Sustainability Videos & Lecture Series

David Pijawka: We’re very lucky to have Professor Tim Beatley here with us today from the University of Virginia. If we’re thinking about people who’ve had influence in the field of sustainability, and this relationship to design and planning and ethics, and how do we develop the sustainable solutions, I can’t think of anyone else but Tim Beatley, who has had such an influence in sustainability thinking. I just went down a list of about 15 books he’s written in the last few years that have really shaped our thinking about sustainability, and it’s phenomenal. Some of these books I’ve given to my freshman class. Sustainable City is a huge class, one of the largest at ASU with almost 500 people per semester, 500 students per semester. All very excited, but especially excited by the work that Professor Beatley has done, and his influence—a major intellectual force in sustainability.

Just going down this list I have here, and I’m not gonna do all of them, because it just goes on and on, but just a few of them and its influence on us. Some of you, I’m sure, have read these books or heard of the books or seen the references to these things. Green Urbanism, Learning from European Cities—now translated into Chinese, Habitat Conservation Planning, Native to Nowhere, which I used to use every year in my introductory class. Also used it a couple of times in my graduate class on sustainability. Native to Nowhere. Planning for Coastal Resilience. A work that he did with Peter Newman, Resilient Cities, a really important book that all students in sustainability should be reading. Green Urbanism. But especially, one of his older books, which is now being identified by the American Planning Association, as one of the most influential books, the 100 most influential books in planning, is Ethical Land Use. Somebody has a copy of it. Does he pay you for doing his marketing, or what? [Laughter] It’s wonderful to have you guys here, but—is this your marketing team is in Arizona? I mean, it’s amazing! I don’t have that luck. I guess once I’ve reached 10 to 15 books in sustainability, I can have a marketing group like this. Considered to be in the 100 essential books in planning.

There’s more. His latest one is called Biophilic Cities. That’s what Tim is gonna be talking about today. He’s also come here, want to address our class of about 500 students on Biophilic Cities, and we, as part of that class, we have a Barrett honors section, that are actually starting to work with University of Virginia and Professor Beatley on a project on how to establish city of Phoenix as a biophilic city. What do we know about nature and a city, especially a desert city? What do we know about restoring nature in the city? What do we know of how much of the wildlife corridors have been destroyed by development? What do we do now to turn it into a biophilic city, and what are the impacts to people, to neighborhoods, of having a rich biodiversity in their neighborhoods? Of having nature there? What does that mean? We’re looking at the impacts behaviorally. We’re looking at the impacts psychologically, on economics, on social progress, et cetera. But especially, what role does it have in developing sustainable communities?

In addition to his work, I should also mention that he is—I did mention, University of Virginia, but he is the Teresa Heinz Professor of Sustainable Communities there. He’s been doing this work—the essence of some of his work, most of his work, I should say, is in the area of resiliency and sustainable development. In addition to his writing, his scholarship, his teaching, he has also just produced a movie, a documentary film shown by PBS all over the country, called The Nature of Cities. If you haven’t seen it, we should all see it. He writes regularly for Planning Magazine on a section called Ever Green on sustainability.

He holds a PhD from City and Regional Planning from University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, an MA in Political Science from UNC, a Master’s in Urban Planning from University of Oregon, and a Bachelor’s from University of Virginia. I really wanna thank him for being here. He regularly comes to ASU and I’m really, I’m just delighted. He basically, he has such an impact on the kids in the freshman year in Sustainable Cities. Let’s give a wonderful hand for Tim Beatley here. [Applause]

Tim Beatley: Sorry about that. Hello! Now I’m projecting. I essentially wanna talk about this idea of biophilic cities. David mentioned several things, and I’m gonna quickly go through a number of cities and projects and things going on around the country and around the world. If you, not so much by way of applauding, but if you want some place to look for more information, there is this most recent book called Biophilic Cities, which is really—it’s a thin book, actually. I needed to know where, some of the other books were kinda fat, partly cuz I have an editor who thinks people don’t read fat books anymore. [Laughter] They’re trying to get me to kinda shred them. It’s partly by design, because I’ll be honest, that this is very exploratory. I’ll get you all hopefully comfortable using the terminology biophilia and biophilic cities, but I certainly don’t entirely know what a biophilic city is. This book was an effort to sort of throw out some ideas and start a conversation about it, which hopefully we can continue today. There is this film that David mentioned, and there actually is another book that’s just come out in the last few months, called Green Cities of Europe, which includes a number of cities that I would describe as biophilic cities, like Freiburg, Germany, and Copenhagen, and some cities that I’ll actually talk about today.

I am from the University of Virginia, and as many of you, some of you know, probably, my university was founded by Thomas Jefferson. I’m required to begin every lecture by referencing—no, I’m not. [Laughter] It’s very easy, actually, in the context of sustainability to argue—we were talking earlier to David about the sustainability timeline. We like to argue at UVA that Thomas Jefferson was one of the first people to advocate sustainability. I often have slides; I don’t today. In his concern about how we use forests and farmland and his love of landscapes, he was an avid gardener, of course, and an astronomer, and did just about everything, an amateur architect, had an interest in lots of different things, but nature in particular held a special place for him. I like to argue that he was our first biophilic president. A little known fact that he was the first president actually to have a pet in the White House. He took with him a mocking bird, a mocking bird by the name of Dick. Little known fact, cuz he loved birds, and really all things in nature.

