marcszar_matrix_pt2_urbangreenwashing

Part 2 - Well-meaning wilderness preservation efforts have unintentionally led to urban greenwashing
 * //The Matrix - The Diminishing Returns of Technology//**

There has been a surge in interest in providing meaningful parkland and garden space in urban areas in the last decade - significant investments have been put into parks and green roofs, for example. But there has also been a worrying rise in obtuse, abstract notions of "green space" and "open space" in the public discourse - naive, misguided greenwashing strategies are used to suggest remedies for struggling urban centers.

The images above reflect this disconnect between rational and irrational thinking when it comes to providing urban parkland and gardening space. The top left image shows an urban vegetable and herb garden in the South End of Boston. The top right image shows a fanciful proposal for filling in Philadelphia's urban prairies with full-scale agricultural operations (wheat and corn fields). The image is a photo of Philadelphia's heavily-used and practical Rittenhouse Square. The bottom right image is a fanciful proposal for providing abstract urban "green space" by creating seemingly-wild expanses of useless green fields and by painting the sides of buildings green.

After decades of disinterest and disinvestment it is heartening to see a burgeoning interest in green design, especially in the fields of architecture and urban planning. "Green" concepts that have existed for generations in other countries - green roofs and allotment gardens, for example - are becoming increasingly popular in American cities. For example, the "missing teeth" (abandoned empty lots) in many cities are increasingly being converted into locally-managed community gardens - a good local example is the Capital District Community Gardens project in Albany and Troy, NY.
 * Introduction**

However, at the same time as we have absorbed useful "green design" lessons from other parts of the world, we have also fallen into a deeply-unfortunate habit of "greenwashing" - we often resort to spurious abstraction and we misapply sustainability lessons we've learned in certain design fields to totally inappropriate environments in our eager desire to be "green." In keeping with the first Matrix presentation's theme of "unintended consequences," this second Matrix presentation will discuss how we have taken the valuable lessons we learned from our efforts in land preservation and unintentionally misconstrued those lessons in our new effort to develop "green spaces" in our cities.

As a society we are particularly susceptible to greenwashing because we generally exert a strong desire to save "green spaces" and "old buildings." But why did we develop such a strong social consensus towards building and environmental preservation in the first place? After all, environmental and building preservationists are sometimes criticized for being excessive in their desire to save as many scraps of land or as many old buildings as possible, but their efforts are part of a larger contemporary desire to save as many old environments as possible. The preservation movement is rooted in a deep social awareness that emerged in the postwar era - we realized that the new environments we were building were much worse than the old environments we were losing.
 * A history of the wilderness and building preservation movements**

As J. H. Kunstler argues in //Home From Nowhere//, there never was a need for historic (building) and environmental preservation before the hyper-industrialization and suburbanization of the 20th century because it was understood that the new things we were creating would be an improvement over the old environments that were being replaced. For example, the clearing of a forest or a field was once deemed acceptable because something more valuable and useful - a compact, efficient, self-sustaining village - was slated to replace it. Today such pristine natural environments are more likely to be replaced with human habitats that most would deem (however grudgingly) undesirable and unlovable - industrial brownfields, big-box strips with seas of parking, or isolated low-density housing clusters. Hence it is not surprising that environmentalists have at times become militant and excessive (NIMBYism) in their desire to save as many wildernesses as possible from human development. There is inherently nothing lovable in the architecture of the big-box store, the strip mall, or the boring office park; thus we should not be surprised at the emergence of numerous and fierce local efforts against "growth" and development across the country.

Some of the earliest efforts at preserving vast expanses of wilderness began with John Muir in the early 20th century - he is credited for initiating efforts to preserve Yosemite National Park and Sequoia National Park, and he also helped found organizations for environmental preservation such as the Sierra Club.

