Editorial: Nature and equity in the city

I. Introduction

Since the COVID-19 pandemic began in January 2020, millions of people around the world have endured lockdowns. Traffic stilled, shops closed, and streets emptied in formerly bustling cities: Cape Town, Delhi, Jakarta, Melbourne, Mexico City, Milan, New York, Wuhan, and thousands more. During the long weeks and months, urban residents lucky enough to have access to green and blue space cherished it more than ever. Time spent in parks or along waterways became precious after hours spent indoors. Many found consolation from grief or loneliness in these environments, while others delighted in heretofore undiscovered pockets of nature in their neighbourhood.

While lockdowns are gradually though unequally lifting around the world, the importance of our urban environments will not diminish. An ever-growing share of the world’s population now primarily encounters nature within the city, though it is now more evident than ever that access to green and blue space is not evenly distributed. Moreover, urban environments are often degraded and urban ecosystems profoundly changed through the concentration of human activity. ¹ The environmental problems associated with urbanization are most apparent in lower-income neighbourhoods and cities, which often lack the policies and infrastructure to mitigate local concerns such as air pollution, municipal solid waste, or water contamination. ² However, it is the environmental footprint of higher-income neighbourhoods and cities – which may seem pristine to the human eye – that is driving humanity past critical planetary boundaries such as climate change. ³

This special issue was commissioned in the “super year for nature”, when the 15th Meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (COP15) was scheduled to be held in Kunming, China, and the 26th Conference of Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP26) was scheduled to be held in Glasgow, Scotland. ⁴ Submissions were invited to reflect on the contribution of cities to local and planetary health, with particular attention to equity and nature. Although we may see local green or blue spaces as discrete entities or human artefacts, they likely serve as breeding sites, food sources, water purifiers and more for a much larger hinterland. Ecological management within city boundaries can therefore reinforce or undermine global efforts to secure sustainable development. ⁵ In turn, transgressing planetary boundaries will jeopardise the viability of urban environments and ecosystem services. The onset of the Anthropocene therefore demands that we consider the linkages between local and global environmental outcomes.

We have been delighted to accept eight submissions that span a wide array of cities and biomes. Five of these papers were submitted as part of the special issue on the contribution of cities to local and planetary health. Three are part of Environment and Urbanization’s regular section on cities and climate change, and speak to issues that are particularly relevant to the theme of our special issue. This collection of papers will take you to the lakes of Bengaluru, the coasts of Honiara, the floodplains of Khon Kaen, the forests of Obafemi-Owode, the parks of Johannesburg, the orchards of Shenzhen and the wetlands of Kolkata. The authors deploy a wide range of disciplinary lenses and methodological tools to enrich our understanding of the contribution of cities to local and planetary health, including archival research, focus groups, interviews, policy analysis, spatial analysis, transect walks, and water-quality assessments.

II. Recurring Themes In This Special Issue

Despite the dramatic differences among the cities and research approaches, three common themes emerge from this special issue: the importance of thinking across scales, seeing through a historical lens, and paying attention to power relations in the study of urban socio-ecological systems.

a. A multi-scalar approach to urban environments

While green and blue spaces within cities may be shaped by individual or neighbourhood-level landscaping decisions, they remain connected to broader ecological functions and structures. The management of these urban habitat fragments can therefore influence wider environmental outcomes. ⁶ Are they sufficiently large to allow viable populations of local animal species to survive and connected to enough other green spaces to enable genetic diffusion? Are they planted with native vegetation or with alien species that may prove invasive? Are the habitat fragments themselves managed well enough that they can serve as a “source” for fauna and flora populations in poorer-quality habitats in the built environment? Are carbon-rich ecosystems like urban wetlands and forests being conserved and enhanced or emitting greenhouse gases as they decline and disappear?