We do have this emerging work that’s a little fuzzy, but I wanted, before I forget, just open by actually building on what David’s saying. I’m here, in part, because David and I are joining forces and this is partly about exploring how cities can connect, how urbanites can better connect to the nature around them, how we can better integrate that nature into urban environments, as we increasingly become an urbanized planet. We’ve gotten some funding from the Summit Foundation, which is a Washington-based foundation. We’re in the middle of about an 18-month project, and we’re, among other things, developing a network of global cities, global partner cities. I’m gonna give you a lot of examples from those partner cities, and developing a network of what I’m calling biophilic urbanists. We have a website, biophilic cities dot org, and I write a—you can’t see it here, but a biophilic cities blog, and we have several other parallel blogs that deal with ideas and good practice, and a blog about technology. There is a page for each of the biophilic city partner cities. We’re using, we’re imagining this website as an important portal for understanding the work that we’re doing. If you would like to go and join our list and see, that would be a great way to kind of keep track of what we’re up to.

As David mentions, I have this larger interest. I’m an urban planner, larger interest in cities and larger interest in kind of urban sustainability. I sometimes put the biophilic design, biophilic urbanism in that larger context. I’m probably telling you the obvious, which is that these are both very daunting times, when we think about the challenges faced by cities today, but also very exciting times, when you think about the possibility of reaching a truly sustainable place in the future. It’s got to involve cities. It cannot not incorporate cities. Cities everywhere are rising to the fore, and setting very ambitious targets, and laying out ambitious visions for a more sustainable future. This is one of my favorite Herbert Girardet quotes, “The cities of the 21st century are were human destiny will be played out, and where the future of the biosphere will be determined. There will be no sustainable world without sustainable cities.” That is very, very true, when we think about where carbon and greenhouse gases are emitted, and where energy is consumed and waste produced. Again, when you think about where we have the possibilities of living with a smaller ecological footprint, living more compactly, densely, more energy-efficient, it’s in cities. Cities do represent our best hope, I would argue.

That said, there is an awful lot going on. This is not Herbie’s year day on the left, this is a fellow named Klaus Bondam, who—he actually appears in our nature cities film. He’s holding up, he’s kind of a stand-in for a lot of the really impressive things that cities are doing. In the case of Copenhagen, they’re aspiring to be what they’re calling an eco-metropol. This is a very ambitious document that’s setting some amazing goals: minimum green spaces per capita, maximum greenhouse gas emissions per capita. One of the goals is to achieve a point where 50 percent of the trips made in the city are made by bicycles. 50 percent. Which seems laughable, right? Hard to believe. In the American context, we’re happy for a one or two percent. In Copenhagen, they’re already almost at 40 percent trips made by bicycles, and doing some pretty amazing things to continue to push down that path.

These are, again, daunting and exciting times. I can’t remember in my 25 years or longer time, when it’s been more exciting to be involved in planning as a profession. Partly daunting, I often using this language, green urbanism. The idea of bringing the green, the ecological and green together with the compactness and the urban. We have a lot of moving parts, of course, and a lot of things that we’re trying to think about all at once. David mentioned the word resilience. When you think about what we’re facing, what cities are facing in terms of adaptation to climate change, sea level rise, and all of that means, thinking about droughts and heat waves and all the ways that cities will need to be more adaptive and more resilient. A long-term decline in global oil supplies will be a real test for American cities. Think about American cities like Atlanta, that are not going to be very resilient in the face of reducing reductions in oil.

It’s also about health. We’ve started actually, at UVA, just as a little side note, a brand new center for design and health, which is kind of neat. We’re actually beginning to pull together, bring together, the medical school and the nursing school with the architecture and planning schools, and begin to think about how we can work together in tackling obesity and tackling our sedentary lifestyles. How we figure out how to get more people on bikes and walking. It’s also about livability and sense of place. It’s also about the social end of the things and how do we maximize social connections and social capital and bring design places that accommodate multiple generations and an inter-generational society. Again, exciting times, but lots of things that we’re gonna try to think about at once.

One of the reasons, for me, that it’s very exciting right now to be in planning is that we’re rethinking just about everything that we do. Rethinking the very nature of what a city is, which is exciting. This idea that we might imagine a different energy system, one less based on coal-burning power plants or fossil-burning plants, large plants away from where people live, losing a lot of energy in the transmission lines. Imagining an energy system based on renewable technologies integrated into buildings and neighborhoods very close to where it’s needed. This notion of solar cities. We’ve been writing about several of them emerging. The notion that just as my colleague Bill McDonough talks about designing every building to function like a tree, every city like a forest. We want cities with forests in them, but we also wanna design cities that function like natural systems. Just as a tree likes off solar income, can’t we imagine cities that do the same? That’s a challenge.

