Visualization

Vienna Zoo: Wildlife and Humanity

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(Photo by Christoph Steinbrener and Rainer Dempf.)

Sculptor Christoph Steinbrener and photographer Reiner Dempf have modified the animal enclosures of the Vienaa Zoo for summer 2009 (June 10 – October 18) for their show Trouble in Paradise. Their show transforms the idealized wild setting in which animals into settings that contain some our activities that are endangering animal populations outside of zoos.

The artists describe their show as:

… A sunken car wreck at the rhinos, railroad tracks in the bison pen or toxic waste in the aquarium are unexpectedly interfering with our notions of idyllic wildlife. The viewer is forced to reconsider traditional modes of animal presentation and simultaneously to question the authenticity of concepts which are restaging ‘natural’ environments while they are increasingly endangered.

…Present-day conceptions of zoological gardens aim at the presentation of animals in an idyllic and apparently natural environment, untouched by civilization. But this is a contemporary conception, since courtly menageries and kennels were adapted to the exposure of animals as decorative objects. Until the early years of the 20th century, animals were part of a preferably spectacular and exotic staging, to the entertainment and amazement of the public. The artificial and the sensational were foregrounded, without creating a realistic setting of the natural environment of the animals.

(Photo by Christoph Steinbrener and Rainer Dempf.)

(Photo by Christoph Steinbrener and Rainer Dempf.)

(Photo by Christoph Steinbrener and Rainer Dempf.)

All photos by Christoph Steinbrener and Rainer Dempf from their webpage.

via Pruned.

Ecological Economics, Ecosystem services

Michael Pollan interviewed in Vancouver’s the Tyee

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Systems thinking food writer Michael Pollan interviewed by Vancouver’s the Tyee after a talk in support of the University of British Columbia’s Farm. The interview – Garden Fresh – discusses US agricultural policy and resilience food systems:

On whether he’s trying to rally a movement in time to avert disaster, or just prepare us for the inevitable mess caused by scarcer oil, degrading ecologies, and global warming:

“It’s more the latter. We need to have these alternatives around and available when the shit hits the fan, basically.

“One of the reasons we need to nurture several different ways of feeding ourselves — local, organic, pasture-based meats, and so on – is that we don’t know what we’re going to need and we don’t know what is going to work. To the extent that we diversify the food economy, we will be that much more resilient. Because there will be shocks. We know that. We saw that last summer with the shock of high oil prices. There will be other shocks. We may have the shock of the collapsing honey bee population. We may have the shock of epidemic diseases coming off of feed lots. We’re going to need alternatives around.

“When we say the food system is unsustainable we mean that there is something about it, an internal contradiction, that means it can’t go on the way it is without it breaking up. And I firmly believe there will be a breakdown.”

General

What is resilience thinking and what is it not

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Adaptive cycleVictor Galaz‘s post Machine Fetishism, Money and Resilience Theory reflected on Alf Hornborg‘s recent paper Zero-Sum World: Challenges in Conceptualizing Environmental Load Displacement and Ecologically Unequal Exchange in the World-System, in which, among other things, Hornborg presents a partial critique of what he calls “the gospel of resilence” – resilience theory and adaptive management.

There have been many comments on Victor’s post, including responses from the paper’s author.  To highlight this discussion, I’ve hoisted some points from the comments on that post.

Alf Hornborg writes that he is waiting for a convincing response to his criticism of social-ecological resilience:

At the most general level, the rhetoric on social-ecological resilience is framed in terms of a nomothetic search for the functional principles of socio-ecological systems (SES), as if human ecology was analogous to medicine.  SES are approached like biological systems with processes of adaptation and change that can be studied from a detached, objective position. The recurrent aim is to increase our “understanding” of how SES actually function, as if more data and better models could improve our management of these systems (again, analogous to medical practice).

