Strolling through the city, urban nature is everywhere. It appears in the canopy of street trees that shade busy footpaths, the autumn leaves crunching beneath us, and the bursts of colour from flower beds and community gardens that break up the greys of concrete surrounding us. These moments of connection with nature often go unnoticed, yet their benefits do not.
For more than half the world’s population living in cities, these everyday encounters with urban nature provide a vital connection to the natural world. Both incidental and intentional interactions with nature can support mental and physical wellbeing and strengthen social ties within communities. On a broader scale, urban green spaces also deliver essential ecosystem services, from cooling cities and improving air quality to reducing flood risk and supporting biodiversity.
But unlike many natural landscapes, urban nature is rarely accidental. Parks, street trees, and green spaces are the result of deliberate planning and design decisions. This raises an important question: if urban nature is designed, who is it designed for, and how equitably does it serve the people who use it?
For PhD candidate Samantha Wong-Topp at The University of Queensland’s Centre for Biodiversity and Conservation Science, this question sits at the centre of her research into urban nature inequities. Her work examines the historical and contemporary drivers of inequity through an environmental justice lens, with a particular focus on how cultural and ethnic differences shape who benefits from urban green spaces.
Here, we speak with Samantha about her recent PhD publication, Urban nature equity must consider cultural nuances.
“Our cities are rapidly increasing in cultural diversity, but current approaches to urban planning and design tend to be implicitly monocultural - meaning they often reflect the dominant cultural ideas of what urban nature should look like and how it should be used,” Samantha says. “This can create serious inequities in who is able to access and use these spaces, while also reinforcing existing power imbalances by privileging certain preferences in design.”
She explains that people connect with nature in many different ways. “Some people use urban nature spaces to socialise, others seek solitude, or to exercise. These ways of connecting to nature are shaped by many cultural factors such as an individuals traditions, lived experiences, values, and generational history and so on,” she says. “Yet often, what we deem an 'appropriate' way to utilise urban nature is often based heavily on Western ideals of nature. This also extends to what we consider to be the more suitable types of urban nature as well."
“For example, lawns are a widely used form of urban green space, but they were actually exported globally through colonisation. In Australia, they were historically introduced as part of efforts to ‘civilise’ towns by replacing native bushland.”
“The existence of very different cultural relationships with nature becomes clearer as we consciously decentre dominant Western norms in both theory and practice,” she adds.
The article highlights the need to more explicitly examine these cultural influences in urban planning and design to avoid unintentionally reproducing inequities - not only in access to nature, but also in whose knowledge, values, and relationships with nature are recognised and prioritised.
In response, the article calls for more culturally inclusive approaches to urban nature planning and design - approaches that recognise culture as dynamic, contextual, and diverse, rather than fixed or singular. The authors provide three key recommendations:
- Reframing culture as an asset, not a problem
Transforming cities into places that are inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable, as per the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 11, requires a paradigm shift in how we engage with culture, in which its nuances and historical context are seen not as barriers to urban nature planning and governance, but as an essential asset that enhances it for the benefit of all urban dwellers. This could be done by taking a strengths-based approach to recognise the numerous benefits associated with accounting for culture in addition to other demographic measures such as race and ethnicity. Strengths-based approaches involve shifting away from questions such as “What are the barriers for you to do…” and moving to questions centred on audience needs. This could include questions such as “What issues would you like this initiative to address” or “How can we work together to achieve these goals”. Taking such an approach allows us to move beyond a problem-based ‘deficit’ outlook, which can frame cultural differences and nuances as a source of complexity and difficulty to be managed or even excluded.
- Undertake place-based approaches to identify cultural nuances
To increase urban nature equity, we should aim to create spaces that are structured to reflect the diverse preferences of local communities. To more accurately capture the diverse preferences of a community across a range of demographic gradients, we propose taking a place-based approach when addressing urban nature equity. This emphasises collaboration between stakeholders and the local community within a specific geographic area, ensuring implementation strategies are effectively tailored for the specific makeup of each community. Actively centring culturally diverse communities via dialogical methods allows planners and policymakers to look beyond simple racial or ethnic categories and gain an understanding of intra- and inter-group variation in cultural practices and identities that shape perspectives about urban nature. Assessing culture can be integrated into diverse methods that use place-based approaches. For example, participatory mapping exercises to identify spatial inequity in nature access can ask participants about their cultural identity, important practices, and how this shapes their preferences and needs related to nature use.
Prioritizing the lived experiences, needs, and local knowledge of diverse communities elicits far more nuanced cultural insight that fosters more equitable urban nature outcomes. It has long been established that many culturally diverse groups, such as Indigenous communities, immigrants and other historically marginalized communities have deep relationships with nature, with unique ecological knowledge and longstanding traditions of stewardship. However, often these communities are excluded from environmental decision-making, prolonging disconnection and disempowerment.
- Account for the influence of historical power imbalances on urban nature design
Situating urban planning within an appropriate historical context helps to (1) prioritise addressing existing discrepancies in nature equity and (2) ensure that proposed urban nature equity solutions do not inadvertently exacerbate inequities between dominant and non-dominant cultural groups. A potent example of such historical influence is redlining in the United States, a discriminatory investment practice in the 1930s, where services such as credit access were allowed or denied based on the racial composition of a neighbourhood. Though the policy was abolished in 1968, the effects persist to this day, with previously redlined neighbourhoods continuing to have fewer urban nature spaces, and higher pollution burdens and other environmental hazards than non-redlined neighbourhoods.
Understanding the way in which culture has shaped the availability and type of urban nature is integral if we hope to implement urban nature equity solutions that truly serve culturally diverse communities. One particular program in the United States, focused on increasing greenery in high- Black, Indigenous, People of Colour (BIPOC) locations in an attempt to “reverse distributional injustices” inadvertently created additional burdens on these residents via increased tree care and stewardship. This example highlights a key tension that can occur when inclusion is ineffectively considered in planning interventions, where it becomes apparent that if we overlook the historical power imbalances and subsequent cultural legacies that shape our urban landscapes, we risk implementing nature equity solutions that may not serve culturally diverse communities, and in fact, may exacerbate the very inequities they aim to address. By increasing our understanding of how historical oppression has both previously and presently influenced the design of our urban nature spaces, we can create spaces that can deliver an equitable flow of benefits to people.
Read the full article here.