Rethinking the very nature of the metabolism of cities is another way of re-imagining places that—we know that cities require lots of things. We need energy and food and water and materials, and historically those things have come from somewhere. We haven’t really cared where they come from, as long as they arrive. The other end of it, we generate lots of waste: air pollution, water pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, municipal solid waste. Those things we think go away. They don’t really go away. We hope they’re out of sight, anyway. A new way of imagining cities is to understand that a healthy and sustainable metabolism, and that’s, many of us, David as well, many of us are working on that, what that means. For a lot of us, it means our reducing the through-put. Figuring out how we can make those metabolic flows smaller or lesser. It means shortening supply lines, so we wanna again, back to the energy, produce more of that energy closer to where it’s needed, and produce more food closer to where it’s needed. Then imagining how we might enclose the loops and see that city like a natural system. As in nature, there’s nothing wasted, so therefore, why not apply the same principle in a city? Things that were a waste, return back to the city as productive input.

Those are different ways of thinking about the cities, the concept of a city. We now, at UVA and many other planning programs, we offer a community foods systems class as a basic class that a couple of us started about five, six years ago. Food planners have rediscovered food in a big way. Greg Peterson I’m looking at over here on the urban farm in town, one of our inspirations. Yay! [Applause] We’re really rethinking the very nature of a city when we’re doing this, imagining cities as bountiful places, of places, that not just sucking food from hundreds or thousands of miles away, but rather places that can produce a lot of the food needed. These are really quite important times.

The rest of what I wanna talk about today is this really important subset of issues having to do with nature. Sometimes we, in our understandable zeal to figure out the energy or the material flow issues, we emphasize the green but we forget the real green. We forget the kind of, the nature part of the equation. That’s really what this biophilic planning, biophilic design is all about. I give a lot of credit to Ed Wilson, E.O. Wilson, the biologist at Harvard, who kind of popularized the terminology of biophilia. This is one of several of his definitions. Biophilia, the innately emotional affiliation of human beings to other living organism. Innate means hereditary, and hence, part of ultimate human nature. We could argue, we do argue that it’s something that we’re hard-wired to need. That, to be happy and health and productive and to lead meaningful lives, we need that nature. We don’t just need it on holiday, during the summer. We need it every month, every week, every day, perhaps every hour. It needs to be all around us. It’s not something out there that we go to. It’s something that we, it’s a condition that we live within, hopefully. We’re very lucky to get Ed Wilson to write the foreword to this Biophilic Cities book. He’s a hero for a lot of us.

This is the charge, is to think about them, if we do need this nature. It’s not optional. It’s absolutely necessary for us to be happy and healthy and productive. What does that mean for how we design cities? I don’t entirely know the answer, but that’s what the discussion is about. I have a few slides just to tell you what you probably already know, and that’s that the evidence is mounting about this, and how and why it is we need that nature in our lives. It does help us to be profoundly more at ease and relaxed and productive and happy. I love this Japanese research around the concept of forest bathing. Sometimes I show this slide, people think I’m talking about actual bathing. [Laughter] That could be part of it, too. This idea of bathing in a forest, with the dappled light and the sounds and the beautiful hues around you. It’s like a bath, right? This evidence is pretty compelling. They actually show that a walk in a forest results in a reduction in stress hormones and cortisol, and gives us a boost to our immune systems. From a design and health point of view, biophilic design is very important. It also helps to bring us together in a very powerful way. It’s not the only thing that can, but nature has a special power to create the condition in which we form friendships and we come together to socialize and build those social relationships.

These two women here in the imagine are from, it’s a story from our film. They are two amateur urban wildlife trackers. They’ve gone to school to learn to recognize the difference between a domestic cat paw print and a bobcat, for instance. We followed them one day, and one of the beautiful canyons in San Diego has this pattern of development that’s kind of skipped over these beautiful canyons full of biodiversity. It was quite interesting for us, cuz we couldn’t—we could hardly keep up with them. They went running down the trail, and we were running after them. At a certain point, they went off the trail, and we wondered, where are they? Where were they? Then we heard this yelping, this joyful yelp. They had just discovered a blood spot on a branch. They concluded that the resident female bobcat had not—it was there, just a few minutes before. They were extremely happy about this, and we went down. If you watch the film, you’ll see us kind of filming them explaining their discovery.

They talk about—these are friendships that are formed in this environment. They talk about, this particular canyon, Rose Canyon, has multi-family on one side, has single-family on another side. It has communities around it that probably would not come together without having this space, and this amazing environment. That’s what this does. It brings people, who would not perhaps have friendships or have much interaction, together. I call it nature’s social capital, natural social capital. Again, it’s not the only thing, the only kinds of spaces that do this, but nature’s uniquely suited to bringing us together.

We know, actually we have a lot of evidence now, about the urban healing power, I’m calling it here. This is one recent study published last year in the American Journal of Epidemiology access, showing a study from Philadelphia. Philly is one of the cities we’ve been studying and starting to develop some partner relationships with. There they have had a program for planting trees in vacant urban lots. 40,000 vacant lots, something like that, in the city of Philadelphia, so a tremendous opportunity. It turns out, when you study places where those lots, those vacant lots that are green, that interesting things happen. In fact, reductions in gun assaults, for instance. Consistent reductions in vandalism, and that the people who live near these vacant lots actually, the green lots, show less stress, report having less stress, and more exercise. Green elements help us, help promote health activities like being outside and exercising, walking, and so on.

