Urban Social-ecological Systems Research Articles

Modeling teleconnected urban social–ecological systems: opportunities and challenges for resilience research

ABSTRACTUrban social–ecological systems (SESs) have progressively become more interdependent in their information, resource, material, energy and waste flows. The evolution of those systems has been studied through a variety of concepts (including central place theory, urban ‘metabolism’, etc.). New frameworks on teleconnections have synthesized and extended past theory, but the relevance of the type, degree and spatial structure of the interlinkages for the resilience of urban systems is understudied. We explore the evolving nature of the interlinkages of cities, resource bases and resilience using two approaches: (1) we review literature on urban systems, teleconnections and resilience and (2) we develop scenarios of a stylized network of urban SESs and examine the system-level resilience of each scenario to external shocks using a mathematical biology model. Our results show how factors such as resource consumption, extraction and population migration drive system-wide resilience at different levels of teleconnection of urban systems.

Analysing scale, quality and diversity of green infrastructure and the provision of Urban Ecosystem Services: A case from Mexico City

Fostering urban resilience requires a social-ecological systems approach that considers the ecological and social feedbacks of cities. In this paper we argue that Urban Ecosystem Services (UES) could increase urban resilience; and that resilient UES depends directly on the quantity, quality and diversity of the green infrastructure that produces them. The case of the western boundaries of Mexico City is used to map and assess these issues. We classified the different settings of green infrastructure as Service Providing Units (SPUs) and identified their provision of UES through remote sensing techniques; the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) combined with fieldwork verification in two scales of analysis, the local and regional. The results reveal that the vast majority of green infrastructure has low quality, hindering the provision of the UES required for building Mexico City´s resilience. At the regional scale, the growing pressures of urban development and the consequent reduction of SPUs threatens the delivery of provisioning ecosystem services while at the local scale, the low quality of SPUs threatens the provision of regulating ecosystem services. We argue that addressing these challenges could improve the design and implementation of environmental decision-making and urban policy towards more resilient urban social-ecological systems.

Demystifying governance and its role for transitions in urban social–ecological systems

AbstractGovernance is key to sustainable urban transitions. Governance is a system of social, power, and decision‐making processes that acts as a key driver of resource allocation and use, yet ecologists—even urban ecologists–seldom consider governance concepts in their work. Transitions to more sustainable futures are becoming increasingly important to the management of many ecosystems and landscapes, and particularly so for urban systems. We briefly identify and synthesize important governance dimensions of urban sustainability transitions, using illustrations from cities in which long‐term social–ecological governance research is underway. This article concludes with a call to ecologists who are interested in environmental stewardship, and to urban ecologists in particular, to consider the role of governance as a driver in the dynamics of the systems they study.

A Social-Ecological Framework for Urban Stewardship Network Research to Promote Sustainable and Resilient Cities

To realize more sustainable and resilient urban social-ecological systems, there is great need for active engagement from diverse public agencies, non-profit organizations, businesses, natural resource managers, scientists, and other actors. Cities present unique challenges and opportunities for sustainability and resilience, as issues and organizations are frequently intertwined in networks of relations. Understanding and leveraging the range of knowledge types, motivations, skills, and goals of diverse participants and their networks is fundamental to sustainable and resilient cities. As efforts to examine and understand urban stewardship networks continue to emerge, it is increasingly clear that there are no structured or systematic frameworks to guide the integration of social and ecological phenomena. Such a framework could facilitate planning new urban stewardship network research, and provide a basis for comparisons among cities and their urban stewardship networks. In this paper, we develop and present a social-ecological framework for examining and understanding urban stewardship networks. To illustrate this framework and provide examples of its prospective and evaluative utility, we use examples from the U.S. Forest Service’s Stewardship Mapping (STEW-MAP) network in the United States from Baltimore, MD, USA, New York City, NY, USA, San Juan, Puerto Rico, USA, and Seattle, WA, USA.

Towards an Urban Resilience Index: A Case Study in 50 Spanish Cities

Urbanization is a major driver of land use change and global environmental decline. With accelerated urbanization worldwide, it is essential to put in place new policies to conserve urban ecosystems, species and the services these provide in order to secure more sustainable, resilient and livable cities for the 21st century. In urban planning, the concept of resilience has broadly replaced the word sustainability. In recent years, resilience indicators have been gradually developed, but few address urban resilience from a social-ecological systems perspective. We develop a methodological framework to measure urban resilience, define an urban resilience index and apply it to Spanish province capitals as a case study. Results show that most Spanish province capitals are far from being resilient. We conclude that increased efforts to measure urban resilience should be in place, and we offer the urban resilience index as a theoretical framework for measuring resilience in urban social-ecological systems that can be gradually improved as more data become available.

