Also posted on Medium.

​Call it biking the urban wild. Portland, Oregon, is developing a citywide off-road trail network, called the Portland Off-road Cycling Master Plan. Conventional planning processes will produce a network of single-track trails through natural areas, instead of the much more common paved bike/pedestrian trails. Portland is reported to be inspired in this effort by the broad popularity of mountain biking within the area, but the advantages of “wild” urban trails over conventional multi-use paths are worth considering anywhere. A network of single-track through the city is a network of urban wilds, with a built-in community of people to use them. 

What are these advantages? First, there’s the array of benefits to physical and mental health that come with exposure to everyday nature, particularly vegetation. Key to this list are lower perceived stress, greater time spent exercising, and improved mental focus. These three benefits lead to a host of secondary effects, from lower blood pressure to better mood and social relationships. Research on this nature-health connection generally finds that benefits are significant, but small, meaning that the ideal way to benefit from them is through activities done on an everyday basis. Thus, the trail through the natural area across the street is potentially much better for your health than the trail at the state park twenty miles away. It’s the everyday that makes the difference. 

Key to the the mental health benefits is mindfulness, or the necessity of being present and focused on the moment. The more rugged surface of unpaved trails promotes this, as does the narrowness of single-track. The limited views through trees and shrubs promote the feeling of being away from the city, even in locations well within city limits. This feeling of being away, or “extent,” is also key to achieving health benefits from nature, as is the feeling that a landscape can’t be understood completely at a glance, that it contains scope for exploration. 

Biking or running on a trail is obviously good for the trail user’s health, but it’s also good for everyone else’s health, in terms of the climate change mitigation benefits of urban wilds. The abundant vegetation of natural areas in cities sequesters carbon, which aids in offsetting climate change. These same natural areas also help cities adapt to the impacts of a warmer, more volatile climate, through lowering the temperature of adjacent areas and creating more area for rainwater from storms to infiltrate.  

Urban trail networks of any kind fight climate change by promoting human-powered transportation over cars, but an urban off-road network in an outdoorsy town like Portland goes further. If many people - Portland found 12% of county residents - are already doing single-track recreation, they are likely driving to those trails. Trails in the city eliminate at least some of those trips. This is not to say that trail users will never drive out of town, but as with everything having to do with lowering our impact on climate change, it is what you do routinely that matters, not the special occasion. It's the Tuesday night ride, not what you do one Saturday each summer.

An urban wild network promises major advantages to local wildlife and its ability to withstand the disruption of climate change. A substantial challenge for wildlife of warming temperatures and changing precipitation levels is the ability to move fast enough to keep pace with a livable climate. For some creatures, this means moving up in elevation or farther north to stay with cooler temperatures, while for others it means moving to stay with adequate moisture levels. Cities and many suburbs are obstacles to this movement, because they interrupt the habitat necessary to allow wildlife to travel. This fragmentation of habitat is offset by urban wilds, especially those that occur in a connected network, because the wild areas provide wildlife corridors, a kind of safe route for creatures to move through the city. Even manicured lawn, like in the top photo, is inhospitable to many organisms. Even though it’s green, it lacks sufficient shelter and may well lack adequate food and water sources as well. 

There are more benefits - reduced maintenance, improved views from adjacent properties - but this short list illustrates the advantages of a wild trail network like this in an urban area, that are not available with a more conventional trail network. Intriguingly, a wild trail network may be much less expensive, and therefore far more feasible, to build in urban areas that already have ample amounts of vacant lots, brownfields, and other urban wild spaces. Traditional trails are surprisingly expensive to build, so the cost difference between simply adding single-track to existing wild areas and clearing those areas,  establishing lawn, and constructing an asphalt trail, could be quite substantial. Since urban wild spaces are usually seen as waste space, using these spaces more or less as they are to get a desirable recreation and health benefit is well worth considering, for many places other than Portland. Maybe your town needs some killer in-town single-track, too.

