, Y., Engel, B. A., Flanagan, D. C., Gitau, M. W., McMillan, S. K., & Chaubey, I. (2017). A review on effectiveness of best management practices in improving hydrology and water quality: needs and opportunities. Science of the Total Environment, 601, 580–593. Ma, M., Lu, Z., & Sun, Y. (2008). Population growth, urban sprawl and landscape integrity of Beijing city. International Journal of Sustainable Development and World Ecology, 15(4), 326–330. Magoni, M., & Colucci, A. (2017). Protection of peri-­urban open spaces and food-­system strategies: the case of Parco delle Risaie in Milan. Planning Practice & Research, 32(1), 40–54. Matsuoka, R. H., & Kaplan, R. (2008). People needs in the urban landscape: analysis of landscape and urban planning contributions. Landscape and Urban Planning, 84(1), 7–19. Matus, K., Nam, K.-M., Selin, N. E., Lamsal, L. N., Reilly, J. M., & Paltsev, S. (2012). Health damages from air pollution in China. Global Environmental Change, 22(1), 55–66. Mazumdar, S., Learnihan, V., Cochrane, T., Phung, H., O’Connor, B., & Davey, R. (2016). Is Walk Score associated with hospital admissions from chronic diseases? Evidence from a cross-­sectional study in a high socioeconomic status Australian city-­state. BMJ open, 6(12), e012548. Pandey, P. K., Kass, P. H., Soupir, M. L., Biswas, S., & Singh, V. P. (2014). Contamination of water resources by pathogenic bacteria. AMB Express, 4, 1–16. Pataki, D. E., Carreiro, M. M., Cherrier, J., Grulke, N. E., Jennings, V., Pincetl, S., … Zipperer, W. C. (2011). Coupling biogeochemical cycles in urban environments: ecosystem services, green solutions, and misconceptions. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 9(1), 27–36. Pow, C. P. (2018). Building a harmonious society through greening: ecological civilization and aesthetic governmentality in China. Annals of the Amer­ican Association of Geographers, 108(3), 864–883. Salleh, A. (2008). Eco-­socialism and “Ecological Civilization” in China. Capitalism Nature Socialism, 19(3), 123–129. Sallis, J. F., Cerin, E., Conway, T. L., Adams, M. A., Frank, L. D., Pratt, M., … Cain, K. L. (2016). Physical activity in relation to urban environments in 14 cities worldwide: a cross-­sectional study. The Lancet, 387(10034), 2207–2217. Sallis, J. F., Cervero, R. B., Ascher, W., Henderson, K. A., Kraft, M. K., & Kerr, J. (2006). An ecological approach to creating active living communities. Annual Review of Public Health, 27, 297–322. Selmi, W., Weber, C., Rivière, E., Blond, N., Mehdi, L., & Nowak, D. (2016). Air pollution removal by trees in public green spaces in Strasbourg city, France. Urban Forestry & Urban Greening, 17, 192–201. Tzoulas, K., Korpela, K., Venn, S., Yli-­Pelkonen, V., Kaźmierczak, A., Niemela, J., & James, P. (2007). Promoting ecosystem and human health in urban areas using Green Infrastructure: a literature review. Landscape and Urban Planning, 81(3), 167–178. Ulrich, R. S. (2002). Health benefits of gardens in hospitals. Paper presented at the conference, Plants for People International Exhibition Floriade. Ulrich, R., & Parsons, R. (1992). Influences of passive experiences with plants on individual well-­being and health. In D. Relf (Ed.), The role of horticulture in human well-­being and social development (pp. 93–105). Portland, Oregon: Timber Press. Van den Berg, A. E., Jorgensen, A., & Wilson, E. R. (2014). Evaluating restoration in urban green spaces: does setting type make a difference? Landscape and Urban Planning, 127, 173–181. Walker, B., & Salt, D. (2012). Resilience practice: engaging the sources of our sustainability. Washington: Island Press.

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Watts, N., Adger, W. N., Ayeb-­Karlsson, S., Bai, Y., Byass, P., Campbell-­Lendrum, D., & Costello, A. (2017). The Lancet Countdown: tracking progress on health and climate change. The Lancet, 389(10074), 1151–1164. WHO (World Health Organization). (1948). Preamble to the Constitution of the World Health Organization as adopted by the International Health Conference, New York, 19–22 June, 1946; signed on 22 July 1946 by the representatives of 61 States and entered into force on 7 April 1948. Official Records of the World Health Organization. WHO (World Health Organization). (2013). Draft comprehensive global monitoring framework and targets for the prevention and control of noncommunicable diseases. Sixty-­sixth World Health Assembly. Report Geneva WHO(A66/8). WHO (World Health Organization). (2015). Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Resolution adopted by the General Assembly on 25 September 2015. Retrieved from https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/post2015/transformingourworld/publication. WHO (World Health Organization). (2018). Progress towards the SDGs: a selection of data from World Health Statistics 2018. Wu, J., Xie, W., Li, W., & Li, J. (2015). Effects of urban landscape pattern on PM2.5 pollution: a Beijing case study. PloS one, 10(11), e0142449. Xia, Y., Guan, D., Jiang, X., Peng, L., Schroeder, H., & Zhang, Q. (2016). Assessment of socioeconomic costs to China’s air pollution. Atmospheric Environment, 139, 147–156. Yao, L., Chen, L., & Wei, W. (2017). Exploring the linkage between urban flood risk and spatial patterns in small urbanized catchments of Beijing, China. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 14(3), 239–251. Zérah, M. (2007). Conflict between green space preservation and housing needs: the case of the Sanjay Gandhi National Park in Mumbai. Cities, 24, 122–132. Zhan, G. (2015). Beijing city and world heritage. Historic Environment, 27(1), 49–57. Zielke, P., & Waibel, M. (2014). Comparative urban governance of developing creative spaces in China. Habitat International, 41, 99–107.

9 Landscapes and decarbonising the metropolis

Urban settlements occupy three percent of the earth’s land mass yet produce 70 percent of carbon emissions, making them the major contributor to global warming (Seto, Fragkias, Güneralp, & Reilly, 2011). The most recent report from the International Panel for Climate Change (IPCC, 2018) argues that limiting global warming to 1.5°C would require rapid, far-­reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society. To avoid crossing thresholds that cause breakdowns in major global climate systems, cities will be required to dramatically reduce carbon emissions while accommodating almost three-­quarters of the world’s population by 2050 (Bocquier, 2005). In this chapter we explore to what extent will landscapes play a role in the rapid decarbonising of the metropolis. This depends on new approaches to investing in and managing metropolitan landscapes into the future. The challenge will be to devise ways to green and cool cities that are rapidly densifying under the pressure of urban migration. This chapter approaches this question by examining the interaction between landscapes and the flows of energy through the metropolis. In a decarbonising global economy, we should consider how metropolitan landscape policies can contribute to mitigating energy flows, offsetting energy consumption and supporting efforts to achieve carbon neutrality in the functioning of metropolitan systems. As discussed in previous chapters, landscape-­based approaches can achieve a range of benefits such as improved mental and physical health, cleaner air and water, more accessible fresh food and enhanced biodiversity. When considering the role of decarbonising the metropolis, we need to think differently about the role of landscapes from the perspective of energy flows. Rather than identifying the range of benefits afforded to citizens through the development of a metropolitan-­wide landscape policy, we consider the role of landscapes in addressing the fundamental challenges associated with decarbonising the metropolis. The questions we are asking here are rather more existential. What will a carbon neutral metropolitan landscape

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look like? How will governments reconcile the competing needs for a rapidly urbanising population and a rapidly decarbonising economy? In other words, how will metropolitan governments reconcile the tension between deploying urban densification to reduce energy use (e.g. car use and land use) and the provision of space for accommodating landscapes that mitigate the flow of energy through the urban systems by deploying strategies such as urban greening and cooling? The arguments for deploying landscapes to green and cool cities are well established (see, for example, Wachsmuth & Angelo, 2018; Žuvela-Aloise, Koch, Buchholz, & Früh, 2016). Our interest here is how to deploy greening and cooling strategies in the context of increasing competition for space and resources. Chapter 4 explored the differing conceptions of urban greening to help frame the question of how landscapes contribute to a more sustainable urban environment. Policies to address energy consumption potentially include a mix of adaptive and mitigating approaches that deploy both technical and biological greening techniques. Innovations in materials, architectural and urban design, in combination with intelligent use of biological materials (vegetation, water and soil biota), will be most effective in addressing the energy challenges into the future. A more detailed examination of design and policy approaches to address urban heat island effect (UHI) later in this chapter demonstrates the need for an integrative approach. The next section critically examines the concepts of greening and cooling and the challenges policy makers face in achieving such an approach needed to reduce the total carbon budgets of cities.

Urban greening and urban cooling The benefits of urban greening and cooling to human wellbeing are well established. Equally, the translation of research into policy is widespread, as evidenced in the metropolitan plans examined in previous chapters. Regardless of the ambitions set out in these plans, the benefits of urban greening policies have not offset the decline in environmental standards and even less has been achieved in offsetting carbon emissions (Žuvela-Aloise et al., 2016). Yet landscapes do play a critical role in decarbonising the economy and therefore need to be considered in the planning and development of urban infrastructure. An explanation for the lack of progress in integrating landscape policy into mainstream urban agendas can be attributed to the persistent way that nature is separated from our thinking about urban policy problems. Recent research into more-­than-human thinking (Maller, 2018) sheds light on the technical and mechanistic failings in addressing environmental problems. More-­than-human thinking presents an opportunity to conceptualise what a less anthropocentric understanding of the metropolis might mean. More-­than-human research has barely started to translate into useful planning strategies, and yet the potential to expand our understanding of the role of biological structures supported by the landscape in decarbonising our cities will be an exciting challenge for future planners. Recapping the argument presented in Chapter 4, we can see that urban greening takes on a number of different interpretations that have little to do with biological

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greening and landscape policy. As mentioned in Chapter 4, the design and deployment of green building ratings systems such as LEED (USA), BREEAM (UK) and Green Star Certification (Australia) neatly conform to the ambitions of an ecological modernisation approach to sustainable urban development in that they have become an industry that drives change. Such ratings schemes involve re-­presenting green technologies in the built environment as achieving green urban development (Hagerman, Clark, & Hebb, 2007), but do not delve too deeply into achieving ecological conservation goals or take into consideration social justice issues for affected communities (Cidell, 2009). The success of such tools has been to make existing urban systems more energy efficient through architectural design and broader urban consolidation approaches, but without addressing ecological decline associated with fundamental consumption patterns of citizens. The key drivers for achieving a more energy efficient urban system has been to increase the density of built form, reduce car dependence and improve the environmental performance of buildings in construction and operation. The landscape has been conspicuously peripheral in these calculations, particularly in inner urban cores, until relatively recently. In the project of transforming urban systems and reducing direct consumption of energy, landscapes have actually played a relatively minor role. However, we should not overestimate the effect of urban forests in sequestering carbon and improving air quality compared to technology driven solutions along with regulatory and pricing regimes that drive behavioural change. One cannot imagine Beijing’s air quality will dramatically improve from a tree planting program alone. The role of landscapes in urban greening is significant for other reasons that are discussed in this chapter.