My other imagines of Philly have to do with some of the neat things going on. There is a non-governmental organization called the Philly Orchard Project. This is an image from a recent fruit tree class. They go into neighborhoods around Philly and help them establish these orchards. The orchards, they have to be in places that are food-insecure in some way. They have to be places where the neighborhood is willing to take over and manage these important food-producing trees and spaces. A lot of very interesting ideas coming out of cities like Philadelphia.

We could also argue the evidence about the economic, positive economic effects of nature in cities. This is actually another story from the film. Merlin Tuttle on the left founded something called Bat Conservation International. He’s standing here right next to the Congress Avenue Bridge in Austin, Texas. We tell the story in the film about the one and a half million Mexican free-tailed bats that come to roost, come to visit, spend the summer in Austin each year. The first reaction of the city of Austin was, this is a health hazard. This is a danger. They were ready to go along, actually, with torches, and eradicate these bats. To Merlin’s credit, he moved actually this organization from Wisconsin, moved it to Austin, and over a relatively short period of time, the city turned its whole perspective towards the bats around. If you’ve ever been to Austin in the summer, you’ve probably been told you need to go there and watch the emergence of the bats at sundown. People stand several hours ahead of time. There’s a bat-watching area below the bridge. We had a great time filming several nights here. It’s just spectacular. I’m showing the slide in part to make the case about economics. What happened here is that there are now three or four bat-watching dinner cruises. [Laughter] They go up and down the lower Colorado River. They’ve named their hockey team after the bats. There’s a big bat statue that they’ve erected. They’ve kinda gone a little bat crazy in Austin, you could say, but millions of dollars in tourism revenue coming in to the city, from people coming in to watch the bats. There’s a kind of an economic argument here as well that we need to think about.

Very interesting evidence about, from psychology, and about the, when you look at experimental evidence that the presence of nature may actually help us to be better human beings. I find this quite convincing, and quite compelling. I won’t go through all of this, but some researches at the University of Rochester showing that you are more likely to exhibit generous behavior in an experimental setting if you have nature around you, compared to a similar set of exercises without nature. To me, this makes complete sense, when you think about where we are the happiest and most comfortable. We are carrying around with us these ancient brains, and it’s not a big surprise that having nature around us will make us more generous or cause us to have to bring out those qualities of generosity.

This is a sulphur-crested cockatoo who is my little side story here. We lived in Sydney, Australia for a while. We moved into this apartment. Almost within a few minutes, this flock of sulphur-crested cockatoos came to visit us to see how generous we were going to be. [Laughter] Not sure that we were, particularly, but that was a very important part of the biophilia, the biophilic condition of Sydney, actually.

Strong evidence, we know we are increasingly an urbanized planet. We know that we can’t do without nature. How do we reconcile those two realities? I’m not sure exactly what a biophilic city is, but we’re starting to flesh this out, and part of it is looking at different cities around the world and looking at different models and looking at different conditions. If you are interested in this book, this Biophilic Cities book, there is one table that has a little bit more detail about some metrics about what a biophilic city is or could be. First, and I’m not gonna read this, but I may just tell you the headings.

One big one, biophilic conditions and infrastructure. The presence of nature, of natural systems, of nature around us and urbanized environments, is very important. To a certain degree, there’s always nature around us, but we know that we can have, we can daylight streams, we can plant trees and forests, we can have green rooftops. We can have more abundant nature around us. There are different ways that we can measure that. Some of them are becoming pretty standard now. For instance, this measure of percentage of population within a certain distance of the park. There is now in Europe this new green capital city program, and one of the key measures that all the applicants have to indicate is, what percentage of your city’s population lies within 300 meters of a park or green space? I think in this table, I say 100 meters is probably a better indicator. That’s one way we could measure it. Lots of cities are calculating tree canopy coverage. We’ve got some organizations, like American Forests, arguing for a certain percentage—40 percent, whatever it is. Presence or absence of nature is part of what we wanna know, but it’s not the only thing. We can actually think about cities where we might have a lot of nature, but the residents of that city don’t enjoy that nature, don’t engage in and connect with that nature as often or as intensively as they could.

Biophilic activities. What percentage of an urban population is engaged, in some way, in outdoor nature activities? That’s everything from being part of a birding club, native plants club, to working on an ecological restoration project. We’re not very good, actually, at adding up these things and trying to understand the various ways that people can be encouraged to connect. Back to that story of the two urban trackers. That’s one thing that you might engage in. Increasingly, though, we are seeing cities that are just as concerned, not just with the protection or the restoration of nature, but with the side of educating and engaging the population, which is important as well. Biophilic activities.

