Susan Dieterlen
  • Home
  • Bookshelf
  • City Wild Blog
  • Workshops and Classes
  • About Susan
  • Connect

City Wild
Unraveling Urban Life and Space

Spooky Hollows: Fear and Protecting Nature

10/8/2018

 
Picture
Image from pixabay.com. although honestly this could be any house in Connecticut.
It’s October. Every door creaks, every picture has eyes that follow you, every call is coming from inside the house. Night falls sooner, mist swirls, dry leaves - or footsteps? - whisper along every path. Bats fly out of the tower on the old house at the edge of town, and surely phantom hitchhikers wait along every lonely road. 

Picture these spooky scenes. Where do you see them happening? Everybody knows a spooky place. A place that makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up. Not just dangerous, but eerie. Maybe not now, but years ago when you were a child, you knew a place like this - the haunted house, the old cemetery, maybe just the basement or attic. 

Remember it, then ask yourself: have you really outgrown spooky places? What scares you, and where is it? Maybe it’s Area 51. Or your favorite Bigfoot hotspot. Or Point Pleasant, West Virginia, or (the former) Edmonson, Kentucky. 

We’re justified in fearing some places, because they are contaminated, a scarier scare for the fully grown than whatever’s going bump in the night. Paranormal or aliens or radiation, eerie places are fascinating in a way that your run-of-the-mill dangerous place is not. Show me a dangerous intersection, and I’ll show you a place you avoid but never think about. But what’s eerie combines fear with mystery - and mystery is a potent, enduring universal attractant. 

Mystery, in fact, is one of the aspects of landscapes we find attractive, according to research on the subject. That general rule is this: that we are intrigued by scenes that we can’t immediately understand fully, because they invite exploration and hint that there’s more to be learned from them. Spooky places are mysterious, but they also scare. Two reasons to notice them, remember them, and care what happens to them, for good or ill. Another general rule: we place less value on what’s overgrown and unkempt, because those places look like no one else values them. But what good is a well-maintained spooky place? It’s just ordinary. A greater feeling of abandonment makes an eerie place eerier, and perhaps that much more mysterious/frightening. Our feelings about them are, in a word, contradictory. 

Also contradictory is that spookiness can protect a place. We aren’t indifferent toward places we fear, and indifference is the real enemy here. Indifference is what makes a place invisible, and that invisibility makes it ripe for a new Wal-Mart or subdivision or what have you. That protection can create a space for nature. To see this in action, you wanna see something really scary. Like Chernobyl.

In 1986 an accident at Ukraine’s Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant caused one of its reactors to explode. At least 50 people were killed immediately, and 120,000 residents were evacuated. The site remains radioactive today. A vast 1,000 square mile exclusion zone surrounds the site, including the abandoned city of Pripyat.  

Today, Chernobyl is famous not just for the disaster, but also as a haven for wild horses, elk, boars, bison, and most especially wolves. There’s room for them to live and thrive (radiation notwithstanding) because we humans are too afraid to enter that place enough to disturb them. Chernobyl is the perfect example, because we’re afraid not just of the place, but of objects and resources, like timber, that might be extracted from that place, and it’s a big place - 1,000 square miles! Big enough for wolves to thrive. 

Nuclear contamination is authentically terrifying, but there’s also a thousand horror stories about mutants, people or animals or viruses, and about you yourself becoming mutated. We can’t see radiation or contamination, so we can’t tell if it’s gone or increasing or creeping up behind you. That’s sinister. At this point, thirty-odd years on, the sheer size of the abandoned area around Chernobyl is unnerving because who knows what’s really in there? If you go in and get into trouble, no one can hear you scream. It’s self-perpetuating spooky.