Greening strategies So where can we see the conservation, planning and management of landscapes profoundly impacting on urban energy systems? On a metropolitan scale, landscapes have played a long-­established and important role in accommodating essential utilities, such as dams for potable water storage and waste recycling and treatment. For example, the National Capital Greenbelt in Ottawa, Canada (see Chapter 4) is a land bank that covers an area of 20,000 hectares, that provides open space to accommodate large infrastructure projects close to the city centre (National Capital Commission, 2002). These assets have been protected through land use controls, but now factor more consciously into the calculation of efficient use and transfer of energy. Well-­ protected river catchments have for centuries protected urban water supplies, offsetting the need for energy intensive reticulation and reuse. Productive agricultural landscapes have provided fresh food close to the consumer, avoiding energy intensive storage and distribution from further afield. Publicly accessible landscapes free from development and close to residential areas in Copenhagen and Canberra provide recreation opportunities and contribute to the city’s culture of active living. More recently, undeveloped open space has accommodated wind and solar farms. The presence of these undeveloped landscapes close to urban settlements

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play a critical role in the opening up of the electricity generation sector allowing municipal level organisations to compete with national providers in supplying renewable, cost competitive electricity. The resulting localisation and democratisation of energy has placed additional direct and indirect pressure on the landscape to “fit” energy production into the spatial fabric. When open space systems have been incorporated into metropolitan planning schemes over time, these infrastructure projects have been successfully integrated and allow for multiple uses to occur such as wind farms on recreation or grazing farmland. In essence, metropolitan scale landscape planning and management can play a key role in offsetting energy intensive and fossil fuel dependent transport, food and water systems. When considered in this way, the landscape can be thought of as essential green infrastructure (Chapter 3). According to the European Environment Agency, green infrastructure is “a strategically planned network of natural and semi-­natural areas with other environmental features designed and managed to deliver a wide range of ecosystem services” (EEA, 2011). The ongoing project of urban greening in conjunction with the trend towards denser, more compact urban form has seen the landscape reconfigured through changes to housing patterns, transport infrastructure and the provision of public spaces designed to accommodate higher population densities. In making cities greener through the deployment of green technologies and policies to reduce dependence on non-­renewable energy systems, cities have had to find new ways of retrofitting green landscapes into these spaces. Chapter 3 touched on the perception that landscape urbanism might actually threaten the progress towards more compact and sustainable urban forms by encouraging the perpetuation of the suburban sprawl that defined the twentieth-­ century growth of cities. These competing visions of urban greening remain unresolved for many cities. On one hand, the promotion of urban greening through preserving and enhancing ecological processes and, on the other, the compact technology driven urban consolidation advocates offer radically different interpretations. As discussed in Chapter 3, Singapore has successfully enmeshed biological and technical greening agendas with great success. Unfortunately it remains an outlier and exception to the general trajectory of urban greening. The challenge is not so much where and how much biological greening should occur in a city, but rather how biotic (plants, animals, bacteria) and abiotic (soil, minerals, rocks) structures and natural systems are protected, valued and mobilised in and through the development process. Retrofitting greenery is very context dependent and demands ever greater creativity from planning, landscape architecture and urban design. As cities become more dense and congested, pragmatic considerations such as narrow footpaths with high pedestrian flow, lack of sunlight caused by tall buildings, poor quality compacted soils and air and water pollution all exacerbate the problem of retrofitting dense urban environments with new green spaces and structures (Haaland & van den Bosch, 2015). The task is and will be into the future, how to reconcile the competing demands between built and unbuilt spaces that will constitute the twenty-­first-century green city. In other words, how, in already dense urban environments, will the development

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of new natures occur from a policy perspective? Conventional planning approaches identify, protect and manage established landscapes on the edge of and within cities, such as green wedges, green belts, parks and nature reserves. Yet there is great potential to incorporate the left-­over landscapes that constitute most of the metropolitan area into urban greening agendas. The suburban gardens, nature strips, utility easements, road corridors and intermediate spaces occupied by the city’s biota all play a role in urban ecological function and is well researched but has made little impact on planning policy (Maller, 2018).

Cooling strategies For the purpose of this book, greening and cooling are treated differently. In practice, the environmental functions offered by landscapes overlap considerably in terms of greening and cooling. However, they are treated quite differently in terms of planning and implementation. Chapter 2 provides a detailed account of the co-­evolution of town planning and urban greening. The idea of the modern green city plan extends back to Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City of To-­Morrow. Today, urban cooling is a direct response to the combined effects of urban densification and the warming caused by climate change. Thousands of years ago, the first cities in today’s Middle East deployed cooling techniques in the design of buildings and public squares. The use of plants and water for cooling is an ancient practice. Persian gardens existed as long ago as 4000 bc, yet the imperative to develop metropolitan-­wide cooling strategies is a relatively recent response to urban heat island effect (UHI). Urban cooling is part of the mix of risk reduction strategies to mitigate the effects of extreme heat events that are predicted to become more severe and more intense, particularly for semi-­arid zone cities (Rizwan, Dennis, & Liu, 2008). Therefore cooling strategies should form part of a broader policy mix to reduce the energy consumption across the whole metropolitan system. Most interest for deploying cooling techniques occurs in dense inner urban environments, whereas a metropolitan wide approach could see surface temperature reduction as a necessary step towards in reducing overall energy consumption. As planners contend with a policy shift from mitigating environmental effects to enhancing the adaptive capacity of urban environments, policy emphasis should be on re-­evaluating and  redesigning all metropolitan spaces to achieve adaptive but optimal thermal conditions at different times of the year (Csete & Buzasi, 2016). One of the main challenges for the future of urban design will be to respond to two major challenges: promoting and implementing climate adaptation measures to mitigate local climatic effects such as UHI and the various conflicting spatial demands for achieving urban density (Martins et al., 2016). We can see today that urban cooling fits into a complex mix of urban sustainability agendas that depend on a mix of biological and technical strategies. You will see that the Masdar City case study at the end of this chapter shares a broadly similar policy goal as Singapore in achieving a sustainable urban form and yet the integration of landscape planning principles and structures are polar opposites. The next section explores

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how landscapes fit into the policy mix for addressing UHI. It asks you to consider the policy implications of translating the research cited in this next section into achievable outcomes.

Urban heat island effect (UHI) UHI is broadly defined as the observed increased night-­time temperatures in urban areas relative to adjacent rural areas (Coutts, Beringer, & Tapper, 2010). The principal drivers of UHI are regional climatic factors, landform, land cover type, urban morphology and energy use resulting in changes to the patterns of radiated and anthropogenic heat. While UHI was first described in the nineteenth century, empirical research into the cause and effects is a relatively new field of research (Emmanuel, Rosenlund, & Johansson, 2007). More recently, improvements in two- and three-­ dimensional spatial mapping technology, along with greater awareness of global warming impacts, have resulted in a significant increase in research in the past 20 years and yet policy development lags behind (Lenzholzer & Brown, 2013). Translation of research into planning and urban design policy has been limited due to low transfer of knowledge, conflicts of interests between development partners, communication barriers between research and design practice, and financial barriers to implementation (Chun & Guldmann, 2014; Coutts et al., 2010). In order to advance the UHI policy agenda, there needs to be a better understanding about the benefits of urban cooling in mitigating the social and economic as well as environmental costs of UHI. Landscape strategies also need to take into consideration the socio-­spatial impacts of UHI on communities. For example, in cities where the poor and vulnerable live in dense inner urban neighbourhoods, the effects of UHI are exacerbated by the physical characteristics of the built environment. The severity and extent of heat irradiance resulting from longer hotter summers will disproportionately affect urban cores because the intensity of irradiated heat is exacerbated by the surface materials, the absence of vegetation and water bodies, and the scale and distribution of buildings and infrastructure (Wong, Lai, Low, & Chen, 2016). In the case of semi-­arid zone cities, urban core areas have experienced a threefold increase in average temperatures compared to the regional average (Declet-­barreto, Brazel, Martin, Chow, & Harlan, 2013). The long-­term implications of the energy demand will be so great in extreme cases, UHI will have significant influence on the design of energy infrastructure to address peak load power demand (Gago, Roldan, Pacheco-­Torres, & Ordonez, 2013). For poorer communities, the cost of cooling may become prohibitive leading to potential increase in heat related illnesses and deaths. While the bulk of research on heat vulnerability has focussed on urban core scenarios, the same principle can apply to any part of the metropolis experiencing localised UHI impacts. For this reason we can consider that a metropolitan-­wide UHI mitigation strategy should reduce heat related vulnerabilities at a local level and reduce the overall non-­renewable energy consumption for regulating building temperatures through the use of air conditioning. As governments move to decarbonise their

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e­ conomies, addressing peak flow demand for electricity will require a multipronged approach and urban cooling will be a significant contribution. Energy demand is the most significant but not the only policy challenge presented by UHI. Other effects during more frequent and intense heat events include threats to human health (Boeckmann, 2016), increase in atmospheric pollution (Stone, 2005) and altered ecological processes (Jenerette et al., 2007). The role of landscapes in combatting UHI is mainly concerned with the presence, type and arrangement of vegetation and water and the strong relationship between micro-­climatic site conditions and effective design interventions. In order to develop effective landscape strategies, we need to consider what the factors are causing UHI.

Factors driving UHI The drivers of UHI can be broadly categorised into controllable and uncontrollable factors. Controllable factors are variables that can be altered by human intervention. These include urban morphology (built form, infrastructure and open spaces), land use cover (green spaces, tree cover, building and infrastructure surfaces and materials) and anthropogenic factors (energy flux from transport systems and cooling and heating systems). Uncontrollable factors, conversely, are variables that cannot be altered. These include topography, proximity to water bodies and climatic conditions (such as humidity, temperature, rainfall, etc.). Considerable research has been undertaken to evaluate the impact and relationship between uncontrollable environmental factors on UHI (Rizwan et al., 2008). The following key factors affecting UHI show that, while landscape policy plays a key role, this is not in isolation from other interventions and the development of urban cooling policies should take into consideration the overlapping relationship between the following factors.

Vegetation and water The relationships between near-­surface temperature and landscape elements in cities are well documented (Rizwan et al., 2008; Stewart, 2011; Wang & Ouyang, 2017). From a policy perspective, when land use and urban design decisions are made, de facto water and energy use decisions are also made and the trade-­off between the use of water and energy must be considered in developing heat mitigating strategies (Gober et al., 2010). Of most interest to landscape policy is the role of vegetation and water in mitigating UHI. This includes tree plantings for shade, irrigated gardens and lawns for convective cooling, and green roofs, walls and constructed water bodies such as wetlands and detention ponds. Each of these strategies are highly context dependant and contingent on local climate and localised building density, urban morphology and other risk factors such as socio-­economic status of an affected community. For example, tree cover in arid zones is most effective for reducing UHI. However, the use of irrigated grass as a surface cover has limited

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effect over a certain temperature and needs to be considered in terms of water and energy demands for vegetation maintenance (watering, mowing, fertilising etc.). Alternatively, the provision of green spaces and park improvements in poorer residential areas can provide comparatively greater human health and community benefits as accessible public green spaces become increasingly important during extreme heat events. The greatest benefits may be afforded by the communities with both the space to accommodate medium and large scale parks but lack the financial means to own or operate air-­conditioners during extreme heat events, or deploy energy efficient technology in their homes (Declet-­barreto et al., 2013).

Trees Where space is available, tree planting is the most effective greening strategy for mitigating the effects of UHI through the direct shading of surfaces such as roads and pavements. From a policy perspective a heat mitigating strategy could have a requirement for tree planting based on shade coverage of sealed surfaces (Stone, 2001). However, this is impractical in dense urban cores, whereas trees are relatively more effective in lower density areas. Roads and pavements in low density areas contribute more radiant heat energy than higher density development patterns where buildings themselves shade roads and pavements for most of the day. Conversely the relative effectiveness of street trees in high density urban cores is reduced due to the lack of space for planting, compacted soils and the relatively high amount of shading from buildings. Targets for street tree planting in dense urban areas are hard to implement, yet trees and other vegetation can play a role in reducing the latent increased temperatures and improving wind flow through the design of parks within high density areas. In these settings, parks more so than street trees generate parcels of cooler spaces nested in warmer urban areas. At street level, Shashua-­Bar & Hoffman (2000) found that the effective horizontal cooling range of small gardens in cities was up to 100 metres, suggesting that green spaces up to 200 metres apart could positively affect thermal comfort in dense urban environments. The beneficial cooling is created by both shading and transpiration by cooling the air parcel above the urban core areas and through advective (horizontal) movement (Declet­barreto et al., 2013). Green urban areas also store less overall heat during the day and cool down more after sunset, explaining the positive influence of vegetation on reducing night-­time temperatures (van Hove et al., 2015). By paying attention to the distribution and density of park vegetation in a city centre, the cooling effect could be amplified and contribute to reducing latent UHI effects from elevated night-­time temperatures (Kong, Sun, Liu, & Yin, 2016; Žuvela-Aloise et al., 2016).

Green roofs and walls Green roofs and green walls have enjoyed a high profile in urban planning and design as effective cooling strategies for dense urban cores. Green roofs have been

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comprehensively studied in relation to cooling buildings, thermal insulation, energy conservation, storm water attenuation and enhanced urban biodiversity (Jim, 2015; Wang, Berardi, & Akbari, 2016). In comparison, green walls receive less attention; however, the potential to reduce UHI is far greater because wall surface areas far exceed roofs as a portion of total facade area. Similarly the effect of green walls on UHI in some circumstances is considerable whereas green roofs provide negligible benefit due to their height from street level (Jim, 2015). As with gardens and lawns, green walls and roofs need to consider the total energy and water costs of maintenance. For this reason such strategies are more successful in warmer, wetter climates such as Singapore.

Water bodies Water bodies in urban settings are used for mitigating UHI through day-­time evaporation, providing a cooling effect in combination with wind flow. However, depending on the climatic conditions, water may not act as a cooling element as previously thought. Water’s thermal properties supress the diurnal and annual cycle of temperature and can retain night-­time heat when water surface temperatures can stay relatively warm (Steeneveld, Koopmans, Heusinkveld, & Theeuwes, 2014). Therefore the use of water to mitigate UHI should take into consideration the thermal properties along with the energy costs of maintaining water flow and quality.