Frederick Law Olmsted is another prominent figure who advocated for the preservation of wilderness areas in the late 19th century, but he is even better known for the many seemingly-natural parks he built in cities across the US - the most famous one is arguably New York's Central Park. Olmsted's parks are well known for their strong theme in replicating natural, "unspoiled" environments - this theme became particularly popular in 19th century park design because Americans were worried that their ever-expanding and overcrowded cities would soon spread out and cover up all the remaining countryside on their peripheries. Likewise other 19th century preservationists (John Muir et al.) focused much of their attention on saving the many still-unspoiled landscapes of the American West because it was becoming increasingly obvious that rapid expansion (the rapid growth of large-scale farming, hunting, ranching, railroading, and urbanization) would soon destroy the last available expanses of unspoiled land in the US.

The desire to preserve and replicate the natural environment was an effort to counter the effects of the rapid urbanization/industrialization of America in the 19th and 20th centuries, and that desire for replicating/preserving the natural environment is still with us today. After the distractions of world wars and economic depression in the first half of the 20th century, the preservation movement gained momentum in the 1960s and 1970s. We are quite familiar with the positive results of the "second wave" of environmental preservation of the 1960s/1970s - the Clean Air and Water Acts, the early campaigns against litter, the legislation for wetlands/forest/mountaintop protection, etc. But a new movement - historic building preservation - began to rise alongside the burgeoning environmental preservation movement. The lessons we learned from environmental preservation - that the old environments we were losing were far superior to the new land uses we were introducing - we applied to the human habitat as well. We realized that the old buildings we were losing were far better in their architectural/urban design qualities than the new buildings we were putting up to replace them.

The historic preservation movement arose in New York as an angry response to Robert Moses' destruction of large swaths of the city in the 1940s and 1950s to make room for new highways and housing projects, but the movement was particularly galvanized and outraged when the city's famous and elaborate Penn Station was demolished in 1963. An October 30th, 1963 //New York Times// editorial famously said of the station's demolition, " Any city gets what it admires, will pay for, and, ultimately, deserves. Even when we had Penn Station, we couldn’t afford to keep it clean. We want and deserve tin-can architecture in a tinhorn culture. And we will probably be judged not by the monuments we build but by those we have destroyed." Other cities across the US quickly realized that they were losing valuable buildings as well and numerous local efforts at building preservation were finally organized into law with the passage of the National Historic Preservation Act in 1966 which established the National Register of Historic Places and the National Historic Landmarks list. The heroic efforts at environmental and historic building preservation discussed above led to the development of a positive national consciousness in which we learned to closely study the potential impact that new construction could have on a natural or urban environment slated for replacement or development. No longer could undeveloped land or old urban fabric be wantonly demolished or cleared to make way for new development without first taking into consideration methods to mitigate against any potential negative consequences.
 * Urban greenwashing and contemporary notions of "green space" and "open space"**

Unfortunately these valuable lessons in land and building preservation are being misappropriated in our contemporary desire to create "green space" in our urban areas. We've developed a national consciousness that "green" (the provision of physical green matter such as trees, lawns, and shrubbery) is inherently good and that "gray" (the provision of physical manmade matter such as pavement, rooftops, and building fabric) is inherently bad. Rather than filling in the "missing teeth" in our cities and allowing them to densify, we consistently try to drag the natural environment directly into the city (Never mind the fact that it is impossible to recreate a truly pristine natural environment in an urban area). We are trying to apply the useful strategy of environmental conservation to an //inappropriate// //context// - the urban environment.