Individual green and blue spaces within any given city will vary considerably in their environmental quality and relationship with ecosystems beyond metropolitan boundaries. Amidu Owolabi Ayeni and Adeshina Gbenga Aborisade have contributed an interdisciplinary study of Obafemi-Owode, a Nigerian town with a population of over 334,000 that illuminates how urban and peri-urban environments are interconnected with broader socio-ecological systems. Their spatial analysis reveals that vegetation and wetlands around the town are being rapidly replaced with savannah and built-up land. The authors estimate that land-use change resulted in a net loss in the value of ecosystem services worth over US $11 million between 2007 and 2017. The substantial decline in value reflects the wide range of ecosystem services provided by wetlands, including recycling nutrients, absorbing flood waters, sequestering carbon, and providing a breeding ground or habitat for many species. The costs and benefits of both ecosystem services and land-cover change around Obafemi-Owode are not felt equally across scales. Some of the monetised benefits of conserving wetlands and forests within the city’s periphery may be valued globally, such as biodiversity conservation and carbon sequestration. However, Ayeni and Aborisade’s survey of peri-urban residents suggests that they are more aware of provisioning ecosystem services such as access to food, fibre, fuel and timber. At the household level, it makes sense to clear vegetation or build over wetlands to grow crops or build shelter. The cumulative effect of these choices, however, fuels environmental degradation that is affecting the livelihoods and food security of Obafemi-Owode’s peri-urban communities.

A far smaller proportion of urban residents is likely to depend on provisioning ecosystem services within large urban centres, but all urban dwellers depend on regulating and supporting ecosystem services such as moderating temperatures, purifying air, and reducing noise pollution. Proximity to parks may also encourage social interaction and physical exercise, further improving human health. However, Samkelisiwe Khanyile and Christina Culwick Fatti remind us that access to urban green space is often deeply unequal. Few cities prove this more starkly than Johannesburg, their case study city of 5.6 million people where the current distribution of parks is a legacy of the brutal colonial and apartheid regimes. The city government has introduced a standard of 4 hectares of green space per 1,000 people per ward: an improvement on past injustices but one that fails to consider the socio-economic characteristics of urban residents and the impacts on park access. Khanyile and Culwick Fatti therefore propose a new approach, deploying a Geographically Weighted Regression to assess how factors such as population density, unemployment rates and education levels correspond to distance from a park and the size of that park. Their findings reveal pockets of disadvantage within Johannesburg such as Ruimsig and Randjesfontein, where creating additional parks could advance environmental justice at the city scale. Khanyile and Culwick Fatti’s analysis underscores the importance of evaluating the accessibility and quality of urban environments within neighbourhoods and districts, rather than depending on simplistic spatial metrics that may conceal significant inequalities.

While Ayeni and Aborisade and Khanyile and Culwick Fatti focus on people’s relationship with their immediate urban and peri-urban environments, other contributions to this special issue explore the impacts of extreme weather events fuelled by global climate change on urban communities and environments. Emma Hambrecht, Rachel Tolhurst and Lana Whittaker review primary literature on the impacts of flooding, extreme temperatures, droughts and storms on health in informal settlements. Meg Keen, David Sanderson, Kira Osborne, Roshika Deo, Janet Faith and Anouk Ride use key informant interviews to evaluate disaster recovery responses in the urban centres of Fiji, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu, typically in the wake of cyclones, storm surges and landslides. We will return to the work by Keen et al. in Section II c.

Hambrecht et al. explicitly address the question of scale. At the individual or household level, low incomes, occupation, education levels, gender, age and existing health status all influence susceptibility to extreme weather events. An individual’s exposure to hazards is also mediated by material circumstances at the settlement level: population densities, infrastructure provision, housing quality and location. Wider political and social contexts in turn influence an individual’s experiences of disadvantage and material circumstances: for example, whether governments provide social protection or how certain occupations may be gendered. Thus, the health impacts of environmental shocks and stresses are not experienced uniformly within informal settlements, but require attention to context-specific and multi-scalar determinants of vulnerability. Of course, informal settlements do not emerge in a void. Understanding why particular urban forms emerge and persist is a necessary precondition for a transition to more inclusive, sustainable and resilient cities.