Wind Wind plays an important role in improving thermal comfort for residents in cities. Psychologically equivalent temperature (PET) is a key determinant of thermal comfort. PET is the perceived temperature experienced by people in an environment and depends on the combined effects of air temperature, humidity, radiation and wind speed (van Hove et al., 2015). Therefore, strategies that lead to reducing maximum air temperature alone may not lead to thermal comfort. Other factors need to be considered such as wind. For example, attention needs to be paid to street level wind flow to attenuate night-­time heat retention (Emmanuel et al., 2007). Urban morphology and road orientation play a major role in affecting wind intensity and direction in cities. So far we have identified climatic and biological factors that contribute to urban cooling. Yet, like urban greening, not all factors are biological in nature. Other factors impacting the extent of urban heat island effect relate to the built environment itself and should be considered.

Urban morphology Key morphological determinants influencing UHI include sky view factor and the urban canyon effect (Emmanuel et al., 2007). Referring to the height/width ratio

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of spaces between buildings, sky view factor is a measure that predicts the extent of shading provided by buildings in summer and this correlates to wind turbulence at street level. The term urban canyon describes this trade-­off. A high height/width ratio (deep urban canyon) will maximise shading by reducing direct surface irradiance but restricts wind turbulence at street level under heat event conditions. Therefore strategies that lead to reducing maximum air temperature alone through shading by tall buildings may not lead to thermal comfort at street level (Emmanuel et al., 2007). Conversely shallow urban canyons (low height/width ratio) reduce shading of surfaces by buildings but will not inhibit wind turbulence as much. Climatic and seasonal variances mean that, while goals of mitigation may be common, approaches to heat mitigation are very specific to local urban morphologies.

Anthropogenic heat Anthropogenic heat emission from buildings and transportation systems is not well researched (van Hove et al., 2015). However, the reduction of anthropogenic heat is one of the major carbon mitigating tools available to planners and decision makers (Costanzo, Evola, & Marletta, 2016). Earl, Simmonds, & Tapper (2016) found that the energy contribution from human activities is related to the working week and includes industrial activity, heat loss from electrical wiring and appliances, biomass burning and motor vehicles. Weekly cycles of activity are strongly correlated with the working week and have a profound impact on the UHI in cities. During extreme heat events, modifying human activity to mitigate extremes of heat flux is a major consideration for managing the ill effects of UHI. Only a limited number of studies have applied a more integrated assessment, taking into consideration a range of parameters (van Hove et al., 2015). Therefore, reducing cars in dense urban areas during heat waves and reducing the reliance on air-­conditioning in buildings are examples of integrated policy approaches to mitigating anthropogenic heat emission. In extreme examples it may be necessary to restrict vehicle access to CBD’s in the future.

Materials Mitigating UHI effects by modifying surface materials, textures and colours to reflect irradiated heat is often as effective as deploying vegetation, particularly in relation to green walls and roofs (Djedjig, Bozonnet, & Belarbi, 2013). Known as albedo, changing the colour or texture of surfaces to reflect heat can be the most cost effective option for reducing UHI in dense urban cores (Akbari, Matthews, & Seto, 2012; Costanzo et al., 2016). However, the impact of changing surface textures on walls and roofs in dense urban cores has less effect on the thermal comfort at street level for pedestrians (Djedjig et al., 2013; Ruiz, Sosa, Correa Cantaloube, & Cantón, 2015). The most effective use of these cooling strategies are in medium density areas where maximum benefit can be derived from changing pavement surface colour and texture (Wang et al., 2016).

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Urban heat island effect is a metropolitan wide problem for planners. While research tends to focus on localised effects and the impact on dense urban cores, attention needs to be paid to the socio-­spatial impacts across the full spectrum of urban and peri-­urban configurations. In many respects, this policy challenge highlights the importance of developing a whole-­of-metropolis approach to greening and cooling. To be effective, landscape strategies are a major policy tool that need to be considered in the context of other technical and regulatory measures needed to help cities to become less dependent on non-­renewable sources of energy. As planners contend with a policy shift from mitigating environmental effects to enhancing the adaptive capacity of urban environments, policy emphasis should be on re-­evaluating and re-­designing urban spaces. UHI is one example of how stocks and flows of energy drive policy agendas (see urban metabolism in Chapter 6). The same analysis could be applied to the consumption of fossil fuels or water in cities. This examination of the factors driving UHI presents you, as a potential policy maker, with a range of tools and strategies to address some of the major challenges for communities and governments adapting to a hotter dryer climate. It is only one half of the puzzle. By now you should have a much better understanding of the political and ideological forces operating within a global market economic system in constant flux. The case study of the eco-­city project in the United Arab Emirates, Masdar City, at the end of this chapter highlights some of the political challenges in achieving sustainable urban form in the twenty-­first century. Especially as is the case in Masdar, a landscape plan or strategy is peripheral and incidental to the conception of this new zero-­carbon sustainable urban form.

Conclusion Examining how landscape policy intersects with broad urban agendas concerning energy consumption, carbon neutrality and the associated economic drivers necessary to achieve a zero-­carbon city helps to advance our conceptions of what sustainable development will look like into the future. In advancing urban greening and urban cooling policies it is worth considering how these agendas are different and how they are similar. Greening advocates come from a range of perspectives that originate from different conceptions of the energy problem. The technology approach to urban greening is instrumental, adopting a metrics-­based approach to reducing the energy costs of a building or precinct during its lifecycle. Ecological modernisation drives the policy objectives and subsequent stakeholder support largely because the green technology industry is a profitable approach that is broadly acceptable to governments. Similarly green technology outcomes are relatively narrowly defined and measurable, despite the apparent complexity of green ratings tools. The biological approach to greening on the other hand is somewhat ideological, encompassing a much wider set of goals and outcomes and often difficult to evaluate or establish targets. To some extent the emerging field of green infrastructure fills

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some of the policy analysis and evaluation gaps with the help of environmental economics. However, in practice, current urban (biological) greening strategies in metropolitan planning are limited to the conservation and management of existing green spaces from reserves to parks and street trees. A few examples, such as Singapore, lead the way in developing a whole-­of-metropolis biophilic approach to urban greening. Urban cooling, though a relatively new field, has flourished in both research and policy development. Like greening, cooling addresses aspects of the built and biological environment. Cooling also currently focusses primarily on denser parts of the city. In the case of cooling strategies, inner urban cores tend to receive the most attention, whereas greening tends to focus on preserving existing green areas or the redevelopment of high value inner urban precincts. In order to advance twenty-­ first-century versions of the sustainable city, the benefits of greening and cooling should be applied across the whole metropolis. Future research and policy experimentation will be needed to explore how, at a landscape scale, cities and their hinterlands can fully harness the biological processes, no matter how remote from nature, to achieve better water and air quality, more nutritious and cheaper food, enhanced biodiversity and of course reduced carbon emissions. The next and final chapter explores how cities can learn to adapt and transform the landscape systems that support the rapidly growing metropolises of the world. It critically engages with landscapes as a guiding principle for inspiring a landscape led transformation to a carbon neutral existence for almost three-­quarters of the world’s population by 2050. It concludes by exploring the future role of metropolitan landscapes as we navigate the tentative steps that biological greening has taken towards setting the sustainability agenda. As decision makers we can be clear about what values landscapes bring to cities, but we need a framework for determining why, how and who is going to lead and who should benefit.

Case study – Masdar City This case study differs from many of the others in this book for a few reasons. This is not an examination of a metropolitan plan. In fact Masdar itself doesn’t really qualify as a metropolis in the conventional sense. It is a master-­planned eco-­city under development since 2007 in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates. Due for completion around 2030, the city will occupy a surface area of six square kilometres and will accommodate up to 40,000 people and cater for another 50,000 workers commuting from nearby cities (Cugurullo, 2013). Masdar is a product of a broader national vision for economic transition from fossil fuel dependence to a more diversified economic agenda in anticipation of a decarbonised global economy. The master planned approach to Masdar needs to be understood in the context of the governance structures that underpin its conception, design and implementation. The United Arab Emirates is a sheikdom, currently ruled by Sheik Khalifa bin

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Zayed who rules a regime that dictates every aspect of Emirate life (Cugurullo, 2018). Therefore, the normal participatory and democratic processes of metropolitan planning do not apply. Nevertheless, Masdar is now widely recognised as the first major attempt to develop a greenfield zero-­carbon eco-­city (Joss, Cowley, & Tomozeiu, 2013). While incomplete, Masdar provides an interesting example of how cities are reframing notions of sustainable urban development in an attempt to adapt to changing global economic and environmental conditions. Notably this case study, through its apparent disinterest in biological urban nature, poses significant challenges for landscape planners and policy makers to articulate a broad vision for the role of metropolitan landscapes in the twenty-­first-century zero-­ carbon metropolis. The beginning of the twenty-­first century signalled a global mainstreaming of sustainability policy into urban development agendas, and a feature of this shift has been the proliferation of eco-­city initiatives, of which Masdar is only one. Joss et al. (2013) identified 178 other examples and determined that the concept of the eco-­ city can be defined by the following common principles. 1 2 3 4

The conception of eco-­cities has driven international knowledge transfer about sustainable development technologies involving public and private actors. Carbon neutrality is central to goals, policies and practices driving sustainable development. Carbon neutrality will be achieved though marrying “green” and “smart” technology systems. The long-­term focus of eco-­cities will be to achieve environmental innovation though economic development.

Together these principles signal the ascendance of the ecological modernisation paradigm driving the future of sustainable urban development. (See Chapter 4 to review the positives and negatives of this approach.) Recent scholarly literature on eco-­cities provides an excellent overview of the developing theories, concepts and ideas and is worthy of further reading (see the published research from Cugurullo (2018) and Wachsmuth and Angelo (2018)). This case study, however, focuses on Masdar City and what we can learn from a landscape planning perspective. Like many case studies discussed in this book, Masdar is a product of external political forces enacting national agendas to secure economic and social stability. Masdar is under the jurisdiction of the Abu Dhabi Government which administers the Abu Dhabi Urban Planning Council. The capital of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Abu Dhabi has one of the world’s highest GDPs (Gross Domestic Product) per capita due to an abundance of oil, an impressive foreign investment portfolio, strong trading relationships with major energy consumers such as the USA and a stable but authoritarian government since independence in 1971 (Cugurullo, 2013). However, a new generation of rulers has become aware of the need for structural reform to reduce dependence on oil revenues and are audacious in their desire to engage culturally and economically with Western economies.

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The major environmental risks for the city are profound. Abu Dhabi is not only dependent on oil for export revenues, oil is essential for sustaining life in the desert city. In the UAE, fresh groundwater reserves are scarce, and as the population grows Abu Dhabi depends more and more on energy intensive desalination. Due to the abundance of oil, the cost of desalination is very low, making the city one of the highest consumers of water per person in the world. However, as the population expands and the oil reserves dry up, the city faces a significant economic and environmental challenge to change its water production methods and consumption patterns. In response to this and other potential crises, the city embarked on an impressive program of social and urban reform called Vision 2030 (Abu Dhabi Government, 2008). This plan made sustainability a central pillar of its development agenda. The signature project of the plan was the development of the flagship, Masdar City. Built as a laboratory and living showcase of clean-­technology and innovation from around the world, the city is funded by the Abu Dhabi government to help attract green technology research and development companies that will serve the dual purposes of diversifying the economy and producing technologies and systems for providing alternative renewable energy sources (Cugurullo, 2015). The ambition of Masdar City is to become the world’s first zero-­waste, zero-­ carbon urban settlement that produces no adverse impacts on the environment (Abu Dhabi Government, 2008). Master planned by the renowned global architecture and urban design firm Foster + Partners, the project aims to achieve these goals by deploying “state-­of-the-­art technologies with the planning principals of traditional Arab settlements” (Foster + Partners, 2018). Critical to the success of the city has been to weave into the master plan strategies for eliminating carbon fuel consumption and waste disposal and drastically reducing water use. Cooling techniques described in this chapter are essential to achieving these goals. However, landscapes structures (e.g. trees, parks, gardens, green walls) are superficially mentioned in the project description on the firm’s website (Foster + Partners, 2018). The apparent absence of a green infrastructure strategy could be easily accounted for given the climatic conditions and proposed dense urban grain; so much so that “the sun and the sky will be almost unseen inside the city” (Figure 9.1) (Foster + Partners, 2018). However, in appropriating the title of the world’s first truly eco-­city, Masdar will not be a product of ecological learning from the surrounding biophysical environment, instead it will be a product of market analysis of the economic potential of the global clean technology industry (Cugurullo, 2015). So what is the role of landscapes in eco-­cities? There is no doubt eco-­cities are a product of their time. The rise of the entrepreneurial state has catalysed development models that favour large scale urban projects such as Masdar. Such projects, regardless of their planning objectives, result from increasingly consistent urban visions executed by a few stellar international engineering and urban design firms (such as Foster + Partners). Over time these projects have produced a uniform set of ideas for achieving sustainable development (Rapoport, 2014). In so far as the incorporation of landscape strategies go, this new form of urban sustainability,

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Figure 9.1   A

digital rendering of a pedestrian street in Masdar (Foster + Partners).