Rather than try to develop a conspicuously and naively non-political cybernetic etiology of socio-ecological degradation – based on the assumption that such processes, irrespective of capitalist extractivism, are universally patterned, predictable, and potentially manageable – I challenge resilience theorists to address the operation of the global economic system that is the very obvious source of such processes. The attempt to provide an abstract vocabulary for describing SES often cries out for empirical examples that might get the discussion grounded in the real politics of human-environmental relations. For example, when it is argued that we must define on which scales agency is located and how an increase or decrease of scope for agency at one level influences agency on other levels, we need to consider a concrete case in order to assess whether the concept of resilience is really the most useful way of accounting for what actually seems to be a (rather well understood) problem of power.

Is “path dependence” so much better than various understandings of cultural, social, political, and generally structural problems of inertia and conservatism?

What do we gain by rephrasing environmental conflict and armed resistance as “regulation”?

How can we hope to predict and manage the abrupt surprises and discontinuities implied by notions of “critical thresholds” and “flipping”?

Why should concepts such as “non-linear dynamics”, “disturbance”, “opportunities for innovation”, “adaptation”, and “renewal” provide a better way of understanding what Joseph Tainter and many others for decades have recognized as socio-ecological collapse?

What are, quite frankly, the discursive/ideological benefits of subsuming social systems within the vocabulary of natural science?

I find it hard to respond to this critique because I do not recognize my work or that of my colleagues in the Resilience Alliance in Hornborg’s characterization of resilience thinking.

Perhaps this is because his article only shallowly engages the resilience literature, focusing on the Linking book edited by Berkes and Folke (an overview of resilience books and articles is available on the Resilience Alliance website), but I think it may be because Resilience thinking is not a formula for explaining how the world works.  In a recent paper, Steve Carpenter and Buz Brock described resilience as:

Resilience is a broad, multifaceted, and loosely organized cluster of concepts, each one related to some aspect of the interplay of transformation and persistence. Thus, resilience does not come down to a single testable theory or hypothesis. Instead it is a changing constellation of ideas, some of which are testable through the usual practices of natural or social science. Although particular ideas may be rejected or supported, the program of research on resilience itself is evaluated in a different way. As long as resilience thinking produces interesting research ideas, people are likely to pursue it. When it seems empty of ideas, it will be abandoned or transformed into something else.

Below I give some specific response to some aspects of Homborg’s comments:

  • Neither ecosystems nor society are super-organisms – and therefore most resilience researchers do not think that medicine or health are good metaphors for managing, manipulating, or understanding ecosystems.
  • Social-ecological systems are different from ecosystems or social systems.  How they are different was specifically addressed in the 2002 book Panarchy in a chapter by Westley F, Carpenter SR, Brock WA,. Holling CS, and Gunderson LH. called “Why systems of people and nature are not just social and ecological systems”
  • Resilience thinking takes a subjective rather than objective view of systems.  Being founded in systems theory, it aims to articulate the subjective perspective from which a system is analyzed to assist in the mapping and translating between multiple perspectives.
  • I believe that more data can help us  make the world more sustainable.  Data can show where theory is wrong, identify new problems, and suggest new ways of doing things.  Science and society don’t know how to create a sustainable society – consequently I believe we need to experiment, monitor, and observe to build a better world.
  • I don’t think resilience research lacks case studies.  Researchers in the Resilience Alliance has worked on a lot of case studies.   Ellinor Ostrom in particular has done a lot of compartive case studies.
  • Homborg writes that resilience researchers are trying”to develop a conspicuously and naively non-political cybernetic etiology of socio-ecological degradation – based on the assumption that such processes, irrespective of capitalist extractivism, are universally patterned, predictable, and potentially manageable.”
    The goal of my research is to help people make better decisions under conditions of uncertainty.  I want to better understand the dynamics of human dominated ecosystems – or social-ecological systems – not “subsum[e] social systems within the vocabulary of natural science”.   I am very interested in how people interact with ecosystems and I have tried to read and collaborate with a broad set of social and natural scientists to better understand social-ecological dynamics. As far as I know, none of the various social scientists I have worked with want to subsume the social sciences within the natural sciences but rather create new ways of understanding these linked systems, especially how they cope with change and surprise.

