The potential of ‘Urban Green Commons’ in the resilience building of cities

Ecological Economics 86 (2013) 156–166

Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect

Ecological Economics journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ecolecon

The potential of ‘Urban Green Commons’ in the resilience building of cities Johan Colding a, b,⁎, Stephan Barthel a, b, c a b c

The Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Stockholm, Box 50005, Sweden Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, Kräftriket 2B, Stockholm, Sweden Department of History, Stockholm University, SE-10691, Stockholm, Sweden

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Article history: Received 30 November 2011 Received in revised form 4 October 2012 Accepted 21 October 2012 Available online 23 December 2012 Keywords: Cultural diversity Cognitive resilience building Common property systems Ecosystem services Social–ecological memory Urban systems

a b s t r a c t While cultural diversity is increasing in cities at a global level as a result of urbanization, biodiversity is decreasing with a subsequent loss of ecosystem services. It is clear that diversity plays a pivotal role in the resilience building of ecosystems; however, it is less clear what role cultural diversity plays in the resilience building of urban systems. In this paper we provide innovative insights on how common property systems could contribute to urban resilience building. Through a review of recent findings on urban common property systems and the relevant literature, we deal with urban green commons (UGCs) and discuss their potential to manage cultural and biological diversity in cities. We describe three examples of UGCs, i.e. collectively managed parks, community gardens, and allotment areas, with a focus on their institutional characteristics, their role in promoting diverse learning streams, environmental stewardship, and social– ecological memory. We discuss how UGCs can facilitate cultural integration through civic participation in urban land-management, conditions for the emergence of UGCs, the importance of cognitive resilience building, and what role property-rights diversity plays in urban settings. We conclude by elucidating some key insights on how UGCs can promote urban resilience building. © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction It is often argued that there is a positive link between cultural and biological diversity, and that reduced diversity makes the world and its inhabitants increasingly vulnerable to natural and human-induced changes (Maffi and Woodley, 2010; UNESCO, 2008). While urban scholars claim that urbanization leads to more diverse cities with higher levels of cultural diversity (Zanoni and Janssens, 2009), the movement of people to cities generally leads to a reduction in biodiversity and ecosystems (MA, 2005; Sala et al., 2000). This mismatch between cultural and biological diversity in cities can largely be attributed to the high concentration of humans, infrastructures and buildings in tiny geographic locations. However, as argued herein, it can also be attributed to a lack of sufficient institutions for managing cultural and biological diversity. Urban areas cover less than 3% of the Earth's terrestrial surface, posing strong impacts on ecosystem services both in the local vicinity and at considerable distances from cities. Urban inhabitants affect distant ecosystems through trade and consumption, with cities claiming ecosystem support (including waste absorption) that sometimes is 500–1000 times larger than their own area (Folke et ⁎ Corresponding author at: The Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Stockholm, Box 50005, Sweden. Tel.: +46 8 6739500; fax: +46 8 152464. E-mail address: [email protected] (J. Colding). 0921-8009/$ – see front matter © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2012.10.016

al., 1997). Moreover, some 78% of all carbon emissions, 60% of residential water use, and 76% of wood for industrial purposes have been accredited to cities (Grimm et al., 2008). Likewise, urban development often occurs in biodiversity-rich areas (Ricketts and Imhoff, 2003), with cities tending to emerge in areas with high ecosystem productivity like landscapes suitable for agriculture and/or in coastal areas or river systems with high levels of biodiversity (Hansen et al., 2004; Ljungqvist et al., 2010). It is often proposed that dense urban settlement is less environmentally burdensome than urban and suburban sprawl (MA, 2005). Although this proposition needs further scientific scrutiny (Colding, 2011a), the movement of people into more densely built urban areas can lessen pressure on more remotely located ecosystems. Not included in such analyses, however, is that the urban space itself is likely to influence cognitive aspects related to environmental values of urban populations (Miller, 2005; Tidball et al., 2010). Also, urban studies reveal that biodiversity usually peaks at the level of suburbs (Blair, 2001; McKinney, 2002). Suburban parts hold more natural and semi-natural land (Sukopp et al., 1979), with a progressive increase of natural lands towards the semi-rural urban fringe (Colding et al., 2006). With this outward progression from city centers generally follows an increase in the proportion of per capita land ownership (Colding, 2011b), associated with a number of property rights bundles (Ostrom and Schlager, 1996). In this paper we discuss how common property rights systems and their associated bundles of entitlements hold potential for a closer