Source: by permission Foster + Partners.

expressed as master plans, endeavours to pair high technology environmental engineering and architectural strategies with more conventional biological green interventions, often referred to as renaturing. Today’s sustainable urban agendas attempt to harness the productive power of technology to address global environmental challenges, of which carbon neutrality is the priority discourse. Landscape on the other hand represents a verdant, low-­ tech green strategy which places it in contrast to a city vision such as Masdar (Wachsmuth & Angelo, 2018). Yet landscapes should and do play a role in the greening of the eco-­city. Plants and vegetation are, in the mind of consumer, sustainable because they have the appearance of being natural. Whether or not the master planners of eco-­cities truly believe biological greenery is actually more sustainable, they reproduce the ideology of renaturing by coating their energy efficient smart infrastructure and built forms in green walls offering an illusion of biological green nature (Wachsmuth & Angelo, 2018). Even the most techno-­centric smart

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city projects will deploy green imagery to emphasise the sustainability potential, even if, in the implementation of the project such garnish is impractical, too expensive or, indeed, unsustainable. Certainly in Masdar, green walls and roofs would simply not make sense, yet the representations in digital renderings of palm trees, green lawns and gardens reminds the future citizens in phenomenal terms that Masdar intends to promote living within the rules of nature to enact more sustainable ways to occupying this high tech urban landscape. This is not an optimistic reading of the role of landscapes in the eco-­metropolis of the future. It does however remind you that deploying landscape strategies should take into consideration geological, climatic, technological, social and political conditions. In Masdar, it simply makes no sense to clothe the city in vegetation whereas in Singapore it does. As sustainable urban development has matured as a concept, it has become ubiquitous in policy and planning agendas at all levels of government. In essence, Masdar reflects the most recent iteration of the urban sustainability agenda, including the relegation of strategic landscape planning to seductive aesthetics to sell the sustainability message to the market oriented and technology focussed consumers.

References Abu Dhabi Government. (2008). Economic Vision 2030. Retrieved from www.ecouncil.ae/ ar/Pages/default.aspx, accessed 14 June 2019. Akbari, H., Matthews, D., & Seto, D. (2012). The long-­term effect of increasing the albedo of urban areas. Environmental Research Letters, 7(2), 1–10. Bocquier, P. (2005). World urbanization prospects: an alternative to the UN model of projection compatible with the mobility transition theory. Demographic Research, 12, 197–236. Boeckmann, M. (2016). Exploring the health context: a qualitative study of local heat and climate change adaptation in Japan. Geoforum, 73, 1–5. Chun, B., & Guldmann, J. M. (2014). Spatial statistical analysis and simulation of the urban heat island in high-­density central cities. Landscape and Urban Planning, 125, 76–88. Cidell, J. (2009). A political ecology of the built environment: LEED certification for green buildings. Local Environment, 14(7), 621–633. Costanzo, V., Evola, G., & Marletta, L. (2016). Energy savings in buildings or UHI mitigation? Comparison between green roofs and cool roofs. Energy and Buildings, 114, 247–255. Coutts, A., Beringer, J., & Tapper, N. (2010). Changing urban climate and CO2 emissions: implications for the development of policies for sustainable cities. Urban Policy and Research, 28(1), 27–47. Csete, M., & Buzasi, A. (2016). Climate-­oriented assessment of main street design and development in Budapest. Journal of Environmental Engineering and Landscape Management, 24(4), 258–268. Cugurullo, F. (2013). How to build a sandcastle: an analysis of the genesis and development of Masdar City. Journal of Urban Technology, 20(1), 23–37. Cugurullo, F. (2015). Urban eco-­modernisation and the policy context of new eco-­city projects: where Masdar City fails and why. Urban Studies, 53(11), 2417–2433. Cugurullo, F. (2018). Exposing smart cities and eco-­cities: Frankenstein urbanism and the sustainability challenges of the experimental city. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 50(1), 73–92.

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Declet-­barreto, J., Brazel, A., Martin, C., Chow, W., & Harlan, S. (2013). Creating the park cool island in an inner-­city neighborhood: heat mitigation strategy for phoenix, AZ. Urban Ecosystems, 16(3), 617–635. Djedjig, R., Bozonnet, E., & Belarbi, R. (2013). Experimental study of the urban microclimate mitigation potential of green roofs and green walls in street canyons. International Journal of Low-­Carbon Technologies, 10(1), 34–44. Earl, N., Simmonds, I., & Tapper, N. (2016). Weekly cycles in peak time temperatures and urban heat island intensity. Environmental Research Letters, 11(7), 1–10. EEA (European Environment Agency). (2011). Green infrastructure and territorial cohesion: the concept of green infrastructure and its integration into policies using monitoring systems. Retrieved from www.eea.europa.eu/publications/greeninfrastructure, accessed 14 June 2019. Emmanuel, R., Rosenlund, H., & Johansson, E. (2007). Urban shading: a design option for the tropics? A study in Colombo, Sri Lanka. International Journal of Climatology, 27(14), 1995–2004. Foster + Partners. (2018). Foster + Partners Masdar City. Retrieved from www.fosterandpartners.com/projects/masdar-­city, accessed 14 June 2019. Gago, E. J., Roldan, J., Pacheco-­Torres, R., & Ordonez, J. (2013). The city and urban heat islands: a review of strategies to mitigate adverse effects. Renewable & Sustainable Energy Reviews, 25, 749–758. Gober, P., Brazel, A., Quay, R., Myint, S., Grossman-­Clarke, S., Miller, A., & Rossi, S. (2010). Using watered landscapes to manipulate urban heat island effects. Journal of the Amer­ican Planning Association, 76(1), 109–121. Haaland, C., & van den Bosch, C. K. (2015). Challenges and strategies for urban green-­space planning in cities undergoing densification: a review. Urban Forestry & Urban Greening, 14(4), 760–771. Hagerman, L. A., Clark, G. L., & Hebb, T. (2007). Investment intermediaries in economic development. Oxford University Centre for the Environment, WP. IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). (2018). Global warming of 1.5°C. An IPCC special report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5°C above pre-­industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty. Incheon, Republic of Korea. Jenerette, G., Harlan, S., Brazel, A., Jones, N., Larsen, L., & Stefanov, W. (2007). Regional relationships between surface temperature, vegetation, and human settlement in a rapidly urbanizing ecosystem. Landscape Ecology, 22, 353–365. Jim, C. Y. (2015). Greenwall classification and critical design-­management assessments. Ecological engineering, 77, 348–362. Joss, S., Cowley, R., & Tomozeiu, D. (2013). Towards the “ubiquitous eco-­city”: an analysis of the internationalisation of eco-­city policy and practice. Urban Research & Practice, 6(1), 54–74. Kong, F., Sun, C., Liu, F., & Yin, H. (2016). Energy saving potential of fragmented green spaces due to their temperature regulating ecosystem services in the summer. Applied energy, 183, 1428–1440. Lenzholzer, S., & Brown, R. D. (2013). Climate-­responsive landscape architecture design education. Journal of Cleaner Production, 61, 89–99. Maller, C. (2018). Healthy urban environments: more-­than-human theories. London: Routledge. Martins, T. A. L., Adolphe, L., Bonhomme, M., Bonneaud, F., Faraut, S., Ginestet, S., & Guyard, W. (2016). Impact of urban cool island measures on outdoor climate and pedestrian comfort: simulations for a new district of Toulouse, France. Sustainable Cities and Society, 26, 9–26.

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Rapoport, E. (2014). Utopian visions and real estate dreams: the eco-­city past, present and future. Geography Compass, 8, 137–149. Rizwan, A. M., Dennis, L. Y. C., & Liu, C. (2008). A review on the generation, determination and mitigation of Urban Heat Island. Journal of Environmental Sciences, 20(1), 120–128. Ruiz, M. A., Sosa, M. B., Correa Cantaloube, E. N., & Cantón, M. A. (2015). Suitable configurations for forested urban canyons to mitigate the UHI in the city of Mendoza, Argentina. Urban Climate, 14, 197–212. Seto, K. C., Fragkias, M., Güneralp, B., & Reilly, M. K. (2011). A meta-­analysis of global urban land expansion. PloS one, 6(8), e23777. Shashua-­Bar, L., & Hoffman, M. (2000). Vegetation as a climatic component in the design of an urban street: an empirical model for predicting the cooling effect of urban green areas with trees. Energy and buildings, 31(3), 221–235.  Steeneveld, G. J., Koopmans, S., Heusinkveld, B. G., & Theeuwes, N. E. (2014). Refreshing the role of open water surfaces on mitigating the maximum urban heat island effect. Landscape and Urban Planning, 121, 92–96. Stewart, I. D. (2011). A systematic review and scientific critique of methodology in modern urban heat island literature. International Journal of Climatology, 31(2), 200–217. Stone, B. (2001). Urban form and thermal efficiency: how the design of cities influences the urban heat island effect. Journal of the Amer­ican Planning Association, 67(2), 186–198. Stone, B. (2005). Urban heat and air pollution: an emerging role for planners in the climate change debate. Journal of the Amer­ican Planning Association, 71(1), 13–25. van Hove, L., Jacobs, C., Heusinkveld, B., Elbers, J., Van Driel, B., & Holtslag, A. (2015). Temporal and spatial variability of urban heat island and thermal comfort within the Rotterdam agglomeration Building and Environment, 83, 91–103. Wachsmuth, D., & Angelo, H. (2018). Green and gray: new ideologies of nature in urban sustainability policy. Annals of the Amer­ican Association of Geographers, 108(4), 1038–1056. Wang, J., & Ouyang, W. (2017). Attenuating the surface Urban Heat Island within the Local Thermal Zones through land surface modification. Journal of Environmental Management, 187(Supplement C), 239–252. Wang, Y., Berardi, U., & Akbari, H. (2016). Comparing the effects of urban heat island mitigation strategies for Toronto, Canada. Energy and Buildings, 114, 2–19. Wong, P. P.-Y., Lai, P.-C., Low, C.-T., & Chen, S. (2016). The impact of environmental and human factors on urban heat and microclimate variability. Building and Environment, 95, 199–208. Žuvela-Aloise, M., Koch, R., Buchholz, S., & Früh, B. (2016). Modelling the potential of green and blue infrastructure to reduce urban heat load in the city of Vienna. Climatic Change, 135(3), 425–438.

10 New concepts of a sustainable metropolis

The social and environmental challenges facing decision makers in the world’s metropolises are well documented and profound. Every year, climate historical records are broken and the impacts on the environment and human wellbeing are daily news stories. Global warming denialists argue that the climate has always changed; inferring, but not stating, that at some point the climate will return to some mythical equilibrium. Rather than joining in the endless debates about the causes and extent of climate change, the practical response to the full spectrum of climate denialists, nihilists and sceptics, should be to focus on how to improve the functioning of our cities regardless. The way forward set out in this book is to accept that climate change is human induced and real but to adopt an agnostic view on climate change predictions. Not because agnosticism about climate change is encouraged, but rather our collective knowledge about the impacts are evolving so rapidly that we can no longer depend on stable forecasts to plan more than a decade or two into the future. For example, key indicators such as ocean temperatures have proven that, as climate modelling improves, the potential impacts are far greater and occurring faster than originally predicted (Resplandy et al., 2018). Factoring rapid changes to climate systems into metropolitan policies, such as the consequences of warming oceans, will be largely unknowable. So how can landscape planners and decision makers design policy in an increasingly unpredictable global ecosystem? This book includes numerous examples and case studies proposing different strategies and actions that operate to push the boundaries of, but ultimately operate within, the confines of bureaucratic conventions. Seeking socially equitable, efficient and politically acceptable policy solutions is, after all, the most effective approach to initiating real change. This chapter threads together the concepts and tools set out in this book and argues that in developing landscape led policy approaches to metropolitan planning and management, decision makers will need

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to critically engage in two overarching agendas. The first is that resilience thinking should drive policy approaches to achieving new manifestations of the sustainable metropolis. The adaptive governance framework provides a navigable approach to positive transformation of metropolitan systems. The challenge will be to engage all levels of government and civil society in the project of progressing towards a truly sustainable society. The second is that the metropolis must go beyond the current mitigation goal of a zero-­carbon global economy and progress towards net positive development such that metropolitan regions become carbon sinks, absorbers of waste materials and energy, and sites for biological intensity.