When the economic engine stalls − A multi-scale comparison of vegetation dynamics in pre- and post-recession Phoenix, Arizona, USA

Often, we think of cities as designed landscapes, where people manage everything from water to weeds. But we do not fully understand what happens to these extensively managed landscapes when there is an abrupt disruption in economic activity. Considering the ability of cities to support plant biodiversity and their importance as human habitat, we studied pre- and post-recession landscapes across a gradient of human influence by asking: How did vegetation change over time from before the housing bubble to after the nadir of the Great Recession? And how did vegetation vary across sites at regional versus residential scales? This investigation used long-term vegetation data to examine diversity trends and responses to a novel economic disturbance in an urban social-ecological system. Overall, we found that plant species diversity increased through time across scales, while species composition homogenized in urban and agricultural areas. Residential yards, however, initially had high compositional heterogeneity which then increased over time. Changes in residential diversity were driven by substantial increases in the role of annual plants. This research improves our understanding of spatiotemporal vegetation dynamics in a coupled human-natural system, and specifically how urban vegetation dynamics are linked to anthropogenic influence. Ultimately, we recommend that city planners and managers consider economic trends when approaching community projects because of the interconnectedness of ecology and socioeconomics in urban landscapes.

Social-ecological innovation: adaptive responses to urban environmental conditions

Novel approaches to natural resource management, particularly those which promote stakeholder participation, have been put forward as fundamental ingredients for establishing resilient, polycentric forms of environmental governance. This is nowhere more pertinent than in the case of the complex adaptive systems associated with urban areas. Decentralisation of urban green space management has been posited as an element thereof which, according to resilience thinking, should contribute to the adaptive capacity of cities and the ecosystem services upon which they rely. Implicit in this move towards increased adaptive capacity is the ability to manage through innovation. Although the importance of innovation towards system adaptability has been acknowledged, little work has thus far been carried out which demonstrates that innovative use of urban green space represents a form of adaptive response to environmental conditions. The current paper reports on research which maps examples of organised social-ecological innovation (OSEI) in an urban study area and evaluates them as adaptive responses to local environmental conditions which may contribute to system resilience. The results present OSEI as a coherent body of responses to local social and environmental deprivation, exhibiting diversity and adaptability according to individual contexts. The study therefore provides evidence for the importance of local stakeholder-led innovation as in the building of adaptive capacity in urban social-ecological systems.

Forty-three years of Ramsar and urban wetlands

The Ramsar Convention is unquestionably the backbone of modern wetland management theory and practice. In the last four decades, it has mainstreamed wetlands in the environmental discourse and fostered the development of a comprehensive institutional framework for wetland governance. However, many of the wetlands that occur in human-dominated landscapes remain acutely threatened. The problem is most alarming in urban areas, especially in the fast expanding cities of the developing world, where unprecedented wetland destruction is leading to recurring environmental disasters. This triggers the question: are these failures in wetland governance purely induced by factors exogenous to Ramsar-based institutions or are they manifestations of conceptual drawbacks within Ramsar conceptual framework. Here, we investigate the success and failures of the application of the Ramsar framework's policy directives and management guidelines for urban wetlands using two rapidly expanding cities in South Asia as case studies – Colombo (Sri Lanka) and Kolkata (India). We conclude that despite its remarkable achievements over the past four decades, the Ramsar framework has several conceptual drawbacks that weaken its effectiveness in complex urban contexts. An inadequate recognition of the complex dynamics of urban social-ecological systems, an inadequate recognition of the political complexity of the policy processes, and a lack of an environmental justice perspective are the main shortcomings contributing to failures in urban wetlands governance. While we acknowledge that some solutions are contingent upon national and transnational level socio-political processes and reforms, we offer a set of technical and strategic modifications to the Ramsar framework that can significantly improve its effectiveness in urban wetlands governance.