To response to specific questions:

  • Is “path dependence” so much better than various understandings of cultural, social, political, and generally structural problems of inertia and conservatism?
    Path dependence is a shorthand way of describing these things.   The term is general and not a term produced by resilience researchers.
  • What do we gain by rephrasing environmental conflict and armed resistance as “regulation”?
    Who does that?
  • How can we hope to predict and manage the abrupt surprises and discontinuities implied by notions of “critical thresholds” and “flipping”?
    That’s what resilience research is all about. There is a lot of active research on predicting “flips” (one recent example), with lots of papers being published on it in the last few years.
  • Why should concepts such as “non-linear dynamics”, “disturbance”, “opportunities for innovation”, “adaptation”, and “renewal” provide a better way of understanding what Joseph Tainter and many others for decades have recognized as socio-ecological collapse?
    While non-linear dynamics and disturbance and general terms from math and ecology, the other concepts are exactly what some resilience researchers have added to Tainter’s analysis.  Many resilience researchers are interested in how to avoid collapse and actively transform systems to new better states.  These concepts are new additions to our exploration of social-ecological systems.

Resilience researchers believe that because living in a human dominated biosphere, in which our way of life is destabilizing the ecological systems that stabilize our life support systems, learning how to be resilient to shocks and surprise are useful and important research goals.

I do this type of research because, I want to contribute to making human impacts on the biosphere positive rather than negative, and doing this requires a better, richer, understanding how social-ecological systems actually work.

Scenarios

Robert Charles Wilson on The Ruins of Tomorrowland

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Canadian Science fiction Robert Charles Wilson writes about shifts in the consensus vision of the future in The Ruins of Tomorrowland

This week ABC broadcast a two-hour documentary special called Earth 2100 that used art, narrative and interviews to sketch a doomsday scenario for the next 90 years. The problems the show enumerates—climate change, population pressure, and ever-fiercer competition for ever-scarcer resources—are inarguably real, though their consequences and potential solutions remain fiercely debated.

What struck me, however, as I watched Bob Woodruff walk us through the collapse of civilization, was how far our consensus vision of the future has evolved. Since when? Well, take as a baseline the year 1955, when TV viewers were exposed to another art-driven, scientifically-based panorama of the near future: Disney’s Man in Space, broadcast in three parts (Man in Space, Man and the Moon, and Mars and Beyond) on the Sunday-night program then called Disneyland.

For many viewers, Man in Space was probably their first systematic glimpse of space travel treated as a real-world endeavor. Producer-director Ward Kimball mapped out a scenario already long familiar to sf readers: how we would put a man into orbit, followed by the building of a space station, a landing on the moon, the exploration of Mars, and ultimately the launch of a fleet to the nearest star. …

We lived with that consensus future for the next couple of decades. Its apotheosis was the moon landing, and it unraveled along with the Apollo program, Skylab, the shriveling of NASA, and a dawning appreciation of the technical difficulty of prolonged manned space travel. Its legacy—one in which we can take great pride, I think, as a species—is the continuing robotic exploration of the solar system. We didn’t get that big shiny Wheel in the Sky, but we’ve seen the vastness of Meridiani Planum and the icy bayous of Titan’s methane rivers.

In the meantime the consensus future has shifted radically. ABC’s Earth 2100 is much the same kind of program, using art and narrative to sketch a scenario of what science leads us to expect from the future, but it’s more dismaying than Man in Space, the way a cancer diagnosis is more dismaying than a clean bill of health. What it tells us is that our civilization is teetering on the brink of unsustainability and collapse. Earth 2100 presents a scenario that ends with major cities flooded or deserted and a global population decimated by starvation and disease. (And God bless us all, as Tiny Tim might say.) Even the panaceas offered as consolation at the end of the program seem absurdly timorous: better lightbulbs and electric cars. In this world, Disney’s Tomorrowland is either a grotesque incongruity or simply a ruin.

Behind both visions of the future, however, there were and are unspoken caveats. The specter stalking Tomorrowland from the beginning was nuclear war. The implicit promise of Man in Space was not that its glittering future was an inevitability, but that it would be our reward if we managed to sidestep atomic annihilation.