Andr é s Duany describes the unfortunate scenario above in a case study of Portland, Oregon. He begins by clarifying that the strategy of "physically greening" the city is not necessarily unique to Portland but is rather a mindset prevalent across the country: "The environmental assessment of the city is greening the city by naturalizing it." He describes the shocked reaction of Portlanders at a planning meeting upon realizing that their city had extensive suburban sprawl but few parks for public enjoyment: "We will not stop until there's a woodland in every square and a trout stream by every road." Portlanders reacted irrationally to a desire to create urban recreational space by resorting to a strategy of dragging the wilderness directly into the city center. This irrational goal is widespread across the US - in many cities there is a bias against arranging new street trees into neat rows/lines ("It isn't natural"), towards using wildly-varying species in street trees ("Let's make it look like a natural forest") and towards using natural, unkempt grasses in the "green spaces" throughout the city. The result, Duany argues, is that people are //miscued// - the artificially-wild "green spaces" are not very useful for the formal, traditional activities we typically engage in when we go to urban parks (swimming, strolling, playing sports on designated fields or pavements, reading, tanning, etc.) so the artificial woodlands and landscapes are often appropriated by the dregs of society for illicit activities. Duany cites an example of a Portlander who tried to walk his dog in a newly-woodlanded city square but found the environment unsuitable: "I can't go in the morning because my dog is always picking up condoms." Likewise, across the country, urban "green spaces" that are deliberately designed to look natural and undisturbed inevitably attract the drug addicts, the muggers, the rapists, the discarded needles, the beer bottles in the bushes, etc. The brush and undergrowth of a "green space" attracts illicit activity, Duany argues, because it is located in the wrong transect zone (See especially the Scientific American article on the transect). Wild-looking "green spaces" in the city are inherently vulnerable to social misuse.

James Howard Kunstler describes in greater detail our preoccupation with designing natural-looking parks, and the unintended consequences of engaging in such design: "The Olmsted park is our main model for how to do parks. There are some really serious shortcomings with it, the main one being that you can only do it on the grand scale. It doesn't form a template for how to do a small park on the small scale. Our knowledge and skill of building small parks is almost nonexistent. We have no sense of formality. The whole idea of an Olmsted park is that you're going to reconstruct an artifact remnant of the rural landscape that is being displaced by the city. Everything is made to look romantic as if nature made it, as if nature arbitrarily planted the trees here and there in a way that happened to be especially scenic. On the small scale you really need more overt formality to make small parks work. You don't want people hiding in the shrubbery - you don't want muggers and rapists and people hiding behind shrubs and obstructions to bushwhack people. That's one of the things we don't get - we do these small parks in America and we fill them up with arbitrary plantings and undergrowth - then we're surprised that people regard them as dangerous. Formal parks don't have an understory and there's no place for dangerous people to hide - and that's one of the things they do so well in Paris where they never abandoned the idea of formality and geometry [in park design]." Here in the US of course, we seem to assume that geometry is unecological - we think that just because plant matter never grows in an orderly manner in natural settings it is not appropriate to force plant matter to grow in an orderly manner in an urban setting.

Besides tending to naturalize urban parks and squares, we also exert a //huge// pressure against filling in the empty lots ("missing teeth") in urban areas - there are constant battles between developers in cities seeking to put up new buildings on empty lots and environmentalists seeking to preserve the lots as abstract "open space" at all costs. Because, as discussed earlier, we have an inherent bias in assuming that anything that is physically "green" is good, the environmentalists usually win the public debates and the missing teeth are left open and converted into useless grasslands or woodlands. Thus the environmentalists unintentionally fuel the destruction of wilderness on the periphery of urban areas - if new buildings can't be built in an already-compact downtown (where land value is high and access to nearby services is very convenient), new development must instead be forced onto "greenfield" land outside of the city. Rather than allowing the city to densify (and thus preserve land on the periphery of the city in the process), urban environmentalists advocating for the preservation of missing teeth are just (unintentionally) encouraging suburban sprawl. The city is most efficient when it is compacted into a small area and it is irrational to call for the preservation of every scrap of open space in the city. To do so is to weaken/burden the infrastructural/financial health of the city - every vacant lot requires the wasteful passing-by of expensive sewer, water, gas, electricity, and trash collection systems which need to spread out over greater distances to provide access to fewer and fewer people. Avoiding such a wasteful dispersal of urban fabric is the major rationale behind the "planned shrinkage" and redensification of rust belt cities such as Detroit and Flint.