b. A historically informed approach to urban environments

We have already mentioned how history has shaped the current distribution of green assets in Johannesburg. All urban green and blue spaces are in some ways a human artefact, a remnant of former ecosystems that may or may not be actively managed, but will certainly be disturbed by proximate anthropogenic activities. Yet urban environmental scholarship often provides a snapshot of a city at a particular moment in time rather than contextualising it amidst historical and contemporary processes. While most ecosystems may reach a dynamic equilibrium if left undisturbed, urban habitats are characterised by frequent perturbations – and ecosystems everywhere are now confronted by large disruptions associated with the onset of the Anthropocene. ⁷ We were therefore delighted to receive submissions to this special issue that contextualise contemporary urban nature within a city’s broader history while also looking forward to consider the environmental impacts of a changing climate.

Jenia Mukherjee explicitly draws on the tools of historical political ecology and environmental history to interrogate different narratives about Kolkata’s wetlands. The deltaic city, home to nearly 15 million people, is located near the Sundarbans, the largest mangrove forest in the world. When the British colonised the region in the seventeenth century, they transformed what they perceived to be a “wild” and “unhygienic” territory into a network of canals and drainage–sanitation systems through “a series of interventions: artificial cuts and excavations, and the construction of pumping stations, lock gates, sluices, and mortar sewers”. Although canal trade has since declined, East Kolkata’s wetlands still treat almost 80 per cent of the city’s wastewater and sewage. The colonial project of drainage and reclamation also enabled fish farming in the manually excavated bheris (sewage-fed fish ponds), providing an important source of protein and income. While Kolkata’s wetlands may seem like natural ecosystems in contrast to built-up or cultivated lands, Mukherjee’s archival research and focus groups underscore that they have been heavily shaped to meet human needs. Over the last five decades, they have faced a new threat: conversion into agricultural and built-up lands. Demand for land is unsurprising given that Kolkata’s population has tripled since India won independence, but Mukherjee finds that decision-makers are concerned about losing the wetlands’ regulating and provisioning services – especially flood protection and fish production.

Many urban dwellers obtain food from or produce it within the city, with one estimate suggesting that 25 to 30 per cent are involved in urban agriculture or food processing. ⁸ Urban farms, allotments, orchards and the like are therefore important sites not only environmentally, but economically, socially and culturally. Gianni Talamini, Qi Zhang and Paola Viganò explore the persistence and productivity of urban agriculture in Shenzhen, China. Until the late 1970s, the area was dominated by rice paddies in the plains and orchards in the uplands – but industrialisation and liberalisation fuelled a staggering population increase from 1,500 people to around 8.2 million. Talamini et al. find that most urban farmers are older (the average age is 53) and many are rural migrants motivated by a combination of subsistence and market-oriented farming. Shenzhen’s farmers collectively produce over 30 types of crops from leeks to lychees, pak choi to pea sprouts, soy beans to strawberries. Talamini et al. underscore that although the farmers may be new to Shenzhen, they have often adopted the agricultural practices of the region. While farmland accounts for a tiny fraction of modern Shenzhen, these sites maintain a rich agricultural heritage that dates back centuries.

Residents of older cities inherit a legacy of buildings and infrastructure rather than agricultural practices. This heritage encompasses blue and green spaces that have been shaped by people, often over many generations. Clifford Godwin Sundar Navamany, Abishek Sankara Narayan and Lisa Scholten take us to Bengaluru, another megacity with a population of over 13 million. Scattered throughout the city are 285 lakes, constructed during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to capture and store water for drinking, irrigation and fishing. However, the population of Bengaluru soared when it emerged as the “Silicon Valley of India”, creating new demand for housing and water while producing ever more waste. As a result, many of Bengaluru’s lakes have been built over, polluted, or dried up as groundwater has been abstracted. Only 80 lakes are classified as healthy today. The analysis of Kommaghatta Lake by Navamany et al. illuminates some of the social, technical, institutional and financial factors contributing to the decline of Bengaluru’s blue infrastructure. Most critically, the city government has failed to provide or facilitate adequate, affordable access to sanitation for low-income communities living in informal settlements. Even where sewers have been laid, there has been little consideration of treatment and disposal, which has had catastrophic implications for public and environmental health in and around Kommaghatta Lake.