Imagining a resilient metropolitan system The characteristics of vulnerability, adaptability and risk have gained greater attention from international agencies determined to evaluate the performance of cities, their dynamics, and their capacity to become more sustainable (see, for example, the Millennium Assessment, 2003). These characteristics are closely associated with the system’s resilience (its ability to cope with and benefit from change). Resilience has been widely deployed in the study of ecological systems but is less popular in many fields of social science (Olsson, Jerneck, Thoren, Persson, & O’Byrne, 2015). This unpopularity derives from the characterisation of resilience theory as a unifying concept to evaluate sustainability, undervaluing the pluralistic and unpredictable nature of socially constructed systems. Regardless of theoretical shortcomings, resilience has matured and endured as a concept to explain the dynamics of socio-­ ecological systems such as cities and provide a framework for evaluating sustainable development (Walker, Holling, Carpenter, & Kinzig, 2004). In applying the concept of resilience this final chapter weaves together the key themes in this book and how they apply in a metropolitan context. Broadly speaking, the sustainability of metropolitan systems can be characterised by understanding three key attributes. These are: resilience, adaptability and transformability (Walker et al., 2004).

1  Resilience Resilience theories have been applied across a number of different disciplines, each with their own assumptions and definitions of what constitutes the resilient state of infrastructure, a person or community, or management and political entities. Like sustainability, resilience is an enduring term. The rhetorical power of resilience comes from its broad application in practice. In deploying the term it is important to have a clear understanding of the disciplinary perspective of resilience that you adopt and an appreciation of other approaches so as not to confuse your audience. The application of resilience to metropolitan systems is briefly discussed in Chapter 4. To recap, Walker and Salt (2012) define resilience as “the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and re-­organize during disruption while retaining essentially the same identity” (p. 25). The ecological perspective on resilience includes some key differences from

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other interpretations. Principally, ecological resilience is not value laden. It is neither a good nor bad condition (unlike engineering or psychological resilience). It simply refers to the state of a system. It is up to you and the stakeholders involved in a policy process to determine if the resilience of a system is desirable and needs to be retained and enhanced; or undesirable and needs to transform to a different identity. Consider a metropolitan transport system that is strongly oriented towards private car use. This can be desirable or undesirable depending on your perspective. However, overwhelming evidence shows that car dependent transport systems are bad for social, environmental and economic reasons. Governments around the world deploy significant investment in public transport infrastructure and regulatory tools to change the identity of transport systems. Yet as the evidence shows, these systems are highly resilient to shocks and disturbances such as fuel price rises and regulations such a licence fees, congestion taxes and even access restrictions imposed by the state (as is often the case in Beijing).

To gain a better understanding of this definition, think about how objects or structures return to a similar identity (though not necessarily identical) after an external impact or shock of a certain scale. Coconut Palms (Cocos nucifera), for example, can withstand very high velocity winds. In category five cyclones (or hurricanes) at wind speeds of up to 300 km/h (190 m/h), most of the foliage and fruit will be torn from the crown, but the palm is likely to remain upright. After only a few months, the leaves and fruit will regrow. After the shock, the coconut palm has the same characteristics or “identity” and is therefore highly resilient to cyclones. In contrast, a glass panel can deform under pressure, but will crack or break at some point and is unable to return to the same essential form or identity. It is, by definition, brittle or not resilient in this case. These are of course simplifications (palms can die from pest infestations and glass can be resilient to intense heat) but it helps to frame your thinking in terms of a systems capacity to change, adapt to external forces and return to an essential identity. An excellent practical application of resilience theory is Walker and Salt’s (2012) Resilience practice: building capacity to absorb disturbance and maintain function. While the thrust of Resilience Practice is about applying theories of resilience in rural contexts, it offers great insight and scope for policy makers to consider how these theories can be applied in a metropolitan context.

2  Adaptability Adaptability is the capacity of shaping forces to influence a system’s resilience (Walker et al., 2004). The form and function of cities themselves are the shaping forces that collectively influence the system’s capacity to maintain many processes

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in the face of internal and external disturbances. In the context of metropolitan systems we have identified a number of broad factors that influence the systems resilience. Chapter 2 discusses the influence of path dependency in resisting change despite the technological and societal advances that have occurred in the past 500 years. Chapter 1 describes how both conservative and performative interpretations of landscape provide similar ecosystem services, but from seemingly different approaches. Both are legitimate policy approaches yet they derive from very different assumptions about how landscapes should serve the metropolitan agenda. Framing these examples in the context of resilience theory, we can say that these shaping forces, acting on the system, influence the adaptability of the metropolis. Chapter 2 briefly explored the creation of public parks in England and New York in the nineteenth century. Birkenhead Park, opened in 1847, was the first publicly funded park in England. It became an influential model for public parks around the Western world. Soon after, the New York mayor at the time proposed what is now Central Park to counter the health impacts from overcrowding, pollution from factories and poor sanitation. In applying resilience theory, we can say that the creation of the public park changed the identity of the metropolis by improving the health of workers and in turn changed attitudes towards the provision of healthy public spaces for the benefit of citizens. This is an example of actors influencing the resilience of a system through the creation of public parks. Chapter 8 explores this relationship between health and landscapes in more detail and offers some insight into how we frame the approach to improving citizens’ wellbeing from a landscape perspective. Returning to the concept of adaptability, we should consider as decision makers that we need to think about how a metropolitan system adapts. We can draw on two key concepts for applying resilience theory in practice. The first concept to consider is that resilience describes the dynamic properties of a system and managing resilience requires an equally dynamic and adaptive approach. Chapter 1 defines the metropolis and surrounding landscapes as dynamic, fragmented morphologies of built and unbuilt structures. While we can think of the physical characteristics of the metropolitan system in this way, we can also think of the social and institutional systems that interact with the metropolis as equally dynamic and often fragmented. Essentially this characterisation of the metropolis describes the system’s properties and the shaping forces that influence the resilience of the system. It stands to reason that the approaches to management, regulation and governance discussed in Part II of this book are in effect describing a method for managing the resilience of the system. When you read (or use) terms such as resilience or adaptability, you should have a solid mental picture in your mind about what you mean by them and how you apply them in presenting your arguments. The second concept is that resilience thinking involves appreciating a system’s thresholds and adaptive cycles. You will have come across the term threshold a number of times in this book. A systems threshold essentially describes the moment when the trajectory of that system changes. This occurs when an often slowly changing variable causes a more profound change in the whole system and tempor-

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arily or permanently alters its identity. In practice, thresholds are very difficult to detect. It is far easier to observe a system that has changed as a result of crossing a threshold. From a planning and policy perspective this can be unhelpful if the task of managing resilience becomes one of triage. It is important to be mindful of the potential thresholds that you are either trying to avoid crossing or those that you wish to cross to change a system. Chapter 9 provides a detailed account of urban heat island effect (UHI) and policies and strategies that can be deployed to combat the effects. Understanding the policy problem of mitigating UHI from a systems perspective would require an analysis of potential thresholds that may exist. For example, the system may be changed temporarily into a new identity during an extreme heat event. Imagine a scenario where an older residential area lacks basic street tree cover because the local council has failed to replace the trees over time; nor do the houses meet contemporary solar passive design codes or have adequate insulation. The UHI effect in the neighbourhood results in higher average night-­time temperatures compared to surrounding rural areas. Imagine an extreme heat event (a heat wave) hits the city and a blackout ensues due to excessive demand on the energy system (in part due the effects of UHI across the system). The compounding effects of elevated night-­time temperatures and extreme day-­time temperatures caused by the heat wave results in sustained high internal and external temperatures. The neighbourhood transforms temporarily from habitable to uninhabitable putting residents health at risk as a result of a number of thresholds being crossed. What are those thresholds and what strategies can be put in place to make the system more adaptable and to enhance its resilience?

As described in Chapter 6, adaptive cycles are also difficult to detect at a particular moment in time. Like thresholds, it is important for practitioners to be aware of the concept and how it may affect your decision making, particularly when impacts occur over longer timeframes. This concept, however, is perhaps the most useful in adapting resilience theory for metropolitan systems. A system that resists change becomes susceptible to redundancy and more vulnerable to shocks resulting in unpredicted changes (Walker & Salt, 2006). Yet a system that changes too quickly may lose its essential identity. Therefore, policies and strategies need to be responsive to future, partially known or unknown disturbances and shocks (e.g. increased frequency and intensity of climatic events and increased demands on infrastructure brought about by multiple factors such as migration, new technologies, and changing socio-­political agendas). Decision makers should also pay attention to how policies and strategies can increase the transformability of a system.

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3  Transformability Transformability is the capacity for a system to become sufficiently adaptive to cross thresholds into new development trajectories resulting in a different system identity. Returning to Figure 6.1, we can see that the value of experiments at a smaller scale is not simply about mitigating risks. Such experimentation affords continuous learning from transformational changes at smaller scales that enables greater resilience at larger scales (Folke et al., 2010). This may all seem too complex and difficult to translate into meaningful policy action, but it is important to appreciate that resilience is about simplicity, or what you need to know to keep the system sustainable. As discussed in Chapter 4, transforming into a carbon neutral economy is necessary and will require considerable positive and negative disruptions. As an example of transformation in the making, moving toward, and ultimately beyond, carbon neutrality will depend on how quickly existing structures, practices and rules change over time. Australia, like most developed economies, is moving slowly toward a carbon neutral economy. What it will look like and how we know when we get there are all questions to be answered by policy makers in the not too distant future. However, we can see that smaller scale experiments are occurring and providing lessons that will affect the larger scale systems. In 2018, the Amer­ican automotive and energy company, Tesla, built the world’s largest battery grid in just 54 days in the state of South Australia. During the first 12 months of operation, the project eliminated blackouts and repaid one-­third of its construction costs. This experiment has demonstrated the performance of a power storage project on this scale, but also how the rest of the energy systems (power plants, the national electricity grid) will be affected by new disruptive technologies. While this experiment did not translate into a net decline in Australian carbon emissions in 2018, the lessons from the project will provide essential knowledge for policy makers to design efficient, equitable and politically acceptable policies to move towards carbon neutrality in the future. As a result of this comparatively small scale experiment, the transformation of the national electricity system is underway in Australia. While electricity generation and storage represents a significant sector of the carbon economy, other sectors such as transport, manufacturing and agriculture will need to experience similar transformative changes. Chapter 9 demonstrates how landscape policy can play its part in progressing towards and beyond zero-­carbon through addressing UHI.

From mitigating impacts to progressing a positive agenda Adopting a landscape led approach to metropolitan policy has taken many different forms as the case studies have demonstrated. They represent a selection of current best practice examples, such as Singapore, London, Canberra, Ottawa and

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­ openhagen. Others such as Beijing, New York, Masdar and Milan demonstrate C varying degrees to which governments are committed to deploying landscape strategies in the face of significant environmental and social challenges. None of these plans go far enough in exploiting the potential for a landscape led approach to metropolitan planning. The challenge for you as landscape architects, planners, policy makers and advocates will be to pursue a more proactive agenda and discover new strategies that go beyond current practices. This book sets out the conceptual challenges faced by metropolitan regions in progressing toward a sustainable development model that strives for “development [that] meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (WCED 1987). Add to this the known and unknown impacts of climate change and consider how a landscape led approach could contribute to achieving a positive development agenda rather than just seeking to mitigate the worst effects of climate change. Positive development is a radical proposition to progress sustainability beyond current thinking about how a metropolis functions. The overarching goal of positive development is to restructure the metropolis and urban life to become solutions to, rather than causes of global environmental decline. In essence, rather than drawing down on the planet’s limited resources, the atmosphere’s capacity to regulate carbon and the biota’s ability to preserve biodiversity, metropolitan systems should be doing the opposite. They should reuse and upscale the already existing flows of energy and materials, sequester more carbon then they emit and enhance more biodiversity than they destroy. Birkeland (2012) characterises this positive development agenda as encompassing the following goals.

4  Develop new concepts and approaches to expand known and unknown future options Chapter 4 describes how sustainability has endured as a concept largely because it has evaded precise definitions. Yet the rhetorical power of the term persists today, ironically because there is no measurable benchmark or milestone that can be reached. Indeed there is no consensus on what a sustainable society benchmark might be. There is, however, an accepted trajectory toward sustainability and there is broad consensus that civil society should at least be striving in the direction of this goal. The challenge is: how ambitious should we be and how rapidly can we afford to transform our socio-­ecological systems? The goal of expanding future options to enhance quality of life (for humans and non-­humans) goes beyond current concepts of sustainable development set out in metropolitan plans. For example, the London Plan (2017) adopts the triple bottom line definition of sustainable development. Chapter 4 argues this is insufficient because more nuanced debates about the triple bottom line approach need to consider that it is simply inadequate to balance social, economic and environmental interests. As Campbell (1996) argued over two decades ago, striving towards sustainability not only necessitates making visible the conflicting agendas, but new intersections between those competing agendas is

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where new concepts and approaches of sustainability will emerge. This can only occur when sustainability is not a compromised benchmark; instead it is a trajectory, that like positive development can never be reached. The London Plan also describes a range of indicators including carbon neutrality by 2050 as a headline sustainability goal. By mid-­century, metropolitan governments will need to go way beyond such targets and should be planning cities to become major players in global carbon sequestration, pollution reduction and biological restoration. Striving towards an elusive sustainability goal, rather than purporting to meet known targets, will force us to innovate by developing new concepts and approaches that are not constrained by current benchmarks set out in metropolitan plans.