Not all missing teeth are converted into useless "green spaces." Some missing teeth are reappropriated for practical community gardens, but many fanciful architecture and urban design competitions encourage a lot of grandiose and impractical proposals for bringing industrial-scale agriculture directly into the city. As seen in one of the Matrix images above (the top right image shows a proposal to fill Philadelphia's urban prairie with wheat fields), a popular fad among design professionals these days is to bring enormously-scaled rural landscapes (forests, fields, cropland, lakes, etc.) directly into the city. Let's stop and think for a minute: is it really practical to have cropland in the middle of a city? First and foremost, urban land is valuable and it is an incredible waste to underutilize it for the purpose of industrial agriculture. How will the complex web of underground urban infrastructure (sewer, water, gas, and electricity lines) be protected against the blades of industrial farm machinery constantly digging into the soil during planting season? How will the same infrastructure's physical condition be protected from the corrosive effects of agricultural petrochemicals? How will urban groundwater be protected from contamination from the same petrochemicals - we've seen how agricultural runoff has destroyed the Chesapeake Bay's ecosystem; what is the health risk when the same runoff begin to seep into the basement of a nearby rowhouse? What effect will the industrially-scaled application of pesticides and fertilizers have on the health of the residents living in the remaining blocks of rowhouses - it wouldn't exactly be a thrill to be walking down the street one day and suddenly be sprayed by some industrial chemical from a crop duster plane flying overhead. Environmentalists and design professionals need to move past their current obsession with "land-banking" urban open space at all costs and should realize that the city needs to have the freedom to //densify// as it grows (Many American cities are finally beginning to attract population again).

Kunstler cites a prominent example of good-intentioned environmentalism blocking the necessary densification of the city: After the demolition of the elevated Central Artery highway in downtown Boston, many acres of open land that had once been dense urban fabric (streets, building blocks, squares, etc.) were finally available for redevelopment. Architects and developers wanted to construct new buildings on the site but environmental preservationists put up a huge and successful fight against the proposed infill. The former footprint of the Central Artery was thus left open and converted into a nebulous "green space" - useless patches of lawn and pointlessly-meandering paths were woven into the bare land in between the tunnel entrances to the new Big Dig freeway below. The result was a half-assed, oddly-landscaped barren expanse of dreary pavement and threadbare lawns that served no useful civic purpose: "There was a huge fight among people who should have known better what that [the space recovered from the demolition of the Central Artery] was going to be - whether it was going to be "open space" or whether they were going to replace blocks and buildings and building lots and urban fabric and intimate streets and exactly the kind of material that made Boston a great city before it was mutilated in the automobile age. The fact that all these well-intentioned and certainly well-educated Bostonians on both sides could not come to an agreement that buildings were more important than vacant space really showed me something about how lost we are... To this day that area remains either contested or land-banked open space that they cannot bring themselves to build upon - but it should be built on! Within the amount of acres that they had available, there's no question they could have reserved a half-acre for a green square... You could have also had huge amounts of new buildings - they didn't have to be out-of-scale (there's no requirement that they had to be skyscrapers); they could have been perfectly good four or five story buildings - that would have been optimal. But instead they couldn't even conceive of having anything there - they ended up with a nebulous, ambiguous space with no particular civic purpose."

Robert Campbell of the //Boston Globe// came to many of the same conclusions, particularly when he pointed out the most fundamental, tragic flaw of the new park: "There were rare walkers and a few skateboarding kids [in the park], no one else. I thought maybe the problem was I had come on a weekday, even though it was a half holiday. But as I finished my walk, I turned into Quincy Market and found, of course, that it was mobbed. Crowds were delightedly lining up for ice cream or lobster, or they were people-watching, or checking out the shop windows. Too hectic, maybe, but there was a powerful sense of place. The Greenway, by contrast, is placeless desert. It’s a series of oversize shapeless spaces, none of which seems to have a purpose. Some are paved with stone, some with concrete, some have trees, some have flowers. It all feels random. It doesn’t look as if it’s been shaped by a creative mind. **There are things to look at but nothing to do.**"

