ABSTRACT
One of the features of urban nature conservation is that many different and totally unrelated initiatives started at about the same time in places as far apart as Portland Oregon, New York, Toronto, London, Birmingham, Berlin, Tokyo and Cape Town. These initiatives had contrasting origins, but their objectives were much the same, namely to provide a place for nature in towns and cities. During the 1940s and 1950s several writers described the ecology of big cities, including London’s Natural History by Richard Fitter and The Natural History of New York City by John Kieran. These influential publications described, for the first time, the vast array of species and habitats that exist within the urban environment. The scene was set for others to follow and it was not long before specialists involved in urban design were advocating the need to take a more ecological approach. Notable amongst these were Ian McHarg in Design with Nature (1969) and Nan Fairbrother’s New Lives, New Landscapes (1970). Another influential book was Richard Mabey’s Unofficial Countryside (1973) which first drew attention to the value of wild corners in British towns and cities. It was a time when new ideas were developing. One of the first ecologists to espouse the value of urban wildlife was Ray Dasmann in a speech entitled Wildlife and the New Conservation given in Maryland, USA in 1966. He pointed out that generations were growing up in cities, with no roots in the land and little experience of the natural world. Dasmann felt that the wildlife profession in America was too closely identified with game animals and hunters, and urged naturalists to get out of the forests and into the cities. He argued that they should work with city and metropolitan regional planners, with landscape architects and others concerned with the urban environment, to make towns and cities into places where each person’s everyday life could be enriched by contact with nature. It was all the more significant coming from one of the leading figures in world conservation (Dasmann 1966). Not long after this, in 1968, a national conference on Man and Nature in the City was held in Washington, D.C., sponsored by the Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife, at which the director admitted that if the Bureau continued to focus on wide open spaces and neglected the people of the city, as it had in the past, then it would find itself in a very questionable position with society (Gottschalk 1968). Other conferences on urban wildlife followed in the USA and
Canada, and in 1973 a National Institute for Urban Wildlife was established in the USA. One of its first publications was a report on planning for wildlife in cities and suburbs (Leedy et al. 1978). By this time a number of cities had started to take urban wildlife seriously, including New York, one of the first to develop an urban wildlife programme with inventories being made of urban habitats (Miller 1978). By the mid-1980s a number of projects were underway in the USA which involved planning as the principal means of achieving urban nature conservation. A conference on Wildlife Conservation and New Residential Developments (Stenberg and Shaw 1986) included a review of such initiatives (Leedy and Adams 1986). The Director of the National Institute, Lowell Adams, must take credit for the surge of activity at this time, as he actively promoted the involvement of professional planners and landscape architects (Adams and Leedy 1987). The Washington conference of 1968 led to a similar conference in Manchester UK nearly ten years later, organised by landscape architect Ian Laurie (1975). It is fascinating that in Britain it was members of the landscape profession who led the way in making proposals for urban nature conservation, rather than ecologists or wildlife conservationists. The meeting in Manchester was the first in the UK to bring together all the different professions involved, including urban planners, landscape designers, ecologists and even social scientists. It was a significant event which led to a spate of new initiatives across a wide range of disciplines during the 1980s. Meanwhile, in Germany and Poland there were already well established research schools of urban ecology associated with universities in Berlin and Warsaw, investigating many different aspects in great depth. Professor Herbert Sukopp established the Institute of Ecology at the Technical University in Berlin which concentrated largely on botany and vegetation, with a strong emphasis on the phytosociology of urban areas. Dr Luniak and colleagues in Poland concentrated mainly on animal ecology. These two centres effectively led the way in urban ecological studies in Europe. West Berlin has a special place in the history of urban ecology and conservation. During the 1970s strategic nature conservation programmes were developed in several states in the Federal Republic of Germany, and West Berlin was included as a city state. Isolated as an island in East Germany it had to provide for nature conservation alongside other land uses within the confined boundaries of the city. Comprehensive biotope mapping was carried out for the whole city, providing the ecological basis of the land use plan. The result was an extremely detailed strategic plan for conservation, adopted in 1979 (Henke and Sukopp 1986). Not only was Berlin the first city to have such a plan, but it was supported by an immense amount of ecological information. No other city has been subject to the same degree of investigation and the studies carried out over the years have provided major advances in our understanding of urban ecology (Sukopp 1990). It is striking that by the time the first European symposium on Urban Ecology was held in Berlin in 1980 there was a wealth of detailed work on a wide range of newly developing topics in the field of urban ecology (Bornkamm et al. 1982). Most contributions were specific autecological or habitat related studies. Examples include urban fox populations, invertebrate diversity of urban habitats, and the botanical importance of industrial habitats. There were also attempts to look in a holistic way at the urban environment as an ecosystem. The contribution by Numata (1982) is a notable example. The organisers endeavoured to include contributions on the ecological effects of human activity in urban areas, and on the application of ecological knowledge in urban design and planning. But it is clear that at that time, with the notable exception of Berlin, planning for nature in European cities was still in its infancy. An important initiative dealing with the ecology of cities at this time was the UNESCO Man and the Biosphere programme known as MAB 11, led by John Celecia. This was an ambitious
programme which involved environmental system analysis of selected cities around the world, including Tokyo, Hong Kong, Rome, Madrid, Buenos Aires and Seoul, as well as some smaller European cities such as Delft and Valencia. The broad objective was to examine the way in which cities function, in order to find more sustainable solutions. One of the aims was to demonstrate through ecosystem modelling the dependency of large cities on their underlying ecological features, and to encourage greater interaction between environmental scientists and political decision makers. Many of these projects involved detailed analysis of urban habitats and their flora and fauna as part of the modelling process. The investigation of Tokyo, referred to above is a good example (Numata 1982). Whilst such studies did not lead directly to systems of planning for nature conservation, the methodologies provided useful tools for production of inventories and classification of biotopes (Celecia 1990). The situation changed dramatically during the 1980s when planning for nature in cities suddenly became a mainstream activity with a wide range of initiatives in many different countries. The way that this developed in the UK illustrates very well how strategic planning can be used as a basis for conserving important sites.