Data* is one of the big ideas of our time, or better said, it’s a big idea following on the heels of a mammoth established trend. This makes it much more powerful than if it were merely an idea, because it’s an idea resting on a foundation of facts. Those facts are that our lives and opinions and environments are documented to a completely unprecedented extent, and that documentation - that data - is available to third parties. Frequently it’s publicly available, or available to anyone with the skills and savvy to figure out how to get it, or it’s the property of some Big Authority somewhere. Regardless, it’s not really under your control, particularly because there’s so much data that tracking what you produce is a full time job. Social media, photo sharing, fitness trackers, web use, remote sensing, financial transactions…the list goes on and on. 

Besides being the plot of nearly every dystopian movie ever, the rise of Big Data is a mega-trend. That makes it a good candidate for the biggest influencer of the next 25 years, which concerns us in this course and anyone planning to work anytime before 2041. I imagine (hope) that includes most of us.

So what does data mean for urban environments and their residents? What does it mean for urban design?
That’s a question without a ready answer, which is a good reason to study it: any question worth asking doesn’t have a ready answer. So, how to go about answering an answer-less question? 

Look at what’s already been done around the edges of the question. In this case, that includes data-based plans for very large cities, performance landscapes, and citizen science. Green building, to a large extent, relies on data, particularly in the myriad rating systems required to achieve various certifications or credentials. These are based on checklists, and checklists, like surveys or quizzes on Facebook, are data. These certifications also strive to be objective and quantitative in their measurements, so they rely on thresholds and ranges - data again.   

At the outskirts of data + design, things get really weird, meaning futuristic and mind-blowing, with just a hint of sinister. Environments that respond to individuals via real-time data. Buildings joining the “internet of things.” This is all pretty hard to imagine, but there’s this thermostat already on the market. Research on office systems that adapt to individual users is going on right here right now, at the Syracuse Center of Excellence indoor environmental quality lab.  

Most of these projects differ in scale from our interests, with the metropolitan region plans at one end and that thermostat at the other end. What does data mean for the neighborhood or site scale?

If you’ll indulge me in a Gen X moment, I’ll observe that back in the day when I was doing my first degree in landscape architecture (ca. 1995), we made a lot of assumptions and generalizations about site functions and use because we had no data. You could talk to the client, visit the site in person, and collect your aerial photos - taken from a real plane about every five years and available only in hardcopy -  from the county offices. If the project went forward and the client hired you, you’d have a survey done - with actual instruments on the actual land - and then you’d know the topography and the dimensions of structures. You could sometimes get as-built drawings of buildings. It was nothing like the data glut we live in today. So design decisions often got made according to what we “knew,” not what we really knew, following, for example, the boss’s pronouncement that “no one plays tennis anymore.” Therefore: the park plan without a tennis court. 

My point, digital natives, is that the atmosphere or paradigm then was data scarcity, so we created ways of doing things that compensated for or disguised that lack. Tradition, culture, and convention have great influence in design; perhaps they do in every profession. Realize that much of “the way we do it” may/is/could be based on this data scarcity. A big part of earning a professional degree in any design field is learning “the way we do it,” so be wary.

How will urban design practice embrace the era of data?

Let’s find out.




WHAT DO I DO FOR CLASS? 

• Read this post and click on all the links within it. 
• Read the articles; review (that means look through, but don’t read every word) the websites.
• Think about what you agree with, what you disagree with, and what doesn’t make sense to you. 
• Come to class prepared to talk to your classmates about it.

*Yeah, I know it’s plural. In keeping with the informal tone and breezy feel of this blog and my classroom approach, I’m sticking with the common usage of “data” as singular.

What's the cost to wildness of updating infrastructure?

“Urban wild” immediately brings to mind corridors, the linear routes of infrastructure like interstates and power lines.  Paul Gobster lists such corridors as one type in his typology of wildscapes, so I’m not alone in this observation. 

Let’s think about these corridors as spaces. These are perfect examples of forgotten spaces that we train ourselves not to see, yet they are large swathes of the city. Utility corridors and freight rail corridors tend to run along the backs of properties - or better said, the properties around them align along the corridors - so it’s easy to miss them in everyday life. These corridors are negative space framing the positive space of the lots around them. The more overgrown (wild) they are, the more they disappear. Interstate corridors are really a contradiction, because we drive through them constantly. Yet what forgotten invisible spaces they are. Here in Syracuse and back in Ann Arbor, and surely a host of other places, interstate corridors are popular spots for homeless camps, which is the best proof you could have that most residents don’t see these spaces. They also collect trash - lots of trash- and are frequent sites for graffiti, both suggesting that these are seen as spaces no one owns. Invisible, yet right in front of you.