It is not surprising then that the ambiguous Central Artery park is underutilized - except for some days of the year where it makes for a useful tanning lounge, there is nothing else to do in the "open space." The winding "open space" is still separated by two wide ribbons of busy avenues and it is also segmented by several entrances to the Big Dig tunnel. Who wants to walk along a narrow strip of lawn sandwiched between streams of noisy, smelly cars? The Boston Common and Public Gardens are far more useful - they contain amenities for all types of outdoor recreational activities and thus see heavy patronage at all times of the year. A valuable opportunity to densify Boston was completely ignored - they could have created new residential and commercial structures that would have been conveniently adjacent to existing urban programs, and they could have tied the isolated North End back into Boston proper. Kunstler says it is not surprising we missed such a valuable opportunity to redensify Boston: "The failures of urbanism in America have been so gigantic and comprehensive in the last fifty years that we have no faith in our ability to do it anymore. So our default setting now for remedying the whole situation is nature. The automatic response [to a missing tooth] should be 'Let's get a better building in here and repair the mutilation in the fabric of the city.' But instead you get this knee-jerk default reaction, 'Oh, your city's screwed up? You have a problem with a bad building? Replace it with nature.'"

The practice of dragging natural landscapes directly into the city and the militant movement against filling in "missing teeth" in urban fabrics are both severe "greenwashing" challenges that need to be fought, but perhaps the most destructive phenomenon militating against the necessary densification of our cities is our preoccupation with abstraction, especially when it comes to using effective, precise language to describe our environmental needs and wants. Note that in the public discourse we rarely ask for "parks," "promenades," "squares," or "gardens" anymore. Citizens, environmentalists, and design professionals militating for urban greenery ask for only two things - "green space" and "open space." What use is a "green space" or an "open space?" These two concepts are so abstract that landscape architects and urban planners inevitably come up with useless, abstract solutions to our requests for urban greenery. Vague demands will lead to vague solutions. In his discussion on the problems of Olmstedian park design Kunstler continues by saying: "One of the problems in America is that we have no really useful vocabulary for asking for parkland. We have so many people on the planning board fights always yelling about green space and open space, and that's their only nomenclature for what they're trying to describe. If you're having a battle in your town over parks and over so-called "green space" and so-called "open-space," you should go into the lexicon of urban design and actually find out the specific names of things you want and ask for them by name. If you ask for an abstraction, an abstraction will be delivered. If you ask for an open space, you'll get a berm between the Walmart and the Kmart. It won't be a place that has any civic use or meaning; it'll just be a decorative buffer between one use and another. It's very important that if you wish to have something in the urban fabric that is parklike, to say, 'We want to have a ballfield. We want to have a bandshell surrounded by a garden. We want to have a rose garden. We want to have a duck pond. We want to have a formal square. We want to have a childrens' playground. We want to have an Italian water garden.' Never ask for just green space or open space."

As Kunstler discussed above, if we want to fight the greenwashing phenomenon and quell the persistent public cry for "green space" and "open space," we need to tell citizens and activists to be more specific when asking for urban greenery. They should ask for specific //programmatic constructions// to be inserted into parkland rather than calling for meaningless "open space."
 * What can we do to counter urban greenwashing?**

Furthermore, the educational methods used in the design schools - architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, environmental conservation, building sciences, historic preservation - need to be rethought and rebuilt. We need to move away from abstraction and modernist oversimplification and segregationist thinking and develop a strategy for thinking //holistically.//

Design professionals are currently taught to hyperspecialize in their fields of study rather than to engage in the many design fields related to their chosen professions: The architecture schools are trapped in a fad of fashionista starchitecture where they concentrate only on creating sculptural objects and seldom give any thought to how those objects should be positioned in larger urban settings; indeed it is frowned upon to make buildings "fit in." They need to realize that the city is more important than any one building in it. The landscape architects concentrate only on creating picturesque scenery rather than using plant matter as a type of architecture to define the urban landscape. The urban planners focus only on specialized land-use strategies and work on adding to the ever-expanding bureaucracy of segregationist zoning regulations. The conservationists concentrate only on saving every open scrap of land. The historic preservationists concentrate only on saving every prewar building. All these design professionals need to engage in interdisciplinary education to realize that the goal of sustainable living encompasses more than just their chosen design field.