Bring contamination closer to home, subtract the radioactive wolves, and you come to Love Canal. Love Canal is a former subdivision near Buffalo, NY, made infamous as a toxic waste disaster. The homes and, incredibly, an elementary school, were built on the site of an abandoned canal project (hence the name) that was used as a chemical waste dump in the 1940s and 1950s. A disease cluster in the neighborhood prompted grass-roots investigation, revealing that chemicals were leaching through groundwater into area basements and yards, as well as the school playground (!). A lengthy and intense struggle by neighborhood activists (mostly women) led to the relocation of over 900 families, and eventually to the creation of Superfund by the federal government in 1980. The disaster exponentially increased public awareness of the dangers of industrial pollution, particularly in working-class areas (like Love Canal) and minority neighborhoods.

Today the site of these vanished homes is a parcel of approximately one square mile, comprised of meadow, more or less, and scattered trees. It’s a savanna with crumbling driveways and roads, surrounded by chain link fence. A landscape that’s terrifying, if you’re old enough to remember Love Canal as breaking news; unsettling, if you are one of the residents across the road wondering about the genesis of their ailments; welcoming, if you are a rabbit or possum or deer. 

Industrial contamination is scary stuff, and the nature of pollution underground, in ground water, or in the soil, or in your basement courtesy of your sump pump, is, again, hidden and mysterious in its extent and severity. They say it’s gone. Is it? The idea that we’ve unleashed dangers we can’t control, be they industrial or nuclear, is a very disturbing one - and a fascinating one, as illustrated by most Twilight Zone episodes, a lot of science fiction, and any scary story about repeating names while looking in a mirror.   

Spooky/ nature spaces don’t have to be famous. I used to live near Split Rock, an overgrown abandoned quarry and industrial ruin in Syracuse, New York. Already you see the eerieness, right? - “abandoned quarry,” “industrial,” “ruin” - but there’s more: in 1918 a factory making explosives for World War I exploded, creating a horrific fire that killed fifty men and critically injured fifty more.

Today the Split Rock  quarry is a big blank spot on the map, approximately 900 acres of woods and brush - and according to some, paranormal activity. It’s a place where roads dead end, with a few rusty “Danger - no trespassing” signs for atmosphere. There’s plenty of good reasons to leave the place alone: old quarry cliffs and holes, industrial ruins, worrying contamination from that munitions plant, and the very real danger of getting lost in the deep, dark, possibly haunted woods.  While not truly urban, Split Rock is close enough to the city to keep me alert for urban ills. There may be a few of those there, plus the occasional ghost hunter, and surely mountain bikers using the unofficial trails. But mostly, Split Rock is left to the deer and the coyotes and smaller creatures. 

Set aside the specters and the chemicals, look at these places as natural landscapes, and you’ll find they look pretty good. Sinister places benefit us just like any natural area, benefits like cleaner water, reduced flooding, less urban heat island, and carbon sequestration, the whole ecosystem services  bundle. These processes are going on in each of these places; some of them are doing all three. They benefit us even while we fear them, and their enduring mystery helps keep us from destroying them, thus protecting their ability to continue helping us. 

Fear can create space for nature to recolonize, recover, even thrive. Contaminated sites are especially good at discouraging development, partly because they tend to have sticky legal issues about what’s there and whose fault it is and who should do what to clean it up. 

Yet plenty of eerie places have no natural value. Most buildings reputed to be haunted are just buildings - ecologically speaking, the most haunted house is just a house, unless it’s got an overgrown yard. Lots of horrifyingly contaminated brownfields are redeveloped  into utterly mundane things, like freeways or strip malls, and people forget what they were. Even the sites of authentically horrific events like Civil War battles, can struggle against encroaching development. Sites like Chancellorsville, where 24,000 men died in 1863, arguably could benefit from being more spooky, thus helping preserve them. 

What makes the difference, turning an unsettling place into a natural space as well? Is there a way to harness spookiness to help preserve natural areas? Can we use this without it backfiring and creating a place so eerily fascinating that people love it to death? 