J. Colding, S. Barthel / Ecological Economics 86 (2013) 156–166

linkage of cultural and biological diversity in urban areas. Property rights represent key institutions1 that link people with nature (Hanna et al., 1996). Still, there exist few analyses of property rights linked to management of ecosystems and their services in cities. This is surprising considering that changes in property-rights regimes may explain much of the land-use dynamics going on in contemporary cities. The shift to private property rights is so pervasive in cities today that institutional scholars regard it is a global phenomenon (Barzel, 1997; Lee and Webster, 2006; Webster, 2002). As a result lands held in the public domain increasingly become privately enclosed, with considerably fewer examples of lands being managed as common property systems, propelling alienating processes between urban populations and local ecosystems (Colding, 2011b; Ollman, 1971). In this paper we provide innovative insights on urban common property systems and discuss their potential in contributing to urban resilience building, dealing specifically with cases of urban green commons (UGCs). Common property systems comprise systems of social arrangements that regulate the maintenance and consumption of natural resources. Control and management rights to resources are in the hands of an identifiable community or group of users that may craft their own institutions in resource management (Berkes and Folke, 1998; Berkes et al., 2003; Ostrom, 1990). Users in such systems manage resources collectively by way of a wide array of rules-in use, selfimposed norms and social mechanisms (Berkes et al., 2000, 2003; Colding and Folke, 2001; Ostrom, 1990). We have elsewhere analyzed cases of such systems in urban settings from a property rights perspective (i.e. Colding, 2011b) and their role for ecological learning and social–ecological memory (i.e. Barthel et al., 2010a,b,c; Bendt, 2010; Bendt et al., in press; Colding, 2011a). Here we draw on these studies and other literature findings, providing examples of what we here refer to as urban green commons (UGCs), representing urban ecosystems of diverse ownership that depend on collective organization and management. We begin this paper by elaborating upon the notion of cultural and biological diversity linked to cities and what role diversity plays in resilience management. We proceed by describing three examples of urban green commons (UGCs), i.e. collectively managed parks, community gardens, and allotment areas, elucidating key institutional characteristics and their role in promoting diverse learning streams, environmental stewardship, and social–ecological memory in urban systems. We discuss how UGCs can facilitate cultural integration in cities through civic participation in urban land-management by offering an institutional base for groups and individuals to meet and interact. We also discuss some key conditions for the emergence of UGCs, the importance of ‘cognitive resilience building’, and the role of institutional diversity for resilient urban development. We conclude by summarizing the major insights conveyed herein.

157

2009). In fact, parts of the world's biological diversity have come about as a result of co-evolution between human cultural practices (i.e. land-use and management) and natural systems (Barthel et al., 2005; Rindos, 1980), with domesticated landscapes making up the majority of terrestrial space on Earth (Baleé, 1993; Crumley, 1994; McIntosh, 2000; Scarborough, 2008). It is often argued that cultural diversity plays a major role in creating mechanisms for innovation, providing new ways to adapt to change, and generating knowledge and institutions to deal with the challenges, opportunities and threats generated by change (UNESCO, 2008). The term cultural diversity2 as used in this paper encompasses a diversity of social relations among people of different ethnic background, age, or gender, and less visible attributes such as education, technical abilities, socioeconomic background, personality characteristics, or values (Milliken and Martins, 1996). By culture we use Geertz definition of culture as a system that gives meaning and significance (Geertz, 1993). Cities have been described as loci of cultural diversity par excellence (Zanoni and Janssens, 2009). One of the very foundational and distinctive characteristics of the city is the presence of cultural difference with the ‘diversity of proximity’ being a distinctive feature of the urban environment (ibid). Proximity, referring to those different groups of people living close enough to interact, facilitates face-to-face relationships that remain fundamental in all spheres of social life. This is realized through urban space and social networks. We are witnessing more diverse cities at a global level as the world population is growing and increasingly is moving into cities (Thorns, 2002; Zanoni and Janssens, 2009). Whether cultural diversity is a “bad” or a “good” thing for a city has been debated for long in urban discourse, with one side arguing that it stimulates creativity, innovation, production and providing economic advantages (Bellini et al., 2008; Florida, 2002; Jacobs, 1961; Ottaviano and Peri, 2006; Sassen, 1994); the other that it can produce conflict and disorder (e.g. Castells, 1989; Roszak, 1973) and has a negative effect on economic performance (Abadie and Gardeazabal, 2003; Alesina and La Ferrara, 2005). These polarized outcomes may in reality be subtler. For example, Collier (2001) contends that cultural diversity only has negative effects on economic growth in non-democratic countries, and Alesina and La Ferrara (2005) found that ethnic fragmentation has more negative effects on the economy in countries with lower levels of income. While cultural diversity can be both an asset and a liability for a city, or both at once, we agree with the view of Zanoni and Janssens (2009) that the challenge today is to make cities socially inclusive, to re-invent forms of interrelatedness that recognize diversity, and value it, and by so doing “channel its creative potential to make our cities sustainable” (ibid: 21). Accordingly, cultural diversity needs to be both governed and managed in cities in order to nurture it in productive ways. 2.2. The Role of Diversity in Resilience Management