And ABC has given us a stick rather than a carrot, but the implication is strikingly similar: this is what will happen if we are not wise, and prompt, and lucky.

It’s the continuing business of science fiction to explore these consensus futures and to challenge them. Optimism is still an option—we may indeed be wise and lucky—and, even in the worst case, the Earth 2100 scenario still leaves us with a human population and the possibility of creating something better than civilization as we know it.

And in the end the new consensus future will prove just as true, just as false, just as prescient, and just as absurd as was the Disney version. The only well-established fact about the future is that we can never completely predict it. Which is what makes science fiction such a useful and pertinent art. Even now. Especially now.

Big Back Loop

Limits to Phosphorus?

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People have more than doubled the global flows of phosphorus, but unlike nitrogen, the other main fertilizer, phosphorus is mined. David A. Vaccari, an engineering professor from Stevens Institute of Technology writes in Scientific American about Phosphorus Famine: The Threat to Our Food Supply:

Altogether, phosphorus flows now add up to an estimated 37 million metric tons per year. Of that, about 22 million metric tons come from phosphate mining. The earth holds plenty of phosphorus-rich minerals—those considered economically recoverable—but most are not readily available. The International Geological Correlation Program (IGCP) reckoned in 1987 that there might be some 163,000 million metric tons of phosphate rock worldwide, corresponding to more than 13,000 million metric tons of phosphorus, seemingly enough to last nearly a millennium. These estimates, however, include types of rocks, such as high-carbonate minerals, that are impractical as sources because no economical technology exists to extract the phosphorus from them. The tallies also include deposits that are inaccessible because of their depth or location offshore; moreover, they may exist in underdeveloped or environmentally sensitive land or in the presence of high levels of toxic or radioactive contaminants such as cadmium, chromium, arsenic, lead and uranium.

Estimates of deposits that are economically recoverable with current technology—known as reserves—are at 15,000 million metric tons. That is still enough to last about 90 years at current use rates. Consumption, however, is likely to grow as the population increases and as people in developing countries demand a higher standard of living. Increased meat consumption, in particular, is likely to put more pressure on the land, because animals eat more food than the food they become.

Phosphorus reserves are also concentrated geographically. Just four countries—the U.S., China, South Africa and Morocco, together with its Western Sahara Territory—hold 83 percent of the world’s reserves and account for two thirds of annual production. Most U.S. phosphate comes from mines in Florida’s Bone Valley, a fossil deposit that formed in the Atlantic Ocean 12 million years ago. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the nation’s reserves amount to 1,200 million metric tons. The U.S. produces about 30 million metric tons of phosphate rock a year, which should last 40 years, assuming today’s rate of production.

Already U.S. mines no longer supply enough phosphorus to satisfy the country’s production of fertilizer, much of which is exported. As a result, the U.S. now imports phosphate rock. China has high-quality reserves, but it does not export; most U.S. imports come from Morocco. Even more than with oil, the U.S. and much of the globe may come to depend on a single country for a critical resource.

Some geologists are skeptical about the existence of a phosphorus crisis and reckon that estimates of resources and their duration are moving targets. The very definition of reserves is dynamic because, when prices increase, deposits that were previously considered too expensive to access reclassify as reserves. Shortages or price swings can stimulate conservation efforts or the development of extraction technologies.

And mining companies have the incentive to do exploration only once a resource’s lifetime falls below a certain number of decades. But the depletion of old mines spurs more exploration, which expands the known resources. For instance, 20 years ago geologist R. P. Sheldon pointed out that the rate of new resource discovery had been consistent over the 20th century. Sheldon also suggested that tropical regions with deep soils had been inadequately explored: these regions occupy 22 percent of the earth’s land surface but contain only 2 percent of the known phosphorus reserves.

Yet most of the phosphorus discovery has occurred in just two places: Morocco/Western Sahara and North Carolina. And much of North Carolina’s resources are restricted because they underlie environmentally sensitive areas. Thus, the findings to date are not enough to allay concerns about future supply. Society should therefore face the reality of an impending phosphorus crisis and begin to make a serious effort at conservation.