Biophilic attitudes and knowledge. Here’s where the education comes in. I’m gonna tell you a little bit about our kinda dismal lack of understanding about the nature around us in a second. That’s important as well, how much we care about that nature. How much do we know about the nature around us? Can we recognize common species of flora and fauna? That’s another category. There’s probably a more sophisticated metric system. Hopefully we will have one at the end of this project that will have 20 categories, or have some more nuanced approach, but my last category, biophilic institutions and governance. What percentage of a local government’s budget is devoted to this? Are there government and non-governmental institutions that foster connections? We’ve learned, we often see that a presence of a natural history museum is quite important. One of our study cities, partner cities, is Milwaukee. Milwaukee has just opened their third branch of the Urban Ecology Center, and already, the first two branches are seeing something like 80,000 visits per year to these ecology centers. That’s a kind of infrastructure, a kind of governance and institution that’s a little bit different than the planting of trees or the actual kind of nature in a city.

Lots of metrics that we could talk about. One of the metrics that may be really hard for us to figure out, one of the things that I think sold the Summit Foundation on this grant, this grant application of ours, was that we were gonna try to answer this question: What is the minimum daily requirement of nature in cities? Interesting question. I don’t know that we will know the answer, but it’s an interesting way to think about it.

Just to back up a bit, this pyramid, and if anyone would like to know more about this, I just did a big blog for nature cities collective blog page. Been kind of exploring this in a little bit more detail. My colleague, Tanya Denckla Cobb, really her idea, and my version of it is a little bit different than hers. We’ve got to begin to think a little bit more carefully about what is it that makes up the daily or hourly experience of nature in cities? We can start to think about that, maybe, by thinking about a pyramid. We’ve all gotten used to the nutritional pyramid, right? The food pyramid. Now, darn it, the USDA’s going to plates instead of pyramids. The basic concept that what’s healthy, you wanna have some of that stuff at the top of the pyramid, but you don’t want very much of it, and you don’t wanna have it very often. What you wanna do is build your diet based on those things towards the bottom, the fruits and vegetables and the things that are healthy, probably healthier for us in greater measure, greater quantity, more frequently.

What’s the equivalent in a nature pyramid? At the top, it’s good to have longer, more intensive, immersive experiences with nature. Flying off to the rain forest and wherever, it may be nice. I’m not sure that we can really afford for all of us—I think we can’t afford it from a carbon or greenhouse gas emissions perspective. Your footprint is just too great. What we really gotta do is think about what’s down here. What makes up the foundation? That’s the neighborhood nature. That’s the nature that’s here, not out there, but here. What is it? Back to this question of what is it we need in urban environments? I don’t know exactly, and I’m not even sure that, right now, we have a good idea of what to carry on the analogy of the pyramid. What are the servings that we’re talking about? That bird that flies in front of us for ten seconds—is that a serving? [Laughter] Do we have to take a bath in the forest, the forest bathing—is that a serving? Five minutes, ten minutes, half an hour? What is it? What is our dosage? We might think about dosage, would be another word that we could use. This is very much an open question. We’re figuring out how to answer it. It’s one that, if nothing else, whenever I show this pyramid, it starts to stimulate discussion about what kind of nature we’re talking about.

I made the point that we have lots of, we have a lot of obstacles to connecting or re-connecting to the nature around us. I’ve often done this visual survey, given this to hundreds of people, and asking them to identify native flora and fauna. It’s always a little bit discouraging, cuz [laughter] they almost always get the corporate logos, but they almost never get the native common species of birds and trees and flowers. This is a silver-spotted skipper, which is a very common species of butterfly where I live. The last year I did this, two, three years ago, I finally got one correct answer out of hundreds. I get consistent answers. It looked like a moth. It’s actually not a moth. It looks like a moth. I think that’s probably not a bad answer. I’ve had a lot of people tell me it was a monarch butterfly. Doesn’t look anything like a monarch butterfly. [Laughter] Apparently the only butterfly we know in this country is a monarch butterfly. I’ve had two or three people tell me it was a hummingbird, which was [laughter] kind of interesting.

We have a hard time. I don’t believe—we’ve just now, passing the 50th anniversary of Silent Spring. We’ve just had a big Rachel Carson exhibition at my school. She talked a lot about A Sense of Wonder, beautiful book that came out of a magazine article that she wrote. Most eloquent person writing about that. She argues that maybe it isn’t that important for your parent—oh, there it is!

Audience Member 1: 25th anniversary!

Tim Beatley: Oh wow! Okay. That one’s got it. The beautiful picture that we have on the back in that exhibition. What she talked about, maybe parents shouldn’t hesitate. Just because you don’t know what the scientific name is for that thing that you just saw, just the showing of excitement about it and enthusiasm about it is enough. I don’t wanna make this too big a deal, but it is part of the evidence of being disconnected from the nature around us. One of the big points that I make about biophilia is that it’s multi-sensory. It’s not just—we seem to kind of privilege the ocular or the visual. So much of it is other sounds. My part of the world, even right now, the summer evening sounds—we’re not in summer—are great. The tree frogs and katydids, crickets, and during the day, cicadas, it’s just part of the music of the place. Yet, we’re not really understanding it or monitoring it or seeing how it changes over time.