5  Shift from linear input-­output thinking to more circular and regenerative approaches Translation of ecological research into urban systems has flourished in the new millennium. This is, in part, attributed to a shift in thinking about the nature of cities and how novel ecosystems function in urban settings. Today, new understandings about how ecological systems sustain themselves are being applied in the social and technological systems that drive the metropolis. Chapter 3 describes some of the ways various ecological approaches are influencing planning and policy. This book argues that, in order to progress these ideas, decision makers should go further in comprehending how metropolitan systems can mimic ecological processes and how landscape led approaches to planning and management can play an essential role. Chapter 6 describes how landscape urbanism has made tentative steps towards developing strategies for a landscape led approach. In the future, we will need to incorporate these concepts more broadly into policy and subject them to critical analysis. In doing so, we need to conceive of new governance models to more effectively mobilise the social and political will of the broader community to effect change but with tolerable disruption to the functioning of existing structure and systems. Chapters 6 and 7 presents a range of perspectives that gives guidance on how landscape led policies can be advocated, designed and evaluated based on the concept of environmental flows. Urban metabolism, perhaps more so than others, offers a method for transitioning from linear models dependent on resource extraction and waste disposal to circular or closed loop models where the embodied energy in materials are reused within the system. The challenge will be to understand the role that landscapes will play in this closed loop system. The message here is that landscapes are part of a nested network of systems that offers a range of ecosystem services. Determining how those services are measured, valued and evaluated is a recurring theme in this book. Notwithstanding, landscapes thought of as key infrastructure to support transitions from linear to circular flows of energy and materials is a fruitful area for future research and policy development. Integrated land–water landscape management is a longstanding example where landscape structures can be used to reduce the concentration of pollutants leaving

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the storm-­water systems. Such approaches to pollution control are widely adopted, so much so that the term “green infrastructure” has been coined to advocate the system-­wide benefits. Emerging research (see, for example, Buijs et al., 2018; Carter, Handley, Butlin, & Gill, 2018) is exploring the dimensions of green infrastructure governance that will provide evidence for new modes of planning and management into the future. Likewise, experiments in adaptive governance such as those posed by Walker and Salt and applied in Chapter 8 will need to be interrogated more fully.

6  Reformulate management systems to move from mitigating the negative effects of urbanisation to multiplying positive feedback loops The case of exploring metropolitan scale approaches to achieving positive change is a central theme of this book. At face value, it seems counter-­intuitive to look to a past era of metropolitan planning that was so symbolic of the failures associated with technocratic and state-­controlled schemes of the post-­war era. Yet in light of the profound structural challenges facing the global economy and democracy itself, researchers have rediscovered the merits of metropolitan governments (Davidson & Gleeson, 2018; Tomlinson, 2017; Wälti & Kübler, 2017). This book proposes that in exploring what landscape governance may look like at a metropolitan scale, policy makers can conceive of landscapes as sources of ecosystem services that enable new forms of sustainable development to emerge in conjunction with other social, technical and infrastructure systems. As a current framework for policy analysis, ecosystem service provision resolves some of the issues associated with evaluating and monetising the positive externalities afforded by landscape systems. However, in order to go further than mitigating the effects of global warming towards more synergistic approaches, new methods of evaluation will be needed into the future. Resilience is explored previously in this chapter to provide a practical approach to developing new frameworks and future possibilities. This will potentially lead to better understandings about how concepts such as green infrastructure can be applied more broadly across a range of complementary systems rather than discreetly applied to open space development and planning projects. Chapter 3 suggests that new fields of research into urban greening will result largely from interest in urban environments from ecology researchers and offshoots, such as ecological economics, ecological engineering and urban political ecology. These fields will bring new perspectives about the role of landscapes in planning, management and governance. What is exciting about these fields is that fundamental questions are being raised, demanding new responses and approaches to defining the problems faced by communities across the planet. Perhaps the most challenging of these is how we co-­ habit (rather than inhabit) the metropolis with our non-­human companions as part of social structures for the benefit of all (see, for example, Maller, 2018). The deployment of evidence-­based research into decision making will require an openness to new concepts and ideas and a willingness to incorporate learning

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into practice through experimentation and a degree of reflexivity (the extent to which individuals and social collectives such as organisations are capable of self-­ inquiry and adaption). In advocating for landscape led solutions we should also be mindful of the need to critically analyse our own biases. As mentioned a number of times in this book, advocating for a greener, more sustainable metropolis is relatively straightforward. How you defend those policy decisions beyond simple cost-­ benefit analysis and towards future notions of sustainability (that are yet to be imagined) is the ultimate challenge for landscape advocates.

7  Prepare and implement strategies that increase our options for living sustainably rather than preparing to survive a grim future New strategies will be needed to counter the prevailing view that ecological modernisation will continue to be consistent and compatible with modern economic and political structures. Like all paradigms, ecological modernisation has played its part in greening national economies, yet like neoliberalism, the rhetorical power of this free market ideology seems to be fading. This is, in part, because as demonstrated by the most recent IPCC report, current modes of practice are simply inadequate for avoiding the worst impacts of climate change. As a result, new paradigms (as yet not defined) and new strategies will need to be designed and deployed. Consider that all evidence points towards 80 percent of the current generation of urban dwellers living unsustainably (see www.footprintnetwork.org). Defined as ecological overshoot (see Chapter 6), only the poorest nations are surviving within the earth’s resource limits which in itself is deeply unsatisfactory. Yet as discussed in Chapter 4, sustainability cannot be precisely defined because metropolitan systems are too complex and communities are too diverse. As mentioned previously, metropolitan plans are deferring to the term zero-­carbon as a substitute for achieving sustainability, perhaps because poverty eradication is too difficult. From a systems perspective, targets like zero-­carbon propose a theoretical threshold that governments can plan for, such as London’s 2050 target. Yet like sustainability, defining this boundary is complex. Currently zero-­carbon lacks explicit specifications for buildings let alone whole metropolitan regions and shouldn’t be regarded as a surrogate for sustainable development (Pan, 2014). For this reason, the positive development paradigm insists we move beyond such a bounded target to continue to strive along a positive though a never-­ending trajectory, rather than settling for minimal change and preparing for a grim future. Positive development is a more appropriate surrogate for sustainability than zero-­carbon when characterising the role of landscapes in metropolitan planning and policy. As discussed in Chapter 4, landscapes thought of in this way are contesting for policy attention alongside other urban functions rather than being classified as nature and non-­urban; to be experienced in reserves and parks adjacent to, but not in the metropolis. It stands to reason that a whole-­of-metropolitan approach to mobilising landscape values is called for. The challenge will be to understand what

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that might look like in policy and practice. Cloaking the metropolis in a verdant urban forest is too simplistic, though entirely appropriate in many cases. Rather incorporating landscape values into a much broader range of performance measures, planning strategies and development contexts is more meaningful and worthy of further exploration.

A landscape led approach to metropolitan policy This final chapter has brought together the themes, ideas and frameworks in this book to provide you, the reader, with an armature for developing your own approach to advocating for and developing landscape led approaches to metropolitan planning and policy. The premise of this approach is underpinned by two fundamental assumptions. First, the metropolis will have an increasingly major role to play in mitigating the global impacts of climate change by progressing towards a carbon positive (rather than carbon neutral) development paradigm. Second, in order to pursue a more sustainable future, the metropolis will need to become more adaptable while retaining its essential identity. Metropolitan systems that are effective and productive will need to become more resilient to disturbances while unsustainable and destructive systems will need to transform. To pursue a landscape led approach, as a decision maker, you will need a sound mental map of the landscape that you are advocating for and referring to in a particular policy approach. The European Landscape Convention (ELC) provides that simple, encompassing statement and expresses the essential characteristics of landscape for developing a shared understanding. However the ELC definition is inadequate for communicating and advocating the more nuanced arguments as to why a landscape approach should be deployed. Supporting a landscape agenda consistently and convincingly will require you to be confident in understanding and explaining how a landscape approach will advance policy solutions. Figure 1.1 in Chapter 1 describes a mental model of interaction between biological, social and institutional factors that shape and are shaped by the landscape. It suggests that there is a fundamental relationship between human and non-­human systems. Defined by the ELC, landscape “is the result of the action and interaction of natural and/or human factors” (Council of Europe, 2000).

Returning to the model in Chapter 1 (repeated here as Figure 10.1), identify a policy problem (Chapters 8, health, and 9, energy, are examples). Choose a different problem, such as biodiversity or water, and develop an approach that considers these four phases of interaction. In each phase think about how interactions between the biological, social and institutional factors can support a more sustainable system.

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FIGURE 10.1   Mental

model of interactions that shape the metropolitan landscape.

Embracing adaptive governance to transform the metropolis Chapter 6 introduces the adaptive governance framework (Figure 6.1). This model, developed by Walker and Salt (2012), provides a practical approach to bringing a community along the road to transform metropolitan landscape systems. However, the model was originally designed to transform non-­urban landscapes where the number of stakeholders and variables is considerably fewer than that of metropolitan systems. In proposing this model for the metropolitan context, this book argues that the model in itself will not lead to transformational changes to the metropolis; rather it provides a framework for designing landscape led solutions that, in combination with other approaches, will greatly enhance the potential for unsustainable metropolitan systems to transform and become more sustainable over time. Bringing stakeholders along the journey of change means getting beyond the point of denial within an organisation, a community or a government agency. This is perhaps the most difficult phase. Progressing past the point of denial requires a strategy supported by clear communication that describes the problem and is framed at the most appropriate focal scale of concern (see Chapter 5). The way you frame the problems that need addressing should be supported by empirically sound evidence-­based analysis or research. Designing options for change is where the creative thinkers come into play. The landscape architects and urban designers can bring to the table options for change in the form of small scale experiments. These can be a combination of discrete development projects, digital modelling and/or pilot programs in combination

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with a range of regulatory tools described in Table 7.1. These experiments do however need to demonstrate how they address the issues raised and need to respond to a narrative about the nature of the problems at hand. It should also be clear to the stakeholder how design experiments affect and are affected by higher scales of influence (such as state and federal programs and policies). Evaluating the capacity for change to occur is the third phase. This requires you to gain an overall picture of the likely barriers to change and/or the appetite for broader scale adoption of interventions or regulatory tools at higher scales or adjacent jurisdictions. This third phase is the most difficult to evaluate, however we can look at previous examples where small scale interventions have resulted in broad acceptance over time. Take, for example, the deployment of constructed wetlands to improve water quality and ecological values. The first constructed wetlands were designed to treat sewage in 1960s in the Netherlands (Vymazal, 2010). Today the deployment of artificial urban and peri-­urban wetlands is widespread across the world, transforming our attitudes and relationship to water pollution and water quality. This perhaps is the most compelling example of landscape led solutions to major policy problems associated with pollution and community health and safety. There are potentially many others that are yet to be explored at a metropolitan, state, national or even international scale.

Conclusion This chapter has presented challenges for you as a decision maker to consider. The first is how to shift from current unsustainable paradigms to more sustainable futures. In many regards this challenge requires creative thinking that pushes concepts and ideas beyond current ambitions such as zero-­carbon. By adopting a landscape led approach to addressing policy problems, you are critically engaging in the project of defining and advocating the role of landscapes in the functioning of metropolitan systems. Finally this chapter repositions metropolitan landscapes in the context of the complex interrelated domains of systems thinking. Recapping on the fundamental principles of systems theory, we can see that landscapes systems are nested in other social systems that make up the heterogeneous mix of built and unbuilt spaces we call the metropolis. Landscapes are also dynamic systems subject to adaptive cycles that can resist change, but also become part of transformative change. Landscape architects, planners and land managers should see the role of landscapes as part of a bigger picture, where small scale innovations can have profound and lasting effects on the future sustainable metropolis. The landscape shapes the metropolis and the metropolis shapes the landscape in a circular fashion that emphasises the interrelationship between natural, social and technical systems. The challenge for decision makers is to conceive of governance systems, regulatory approaches and infrastructures that are also circular and evolving according to the external and internal forces acting on them (Wyborn & Dovers, 2014). This is an ongoing project that this book endeavours to engage you as a

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practitioner to consider in your approach to professional practice, decision making and advocacy.