Why are these spaces wild? Sometimes they aren’t. In Indiana my husband and I own a rental property in a subdivision that’s bisected by high voltage lines. The space under these lines is kept mowed, if not manicured, and includes some businesses, restaurants and offices. Within the subdivision, the space under the lines contains a retention pond that the houses look out on. Elsewhere in my home state, the interstate right-of-way used to be (maybe still is) kept mowed. You probably know other stretches of highway that were mowed like this. Although interstates are federal, of course, the mow/don’t mow decision varies by state: Indiana mows; Michigan doesn’t. The interstate right-of-way is suddenly wilder as you go north. 

It’s more popular now to not mow. We know why that is. It might be habitat or carbon reduction or some other ecological rationale, but primary or secondary rationale is always money. Mowing cost seems negligible, but…it’s all the time, over and over, year in, year out. Someone pays for it, and why is that, again? Why mow all of it, or any of it? Over the past few decades it’s become more popular to plant wildflower mixes (sometimes natives, sometimes not) in interstate margins like this and stop mowing. The same belt-tightening reflected in the maintenance (or not) of transportation ROWs is surely in play with utility ROWs as well; even less reason to mow land no one sees. Possibly there is advantage in having utility corridors and substations and other assorted bits and pieces of the equipment that keeps the lights on be unnoticed by the general public. You don’t vandalize what you don’t see, and neither do you pay too much attention to what’s going on there or fuss over trees topped to stay clear of lines or whatever. It’s the power company’s business what happens in their little wilderness, and maybe they’d prefer that no one else go there.

Except…people do go there - see above re: homeless camps and graffiti. See all previous discussion about transgressive spaces and cues to care and loose space. Wild spaces are loose spaces, the international waters of urban life, where anything can happen. And if a utility corridor is a wild space, well, it’s loose, too. 

So infrastructure corridors are wild spaces, socially and naturally, but why “vanishing?” At the risk of mixing a metaphor between “invisible” spaces and “vanishing” spaces, follow this logic: 

Energy and transportation are on the cusp of a sea change (to add another metaphor into the mix). Use of fossil fuels faces questions about supply and peak oil, political instability, and the increasingly serious need to address climate change. There are great gains to be made in efficiency, including the landscape-scale issue of where we live in relationship to where we work, and how we get around. Much of our transportation infrastructure in the US dates from the years following World War II, when the interstate highway system was constructed, giving rise to a million suburbs on the public dime. We know this story: the suburbs boom, the cities bust, and we all drive - a lot, alone, in Detroit steel, then massive SUVs. Denser development is more sustainable development. Denser development requires less transportation, is better suited to mass transportation, and at the very least, is more feasibly served by a diffuse grid of surface roads than by limited access highways.  This isn’t the end of interstates, but they’ll be less emphasized in the future, and probably share the space of their roomy corridors with other uses and transportation modes. And yes, perhaps some will be dismantled or converted to other uses or downsized. Exit one type of infrastructural wild.

What could make a much bigger difference is a switch to more distributed energy production. Distributed production means energy produced near its point of use, at many locations, in contrast to one large generator, like a power plant. Distributed production is inherently more resilient, because it’s many instead of one, and in many locations instead of one - the eggs are separately arrayed over a large space instead of being all in one coal-fired basket. Distributed production dovetails nicely with clean energy generation, and with smaller-scale energy systems (microgrids) that can remain functional with or without the larger grid in operation. So distributed energy production seems to be the way of the future for several reasons. 

If you think about it, and most of us don’t, the current electrical system requires a lot of moving power from place to place, to speak in a decidedly non-technical way. Electricity is generated at large power plants, then travels along a series of increasing smaller lines until it reaches the outlet in your wall. It’s a lot of ground to cover, to say nothing of transporting the fuel to the power plant to begin with. As electricity travels, some of it dissipates, so distributed production means less of that loss; a benefit maximized by placing generation next to use. It seems inevitable that this will mean vacating some of the existing system of lines and structures that currently move electricity from power plant to use. 