Cities

Bicycles and Cities

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Many cities have been introducing public shared bike systems.  Montreal city just introduced a city bike system, Bixi, 300 station and 3,000 bikes.  The system allows you to check if bikes are available over the internet – and users pay for a subscription and longer bike rentals -less than 1/2 hr is free.  Stockholm has City Bikes, 70 stations and about 700 bikes, which work with a subscription for 3 hr rentals and are a partnership between an advertising company and Stockholm City.  Paris’s big Velib bike system started in 2007, now has 20,000 bicycles and 1,450 stations, and is a partnership with an advertising company.  These systems are part of an increased use of bicycles in western cities.

David Byrne, pop star and bicyclist, reviews Pedaling Revolution: How Cyclists Are Changing American Cities in the New York Times:

Full disclosure: I’ve ridden a bike around New York as my principal means of transport for 30 years, so I’m inclined to sympathize with the idea that a cycling revolution is upon us, and that it’s a good thing. Like Jeff Mapes, the author of “Pedaling Revolution: How Cyclists Are Changing American Cities,” I’ve watched the streets fill over the years with more and varied bike riders. It’s no longer just me, some food delivery guys and a posse of reckless messengers. Far from it.

That said, the revolution isn’t here just yet. Hedge fund managers and General Motors executives aren’t riding to work (though don’t laugh, they will), and this book is not likely to reach beyond the already converted, which includes me, other cycling advocates, and people in the city-planning and transportation universe. But the book is useful — for those of us who occasionally find ourselves on the defensive, Mapes provides names, dates, facts and figures. He details how cities from Amsterdam to Paris to New York to Davis, Calif., have developed policies encouraging cycling in recent decades, and how other towns are just beginning to make way for bikes. He lays out in an easily digestible way a fair amount of material on trip patterns, traffic safety and air pollution. He quotes the relevant studies and shows how those studies have been either heeded or ignored. All this information is great ammunition for those of us who would like to see American cities become more bike-friendly but may be a tough sell for the people on the fence — the ones who’ve taken the occasional Sunday ride along a riverfront greenway or in a park, or have a vague feeling that they might possibly bike to work somehow someday.

…

Mapes finds the experience of riding around Portland — North America’s most bike-friendly city (though I think Vancouver is close) — so enjoyable that he takes as a given that it’s a positive thing, something that more communities should accommodate without question.

Visualization

Climate change theatre

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There has been a lack of art that addresses climate change, and this lack reduces the ability of people to envision possible futures and consequently make better decisions today.  This appears to be changing.

Playwright Steve Waters double play – Contingency Plan: On the Beach/Resilience focuses on science and politics of climate change.  The Observer writes Writers and artists are getting warmer

It is a striking stage experience. A group of cabinet ministers and scientific advisers, part of David Cameron’s newly elected government, gathers in a Whitehall basement to monitor a storm of unprecedented violence that is sweeping Britain. High seas, engorged by melted ice caps, threaten the country. Reports of gales, flooding and stricken communities pour in. Then, abruptly, the emergency telephone lines go dead and the lights fail. The tiny upstairs theatre at the Bush, London, is plunged into total darkness. Outside, a nation is drowning.

It is riveting stuff, though it is not climate change itself that forms the core of Steve Waters’s Resilience. It is the human and cultural reaction to it. “Who supplies us with electricity?” demands an infuriated minister in the pitch black. “EDF! Christ, I have got fucking shares in EDF.” Thus a national crisis becomes a battleground of self-interest, political ideology, buck-passing and bungled responses to scientific warnings.

According to Guardian theatre critic Michael Billington, Resilience has no theatrical rival for its emotional intensity at present and I am sure he is right. The play, with its partner work, On the Beach, is absorbing, intelligent, daringly imaginative and superbly performed. What really intrigues, however, is the fact that this is the London stage’s first serious attempt to tackle the issue of climate change and its impact on society.