Back in the ‘90s, there was an interdisciplinary effort to design a warning landscape to scare away humans (or any other intelligent life) in perpetuity from nuclear waste storage sites like Yucca Mountain and the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. Yucca Mountain, in Nevada, has since gone kaput as a doomsday nuclear storage facility, but the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in neighboring New Mexico is socking away nuclear waste underground, and still asking how to keep people away long after our civilization and language have crumbled into dust. 

Fear, made to act as a warning. Spookiness to save your life. Think about it, maybe while you ignore the tapping at the window and tell yourself the shadows on the stairs aren’t moving.

Also posted on Medium.



















Wild & Healthy: Urban Nature at Work for Mental Health and Climate Action

11/10/2017

 
Picture
(Photo by author)
 Also posted on Medium.

(Based on my November 3, 2017, presentation at “Community Renewal and its Discontents,” a conference at Albany Law School’s Government Law Center) 


Picture a vacant lot. If nothing comes to mind, the one in the photo will do. What would you find there? Litter, probably. Rats, perhaps. Maybe an old tire or two. Your first answer is probably not “climate change mitigation” or “better mental health.” But expectations aside, you could be getting both from that vacant lot and other accidental urban natural areas.

Weeds fight climate change? Well, yes, but not weeds especially - plants do. The list of ways urban trees mitigate climate change impacts is impressive, but they boil down to this: cleaner air, cleaner water and less flooding, cooler local temperatures, and better livability in the city generally. Trees aren’t weeds (except when they are), but any plant growing on that vacant lot shares some of the salient characteristics. They all photosynthesize. They all raise the relative humidity around them. They all sequester carbon within their structures. They all allow more rainwater to soak into the often-compacted urban soil. At core, “weeds” vs. “trees” is a distinction of human perception, and these climate benefits depend on what plants do and how they interact with the physical world, not how or whether we see those plants. True, some of the benefits of urban trees depend on the larger overall size of the trees to cast shade, but then again, some weedy species, like tree of heaven (Ailanthus altissima) or buckthorn (Rhamnus spp.), can get pretty big. Bottom line: look at that vacant lot again, and take a deep breath.

While you breathe, relax, because that same urban wild is also benefiting your mental health. Again, the list of mental health benefits from urban trees is lengthy, and again, it’s mostly about trees. In summary, humans evolved in natural environments, and therefore, we do better in some important ways when we can see natural environments. We think better, we feel better, and we treat each other better. Research on these effects usually shows a small benefit, but a (statistically) significant one, and these are easy benefits to get, with little downside. The research on benefits to mental health falls into three categories: benefits related to getting more exercise, benefits related to better social cohesion, and benefits related to stress reduction. Do you get these benefits from weeds as well as from trees? Yes, at least some of the time, but what matters here is how we see the weeds. Is that vacant lot a danger or an oasis? Are those weeds wildflowers or a home for vermin? Is that a deer or an assailant hiding in the underbrush?

That ambiguity makes it essential that we know whose health we’re trying to improve with these urban wilds and their benefits. Who you are makes a difference in how you see a given wild, and who you are also often makes a difference in where you live within a particular city. The demographic group, particularly race/ethnicity and gender, of the viewer can make a difference in how s/he views unmaintained vegetation, particularly whether it is threatening or desirable. The level of environmental education a person has, as well as how urban or rural a place s/he grew up in, can also matter.

More useful than sweeping statements about perception and demographic groups: it matters where you are in proximity to the wild area in question. You might enjoy the view from your 10th floor office while I worry about the overgrown lot across the street, but we could be looking at the same vegetated land. Each health benefit of urban wilds has its own geography. Some benefits, like heat island reduction, are best experienced by those closest to the wild site. Some costs, like depression of property values, are, too. Other benefits, like vegetated views and downstream reduction in flooding, may be gained by people too far away from the wild site to be affected by nearby burdens like increased pollen count or disease-carrying ticks. The same urban wild can simultaneously provide benefits to some and burdens to others, or some benefits and burdens to the same people at the same time. It’s not simply good or bad. It’s…both. 