c. A politically sensitive approach to urban environments

The study by Navamany et al. paints a grim picture of inequalities within Bengaluru, a vibrant tech centre where millions of people live without decent sanitation or along dangerously polluted waterbodies. Khanyile and Culwick Fatti also highlight stark inequalities in Johannesburg, where race and class still dictate the lack of green space due to the legacy of apartheid-era spatial planning. In their focus on inequalities, these papers raise issues that will be considered in greater depth in the next issue of Environment and Urbanization.

Other papers in this special issue go further, demonstrating how low-income and other marginalised communities may end up degrading the local environment on which they depend because they are deprived of alternatives. The peri-urban dwellers surveyed by Ayeni and Aborisade, for example, recognise how land clearing around Obafemi-Owode is directly affecting their food security and livelihoods, as well as indirectly contributing to school dropouts as parents cannot afford to pay education-related costs or forgo income from children’s labour. Yet participants cannot afford to stop lumbering or clearing land for cultivation. In Mukherjee’s paper, we see that building over the wetlands would jeopardise fishing livelihoods and sewage treatment. Yet Kolkata’s housing market is failing to produce enough decent homes for low-income groups within the city’s boundaries, leading to both informal settlement and real-estate speculation in the wetlands. These case studies illustrate how urban dwellers’ relationship with nature is profoundly shaped by power relations within the city, enriching an extensive body of research on environmental justice. ⁹

Questions of power are explicitly explored in the contribution from Keen et al. Their paper examines disaster recovery efforts in the urban centres of Fiji, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. Choices made around shoreline development in these primarily coastal settlements have exacerbated vulnerability to disasters such as cyclones. These communities are also on the frontlines of climate change, which poses an existential threat to low-lying urban centres, islands and nations across the Pacific. Key informant interviews completed by Keen et al. reveal how resources have frequently been distributed based on political and economic interests after a disaster, rather than need. Community structures and local civil society organisations have been bypassed by both central government and international non-governmental organisations, which often operate with rigid timeframes and key performance indicators. Keen et al. underscore the importance of patient, participatory and people-centred approaches to disaster recovery, and particularly of drawing on traditional knowledge and practices to enhance adaptive capacity. For example, using traditional, locally sourced building materials rather than imported tin roofs can support island livelihoods and moderate indoor temperatures – and are much less dangerous during a cyclone.

Rebecca McMillan, Joanna Kocsis and Amrita Daniere also emphasise different exposures and susceptibilities to environmental risk, and the importance of data collection and knowledge co-production to build resilience.Their insights are drawn from action research across eight cities in four countries: Battambang and Koh Kong in Cambodia, Bago and Dawei in Myanmar, Khon Kaen and Mukdahan in Thailand, and Lao Cai and Ninh Binh in Vietnam. According to McMillan et al., these countries are characterized by centralized and rigid decision-making processes that can preclude the involvement of low-income and other marginalized groups. Citizen science and participatory research can simultaneously amplify their priorities and build their capabilities, enabling incremental if not transformative change. For example, the floodgates around Khon Kaen divert waters away from the city centre to low-lying, peri-urban agricultural settlements. Involving the affected communities in vulnerability assessments has drawn attention to their concerns while improving their access to decision-makers.

The research by McMillan et al. explicitly reminds the reader that scholars are not neutral actors. Our methods and findings have the potential to contribute to more inclusive local governance and better environmental outcomes. However, as McMillan et al. note, “approaches that fail to challenge inequity are, at best, ineffective in protecting vulnerable groups and, at worst, can exacerbate inequality, downscaling responsibility for confronting climate change to marginalized citizens with the least capacity to cope”. We hope that wealthy and powerful urban dwellers, including researchers, will collectively emerge from the pandemic with a new commitment to social justice and environmental sustainability. Sadly, the so-called “super year for nature” – held against a backdrop of profound vaccine inequalities – gives little cause for hope.