High voltage corridors are large. Look at an aerial photo, and they stand out, x-ing across miles. That they are corridors is in itself valuable, because corridors are difficult, impossible, really, to assemble through land that’s already owned by many different entities and developed into different uses and buildings. A vacated corridor is an intact corridor, and it could be intact for something else, even if it’s merely a right-of-way or easement and not owned outright by the electric company. Corridors preserve protected routes for wildlife movement, helping counteract habitat fragmentation. This aspect of utility corridors is even more important in urban areas, where the surroundings may be entirely built out and thus inhospitable to most wildlife.

It’s worth thinking about and assessing what they do for us in their current state, these infrastructural urban wilds. They do all the things vegetation and permeable surfaces and wildlife do for you anywhere - all those ecosystem services, cognitive and health benefits, views out your back door. We take them for granted, because we don’t see them, remember? But should they vanish, we’d notice the effects. We’d feel the loss. Better to notice and value what they do for us before that time comes.

Last spring I was captivated by a local expert’s prediction that within the next five years, black bears will be living in the Syracuse metro area. This casual observation came as part of a lecture involving the link between increasing tree canopy coverage in a given city and the number and type of urban wildlife, as the increase in trees makes the city more hospitable to critters of various sorts. I’m sure I’m grossly oversimplifying a sophisticated relationship here, but the general idea I took away was:  more tree canopy means bigger animals, and more of the little ones. 

Since then I’ve been speculating about what a city like Syracuse might do to prepare for the arrival of urban bears. Urban wildlife, particularly deer, already conflict with human residents in a number of ways. Deer, though, are also beloved by many, who see them as beautiful and graceful (which they are). This leads to vigorous debate with other residents who see deer as garden-munching, traffic-accident-causing hazards (which they are), as well as carriers of Lyme disease (which they only sort of are, but that’s another post). 

Bears, though - bears! Even though the black bear is the least scary US bear, it’s still plenty scary to us tenderfoot Easterners who think of bears as something glimpsed in a national park vacation. I’m a lifelong outdoors person, but I’ve spent nearly all my life in the Midwest or Northeast, and I’ve seen a black bear once - briefly, from the car, in the Adirondacks, a wilderness (really, a “wilderness”) where everyone expects bears to be. A bear in the backyard, on the playground or loping down Main Street is an entirely different proposition. How do we live with the biggest and scariest urban wildlife? Can we co-exist with wild neighbors that aren’t just cute, but potentially dangerous? 

Perhaps the bigger question is whether we have any choice. Not long ago, coyotes were unheard of in Eastern metro areas, but now they are common, if elusive. If more tree canopy brings more wildlife, within the context of the re-foresting Northeast, and your city, like Syracuse, has tree canopy increasing (something of an anomaly - also another post), then… here come the bears…?

So now what? What would a Bear City be like? To borrow from erstwhile Detroit mayor Coleman Young, Anchorage today is your city tomorrow. It may seem ludicrous to draw parallels between postindustrial Syracuse and what my Alaskan friend and former student Meghan Holtan calls “the OG wild city” way up north in Alaska, but when it comes to urban bears, Anchorage knows how it’s done. Enter the fascinating Anchorage Urban Bears project by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. In their words, this study “has provided unique insights into the lives and habits of urban bears through the use of video cameras attached to GPS collars, similar to ‘GoPro’ cameras that film from the viewpoint of the person wearing the camera.” The project’s online Story Map combines GIS, text, and video to illustrate the habits and habitats of several black bears (!) and brown/Grizzly bears (!!!) within metro Anchorage.

Take a look for yourself here.

These two resources were recently brought to my attention. Current students may find them very useful for those upcoming final papers and projects (including your paper for City Wild!); everyone else, feel free to browse!

Green Cities: Good Health 
University of Washington, College of the Environment
A comprehensive overview of benefits of urban nature, with many links to other resources and an extensive bibliography for further reading

The Nature of Cities
An online magazine/blog/community about all aspects of, well, nature and cities