The question that matters, then, is how to manage wilds in your city for the most benefit and least burden to those most in need. What parcels are more valuable as wilds than as redevelopment, and why? What neighborhoods have the greatest health needs and the fewest resources with which to meet them? For parcels that remain wild, how best can they be managed to be healthy for nearby residents and positively viewed by the general public?

Climate change and healthcare share an urgent need for on-the-ground action that transcends contentious debate. Both are complex problems poorly suited to soundbite solutions. Both are negatively affecting the health of countless people, right now, today. If you had something that could make a difference in both areas without the need for political will or legislative action, wouldn’t you use it, even if the difference it made was small? Look out your window. That small difference may be closer than you think.

Single-Track Saves the City

8/22/2017

 
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.
Picture
Single-track trail traversing a "wild" urban area; in this case, a former quarry.
Picture
Conventional pathway in a manicured park setting.

Crows in the City

1/13/2017

 
Picturewww.helenair.com/
It’s that time of year again - time for crows to congregate in the most unfortunate of city parks, streets, and yards. Sinister seems invented to describe the atmosphere of hundreds of crows roosting in the darkness above you, rustling and softly calling to each other, unseen yet…sinister, a scene out of Poe appropriate to this season. And, as an author in the Michigan Daily noted during my time in grad school, “the crow sh*t falls like rain.”

Places like the University of Michigan’s campus and Forman Park and Oakwood Cemetery in Syracuse struggle with how to pull the crow welcome mat back in. Screeching recorded bird calls seem to be a favorite tactic of campuses. Other places try fireworks or gunshots. Really, not much seems to work reliably. Of interest here is that crows are recognized as being remarkably intelligent birds, with recently published research even reporting their use of tools.  A memorable 2010 episode of PBS' Nature showed how crows remember the appearance of people who hassle them, and react when the same person returns. This same intelligence and responsiveness to their environment must be the key to persuading crows to roost in places we deem acceptable. 

In the winter months I often see flocks of crows flying overhead, high enough and dispersed enough that you don’t notice them at first glance. As you watch, though, you realize that crows continue to pass overhead, on and on, because there are a very large number in the flock. They are all going somewhere, and I speculate that when I see these flocks in the late afternoon, they are heading for roosting spots in town (an attempted murder! Sorry. There had to be at least one “murder” pun). If they are flying from out here, 15 miles away, to spots in town, the choice of those roosting spots must be intentional, because it’s obviously not proximity or convenience at play. What makes a good spot for a murder? What dictates the landscape preference of crows?

I don’t know. Crows aren’t my thing. But revealing the physical environment as a key factor in life in cities is, and so I say: there are environmental characteristics that must matter here, and if we identify them, we can manipulate them, and make the crows decide to sleep somewhere else. There’s got to be somewhere else, though - like every “undesirable” in the city, crows have to be somewhere, so banishing them from one place means their arrival somewhere else. The task of research-based urban crow management might then be to eliminate those characteristics from places where we don’t want crows, and add those characteristics to places where we do want them. For a bonus point, we could draw crows to places where their abundant droppings (falling like rain!) could add needed fertility to the soil. You probably don’t want that to be any place you’re growing food for human consumption, but a degraded brownfield could be the ideal site.

So what do crows like? If I list sites where I’ve personally witnessed mass roosting of crows, I list the north edge of Syracuse’s Oakwood Cemetery, Syracuse’s Forman Park, and the University of Michigan’s Diag (a central campus quad). Far from an exhaustive list, but even with just these three sites, we can compile a short list of possible crow-attracting environmental characteristics. First, most obviously: mature deciduous canopy trees. In these three sites, those canopy trees have open understory beneath them, with either lawn or low-growing perennials and shrubs. Perhaps the crows feel more secure with open space beneath the canopy and less cover for predators. All three sites also have substantial masonry buildings adjacent to them, and at least some paving - perhaps the thermal mass raises the nighttime temperature? It’s interesting that all three sites have a fair amount of human activity, including both cars and pedestrians. These aren’t isolated natural areas. The cemetery edge abuts the edge of campus, specifically a back drive serving faculty parking, a busy place at dusk in the fall and winter. Given the demonstrated attention of crows not just to human activity, but to specific humans, it seems implausible that this is a coincidence. Perhaps the crows want to be near us because we scare off more dangerous wildlife. Perhaps they know we generate tasty trash and roadkill. Perhaps they like the heat from our buildings and cars. Maybe we’re just entertaining.