III. Feedback

Two feedback papers consider the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The paper by Harlan Downs-Tepper, Anirudh Krishna and Emily Rains compares the situation for the first wave of the virus in settlements in two Indian cities, Patna and Bengaluru. Building on an existing data set, the study considered 20 diverse slums in each city. Because COVID-19 conditions precluded the use of a detailed household survey, researchers instead interviewed three knowledgeable, well-connected informants in each settlement about readily observable events, including deaths, hospitalisations and neighbours sick at home, as well as trends related to livelihoods, education, migration, gender and local governance.

There were six waves of interviews between July and November 2020, and data were triangulated, pooled and merged with the existing data sets to broadly establish pandemic effects and the association with neighbourhood characteristics. The study found distinct differences in health outcomes between the two cities. In the Patna slums, there were no deaths and almost no cases of COVID-19. Bengaluru, on the other hand, had widespread illness, although of low intensity, with clusters of deaths in six slums. No clear pattern was found, however, linking these differences to neighbourhood or city characteristics. Residents in both cities experienced widespread loss of livelihoods, with dire economic effects, and schooling was severely disrupted, with effects generally more intense in Patna. Neighbourhoods with strong local leaders were more successful in accessing government assistance and food rations. In both cities, the most helpless households were routinely assisted by their neighbours, a situation that seemed unsustainable in the face of later waves of the virus. It will be of interest to readers that a follow-up to this study will be published in our next issue, with closer attention to the role played by links between residents and local government.

The second COVID-19 paper addresses this very concern, seeking to explain why some informal settlements responded more effectively than others to the first wave of the virus. This comparative analysis of just three popular neighbourhoods in Buenos Aires, by Michael Cohen, Margarita Gutman, Matias Ruiz Díaz, María Belén Fodde, Cecilia Cabrera, Bárbara Mora Doldan and Carolina Díaz, suggests that the capacity of each neighbourhood to respond was closely tied to its level of consolidation and the depth of the relationship between the state and local community organisations. Although all three settlements were subject to the same social policies and similar interventions, as Cohen et al. note, “two of the villas were able to mobilize more quickly in response to unexpected hazards and risks, resulting in a slower growth in the number of cases, which allowed the actors involved to gather information and organize interventions”. Like the Indian study, this paper was able to access data comparing pre-COVID neighbourhood characteristics, but unlike the Indian study, it also had access to official city data regarding the outbreaks. The qualitative data in this case were drawn from interviews with government officials as well as representatives of local organisations and elected local delegates. Although far fewer settlements were considered (three as opposed to 20 in each of the two Indian cities) the closer attention to each allowed for a more granular analysis of the local dynamics in each case, despite the lesser ability to generalise about COVID-19 impacts.

Also from Argentina is a paper by Cecilia Galimberti on citizen participation in planning in Rosario. Its unique contribution is the attention given in this particular programme (“26 Local Strategies: A Metropolitan Plan”) to the coordination of local and metropolitan planning. Most participatory initiatives focus on the local scale and tend to be less common and effective as the scale is enlarged, and as different jurisdictions become involved. This study from Rosario, already a well-known reference point for citizen participation in planning, is a valuable addition to our knowledge about geographically more wide-ranging applications for the involvement of local residents, considering both possibilities and limitations. A central concern of this particular experiment was broadening the perspectives of selected representatives of 26 localities (only 24 of which actually participated) in the course of local workshops, to include a greater awareness of the regional priorities, and the contribution of their locality to the whole metropolitan area. While their initial contributions to debate and discussion revolved around their own homes and neighbourhoods, by the end of the workshops, their perspectives had expanded and participants were able to link their priorities and concerns to those of the entire jurisdiction. Their insights contributed subsequently to the development of local plans and their integration within the metropolitan plan.