Growth and green in the age of Web 2.0

In our Urban Laboratory this autumn, we decided to study Urban Growth and Ecosystem services in the age of Web 2.0. Three topics, seemingly different, but intimately connected. You can hardly find a planning project that does not destroy some of the urban green. People, however, tend to like their parks, forests and fields, and so the conflict is ready. How do planners cope with it? The easy solution - too often heard - is that they couldn't care less, since the residents are simply a bunch of NIMBYs, opposing everything that sounds like planning, with no respect for the hard realities of urban development, namely growth.

Could there be an alternative? This is not an easy question, but we may approach it from two perspectives. First, we need to get rid of the assumption that urban growth is a natural phenomenon, something that simply happens like weather or flooding, and which we should only be prepared for. It is also made by us: we invite people into our cities by providing housing, services, jobs, and a good living environment - including the urban green. If people like it, it must be something valuable (in fact its value to us as human animals can even be proved scientifically, but let us not go into that, at least not yet).

My point here is that we are in fact actively designing the qualities of our cities, we are not forced to react to some natural force. Politics of emergency ("there is no alternative") is not the right answer here. We could even decide not to grow, but this would come at a price: housing and property prices would probably go skyrocketing. I am not suggesting this, but rather a different mindset. Cities are made for hundreds, even thousands of years. They may grow, thrive and decline innumerable times during their history, and we should try to avoid shortsightedness in their planning.

But the urban green is not only liked by people, it also has a logic of its own. This may be a second problem in our traditional mindset: we tend to see construction as if a drawing on top of a green background; it is what is left over after planning. Thus it is no wonder that our cities often consist of small, unconnected patches of green, in addition to some larger recreational areas. It is interesting to compare this relationship with other urban functions. We don't think that streets are what is left over after the buildings are erected. And we don't think that ideal sites for housing are those that remain between industrial plants. But why do we think in this way when the urban green is considered? Like streets, they do - or should - form networks. Like housing areas, they are homes for several species. Like industrial plants, they produce food and materials for us. And like schools and shops, they do provide us services - the ecosystem services. And believe or not, these services are, for us, a matter of life and death.

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Some additional food for thought:

Hansen, R., Frantzeskaki, N., McPhearson, T., Rall, E, Kabisch, N., Kaczorowska, A., Kain, J-H., Artmann, M. and Pauleit, S., 2015. The uptake of the ecosystem services concept in planning discourses Ecosystem Services, vol.12, pp. 228-246.

Maes, J., et al., 2014. More green infrastructure is required to maintain ecosystem services under current trends in land-use change in Europe. Landscape Ecology. 1-18. doi: 10.1007/s10980-014-0083-2

Niemelä J., Saarela ,S.R., Söderman T., Kopperoinen L., Yli-Pelkonen V. Väre S., and Kotze, D.J., 2010.Using the ecosystem services approach for better planning and conservation of urban greenspaces. A Finland case study. Biodiversity Conservation 19:3225-3243