A few years ago, we started developing a sound map for Charlottesville, and we’ve been—part of what we’re gonna do with these study cities is collect sounds and try to have sound samples from those cities. Just as we—this is a question for you. What is that? Just as we don’t recognize that butterfly that flies in front of us, there’s so many sounds that we hear that we don’t recognize, either. Anybody know what that is? It’s gonna come around one more time. Not the--

Audience Member 2: It’s a bird.

Tim Beatley: That sound.

Audience Member 3: Tree frog?

Tim Beatley: Tree frog—that’s a common guess. Actually, it’s a very common species of an eastern screech owl. There’s a place in my neighborhood where I hike. We go almost every evening, and for the last three or four nights, we’ve heard a little eastern screech owl. The other part of the call is this amazing kind of downward whinny. It’s goes whoa-ho-ho-ho-ho, like a horse. Once you hear that, you never forget it. Most people hear it and wonder what it is, but don’t really know what it is. Turns out, screech owls don’t screech at all.

We need to be paying attention to the sound-scape as well. Last summer I spent a bunch of time in Australia, trying to record some of the sounds there. Boy, that’s a little loud, isn’t it? This is an Australian raven. It sounds a little like a crying baby. It’s such a distinctive part of the sound-scape of that place. I love the idea—Val Plumwood is a Australian ethicist, environmental ethicist, who passed away several years ago. She likes to talk about this idea that we begin to recognize what we hear as not just sounds but voices. Shifting from sound to voice. We recognize it’s an actual living thing that we’re hearing, that we’re sharing that space with, or sharing those urban environments with. A fellow citizen, a fellow traveler in that city. That’s part of what I mean when I talk about biophilic cities.

What can we do? The many things that these study cities are doing, these partner cities are doing, we know that it’s gotta be multi-scaled. It’s gotta happen at lots of different levels, from bio-region or region to rooftop or room, and everything in between. We talk a lot about the concept of connected ecological systems and urban ecological networks. We know that some of the best biophilic cities are places—this is Helsinki in the background—places where you can walk out your front door, your flat, and you have nature around you. You are able to walk to connected natural systems, walk to progressively larger parts of nature, as you move out. Helsinki, a place where you can actually walk from the center of the city, all the way out to old-growth forest at the edge. That’s one definition of biophilic city.

Oslo is another study city, which has been a great inspiration for us. It’s a city that is intentionally becoming more dense, and steering development into the compact, urbanized part of the city. Two thirds of the city of Oslo is in protected forest, with what they call marka there. The latest impressive part of what they’re doing is that, here’s the forest, they’re now daylighting. They have a plan for bringing back to the surface the major rivers that run from the forest to the fjord. They’ve done it already, in the case of one large river, but they’re doing it in several of the other rivers, and on the way to this larger vision, a larger plan. It’s quite impressive. Oslo is still a dense city, but amazing amounts of nature left, and an amazing trail network, that overlays on top of this urbanized area. You find a lot of things like this, which is just—oh, I dunno, a kilometer or two from the center of Oslo. This is part of the connected trails network in that city. If you’re working in an office building and just get on your bike and go out, and five or ten minutes and you’re there in pretty amazing forest. I actually have sound recordings from this beautiful stream as well. There’s a multi-sensory dimension.

Lots of things we can do. We can daylight streams, we can think about re-imagining streets, this concept of green streets. This is the Green Bridge in London. We, of course, many of the things that we talk about were radical 15 or 20 years ago, are kind of standard or mainstream, like green roots or ecological rooftops. This is the—Cesar Pelli designed Minneapolis Public Library, almost entirely covered by a green roof, including native species of cactus—cacti. Cacti native to Minnesota. Something’s not right.

We filmed this beautiful green wall—Patrick Blanc was a Parisian botanist who, many of you know probably, does these amazing walls. We set up one day and filmed this. It was a visceral demonstration of biophilia. People could not walk by this wall without interacting with it in one way or another—touching it, standing next to it and getting dripped on, looking up at the sky, hugging it, putting friends and family in front of it and taking a picture. It was a very popular thing. The Eiffel Tower is a couple blocks away, but people seem more interested in the green wall, frankly, but that’s my biased impression. [Laughter]

We see a lot of really creative green design ideas from around the world. Singapore is one of our main partner cities, and we have, actually, a new film—I don’t know if you know about this, David, but Singapore, a Biophilic City. You can find it—it’s on YouTube. If you just Google that, you’ll find it. One of the stories in that film, it’s about a 50 minute film, is Kelvin Kan, who is the designer of this office building in downtown Singapore, the business district of Singapore. It’s an eight story green wall. It’s quite an interesting story, and quite an interesting design—a series of connected pots. A lot of very careful thought went into how you maintain them and how you replace plants and how you kinda make it work over a longer period of time.

We found, from very, very elaborate systems, to very relatively low-cost sort of systems. We spent a day—you’ll also see this in the film—filming at a school in Singapore where the kids and a teacher had designed and built their own green wall, which is—you see part of it here. With a little bit of money from the Singapore government as part of a Singapore greening program. Probably the most beautiful green wall that I’ve ever seen is one that was designed by kids, and built by kids. Really spectacular.