To you and me, a tree might just be a tree (well, really, to me a tree hasn’t just been a tree since 1992, when I took my first plant identification class), but to a crow, I very much doubt trees are all the same. Might the species matter? Is an elm better than a maple, but not as good as an oak?

Crows don’t mind noise, artificial light, and urban air quality. Do these environmental characteristics actually attract roosting crows? The question here is whether crows really prefer urban sites to rural ones for winter roosting, or whether we humans only notice them in urban sites. If a murder roosts in a forest and no one is there to complain, would we know about it? Urban heat islands would seem to be a likely explanation, but surely these intelligent birds have their reasons for selecting between the many possible roosting areas available in the warm city. We have to look at the wild city through crow’s eyes to see those reasons. 

Climate Change and the Shape of the City

7/25/2016

 
Written version of my August 10 talk to the English for Graduate Studies Programs for Fulbright Scholars, through the English Language Institute at Syracuse University.

What does climate change have to do with the shape of the city? Climate change is one of the defining challenges of this era - perhaps the defining challenge - and as such, it’s a good bet that it will touch or is touching every aspect of life. That includes how we live in cities, and what kinds of environments cities create for people. Since that’s my area of focus as a researcher, this post examines that aspect of climate change. Climate change is so mammoth in its impact that from a single parcel of land, that occupied by the Syracuse Center of Excellence, we can see a number of landscape elements that are important to consider.
How people use land, including transportation, density, adn what happens to “used” land, is fundamental to understanding the drivers of climate change in the US, and why they are resistant to change. So if you're interested in in climate change and why it's happening and what to do about it, you should be interested in cities. Even if you live elsewhere, you should be interested in US cities with regard to climate change. We’re a disproportionate producer of greenhouse gases (GHG, but we're also a leader in how cities are shaped and run. For good or ill, other people who are involved in the shaping and running of cities in other parts of the world look at American cities as models, much in the way that American cities were largely modeled upon European cities. 

Most of the world's population lives in urban areas. Some of you may have heard about this: fairly recently we hit this milestone of global urbanization, where more than half of the world population lives in urban areas. This percentage is predicted to continue to rise to two-thirds of the world's population by 2050. So in that way you could say cities are our future - all of our futures. Nearly 90% of that predicted increase of urbanized people is predicted to be in Asia and Africa, most especially India, China, and Nigeria. In the US we urbanized a long time ago, back in the 1920s. Currently US cities are home to just under 63% of the US population, but our cities comprise only 3.5% of our land area. Thus a key part of dealing with climate change is to handle how people live in cities. 

Photo: Looking west from the Center of Excellence

If we look westward from the Center of Excellence, we see a massive elevated highway. This is Interstate 81, which bisects Syracuse from north to south. Since 81 was built after the city was already established, it was built over a number of neighborhoods, displacing people, their homes, and their businesses. Syracuse right now is in the midst of a debate about the future of this highway, since it has reached the end of its designed life span. 