It would help if these schools took the concept of the ecological transect - as the New Urbanists have done in their efforts in urban planning - and applied it to the design work they engage in. Environmentalists would learn that while it makes sense to preserve open space in the countryside, it makes less sense to preserve similar open space in an urban setting. Architects would learn how to create cohesive streetscapes that could be beautiful, engaging places to spend time in, thereby reducing misguided public demand for "open space" to make up for shortcomings in poor urban design and poor building/facade composition. Landscape architects would learn not to inappropriately replicate the natural environment in urban settings and could instead (re)learn how to create formal parks with specific (not abstract) recreational amenities that could be useful to the public year-round and provide for a sense of security (no undergrowth or arbitrary planting).

Abderholden, Frank. Baycan-Levent, Tuzin, and Peter Nijkamp. Campbell, Robert. Crary, Duncan and James Howard Kunstler. Duany, Andrés. Freyfogle, Eric. Fuller, Richard, and Kevin Gaston. Maas Jolanda, Peter Spreeuwenberg, et al. Miller, Sally. Muir, John. Ståhle, Alexander. Stephens, Josh.
 * References**
 * //Bumper Crop of Interest in Community Gardens.// Lake County News-Sun: April 22, 2009.
 * //Urban Green Space Policies:Performance and Success Conditions in European Cities.// European Regional Science Association Conference Papers, August 2004.
 * //How to Save the Greenway? Make it a Neighborhood.// Boston Globe: April 25, 2010.
 * //Anti-Urban Bias.// KunstlerCast: The Tragic Comedy of Suburban Sprawl. Episode 27: August 14, 2008.
 * //Frederick Law Olmsted and the American Park.// KunstlerCast: The Tragic Comedy of Suburban Sprawl. Episode 25: September 31, 2008.
 * //Historic Preservation.// KunstlerCast: The Tragic Comedy of Suburban Sprawl. Episode 68: June 11, 2009.
 * //Missing Teeth in the Urban Fabric.// KunstlerCast: The Tragic Comedy of Suburban Sprawl. Episode 43: December 18, 2008.
 * //Parking Militants and Hotheads.// KunstlerCast: The Tragic Comedy of Suburban Sprawl. Episode 103: March 18, 2010.
 * //Urban Thinkers.// KunstlerCast: The Tragic Comedy of Suburban Sprawl. Episode 84: October 15, 2009.
 * //On the Edge.// Lecture at Simon Fraser University. Vancouver, BC: January 16, 2008.
 * //San Antonio By Design.// Lecture at the San Antonio By Design Seminar. San Antonio, TX: 1991.
 * //The New Agrarianism: Land, Culture, and the Community of Life.// Washington DC: Island Press, 2001.
 * //The Scaling of Green Space Coverage in European Cities.// Biology Letters: 5(3), June 2009. pp352-355.
 * //Green Space, Urbanity, and Health: How Strong is the Relation?// Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health: 60, 2006. pp587-592.
 * //Is Green Space in the Living Environment Associated With People’s Feelings of Social Safety?// Environment and Planning A Journal: 41(7), 2009. pp1763-1777.
 * //John Muir in Historical Perspective.// New York: Peter Lang, 1999.
 * //The Wilderness World of John Muir.// Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1954.
 * //More Green Space in a Denser City: Critical Relations Between User Experience and Urban Form.// Urban Design International:15, 2010. pp47-67.
 * //Starchitecture and Sustainability: Hope, Creativity, and Futility Collide in Contemporary Architecture.// Planetizen: November 1, 2009.

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