Lots of things that we can do in dense cities. Of course, Singapore is a terrific example. I have a few more slides later. Almost the entire, a very high percentage of the population, living in high-rise buildings. Another partner city is San Francisco. We’ve been spending a lot of time in San Francisco. They’ve had a lot of very creative programs for taking small amounts of space and inserting nature. This is part of this pavements to parks initiative. This idea of street parks, taking the median strips between streets and converting them into parks. There’s a whole story about this particular one right on the water. The latest chapter, you’ve probably heard about parklets. Parklets are—San Francisco’s always sort of innovating in this area. How do you take tiny—it’s a pretty dense, already heavily developed place, so where do you find nature? The city now has a program for converting two or three on-street parking spaces into small parks. They call them parklets. There are now more than 20 of them. This is one, this is probably my favorite. Jane Martin is a landscape architect, and she designed this particular space. You’re only seeing part of it. It’s actually the first and maybe only one so far which is a residential parklet. Most of them are commercial, or most of them in front of businesses. She designed the whole thing, including trixie, which is this kinda green, vegetative dinosaur. Can you see? [Laughter] Which is a reference to the ancient history of the part of the world, which is kind of cool. They’ve done some studies that show already that people tend to stop and linger and have more conversations in places where there are parklets. I think we’re gonna see more of them in San Francisco, and the idea is all over the world, now. Actually, they’re quite, understandably, proud about how the idea’s made its way into other places.

Compact, dense, urban neighborhoods—we tell a couple of stories of McCaffrey neighborhood, with lots of trees and courtyards and green spaces, and car-limited spaces, in which kids can play. I’m a big advocate of free-range kids. [Laughter] A biophilic city, we should figure out how we can design cities to be for free-range kids, or as my colleague Peter Newman says, feral kids [laughter], might be a better—the design standard outta be a little higher than just free-range. We filmed, actually, one of the more moving parts of the nature cities film while interviewing the developer, the founder of this community. It’s an amazing green, compact green community with an orchard in the very center. She talks about going out and shaking the trees. It’s something you don’t do very often, as adults anyway.

Many things that we can do, and many things that we’re gonna hafta figure out what the biophilic agenda is in more vertical, compact, denser, vertical cities. How do we ensure that there’s nature there? Singapore represents, actually, a pretty good case. This particular city has, in the last 15 years, 20 years, increased in population by something like two million. At the same time, percentage of green cover has increased as well. Counterintuitive, in some ways. They’ve been able to do it with some pretty remarkable programs, including a park system, a connected network of parks, and a really neat thing they call park connectors, which is a network of pathways that connect apartment buildings and major dense urban neighborhoods with parks. Much of it, actually, in this one, and this is a stretch that’s actually through a canopy. It’s a canopy walk, essentially an elevated walkway system that goes over major roads. You get our your door, and able to basically take a 15 minute hike in an amazing forest. Here’s the forest bathing right here. There’s the green cover.

Everything built today in Singapore has a prominent green or natural element. This is a Ken Yeang design, new building that has a one point five kilometer green forest, green armature, that circles the building. Connected, one point five kilometers long. Pretty amazing. Does lots of things for that building. We encountered and filmed, again, back to this film on YouTube, if you wanna see it, perhaps the most biophilic hospital or health facility I’ve ever encountered. This is the CEO. We filmed him, got him on tape. It’s an amazing story. I can’t begin to tell you all the features, including an amazing green courtyard that everything looks down on. Just from the elevators that have images of forests, to the waterfall in the center. They’re actually measuring the success of this building, this health facility, based on biophilic measures. One of them is a health measure. He gave the architect this particular charge. We wanna be able to come in here and, instead of your blood pressure going up and your heart rate going up, those things need to be going down when you come into our hospital. It’s kind of counterintuitive to most experiences. Also, the idea of hospital as an arc. They’re actually counting the number of species of butterflies, and the number of species of birds that they see in and around the hospital, as the measure of success for them. That’s pretty—I keep bumping into that, sorry. I’m gonna fall over in a minute.

One of the most dramatic things about this hospital is the farm on the rooftop. Yay! 140 fruit trees on the roof of this, and so there are actually a number of rooms that look down on the farm. The CEO, that you just saw a picture of, was a little worried. Didn’t quite know how the patients were gonna react to this, to seeing this farm, this very busy, active farm. He did a little survey, and not surprising to me, people loved it. They’re just very complimentary. They loved watching the farm and some of them, I think, are able to participate in the actual growing of food. Pretty dramatic. Food production in cities is certainly a part of what I imagine a biophilic city is. We have a lot of terrific examples, like the Montreal rooftop gardens project.