Modelling Gardens as Social-ecological Systems Using Geodata: The Example of Watering and Landscaping of Urban Ecosystems

The paper discusses conceptual aspects of modelling gardens as urban social-ecological systems. These conceptual aspects build on previous research, and extend previous research into the nexus of urbanisation dynamics, through changing lifestyles, new aesthetics of urban nature, and the resulting landscape and garden design in urban residential areas that are causally related to changing urban water demand patterns. The focus of modelling gardens as social-ecological systems described here is on the ecological subsystem, and the links to the human subsystem, as formalized by the framework of urban ecosystem services. The paper presents and discusses theoretical and conceptual approaches to understanding and formalizing the spatial patterns of urban vegetated cooling as an ecosystem service, and to link this with an assessment of the potential water requirements to supply these services. Another link is through the impacts of gardens on urban biodiversity. Like parks, gardens are horticultural, ‘novel urban ecosystems’ that have potentially positive effects on urban biodiversity. This aspect is discussed here, but not explicitly included in the conceptual modelling approach. The pivotal role of geodata for modelling gardens as social-ecological systems is demonstrated in two respects: First, by describing the necessity to map relevant urban design features at high levels of detail, which can be achieved with object-oriented classification approaches applied to very high-resolution satellite imagery. Second, the framework concept of ecosystem services is discussed, reiterating why ecosystem services are spatially dependent. It is argued that the ecosystem services concept cannot be applied in a meaningful way if space and location as a framework for analysis, understanding, and presentation of results are neglected. The final section of the paper illustrates the use of the social-ecological systems and urban ecosystem services frameworks in conceptual modelling applied to the research question of understanding how garden management decisions contribute to thermally pleasant residential landscapes.

Explaining planted-tree survival and growth in urban neighborhoods: A social–ecological approach to studying recently-planted trees in Indianapolis

This research seeks to answer the question, what factors of the urban social–ecological system predict survival and growth of trees in nonprofit and neighborhood tree-planting projects? The Ostrom social–ecological system framework and Clark and colleagues’ model of urban forest sustainability inform our selection of variables in four categories in the social–ecological system; these categories are the trees, the biophysical environment, the community, and management institutions. We use tree inventory methods to collect data on the survival, growth, and the social–ecological growing environment of recently-planted street trees in Indianapolis, IN to answer our research question. We use a probit model to predict tree survival, and a linear regression model to predict tree growth rate. The following variables are positively related to tree success (survival and/or growth): ball-and-burlap or container packaging, a visible root flare, good overall condition rating, the size of the tree-planting project, planting area width, median household income, percent of renter occupied homes, resident tenure, prior tree planting experience, correct mulching, and a collective watering strategy. The following variables are negatively related to tree success: caliper at planting, crown dieback, and lower trunk damage. Additional variables measured have less clear connections to tree success and should be examined further. Given that models including variables from all four categories of the social–ecological system generally outperform models that exclude some components, we recommend that future research on urban tree survival and growth should consider the holistic social–ecological systems context of the urban ecosystem.

Resilience of and through urban ecosystem services

Cities and urban areas are critical components of global sustainability as loci of sustainability progress and drivers of global transformation, especially in terms of energy efficiency, climate change adaptation, and social innovation. However, urban ecosystems have not been incorporated adequately into urban governance and planning for resilience despite mounting evidence that urban resident health and wellbeing is closely tied to the quality, quantity, and diversity of urban ecosystem services. We suggest that urban ecosystem services provide key links for bridging planning, management and governance practices seeking transitions to more sustainable cities, and serve an important role in building resilience in urban systems. Emerging city goals for resilience should explicitly incorporate the value of urban ES in city planning and governance. We argue that cities need to prioritize safeguarding of a resilient supply of ecosystem services to ensure livable, sustainable cities, especially given the dynamic nature of urban systems continually responding to global environmental change. Building urban resilience of and through ecosystem services, both in research and in practice, will require dealing with the dynamic nature of urban social–ecological systems and incorporating multiple ways of knowing into governance approaches to resilience including from scientists, practitioners, designers and planners.

Opportunities for increasing resilience and sustainability of urban social-ecological systems: insights from the URBES and the cities and biodiversity outlook projects.

Urban futures that are more resilient and sustainable require an integrated social–ecological system approach to urban policymaking, planning, management, and governance. In this article, we introduce the Urban Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (URBES) and the Cities and Biodiversity Outlook (CBO) Projects as new social–ecological contributions to research and practice on emerging urban resilience and ecosystem services. We provide an overview of the projects and present global urbanization trends and their effects on ecosystems and biodiversity, as a context for new knowledge generated in the URBES case-study cities, including Berlin, New York, Rotterdam, Barcelona, and Stockholm. The cities represent contrasting urbanization trends and examples of emerging science–policy linkages for improving urban landscapes for human health and well-being. In addition, we highlight 10 key messages of the global CBO assessment as a knowledge platform for urban leaders to incorporate state-of-the-art science on URBES into decision-making for sustainable and resilient urban development.

