9. Urban Ecologies: Where’s Nature in the City? — with John Thackara & Gavin Van Horn
SYNOPSIS:
How can people who dwell in urban settings engage with a teeming and vivid animal world – right on their doorsteps? How can cities be the best of both worlds, providing high social connectivity amongst humans and non-humans? Can we design cities from the perspective and the lifeworlds of other species? And by the way, where does the city even begin? How can animals disrupt our associations of what cities are ?
By 2050, over 2/3 of the world’s population will be living in urban areas. Nature deprivation systematically affects lower income families, creating a damaging feedback loop that hits hardest at those already struggling to keep pace. But cities are also beautiful, and our guests today bring us stories of engagement and positive action.
Gavin Van Horn is the Executive Editor of the Center for Humans and Nature Press, and is the author of two books City Creatures: Animal Encounters in the Chicago Wilderness and The Way of Coyote: Shared Journeys in the Urban Wilds. His story teaches a potent medicine for urban alienation, by honing our awareness to species like coyotes, robins, pollinators, and degraded urban forests. We talk about everyday intimacies, wild mutual gazes, the resplendence of pigeon feathers and examples of mutual healing when people repair urban lands and make nature whole.
John Thackara, writer, curator and professor, develops design agendas for ecological restoration, urban-rural reconnection, and multi-species environments. He curated the celebrated Doors of Perception conference for 20 years, and was commissioner of the UK Social Innovation Biennial and the Urban-Rural Expo in Shanghai. John’s expertise lies in the realm of futures design and next economies, and in our chat he shares compelling examples of urban rural reconnection, such as designers experimenting with microbial lives, the viral phenomenon of weed watching, celebrity farmers in china, and placefulness as a doorway into caring.
Together, their examples prove that there is indeed a middle path, and it has as much to do with honing certain perceptions and acuities than it is about smart urban design.
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Urban Ecologies
QUOTES:
John Thackara
Just telling people things is not enough. They need to experience connection, or lack of connection, through an embodied understanding. So now my work is focused on how to enable people to have living embodied relationships with nature.
The task of design isn’t to get people to do things, but to get them to uncover other worlds.
It's not about just going to a forest and feeling sort of green. I think that people should be given tasks to do. These tasks should be productive tasks, that are beneficial to the place.
You don't have to give people lectures about biodiversity. You just say, yeah, do you want to be part of growing food?
The trick is to be inspired. To learn how incredibly resourceful nature is without feeling some kind of compulsion to turn that into a design action. I think the need to make things is not necessarily always consistent with leaving an ecosystem healthier.
I had to let go of the notion that only mass solutions were important.
Gavin Van Horn
It doesn't start with being in awe, or somehow having an epiphany. It starts with everyday intimacies that build our capacity for care, our capacity for extending our empathic imagination into other spaces that we're a part of.
Having our gaze returned or hearing the languages of other species is a reminder that we're not alone, that we are not a species that is apart from other species. We're not the only ones telling stories about them, they're also telling stories to each other about us.
It all started with thinking like a bee.
Think about a bee seeing an ultraviolet spectrum. Think about a hawk, being able to see pinpoint precision two miles away to see a mouse. Think about the speed of a peregrine falcon through the air. Think about all the perceptual attributes that other animals have that we do not. What's it like to be an elephant and perceive the world through our feet?
I think it also is helpful to follow good old Aldo Leopold's advice and try to think like a mountain. How do we think like a landscape? How do we think like a river? How do we imagine ourselves into these other types of being which would expand our empathic imaginations?
It's humbling to see all the different ways that life can express itself in bodily form. Eight legs, four legs, two legs, no legs, wings and fur and fin and feathered - it’s all just overwhelmingly beautiful and amazing to me.