References Birkeland, J. (2008). Positive development: from vicious circles to virtuous cycles through built environment design. London: Routledge. Buijs, A., Hansen, R., Van der Jagt, S., Ambrose-­Oji, B., Elands, B., Rall, E. L., … Olafsson, A. S. (2018). Mosaic governance for urban green infrastructure: upscaling active citizenship from a local government perspective. Urban Forestry & Urban Greening, 40, 43–62. Campbell, S. (1996). Green cities, growing cities, just cities? Urban planning and the contradictions of sustainable development. Journal of the Amer­ican Planning Association, 62(3), 296–312. Carter, J. G., Handley, J., Butlin, T., & Gill, S. (2018). Adapting cities to climate change: exploring the flood risk management role of green infrastructure landscapes. Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, 61(9), 1535–1552. Council of Europe. (2000). European landscape convention. Davidson, K., & Gleeson, B. (2018). New socio-­ecological imperatives for cities: possibilities and dilemmas for Australian metropolitan governance. Urban Policy and Research, 36(2), 230–241. Folke, C., Carpenter, S. R., Walker, B., Scheffer, M., Chapin, T., & Rockström, J. (2010). Resilience thinking: integrating resilience, adaptability and transformability. Ecology and Society, 15(4), 1–9. Maller, C. (2018). Healthy urban environments: more-­than-human theories. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Millennium Assessment (2003). Millennium ecosystem assessment (MA): strengthening capacity to manage ecosystems sustainably for human well-­being. World Resources Institute. Olsson, L., Jerneck, A., Thoren, H., Persson, J., & O’Byrne, D. (2015). Why resilience is unappealing to social science: theoretical and empirical investigations of the scientific use of resilience. Science Advances, 1(4), e1400217. Pan, W. (2014). System boundaries of zero carbon buildings. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, 37, 424–434. Resplandy, L., Keeling, R. F., Eddebbar, Y., Brooks, M.  K., Wang, R., Bopp, L., & Oschlies, A. (2018). Quantification of ocean heat uptake from changes in atmospheric O2 and CO2 composition. Nature, 563(7729), 105–108. Tomlinson, R. (2017). An argument for metropolitan government in Australia. Cities, 63, 149–153. Vymazal, J. (2010). Constructed wetlands for wastewater treatment: a review. Water, 2(3), 530–549. Walker, B., & Salt, D. (2006). Resilience thinking: sustaining people and ecosystems in a changing world. Washington, D.C.: Island Press. Walker, B., & Salt, D. (2012). Resilience practice: building capacity to absorb disturbance and maintain function. Washington, D.C.: Island Press. Walker, B., Holling, C. S., Carpenter, S. R., & Kinzig, A. (2004). Resilience, adaptability and transformability in social–ecological systems. Ecology and society, 9(2), 5. Wälti, S., & Kübler, D. (2017). Metropolitan governance and democracy: how to evaluate new tendencies. In P. McLaverty (Ed.), Public participation and innovations in community governance (pp. 99–121). London: Routledge. Wyborn, C., & Dovers, S. (2014). Prescribing adaptiveness in agencies of the state. Global Environmental Change, 24(1), 5–7.

Index

Page numbers in bold denote tables, those in italics denote figures. Abercrombie, Patrick 28, 42 Abu Dhabi, UAE 188–92, 191 adaptability 197–9; and transformability 200 adaptive cycles 114–15, 198–9 adaptive governance 113, 118–21, 120, 166, 166–9, 195–6, 206–7 aesthetics 91 agriculture 81, 94, 101–2, 103, 111, 125, 145, 163–4 air pollution 159–60, 162–3, 173 Akkerman, A. 22 albedo 186 Alexander, C. 47 Alkon, A.H. 161 altruistic behaviour 137–8 America see United States Anthropocene 5, 42–5 anthropogenic heat 186 Australia: Canberra 8, 75–9, 77, 82; carbon neutral economy 200 Bacon, Francis 20, 21, 23, 25 battery grid experiment 200 behaviour regulation 132, 132–8, 134–5; appropriate mix of 138–40 behavioural economic theory 132, 132–8, 141 Beijing 163, 170–4, 171 benefit, and regulation 142 Bensalem 21

bio-regionalism 9, 95–6; Milan, Italy 100–5, 101, 104 biocapacity reserve 110 biodiversity 8, 51, 91, 97; in Singapore 56–8 biophilic urbanism 51; and Singapore 55–8 Bird, W. 99 Birkeland, J. 201 Birkenhead Park, Merseyside 26, 198 Boeri, Stefano 102 boundaries 94–5; and bio-regionalism 95–6 Bredsdorff 123, 124 bridges 52 Britain: estates 26–7; garden cities 28–30, 31; greenbelts 27, 28; industrial revolution 26–8; Letchworth Garden City 28–30, 31; London 24–5, 24–5, 26, 27, 28, 36–7, 201, 202; London Plan 36–7, 201, 202; suburban landscapes 26–7, 32 Broad-acre City (US) 23 Brown, Lancelot “Capability” 27 brownfield sites 102, 105, 151–2 Bruntland report 64, 67 Bruntland, Gro Harlem 64, 67 Bunje, P. 111 bureaucracy 40–1 Calthorpe, P. 46 Campanella, Tommaso 20–2, 22 Campbell, H. 142

210   Index

Campbell, S. 70–2, 71, 201 Canada: Ottawa greenbelt 79–82, 80, 179 Canberra, Australia 8, 75–9, 77, 82 carbon see decarbonising the metropolis carbon neutral economies 72–3, 177–8, 189, 200, 202; see also decarbonising the metropolis carbon positive development 205 carrying capacity 9, 67, 95, 110, 111 cars 32, 34, 149, 197 Carson, R. 48 Central Park, New York 26, 140–1, 142, 147–8 change management 168–9 Chermayeff, S. 47 Chicago School of Economics 40 China, health policy 163, 170–4 circular approaches 202, 207 citizen engagement 50; co-creation 103; delegated governance 117, 173–4; and sustainability 65, 74, 78, 103 City of the Sun (Campanella) 20–2, 22 civilised and uncivilised landscapes 18 clean technology 190 climate change: agnostic view 195; Anthropocene 42–5; cooling strategies 178, 181–2, 183, 184–5, 186, 188; deniers 195; flooding 137, 173; and food systems 160–1; and health 160; Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 63, 177, 204; and landscape led approach to metropolitan planning 200–7; pace of 195; and transformational change 169; urban heat island (UHI) 50, 160, 182–7, 199; see also decarbonising the metropolis; sustainability; temperature change climate change deniers 195 closed loop models 202 club services 146, 146, 147 co-benefits 98–9, 158–9 co-creation 103 coconut palms 197 common pool resources (CPR) 136–7, 139–40; regulation of 140–1 common services 146, 146, 147 compact city agenda 45–8 congestion 136–7, 138 conservancies 74, 140–1, 148 conservative interpretation of landscape 7–8 consolidation 45–8 Convention on Biological Diversity 57–8 cooling strategies 178, 181–2, 183, 184–5, 186, 188 Copenhagen, Denmark 122–7, 124, 126

Corley, E. 142 Corner, J. 49, 113, 114–15 Cosgrove, D. 18, 20–1 cost benefit analysis (CBA) 142–3, 167 cultural turn 90 data sharing 88–9 data visualisation 90 Davison, A. 44 decarbonising the metropolis 177–92, 204; case study 188–92; experimentation 200; urban cooling 178, 181–2, 183, 184–5, 186, 188; urban greening 178–81, 187–8; urban heat island (UHI) 182–7; see also sustainability; urban greening deconcentrated governance 116–17 delegated governance 117–18 Denmark, governance 122–7 densification: and biophilic urbanism 51; compact city agenda 45–8; and cooling strategies 178, 181–2, 183, 184–5, 186, 188; and greening strategies 180–1; and landscape values 96; and physical exercise 161, 165; Singapore 55–8; urban heat island (UHI) 50, 160, 182–7, 199 Depledge, M.H. 99 desalination 190 Descartes, René 22–3 devolved governance 118 downstream effects 99–100 drinking water see water Duany, Andrés 46, 49 Dunham-Jones, Ellen 46 Earl, N. 186 Eckbo, G. 62 eco-cities 188–92 ecological footprint (EF) 110–12 ecological functionalism 73 ecological modernisation 66–7, 73, 172, 187, 204; eco-cities 188–92 ecological overshoot 110, 204 ecological urbanism 50 ecological wisdom 113 ecosystem resilience theories 67; see also resilience ecosystem services 96–100; co-benefits 98–9; cost benefit analysis 142–3; downstream effects 99–100; and excludability 144, 145–8, 145; mobilising 143–5; and regulation 134–5, 136–40, 142, 143–5; and rivalry 144–5, 145–8, 145 ecosystems management 109–10

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edges and boundaries 94–5; bio-regionalism 95–6 education programs 133, 135, 138 electricity generation 179–80, 183, 200 Elkington, J. 68–9, 68, 70 Elliot, A.M. 22 energy: and cooling strategies 178, 181–2, 183, 184–5, 186, 188; electricity generation 179–80, 183, 200; renewable energy 179–80; and urban heat island (UHI) 50, 160, 182–7, 199; see also decarbonising the metropolis; sustainability enforcement of regulations 132, 133, 134–5, 138 Enticknap, L. 9 environmental flows 202 environmental justice 45, 50 environmental triggers for health 159–62 estates 26–7, 32, 34, 45 European Environment Agency 52–3, 180 European Landscape Convention (ELC) 6, 205 evidence-based research 88–9, 203–4; experimentation 119–20, 121, 167–9, 200, 203–4, 206–7 excludability 144, 145, 145–8 exercise 161–2, 164–5, 166, 168–9 experimentation 119–20, 121, 167–9, 200, 203–4, 206–7 externalities 136, 137, 139–41, 140–3, 148 Federal Land Policy and Management Act 1976 (US) 132 feminism 41 Fertner, C. 127 flooding 137, 173 focal scale 6–7, 92–3, 120 Folke, C. 119 food supply/systems 93, 160–1, 163–4 Foster + Partners 190, 191 fragile ecology argument 67 France: ecological footprint 111; urban vision 22 free market see market economy free rider effect 137, 140 Friedman, Milton 40–1 future benefits 143 Galli, A. 110 garden cities 28–31, 29–31, 32, 48; Letchworth Garden City (UK) 28–30, 31; Radburn (US) 30, 32, 33; Singapore 55–8 garden suburban cities 19

gardens, and urban heat island (UHI) 183–4 Gawel, E. 137 geographic information systems (GIS) 19–20, 88 geometric planning 22–3, 75–6 global warming see climate change; decarbonising the metropolis; sustainability; temperature change Google Earth 88 governance 108–27; adaptive governance 113, 118–21, 120, 166–9, 166, 195–6, 206–7; case studies 122–7, 172–4, 188–90; ecological footprint 110–11; ecological wisdom 113; ecosystems management 109–10; landscape led approach to metropolitan planning 202–3; landscape urbanism 114–16; at metropolitan level 108–9; modes of 116–18; urban metabolism 111–12 government led governance 116 government services 146, 146, 148 grass, and urban heat island (UHI) 183–4 Greater London Authority Act 1999 36 Greber, Jacques 79 Green Belt (London and Home Counties) Act 1938 27, 28 green city agenda 48–51, 54–5; green infrastructure 51–4, 180, 187–8, 203; Singapore 55–8; see also decarbonising the metropolis; sustainability; urban greening green infrastructure (GI) 51–4, 180, 187–8, 203; definition of 52–3 green ratings schemes 66–7, 73, 179 green roofs 184–5, 191–2 green technology 67, 73, 180, 187, 190 green walls 185, 191–2 greenbelts: London 27, 28; Ottawa 79–82, 80, 179 grids 18, 19, 23, 25, 35, 170 Griffin, Marion 76 Griffin, Walter 76 Gunderson, L.H. 114 Hahn, T. 119 health 157–74; and access to open space 161–2, 164–5, 166, 168–9, 198; applying a framework 166–9, 166; case study 170–4, 171; and climate change 160; environmental triggers 159–62; and food systems 160–1; hospital location 158–9; London Plan 37; and parks 26, 99, 198; and physical activity 161–2, 164–5; policy approaches 162–6; and pollution 159–60; targeted approach