Multiple Pathways to Sustainability in the City: the Case of San Juan, Puerto Rico

I examined the multiple visions of the future of the city that can emerge when city actors and organizations reconfigure themselves to address sustainability. In various cities worldwide, novel ideas, initiatives, and networks are emerging in governance to address social and ecological conditions in urban areas. However, cities can be contested spaces, bringing a plurality of actors, network configurations, preferences, and knowledge that shape the politics over desirable pathways for future development. I used the knowledge-action systems analysis (KASA) approach to examine the frames and knowledge systems influencing how different actors involved in the land governance network of the city of San Juan constructed visions for the future of the city. Results revealed four visions for the city coexisting in San Juan. Although sustainability is a goal that cuts across all four visions, they each optimized distinct dimensions of the concept. The contrasts in visions can be explained in part by competing frames of the urban social-ecological system and power asymmetries in the multiple knowledge systems coexisting in the city. I discussed the theoretical, methodological, and practical implications of the politics of sustainability for adaptive urban governance research and practice. The KASA approach can serve as a window into the adaptive capacity of the city by disentangling the competing ways that actors ‘see’ and ‘know’ the urban social-ecological systems. Most importantly, this approach offers a way of appraising sustainable pathways by revealing either the extent to which dominant social structures and cognitive patterns are being reinforced, or whether opportunities for innovative and transformative approaches are emerging in the city.

Toward an integrated theory of spatial morphology and resilient urban systems

We take the first step in the development of a new field of research with the aim of merging spatial morphology and resilience science. This involves a revisiting and reunderstanding of the meaning of sustainable urban form. We briefly describe the fields of resilience science and spatial morphology. Drawing on a selected set of propositions in both fields, we put urban form in the context of the adaptive renewal cycle, a dynamic framework model used in resilience science to capture the dynamics of complex adaptive systems, of which urban systems are prime examples. We discuss the insights generated in this endeavor, dealing with some key morphological aspects in relation to four key attributes of resilience, i.e., “change,” “diversity,” “self-organization,” and “learning.” We discuss and relate these to urban form and other social variables, with special attention paid to the “backloop phase” of the adaptive renewal cycle. We conclude by postulating ways in which resilience thinking could contribute to the development of a new research frontier for addressing designs for resilient urban social-ecological systems, and end by proposing three strategic areas of research in such a field.

Civic ecology practices: Participatory approaches to generating and measuring ecosystem services in cities

Civic ecology practices are community-based, environmental stewardship actions taken to enhance green infrastructure, ecosystem services, and human well-being in cities and other human-dominated landscapes. Examples include tree planting in post-Katrina New Orleans, oyster restoration in New York City, community gardening in Detroit, friends of parks groups in Seattle, and natural area restoration in Cape Flats, South Africa. Whereas civic ecology practices are growing in number and represent a participatory approach to management and knowledge production as called for by global sustainability initiatives, only rarely are their contributions to ecosystem services measured. In this paper, we draw on literature sources and our prior research in urban social-ecological systems to explore protocols for monitoring biodiversity, functional measures of ecosystem services, and ecosystem services valuation that can be adapted for use by practitioner-scientist partnerships in civic ecology settings. Engaging civic ecology stewards in collecting such measurements presents opportunities to gather data that can be used as feedback in an adaptive co-management process. Further, we suggest that civic ecology practices not only create green infrastructure that produces ecosystem services, but also constitute social-ecological processes that directly generate ecosystem services (e.g., recreation, education) and associated benefits to human well-being.