Interstate 81 exemplifies two key characteristics of American cities: the organization of the city around the private car, and sprawl. “Sprawl” here means that American cities tend not to have a defined clearly visible boundary between the city and the countryside or rural areas outside the city. Instead it's a diffused boundary, as lower density development spills into the countryside and takes up a lot of land. These characteristics are intertwined with transportation. Transportation, it turns out, is also incredibly important to climate change. Transportation accounts for about one-quarter of greenhouse gas emissions both in the US and globally. This is a lot, but it’s even more when you consider that in the US it's the number two source of greenhouse gas emissions after electricity generation, so it's not just that it's a huge chunk - it's the second largest one. Here in Syracuse it's actually even more of our total energy consumption, about 36%, so it's more than one-third of Syracuse's total energy consumption. Globally, there there there is predicted growth in the amount of greenhouse gas emissions due to transportation, mostly due to rapid growth in car use, especially in developing urbanizing countries like China. So transportation is key to climate change strategies. Here in the US, we lead the world in urban passenger transportation carbon dioxide emissions. Our carbon dioxide emissions due to transportation are actually projected to fall by 2050 in part due to redensification, or the trend of people moving back into city cores.

In 2013, President Obama put forward a climate action plan, with the basic proposal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions 26 - 28% below 2005 Levels by 2020. Compare those numbers: 26-28% to 25%, and you’ll see that transportation could account for almost the entire reduction on its own. So if we all stay right where we are, and no goods or products move from place to place - that is, if all transportation ceases - we’ve got the necessary reduction solved! Since we obviously can’t do that, we need to do transportation better. How do we do this? It’s simple: we drive less. Or we drive using clean fuels that don’t create GHG emissions. 

So what's the problem? Let's look again at Interstate 81. This is part of the American interstate highway system, which was constructed after World War II. It is a national system, including all 50 states (even Hawaii!) and all major cities. The situation Syracuse has of the elevated freeway going right through the center of the city, displacing neighborhoods and bisecting the city, is common. The original rationale for the interstate highway system was to aid national defense, modeled on Germany’s Autobahn (but with speed limits). However the impact that it has really was to promote suburbanization, which is building at the outside of of cities. The flip side of that is disinvestment in urban areas, like what you see around you in Syracuse. So the interstate highways moved people and money out of the cities and into the surrounding area. These consequences were in part unintentional and in part intentional consequences, because there were also a number of federal and state policies that favored suburban development for decades. These policies, with the interstate highways, set up a common dynamic where people with the economic power to choose live in the suburbs but work in city centers. Transportation between those two areas is therefore key to that way of life. The same dynamic has also created a number of challenges for urban areas in terms of being pleasant and attractive places to live. 

Interstate highways like 81 also work against more sustainable transportation directly. Elevated highways form a physical and psychological barrier to ground-level transportation in all forms. Imagine yourself walking down the street. From here, you can walk straight to downtown Syracuse. It’s about a mile, or 1.6 kilometers, an easy walk, flat, with a sidewalk the whole way. It’s easy to find your way to downtown, but people do not walk and do not ride bicycles because they don't want to ride or walk under 81. You can see it's forbidding. There’s no physical barrier here where we are looking, but it's inhospitable. That has to do with the way that we as humans perceive environments around us, with what we prefer and what we don't prefer. These perceptions make this feel dangerous to us, even if it's not. Interstates like 81 also work against sustainable transportation by lowering property values around them. Simply put, people would rather live, work, recreate, and invest in properties that are not right next to the structure. It’s ugly. The traffic is really loud. There's also issues with air pollution from all those cars, which leads to health problems like asthma and environmental lead (from the bad old days when gasoline included lead). 

As you can see, there’s quite a list of problems with this interstate and creating sustainable transportation. We know the sustainable transportation is very important to fighting climate change, so why not just get rid of the interstate? We don’t, because we already have the ring of suburbs around Syracuse, and all those people living in the suburbs and working in the city.  If you eliminate the interstate, how do you get from the suburbs to the city core? This highlights an important point about land development and land use patterns: they have a lot of inertia once established, because it costs so much to change the physical landscape and it's a lot of work. Our next stop looks at that process of changing the landscape and how some kinds of construction are better than others with regard to climate change.