2. Diversity and Resilience

History reveals that cities in most part of the world have emerged and continue to grow over landscapes that have been domesticated by humans for centuries, and sometimes millennia (Crumley, 2000; Sinclair et al., 2010). These cultural landscapes in which cities are embedded are sometimes rich in species and habitats (Barthel et al., 2005; Emanuelsson, 2010) and may even provide refuge for species that have become rare in other settings (Colding et al., 2006,

Resilience, as applied to integrated systems of people and the natural environment, has three interrelated characteristics: (1) the amount of change the system can undergo and still retain the same controls on function and structure; (2) the degree to which the system is capable of self-organization; and (3) the ability to build and increase the capacity for learning and adaptation (http://www.resalliance.org/). In the resilience discourse, management of diversity per se is considered to be a key attribute for building resilience in complex adaptive systems (Berkes et al., 2003). Diversity spreads risks, creates buffers, and opens up for multiple strategies from which humans can learn in

1 By institutions is here meant the rules and conventions of society that facilitate coordination among people (North, 1990), made up of formal institutions (rules, laws, constitutions), informal institutions (norms of behavior, conventions, and selfimposed codes of conduct), and their enforcement characteristics (Colding et al., 2003a; North, 1990).

2 According to UNESCO (2008: 20) there are different levels of cultural diversity, including linguistic diversity; namely intercultural diversity in the sense of differences between two (or more) cultures, and intracultural diversity referring to the differences between subcultures, or cultures of different sectors of a society (e.g. men/women, different social classes) within a culture.

2.1. Cities and Cultural Diversity

158

J. Colding, S. Barthel / Ecological Economics 86 (2013) 156–166

situations when uncertainty is high. In addition to functioning as insurance, diversity also plays an important role in the reorganization and renewal processes of disturbed systems (Colding et al., 2003b), or events that require change in social–ecological systems by creating a frame for creativity and adaptive capacity to deal with change in constructive ways (Berkes et al., 2003). Diversity is thus seen as key for dealing with disturbance and change in productive ways, with self-organization and the capacity for learning and adaptation constituting important resilience characteristics (Fig. 1). The critical role of diversity and redundancy has been examined in many systems, e.g. genetic, human engineered, complex adaptive, ecological, agro-ecosystems and governance systems (Low et al., 2003; Maffi and Woodley, 2010). In biological systems diversity facilitates functional redundancy, i.e. if a species declines or is lost, other species providing the same function in the system can continue providing this function. Hence, management of many species within a single functional group promotes resilience by reducing the risk of a specific ecosystem function being entirely lost in a biological community or ecosystem (Elmqvist et al., 2003). Moreover, diversity in ecosystems promotes ‘response diversity’. This capacity is mainly related to the diversity of ‘functional groups’ of species in a system, like organisms that pollinate, graze, predate, fix nitrogen, spread seeds, decompose, generate soils, modify water flows, open up patches for reorganization, and contribute to the colonization of such patches (Elmqvist et al., 2004). Response diversity means that different organisms within a functional group respond differently to diverse types and frequencies of disturbance. For example, if honeybees are affected by a pathogen, other pollinator species not affected by the pathogen may take over the function of pollination. In this way diversity creates redundancy in ecological systems (see Jansson, this issue). Similarly, when diverse groups of stakeholders, including resource users from different ethnic or religious groups, scientists, community members with local knowledge, NGOs, and government officials, share management of a resource, decision-making is claimed to be better informed due to that stakeholders may be more invested in and supportive of the decisions, and more options exist for testing and evaluating