212   Index

health continued 164–6; and urban heat island (UHI) 182, 183 heat reflection 186 heatwaves: and urban cooling 178, 181–2, 183, 184–5, 186, 188; and urban heat island (UHI) 50, 160, 182–7, 199 Hoffman, M. 184 Holden, E. 69 Hollar, Wencelaus 24, 24 Holling, C.S. 114 Hooghe, L. 118 Horizon 2067 (Ottawa) 81 hospitals 158–9 Howard, Ebenezer 28–30, 29, 30 Hutchinson, P. 152 Ile-de-France 111 ill health see health imaginary, the 115 incentives, and regulation 133, 134–5, 137–8, 140 industrial revolution 26–8 informal settlements 157–8 information disclosure, and regulation 133, 135, 141 integrated land–water landscape management 202–3 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 63, 177, 204 International Physical Activity and Environment Network (IPEN) 162 International Union for the Conservation of Nature 63 interpretative approaches to landscapes 19–20 invisible urbanism 94 Italy, bio-regionalism 100–5, 101, 104 Jacobs, J. 34–5, 42, 48, 151 Joss, S. 189 Kaplan, R. 6 Kelbaugh, D. 46 Kennedy, C. 111 Keynes, Maynard 40 Khan, Sadiq 37 Lancet countdown report 160 LAND (landscape architecture firm) 102–3 land ownership 18–19, 27, 31–4, 87 land tenure 87 land use classifications 144 landscape led approach to metropolitan planning 200–7; model of 206

landscape processes 90 landscape representation 90–1 landscape urbanism 49–50, 114–16 landscapes as place 91–2 landscapes, conceptualising and valuing 4–9, 87–105; and aesthetics 91; bioregionalism 95–6; case study 100–5; civilised and uncivilised 18; co-benefits 98–9; definitions 6, 18; downstream effects 99–100; ecosystem services 96–100; and edges and boundaries 94–5; interpreting 7–8; and land ownership 87; landscape processes 90; landscape representation 90–1; landscapes as place 91–2; layers of interaction 7, 8; and scale 92–3; topologies of 6; valuing urbanised landscapes 96; see also metropolis, evolution of; metropolitan landscapes (concept) Latour, B. 44 Le Corbusier 23 Le Nôtre 22 Lee Kuan Yew 55 Lefebvre, H. 23 legislation and regulating behaviour 132–3, 134 Lele, S. 65 Letchworth Garden City, Hertfordshire (UK) 28–30, 31 Levitt, William 34 Levittown, New Jersey (US) 34 Limits to Growth (Club of Rome) 62 Lloyd Wright, Frank 23 London: greenbelt plan 27, 28; historically 24–5, 24–5; London Plan 36–7, 201, 202; parks 26 London Plan 36–7, 201, 202 malnutrition 160–1 Mannerist new towns 22–3 maps 18, 24–5 market economy 40–6; and compact city agenda 45–6; and green infrastructure 51–2; neoliberalism 41–5; and regulation 134–5, 138–9, 142–3, 144, 145–6, 147; and sustainable development 65–7 Marks, G. 118 Masdar City, UAE 188–92, 191 Matsuoka, R.H. 6 McHarg, I. 19, 62, 113 McKnight, S. 25 mental health 165 metropolis, evolution of 17–37; first metropolitan landscapes 26–8; garden cities 28–31, 29–31; the plan 24–5;

Index   213

suburban landscape 31–5, 33; utopian vision 20–4, 25; see also landscapes, conceptualising and valuing; metropolitan landscapes (concept) metropolitan, concept of 9–12; definition of 9, 11 metropolitan landscapes (concept) 3–15; classification of 88; diverse characteristics and nature of 10; first metropolitan landscapes 26–8; interactions of 4–12, 8, 205–6, 206; metropolitan imaginaries 14; metropolitan strategies 13; metropolitan trajectories 12–13; and planning 10–11; see also landscapes, conceptualising and valuing; metropolis, evolution of metropolitanism 9–10 Meyer, E.K. 73 middle class 31, 32 migration, urban 10, 48, 172 Milan, Italy 100–5, 101, 104 Miller, R. 22 Mitchell, D. 90 monetisation 142–3 more-than-human thinking 178 More, Thomas 20, 21, 23 Morgan, William 24–5, 25 Mumford, L. 32, 34, 41 National Capital Commission (NCC), Canada 81 National Capital Development Commission (NCDC), Australia 76 National Environmental Protection Act 1969 (US) 62 negative externalities 136, 137, 139–41, 150 neoliberalism 41–2; and the Anthropocene 42–5; and sustainable development 65–6; see also market economy New Atlantis (Bacon) 20, 21, 23 new urbanism 46–7 new world 18–19 New York: Central Park 26, 140–1, 142, 147–8; planning 149–53, 150 Norberg, J. 119 Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) 88, 89 nutrition 160–1, 163–4 obesity 161 Ogilby, John 24–5, 25 Olmsted, Fredrick Law 26 Olsson, P. 119 open source software 88–9

open space planning 28, 161–2, 164–5, 168–9; see also parks Ottawa greenbelt 79–82, 80, 179 Our Common Future (WCED) 64, 67 Palimpsest 5 panoramic view 24 Parker, Richard 28–30, 31 parks: Birkenhead Park, Merseyside 26; Central Park, New York 26, 140–1, 142, 147–8; and health 26, 99, 198; New York Metropolitan Planning Area 151–2; and resilience 198; and urban heat island (UHI) 184 Paxton, Joseph 26 payments, and behaviour regulation 135 Peck, J. 41 pedestrians 32, 165, 171, 186, 191 Pennington, M. 65–6 performative aspects of the landscape 8 persuasion, and behaviour regulation 133, 135 physical activity 161–2, 164–5, 166, 168–9 Pincetl, S. 111 Pinder, D. 29 place, concept of 91–2 planner’s triangle 70–2, 71 Plater-Zyberk, Elizabeth 46 playgrounds 147 policy, concept of 3–4 pollution: air pollution 159–60, 162–3, 173; in Beijing 173; as externality 136; and health 159–60; and integrated land– water landscape management 202–3; policy approaches 162–3; and regulation 148; water pollution/quality 159–60, 162–3, 173 positive development agenda 201–5 positive externalities 136, 138, 139–41 prescriptive regulation 134, 135 private sector: and accountability 74; and common pool resources (CPR) 140, 141; and green infrastructure 52; and land ownership 87; and neoliberalism 42; and planning 42; purely private goods 138–9, 145–6; and regulation 138–41, 145–6, 147; and urban space management 74; see also market economy project-based urban experiments 119–20, 121, 167–9, 200, 203–4, 206–7 psychologically equivalent temperature (PET) 185 public goods 134, 139 public landscapes 87; see also parks

214   Index

public parks see parks public transport 32–4, 125–6, 150–1, 197 purely private goods 138–9, 145–6 racism, and private suburban estates 34 Radburn (US) 30, 32, 33 Radiant City 23 Rasmussen 123, 124 ratings schemes 66–7, 73, 179 recreation see open space planning; parks reflection of heat 186 reflective index 88, 89 regionalism 95 regulation 131–53; applying externality principle 140–3; appropriate mix of 138–40; and benefit 142; case study 149–53; proposed management framework 143–8; regulating behaviour 132, 132–8, 134–5; and risk 141; social objectives of 133, 134–5 Renaissance 22, 23, 24 renaturing 51, 191 renewable energy 179–80 Repton, Humphry 27 resilience: and adaptability 197–9; and adaptive governance 119, 166–7; definition of 67; in Milan 104–5; and metropolitan systems 196–200; and transformability 200 retrofitting greenery 180 rewards, and regulation 137 risk 141 rivalry 145, 144–8 Rogers, S.C. 22 Romans 18 Rowe, P. 10 Russell-Clarke, J. 73 Sallis, J.F. 165 Salt, D. 6, 67, 92–3, 119, 120, 122, 167, 168, 196, 197 Salzman, J. 133, 134–5 satellite technology 19–20, 88, 89 scale 6–7, 92–6; and adaptive cycles 114–15; and adaptive governance 120, 120–1; bio-regionalism 95–6; edges and boundaries 94–5; and health policy 166, 166–9; and regulation 140, 141 scale of interest 6–7, 93, 120 scenic representation of landscape 90 Schama, S. 18 scientific philosophy 22–3 Seaside, Florida 46–7, 47 sedentary lifestyles 161–2, 164–5 settler societies 18–19

shade 98, 139, 184, 185–6 Shashua-Bar, L. 184 Sihlongonyane, M.F. 94 Simmonds, I. 186 Singapore 51, 55–8, 57 Singapore Index 58 sky view factor 185–6 social sustainability 63, 103–4 solar farms 179–80 spatial data 88 spatial scale 6–7, 93, 120 spill-overs 117, 137 sprawl 32, 46, 47, 49, 94, 125, 180 stakeholders 9; citizen engagement 50, 65, 74, 78, 103, 117, 173–4; and governance 109–10, 116, 118–21, 206–7; in Milan 102, 103; and scale 92–3 standing (legal term) 143 Stein, Clarence 28, 30 Stone, R.J. 99 street trees 98, 99, 171, 184, 199 stress reduction 165 subsidiarity 109, 117–18 suburban landscape 10, 19, 26–7, 29, 31–5, 33 surface materials 186 surveys 18, 19, 24–5, 35 sustainability 61–82; adaptability 197–9; case studies 75–82; challenges of 73–5; conceptual weaknesses of 64–8; definitions of 63–5, 67; ecological footprint 110–11; history of 62–8; interpreting sustainable development goals 68–73, 68, 70; and landscape led approach to metropolitan planning 200–7; and metropolitan planning 70–5; positive development agenda 201–5; and resilience 196–7; social sustainability 63, 103–4; and standing 143; and urban metabolism 111–12; WHO 2030 Agenda 157; see also climate change; decarbonising the metropolis; urban greening Sweden 126–7 systems theory 207 systems threshold 198–9 Tacitus 18 Tapper, N. 186 taxes, and behaviour regulation 134–5 technology: eco-cities 190–2; green 67, 73, 180, 187, 190 temperature change: psychologically equivalent temperature (PET) 185; rising 160; urban cooling 178, 181–2, 183,

Index   215

184–5, 186, 188; urban heat island (UHI) 50, 160, 182–7, 199 Tesla 200 Thwaites, K. 91 Tickell, A. 41 TOD (transit oriented development) 47 tradeable permits 134 tragedy of commons 136 transformability 167, 200 transit oriented development (TOD) 47 transnational governance 126–7 transport: cars 32, 34, 149, 197; and planning 149–53; and resilience 197; public transport 32–4, 125–6, 150–1, 197; in suburbs 32–4, 123; transit oriented development (TOD) 47 trees: carbon sequestering 179; and co-benefits 98–9; common pool resources (CPR) 139–40; ecosystem services 139–40; greening strategy in Singapore 55–6, 57; Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) 88, 89; and pollution 173, 179; and regulation 139–40, 141; and resilience 197; and risk 141; street trees 98, 99, 171, 184, 199; and urban heat island (UHI) 183, 184 Tri-State Trial Network (US) 150 triple bottom line (TBL) 68–9, 68, 70, 70 undernutrition 160–1 undeveloped landscapes 179–80 United Arab Emirates, decarbonising the metropolis 188–92 United Nations: and access to open space 161; Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development 63; Framework Convention on Climate Change 63; Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 63, 177, 204; World Charter for Nature 63; World Commission on Environment and Development 64, 67 United States: Central Park 26, 140–1, 142, 147–8; garden cities 30–1; new urbanism 46–7, 47; regulating behaviour 132, 149–53; suburban landscape 32, 33, 34; sustainability 62; territorialisation of 18–19 Unwin, Raymond 28–30, 31 urban canyon 185–6 urban cooling 178, 181–2, 183, 184–5, 186, 188 urban ecology 49, 50 urban entrepreneurialism 41–2

urban forests 179; see also trees urban greening 7, 203; biological approach 187–8, 191–2; eco-cities 191–2; and ecological modernisation 66–7; green city agenda 48–51; green infrastructure 51–4; greening strategies 179–81; London Plan 37; Singapore 55–8; technological approach 187; and urban cooling 178–85; and urban heat island (UHI) 183–5; see also decarbonising the metropolis; sustainability; trees urban heat island (UHI) 50, 160, 182–7, 199 urban metabolism 111–12, 202 urban migration 10, 48, 172 urban morphology, and urban heat island 185–6 urban sprawl 32, 46, 47, 49, 94, 125, 180 urban village 5 Utopia (More) 20, 21, 23 utopian vision 20–4, 25; garden cities 28–9; suburban landscape 32 valuing urbanised landscapes 96 vegetation: eco-cities 191–2; Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) 88, 89; urban heat island (UHI) 183–4; see also trees Versailles (Palace and Gardens) 22 vision, concept of 17–18; utopian vision 20–4, 25 Waldheim, C. 49 Walker, B. 6, 67, 92–3, 119, 120, 122, 167, 168, 196, 197 water: consumption of in Abu Dhabi 190; desalination 190; integrated land–water landscape management 202–3; pollution/quality 159–60, 162–3, 173; and urban heat island (UHI) 183–4, 185 wetlands 52, 207 Wilson, E.O. 51 wind, and urban heat island 185 wind farms 179–80 World Health Organisation (WHO): 2030 Agenda 157; definition of health 157; and malnutrition 161; and pollution 159 Wright, Henry 28 Wright, T. 152 Xia, Y. 163 zero-carbon approaches see decarbonising the metropolis zero-waste 190