I think this may be one of my last examples. I am coming to the end. New York—I mentioned Philly—New York City is another interesting example for us. We’re looking at some amazing work there, of course, with—we know about the high line, but they’re also—there’s a group that’s developing the low line, which is the first underground park in New York City, and a number of other things: amazing waterfront parks. This project, Via Verde, the Green Way in New York, which has a 20-story tower on one side of it, oriented towards the south. This is in the Bronx, so its density, intensifying a part of the city that needs it and recycling leftover land. A very interesting strategy for incorporating nature, so that it’s a building that has multiple rooftops that wind their way up to this 20-story tower. You have a green courtyard at ground level, and then you walk up to a forest on the third level, and you walk up to an orchard on the fourth level. You walk up to this vegetable production area on the fifth level, and then you have sedum rooftops on the other levels as it makes its way up. It’s affordable housing. This is really low-income housing. It’s just remarkable. There’s some market housing as well, integrated into this. We need to be figuring out how we can do more of this. Oh, here is the orchard level.

Oh, it’s not my last! How much time do I have left?

Audience Member 4: Just a few minutes and then [cross talk] for questions.

Tim Beatley: A few minutes. I promise, I have two or three more. I’ll throw out the idea. I’ve been talking a lot about plants. We talked a little bit about bats and the sounds of owls and so on. This idea of imagining biophilic cities as places that are accommodative of other animals, other critters. We know about the conflicts with, perceived conflicts with coyotes. I dunno if you all read the stories recently about new evidence about tracking coyotes in Chicago and greater Chicago. Probably 2,000 coyotes in the jurisdictions around—every American city has them. We’ve gotta become much more clever about coexistence. It’s a potential to have wildness in cities close to us, and I’m a big fan of that, but we’ve also got to be creative about coexistence. We’re looking at cities like Vancouver, where they’ve developed coexistence strategies that are really quite effective. Part of the problem with species like coyotes is that we don’t keep them afraid of us humans. They’re doing some very interesting strategies in that city. Neighborhood coyote walks, education, even telling you how to create your own little noisemaker that you shake. The idea is that you wanna make sure that you wanna watch that coyote and enjoy the presence of that wild animal, but you always wanna make sure that they stay afraid of humans. We have similar strategies, similar challenges and species differ from place to place.

I failed to mention this, but I sometimes talk about zoo-opolis as a way of describing it. Not that cities need to be zoos, of course. What we’re talking about is using it in a sense of coexistence and recognizing diversity in cities and the presence of animals. Jennifer Wolch, the dean of the School of Architecture at UC Berkeley, has coined this term. I love this quote: “To allow for the emergence of an ethic practice in politics of caring for animals in nature, we need to re-naturalize cities and invite animals back in, and in the process, re-enchant the city.” Biophilic cities, as much as anything, I think that captures what we’re trying to do. It’s about re-enchanting those places and making them—going back to some ways in which they are mysterious and wild.

Lots of other things that we are doing in cities. We know a lot of work being doing with birds, and we’re finding clever ways to track birds now, with bird radar. We know about the lights out campaigns in cities like Toronto and Chicago. I’m just about to post a blog about this very innovative program in Wisconsin called Bird City, Wisconsin, which is based on the city tree.

I’ll stop. I’ve got one more—I promise—one more slide. This is actually, yeah. I did, last weekend, I was at the—I didn’t promise the last thing I’ll say [laughter], keep promising. Better World By Design Conference. You all know about this at the RISD and Brown, it’s Rhode Island School of Design in Providence. They do this every year. The speakers they invite, one of the conditions they ask of you, or they present you with, is that you have to come with a challenge. This is entirely organized by design students, undergraduate and graduate design students. I think faculty are nowhere to be seen, actually, but it’s a big deal conference. They want you to bring a challenge, something for them to think about, how they would tackle. This was my challenge. This is me holding a golden-crowned kinglet. I don’t know if you have that species like that here. It’s, as you can tell, a tiny little bird, even tinier than—these are just my, it’s just clustered, it’s not even my entire hand there. This is a bird that had just been killed by flying into one of our UVA buildings, and one of the—so, we have a huge issue about glass and designing. A lot of great work already, the city of New York has new bird-friendly design guidelines. Toronto even has a new bird-friendly development rating system. A lot of work and a lot of attention. This new kind of glass that’s just been developed that will be better for preventing this from happening.

In many ways, I’m kinda using this kinglet as an example of these larger questions that we have about how—I didn’t know that there was such a thing as a golden-crowned kinglet. I didn’t know that until I found this spectacular bird dead. It was all around me, as birds are. So much of the nature around us is around us, but we’re not aware of it. From that fungal growth on the branch of the tree to the bacteria floating by on the clouds, to the, as Ed Wilson calls it, the micro-wildernesses in the soil and the nature around us. How do we make that nature visible to us? How do we celebrate it? How do we nurture it? Those are really big challenges and especially important challenges for biophilic cities. The millions of birds, for example, that migrate through cities like Chicago and San Francisco, that are on major migratory routes—how does the presence of those birds become visible to very busy urbanites?

That was my challenge, and I think, actually—David, I think. I can show you the webpage again.

Audience Member 5: I think we’ve seen that one.

Tim Beatley: You’ve seen that one already. This is it. This is finally it. I promise. There’s my email, and thank you. Send me your thoughts about how to answer that last question. [Applause]