Structuring institutional analysis for urban ecosystems: A key to sustainable urban forest management

A decline in urban forest structure and function in the United States jeopardizes the current focus on developing sustainable cities. A number of social dilemmas—for example, free-rider problems—restrict the sustainable production of ecosystem services and the stock of urban trees from which they flow. However, institutions, or the rules, norms, and strategies that affect human decision-making, resolve many such social dilemmas, and thus, institutional analysis is imperative for understanding urban forest management outcomes. Unfortunately, we find that the definition of institutions varies greatly across and within disciplines, and conceptual frameworks in urban forest management and urban ecosystems research often embed institutions as minor variables. Given the significance of institutional analysis to understanding sustainable rural resource management, this paper attempts to bring clarity to defining, conceptually framing, and operationally analyzing institutions in urban settings with a specific focus on sustainable urban forest management. We conclude that urban ecologists and urban forest management researchers could benefit from applying a working definition of institutions that uniquely defines rules, norms, and strategies, by recognizing the nested nature of operational, collective choice, and constitutional institutions, and by applying the Institutional Analysis and Development framework for analysis of urban social-ecological systems (SESs). Such work promises to spur the desired policy-based research agenda of urban forestry and urban ecology and provide cross-disciplinary fertilization of institutional analysis between rural SESs and urban ecosystems.

Positive dependency and virtuous cycles: From resource dependence to resilience in urban social-ecological systems

We argue that purely deficit-based perspectives regarding urban social-ecological systems (SES) and the human populations within them represent barriers to these systems' ability to move from undesirable system states into more desirable, sustainable ones. We characterize issues such as individual ecological identity, human exemptionalism, anthropocentrism, and resource dependence. We examine notions found in the resource dependency literature, where we trace the roots of ideas about dependency. We use this literature as a spring board into the possibilities of an antipodal notion of resource dependency potentially applicable in urban contexts, what we call positive dependency. Next we describe two possible sources of positive dependency in urban SES, urgent biophilia and restorative topophilia, followed by a brief discussion applying positive dependence to urban systems challenges and management. We conclude with the importance of recognition of positive dependency as a precursor to the development of a heightened sense of ecological self and sense of ecological place in urban SES, and provide insights and suggestions for further research into civic ecology practices that may enhance positive dependency on and investment in ecological assets that contribute to positive ecological senses of self and place, and the importance of these to achieving sustainable, resilient urban futures.

Urban forestry in India: development and research scenario

Urban green spaces are integral components of urban ecosystems, contributing to enhanced environmental quality, quality of life and sustainable urban development. Scientific evidences in the last two decades have emphasised the crucial necessity of green areas within urban social-ecological systems to ameliorate several problems of city-culture. Role of parks and gardens has become much more important in view of ever-increasing population of cities, particularly in developing countries. Tangible and intangible benefits provided by these green assets are often taken for granted by the public and some city authorities. Like other developing economies, India is being urbanised at a faster pace. Generally, cities of developing countries have lower per capita availability of urban green spaces in comparison to the developed countries. Urban forestry studies, involving technical and social science aspects are lacking in developing countries, including India. Per capita availability of urban green spaces in some important cities of India and need for urban forestry research on various aspects of urban greens of the country is discussed in the article.

English

Urbanized ecosystems and urban human populations are expanding around the world causing many negative environmental effects. A challenge for achieving sustainable urban social-ecological systems is understanding how urbanized landscapes can be designed and managed to minimize negative outcomes. To this end, an interdisciplinary Ecological Landscaping conference was organized to examine the interacting sociocultural and ecological causes and consequences of landscaping practices and products. This special issue of Cities and the Environment contains a diverse set of articles arising from that conference. In this introductory paper, we describe the meaning of ecological landscaping and a new conceptual framework that helps organize the topic’s complex issues. The essence of ecological landscaping is a holistic systems-thinking perspective for understanding the interrelationships among physical-ecological and sociocultural variables that give rise to the patterns and processes of biodiversity, abiotic conditions, and ecosystem processes within and among individually-managed urban landscape parcels. This perspective suggests that 1) variables not considered part of traditional landscaping and 2) the effects of landscaping within an individual parcel on variables outside of it must both be considered when making design and management decisions about a parcel. To illustrate how these points help create a more holistic, ecological approach to landscaping, a traditional ecosystem model is used to create a framework for discussing how sociocultural and physical-ecological inputs to a landscape parcel affect its characteristics and outputs. As exemplified by papers in this issue, an integrated sociocultural-ecological approach to the study of urban landscaping practices and products is needed to 1) understand why and how humans design and mange urban landscape parcels, 2) describe how the combined characteristics and outputs of many parcels give rise to the emergent ecosystem properties of urbanized areas, and 3) develop effective educational programs that catalyze adoption of sustainable landscaping choices and practices. The paper concludes with a discussion of challenges for the future of ecological landscaping research and practice, and a list of preliminary guidelines for ecological landscaping. We hope that this special issue will increase understanding, visibility, and research about the value of an ecological approach to urban landscaping.