policies (Colding et al., 2003a; Tidball and Krasny, in press). This argument is in line with findings in management studies, showing that cultural diversity on skill-based dimensions such as education, occupation, functional background, and industry experience is positively associated with a group's ability to process information, perceive and interpret stimuli, and making higher quality decisions (Milliken and Martins, 1996). However, diversity in groups can also increase the likelihood that group members are dissatisfied and fail to identify with the group. For example, the greater the amount of diversity in a group or an organizational subunit, the less integrated the group is likely to be, with higher level of dissatisfaction and member turnover rate (Milliken and Martins, 1996). 2.3. Management of Cultural Diversity in Urban Systems The role of cultural diversity in maintaining resilience has not yet been clearly defined, but it seems established now that variations in cultures that manage land in sustainable ways correlates to spatial variations in habitats, species as well as variations within species, which increases biodiversity on aggregated spatial and temporal scales (Andersson et al., 2007; Barthel, 2006; Barthel et al., in review; Maffi and Woodley, 2010). Also, as suggested in the previous section, cultural diversity appears to promote the ability to build and increase the capacity for learning and adaptation in groups. This latter function seems directly linked to the sharing of a common interest. The work of Elinor Ostrom on common property systems, supports this line of argument, emphasizing the role of collective choice arenas in long-enduring resource management systems by which a whole group or community of resource users shares a common interest in resource management (Ostrom, 1990). For example, when all participants share common values and interact with one another in a complex set of arrangements within a small community, the probabilities of their developing adequate rules and norms to govern repetitive relationships are much greater, and the cost of developing monitoring and sanctioning mechanisms is relatively low (Ostrom, 2005). Conversely, if participants come from diverse cultures, speak

Fig. 1. Key attributes of resilience. The interplay between disturbance and diversity and their relationship to knowledge systems and self-organization are key linkages for building resilience and adaptive capacity in social-ecological systems. Social change (e.g. economic recession, unemployment) can in many times be considered as a disturbance in cities, creating conditions when diversity can be crucial to deal with change in constructive ways. If the social-ecological system can self-organize and learn through making use of diversity (left-hand of figure), capacity to adapt to change is increased. Conversely (right-hand side of figure), when knowledge generation and self-organization do not deal with and respond to disturbance in effective ways, e.g. nurturing diversity in a system, the likelihood of pathological management increases, which can lead to loss of resilience and cultural inertia. Modified and adopted from Folke et al. (2003).

J. Colding, S. Barthel / Ecological Economics 86 (2013) 156–166

different languages, and are distrustful of one another, the costs of devising and sustaining effective rules are substantially increased (ibid). That sharing an interest can be a sufficient condition for making use of cultural diversity in cities has been suggested in the literature on environmental policy and planning. For example, Rydin and Pennington (2000) argue that the prospect of meeting friends who share similar values and beliefs, and the enjoyment of collective effort with these people, may be a sufficient incentive for greater public participation in environmental planning. Likewise, Zanoni and Janssens (2009) suggest that design policies for managing cultural diversity in cities should focus on promoting multidirectional flows between different groups and individuals, coordinating cultural encounters in cities. Defining a common issue that binds together diverse groups and individuals is an essential part in such an approach, e.g. “an activity that is of common interest to the different groups” (Zanoni and Janssens, 2009:195). They also argue that the spatial structure, e.g. a square, facilitating proximity of groups is an essential characteristic for creating multidirectional flows in cities. These propositions appear to be well supported in recent studies addressing collective forms of green space management, indicating a particular promising subset of physical spaces in cities that promote a multitude of desirable social and ecological objectives (e.g. Barthel et al., 2010a,b,c; Boyer and Roth, 2006; Colding et al., 2006; Krasny and Tidball, 2009; Larsson, 2009; Tidball and Krasny, in press). Here we refer to such physical spaces as urban green commons (UGCs). In the following we begin by defining the concept of UGCs and proceed by describing three examples of such systems in cities. 3. ‘Urban Green Commons’: Collectively Managed Urban Green Spaces In the literature, the term ‘urban commons’ is surrounded by a rich array of normative statements of what actually constitutes the ‘commons’, with several scholars avoiding any precise definition of the term. For example, it is often equated with public open spaces (e.g. Blomley, 2008; Campbell and Wiesen, 2009). However, the notion of commons as “public” or as “nonexcludable” is misleading, ignoring the fact that there exists a whole cadre of literature dealing with resources managed under common property systems (e.g. Berkes, 1989; Ostrom, 1990). In common property systems, most rights to a core resource are vested in the members of the local community or group of users. Equating urban commons to open public places is therefore faulty as such spaces rather should be classified as ‘public realms’, i.e. all the areas in cities to which the public has open access (i.e. holds entrance-rights). Instead we employ a more narrow definition of urban green commons here, namely as “physical green spaces in urban settings of diverse land ownership that depend on collective organization and management and to which individuals and interest groups participating in management hold a rich set of bundles of rights, including rights to craft their own institutions and to decide whom they want to include in such management schemes” (see more in Colding, 2011b). Participants in urban green commons hold a number of critical bundles of rights (Schlager and Ostrom, 1992), including access rights, withdrawal rights, management rights, and in some cases also exclusion rights to land (Table 1). The critical feature of UGCs rests on their practical management of land rather than on land ownership per se, implying that land used for urban commons may be owned by a number of potential owners e.g. the state, a local municipality, privately or collectively. Hence, in the following examples the right to manage land for a collective set of individuals is the most distinctive characteristic of UGCs. This right may be subtle, but as we later argue, carries immense significance for cognitive resilience building in cities. Here, we deal with collectively managed parks, community gardens, and allotment areas. In particular we deal with key institutional characteristics, their role in promoting diverse learning streams, environmental stewardship, and social–ecological memory in urban systems.

