Aesthetic and Spiritual Ecosystem Services Provided by Urban Sacred Sites

Peter De Lacy,Charlie Shackleton

doi:10.3390/su9091628

Abstract

The range and use of ecosystem services provided by urban sacred sites has hardly been considered in studies of urban ecology, sustainability and human wellbeing. This paper examines the perceived ecosystem services supplied by green spaces or gardens associated with places of religious worship and appreciated by worshippers in a mid-sized town in South Africa. A questionnaire with open, closed and Likert scale questions was administered at 30 places of worship (25 with gardens and five without). Respondents identified a wide diversity of ecosystem services provided by gardens, with social ones being more recognized than ecological, and economic services the least. Approximately two-thirds of respondents visited a sacred site garden weekly or more often. The majority of respondents (96%) felt that a garden was necessary because it added to their feelings of connection with God, or helped them relax and so be better able to concentrate, and 54% stated that a garden enhanced their overall spiritual experience. Regression analysis revealed that aesthetic appreciation of a garden was significantly related to woody plant species richness, number and basal area in the garden. On the other hand, spiritual experience was positively related to woody plant basal area, but not species richness nor tree number. Neither size of the garden, nor number of years the respondents had been vising a particular sacred site had any influence on the rated spiritual or aesthetic experiences. These results reveal the widely appreciated ecosystem services provided by urban sacred spaces and their centrality in enhancing spiritual satisfaction for some.

Highlights

The importance of ecosystem services generated and used in urban areas is increasingly being recognized [2,3,4], setting the foundation for a revolution in the manner in which sustainable cities are conceptualized and designed [5,6]
Urban dwellers are as dependent on ecosystem services as their rural counterparts, the origin of many of the services that they consume is often spatially divorced from their immediate surroundings
Most food consumed by urban residents is grown well away from the city and transported in, water is captured in high-lying catchments and piped to consumers, and carbon sequestration is typically several orders of magnitude greater in reasonably intact wildlands and forests outside the city than in city centers or suburbs [7]

Summary

Introduction

The importance of ecosystem services (sensu MEA [1]) generated and used in urban areas is increasingly being recognized [2,3,4], setting the foundation for a revolution in the manner in which sustainable cities are conceptualized and designed [5,6]. There is much work reporting on the recreational use of formal and informal urban green spaces with high benefits to users in terms of relaxation, exercise and socialization [8,9,10] These activities provide many benefits to the users, including improved physical health [11,12], mental wellbeing and reduced stress [13], higher levels of social interaction [14,15], increased sense of place [16] and increased environmental knowledge [17]. These must be considered as underestimates because none have looked at the full range of cultural ecosystem services provided or used

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