Photo: Looking south from the Center of Excellence

This construction site is what’s referred to as infill construction or brownfield redevelopment. “Infill” simply means that you are filling in an empty space within existing development. “Brownfield” means that there was a building on this site before. It’s often assumed to mean that the site is contaminated, although that’s not necessarily the case. Brownfields also include sites that are indeed contaminated, including with frightening things like dioxin. 

In any case, brownfield redevelopment like this is more sustainable than the alternative, which is building outside city areas. Why is it more sustainable? There's less need for transportation, and remember, transportation is about a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions. If you live and work in buildings that are adjacent to each other, you just walk next door and there's no greenhouse gas emissions. There’s also less need for new infrastructure, which is not as obvious. Infrastructure includes things like utilities and roads. When you build outside a city, you need to extend utilities - natural gas, electricity, water, sewerage - to the new development. You have to have a road to get there. In contrast, if you build on a site like this one, all those utilities are already here. Clearly the road is already here. You save all  that concrete, all that pipe, all that wire and cable and conduit. All of that has an ecological footprint - it's all manufactured somewhere, so using less of it is more sustainable. Infill or brownfield redevelopment also preserves more land outside cities for natural areas, which can sequester carbon or mitigate some impacts of climate change like urban heat island. Brownfield redevelopment may also be more sustainable because it frequently involves buildings and site work that are more compact, using fewer resources. 

Despite all this, much construction in the US is the opposite of infill/brownfield redevelopment: greenfield development. Greenfield development means building on new land, kind of a ridiculous idea, because of course there is no “new” land. All land was used for something else before. In this case, it’s usually agricultural land or natural vegetation like forests. Greenfield development is seen as far easier, cheaper, and often more desirable than building on lots within the city. It tends to be more predictable, and unpredictable delays in construction are costly. Urban sites tend to have surprise environmental issues, when you dig into the soil and discover it is contaminated with something. There can also be delays when historical artifacts are uncovered, since construction has to halt while the artifacts are evaluated for historic significance. There's also the more basic requirement of the need to work around and preserve existing structures, in contrast to building in an open field. On this site, there’s several valuable elements immediately adjacent to the construction: the wall of the Center of Excellence, the pavement around it, the trees along the street, even the street itself.

Because greenfield development is more popular, there are a number of federal and state grants and various incentives to redevelop brownfields. However they tend to focus on very large brownfield sites like old factories, landfills, or shipyards, and omit small sites like gas stations and dry cleaners. This site adjacent to CoE actually included an old gas station. Finally there is a consumer preference in the US for suburban or exurban housing. People in the business of developing land are aware of those preferences and they cater to them. We tend to think that new is always better, perhaps due to some bias in American culture toward seeing ourselves as breaking new ground and taming the wilderness. Our final stop on our walk around the CoE site looks at what happens to sites like this when they're not redeveloped.

Photo: Looking north from the Center of Excellence

Looking at this view is somewhat tricky, because the element I want to discuss here is actually what’s not there: the land just across the street. People who study cities refer to this as vacant or underused land. This is one of the outcomes of what we talked about previously, including transportation, lack of investment in urban areas, and the difficulty of infill or brownfield redevelopment. Sites like the one across the street are not really used for anything. They tend to sit like this for a long time. These same dynamics also produce abandoned buildings, and abandoned buildings tend to become sites like this in our litigious society. It’s far easier for people to hurt themselves in an abandoned building then it is on a vacant site. People also tend to tear down buildings because they see it as as being cleared for a new use or to be more attractive to new investors. It makes “used” urban land a little bit more like that greenfield. If you look carefully, you’ll see that the vacant parcel across the street has a bit of asphalt on it, and that asphalt has some yellow stripes. If you look at an aerial photo of the site, you can see that those stripes are parking spaces. Underused urban parcels often are nominally used as parking lots, even if no one parks there. There's some possibility of income from parking in urban areas. More than anything, however, this parking lot is merely a placeholder. It’s what this land will be until it becomes something else.