Ecological Economics, Inequality

Machine Fetishism, Money and Resilience Theory

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Here comes the “resilience backlash”. After some considerable praising of resilience theory the last years – for example by Fast Company, Foreign Policy, and the Volvo Environment Award – human ecologist Alf Hornborg from Lund (Sweden), elaborates some harsh criticism in a forthcoming issue of the International Journal of Comparative Sociology. Although the article is almost impossible to summarize in a brief way – as it includes topics ranging from unequal exchange in the world system, “machine fetishism”, to the limitations of organizational learning – this quote captures the main criticism:

“In order to remain within acceptable discursive territory, politicians and researchers alike are expected to assume a profoundly critical stance vis-à-vis current patterns of consumption, transports, and energy use, yet continue to offer pathways to sustainability that do not seem too uncomfortable or provocative. This explains why the rallying-cry of the early 21st century is not ‘revolution’ (as in the early 20th century), but ‘resilience’.”

The key argument running throughout the paper is related to one of the weak spots of resilience theory: asymmetrical distribution of resources and power in social systems.

As a social scientist, I share Hornborg’s concern that resilience theory has been poor in elaborating the power dynamics of social-ecological change. On the other hand, Hornborg misses a range of issues that provide a much more balanced picture of what resilience is intended – and not intended – to do. Here are four quick points:

1. We know it

Yes Alf, “power” – however we choose to define it – has been problematic to integrate within the framework of social-ecological systems. On the other hand, resilience scholars are well aware of the problem, and some attempts have been made already. Elinor Ostrom – one of the most influential social science thinkers in the resilience community, but not at all mentioned in Hornborg’s article – has written extensively on the role of local collective action, institutions, and good governance. Her work does not explicitly deal with “power” as I assume that Hornborg would define it, but it does unpack the features of collective decision-making, how centralized policies often fail to deliver sustainable results, as well as the need for multilevel, nested institutions to deal with rapid market change and stresses. The wording might be different, but the main message is the same: communities and ecosystems are under severe pressure from globalized markets, and the impacts tend to affect the poorest the most. So, no disagreement there I assume.

2. We are getting there

There is a wide spread notion that resilience theory is advanced by ecologists trying to apply ecological theory on social systems (e.g. Hornborg pp. 253). This is not the case. In fact, there are a range of interesting attempts to integrate insights from complex systems theory, with social theory and ecology. Stephan Barthel’s work on social-ecological memory, as well as Henrik Ernstson’s work on the dynamics of power in social networks in urban ecology, are two great examples of how social theory is being integrated with resilience insights. Personally, I’m coordinating the collaboration with the Earth System Governance Project – an international research network that explores the role of agency, accountability, access, allocation, and adaptiveness in global environmental governance. Topics here include the possible creation of a “World Environment Organization”; the severe “trust-gap” between developed and developing countries in climate negotiations: and the international systems inability to create a legal framework to strengthen the security of environmentally induced migrants (e.g. “climate refugees”). It doesn’t get more political than this.

3. Resilience is not a theory about everything…

But sure, resilience scholars could maybe do more. On the other hand, there is a trade-off here. “Resilience” is – just like any other scientific theory – not a theory about everything. In my view, it is a theory of change in complex social-ecological systems, and a way to understand a range of novel institutional and political challenges.

4. … but it provides a range of interesting insights

And to wrap up: I’m not sure whether the suggestion that “the only way of achieving ‘sustainability’ would be by transforming the very idea and institution of money itself” (Hornborg pp. 257), is the way to go. It might be a matter of problem framings and political taste really, but I prefer the combination of practical, but disruptive social-ecological innovations that enhance human security in an ecological literate way. Might sound like an impossibility, but Chris Reij’s work in Niger and Burkina Faso, Elin Enfors’ and Line Gordon’s work on small-scale water innovations in sub-Saharan Africa, as well as the World Resources Institute  report “Roots of Resilience”, comes to mind.

The social sciences doubtlessly have a critical role to play for resilience thinking. But I’m not sure whether Hornborg really elaborates this role in an interesting, constructive and creative way.

Cities

Urban agriculture and the past’s toxic legacies

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Urban gardening with lead’s legacy, from the New York Times For Urban Gardeners, Lead Is a Concern

If soil is found to have high levels of lead, experts advise covering it with sod. Those who want to grow flowers or edible crops can either replace the contaminated soil or alkalinize it by adding lime or organic matter such as compost. Soil with a pH level above 7 binds with lead, making it less likely to be absorbed by plants and the human body if the dirt is inadvertently inhaled or ingested.

..Dr. Filippelli recommends planting kitchen gardens with fruiting crops like tomatoes, squash, eggplant, corn and beans because they don’t readily accumulate lead. Lead-leaching crops, he said, include herbs, leafy greens and root vegetables such as potatoes, radishes and carrots. Dirt also clings to these crops, making it hard to wash off and thereby increasing the risk of ingesting lead.

But some experts advise planting greens, specifically Indian mustard and spinach, for a couple of seasons as phytoremediation, or plant-based mitigation, before growing crops intended for food. By growing spinach for three months, researchers at the University of Southern Maine lowered the lead count in one garden by 200 p.p.m. Of course, the lead-leaching crop cannot be eaten or composted and must be disposed of as toxic waste.

A safer approach, particularly in areas where lead levels exceed 400 p.p.m., is to build raised or contained beds lined with landscape fabric and filled with uncontaminated soil. Luckily for Mr. Meuschke, many of his edible crops are in containers or pots filled with dirt bought at nurseries.

But lead dust blowing in the wind or rain splashing off lead-painted structures can sully food grown even in raised beds or containers. Situating gardens away from buildings is therefore a good idea, as is washing produce thoroughly with water containing 1 percent vinegar or 0.5 percent soap.

“It isn’t that you shouldn’t garden if you find lead in the soil, you just have to manage the space,” said Edie Stone, executive director of GreenThumb, a division of the New York City Parks and Recreation Department that supports urban gardening.

Cities

Transforming a concrete slab into a garden

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Crack Gardens was a winner of the American association of landscape professional award

in the residental design category.

The Crack Garden

Materials: existing site, soil amendment, plants; Size: 800 square feet; Cost: $500; Builders: homeowners

From the project’s statement.

The Crack Garden is an exploration of the identity of site and the clarity of intervention. Pre-existing places have an inherent identity that is based on their history, materiality, and activities. The design is conceived as an intervention that functions as a lens, altering perception of a place rather than completely remaking it. The intervention can reveal the physical and material qualities of the place, and/or become a catalyst to incite new program activities. In the case of The Crack Garden, completely remaking the garden was highly unlikely because of the tiny budget. By fully embracing a strategy of design as intervention, the garden relies on its previous identity as much as it does on the changes that were imposed.

The conceptual basis of The Crack Garden is to reveal the potential for beauty that underlies the concrete and asphalt that is the predominant ground plane material of the urban landscape. The interventions into the site of The Crack Garden were primarily actions of removal rather than the addition of new layers and material. By eliminating portions of the existing concrete and exposing the soil beneath, potential is released, and new opportunities for the garden arise.

Although minimal in scope and budget, The Crack Garden is refined in its creation of well-programmed spaces for the residents of this four-unit building. The edges of the garden are well-defined by existing buildings and new fences, including a stainless steel cable trellis that stretches continuously across the top of the fence and continues across the neighbor’s garage. The side of the garden along the residents’ building is kept open for social activities, and plants selected for the cracks can tolerate foot traffic, which allows for multiple uses throughout the garden. A Jacaranda tree adds scale, creates an anchor for the garden, provides needed overhead definition to help contain the space, and offers filtered shade and summer color. Potato Vine is planted along the fences and back wall to grow on the cable trellis, and a beautiful Five-Leaf Akebia vine creates textural interest on the back wall. The planting within the cracks is somewhat random, changing regularly depending on the whims and desires of the resident gardeners, but usually includes a wide range of vegetables, herbs, flowers and weeds.

via Pruned