Vacant and underused land like this site indicate that infill development isn’t happening. They also increase the perception of urban neighborhoods as undesirable, dangerous places, full of contaminated land and other health hazards. If this was a valuable parcel, wouldn’t someone be living on it, or build a business on it, or turn it into a park? Regardless of the facts, the perception of parcels like this one can be quite negative, and in turn they influence the perception of the entire urban neighborhood. People on foot or on a bike may be reluctant to pass vacant lots like this one, especially at night, so they also act to suppress more sustainable modes of transportation.
​
In these three views from one parcel of land, we’ve seen a number of major factors in why land use in the US is a driver of climate change. We’ve also seen some reasons why our use of land resists change to more sustainable practices. Climate change is such a gigantic challenge that it’s sometimes difficult to grasp - it is, after all, *global* warming. It helps to realize that some important aspects of it are not exotic or huge in scale - that they are actually just across the street.

---------------------------------------------
Facts and sources:

  • U.S. Cities are Home to 62.7 Percent of the U.S. Population, but Comprise Just 3.5 Percent of Land Area. Source 
  • 54% of global population lives in urban areas; predicted to rise to 66% by 2050. Source
  • Nearly 90% of predicted increase in Asia and Africa, most especially India, China and Nigeria.  Source
  • More about "shrinking" postindustrial cities: The Shrinking Cities project
  • Transportation, driven by rapid growth in car use, has been the fastest growing source of CO2 in the world; US leads the world in urban passenger transportation CO2 emissions, and predicted decline due to re-densification. Source
  • Transportation is second-largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions in US, at about 25%. Source
  •  Transportation produces roughly 23 percent of the global CO2 emissions from fuel combustion; increase in car use in developing countries means major growth. Source
  • Syracuse: transportation is 36% of total energy consumption. Source
  • US government policy's history of promoting suburban growth over urban investment, including interstate highway system and redlining - excellent source for further reading is this classic (a book!): Jackson, K. T. (1985). The Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States. New York, NY, Oxford University Press.​
  • Infill vs. greenfield land development and climate change: Basic information, with links to many, many more in-depth sources here.























What to do with a postindustrial river?

2/27/2015

 
From Stephanie
Milwaukee’s Menomonee Valley: A Sustainable Re-Industrialization Best Practice 
By Christopher De Sousa

UIC Institute for Environmental Science and Policy

Full story in pdf

The industrial wasteland/wilderness in Chicago's backyard

7/12/2013

 
Picture
From Tim:
Wilderness South of Chicago: Beauty Amid Industry
05/08/2013 
by J. Green


Full story

    Categories

    All
    Behavior
    Brownfields
    #citybynext
    Climate Change
    Design
    Design X Deficit
    Diversity
    Energy
    Graffiti
    Health
    Infrastructure
    Invasives
    Lectures
    #pandemic
    Planning
    Public Art
    Publications
    ReForest
    Resilience
    Ruins
    Shrinking Cities
    Student Work
    Transgressive Use
    Vacancy
    Wildlife
    Winter Places

    About

    Assorted drafts, previews, and outtakes from the book I'm currently writing about the impact of vegetation and neglect on urban life. I also take other thoughts for a test drive here, including nascent design and research ideas.

    City Wild carries on the discussions and spirit of my 2011-2014 class, City Wild Seminar. This began as a forum for websites, articles, and other intriguing stuff sent to me (Susan Dieterlen) by current and former students, colleagues, and other well-wishers.  

    Thanks for visiting! If you want to be notified about new blog posts and other publications, please fill out the form below and put "blog updates" in the Comment section. 

    RSS Feed

      Keep Me Updated!

    Submit

    Archives

    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    January 2020
    July 2019
    October 2018
    September 2018
    July 2018
    May 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    November 2017
    October 2017
    August 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    November 2016
    October 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    June 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.
  • Home
  • Bookshelf
  • City Wild Blog
  • Workshops and Classes
  • About Susan
  • Connect