159

3.1. Collective Park Management in Berlin In the city of Berlin, there are examples of whole parks being collectively managed by various interest groups. As fiscal cuts impacted funding for public parks, local politicians began making calls for civic engagement in management of green spaces (Rosol, 2010). While the state owned company ‘GrünBerlin’ runs several of the major parks in Berlin, civic engagement in green space management has fostered an immense institutional diversity, in terms of internal organization that has been not only giving rise to a variety of management forms for urban green space, but also providing formal institutional structures for green area management on municipal land, represented by the Burgerpark concept (Bendt, 2010). Burgerparks represent public parks managed by local groups of residents, varying in size between 100 m 2 to 30,000 m 2, and having between 10 and 100 members each. They are especially common in the boroughs of Friedrichshain, Kreuzberg and Neukölln (Bendt, 2010). A particularly interesting form of collectively managed green spaces is public-access community gardens, or PAC-gardens (Bendt, 2010; Bendt et al., in press). PAC-gardens are in public ownership, open for anyone interested in learning to garden. Threshold for active participation is absent or very low. Membership is either formally defined or according to ex post criteria such as residence or acceptance by existing members in the group. For example, Lichtenrade Volkspark and Bürgergarten Laskerwiese are PAC-gardens run by formal associations (vereins) with boards and chairmen. In contrast, Burgerpark Rosa Rose holds no formal organizational structure with decisions taken in an ad-hoc manner. In Prinzessinnengarten – a mobile organic urban farming garden – decisions are made by the founders of the enterprise, but in everyday practice the participants make decisions on an ad-hoc basis. Bendt et al. (in press) combined the social learning approach offered by communities of practice (Wenger, 1998) with a property rights analysis, studying four PAC-gardens in Berlin. Based on extensive fieldwork and in-depth interviews, they concluded that PACgardens represent a clear-cut example of communities of practice, and identified four broader learning streams in them, including: 1) learning about gardening and local ecological conditions; 2) learning about social organization/integration and participation; 3) learning about the politics of urban space (i.e. learning which arises out of negotiation and friction concerning the use and development of space in the city); and 4) learning about social entrepreneurship. PAC-gardens also represent a good example of place making initiatives in cities – a notion long propagated for in planning and architecture (Gehl, 2010; Jacobs, 1961) – and during the last decade

Table 1 Property rights bundles associated with positions. Source: Modified and adapted from Schlager and Ostrom (1992:252).

Access Withdrawal Management Exclusion Alienation

Owner

Proprietor

Claimant

Authorized user

Authorized entrant

X X X X X

X X X X

X X X

X X

X

The bundles of rights are independent of one another, but frequently held in the cumulative manner as arranged in the table. These rights encompass rights of access (i.e. “the right to enter a defined physical area and enjoy nonsubtractive benefits”); withdrawal (“the right to obtain the resource units or “products” of a resource”); management (“the right to regulate internal use patterns and transform the resource by making improvements”); exclusion (“the right to determine who will have an access right, and how that right may be transferred”); and alienation (“the right to sell or lease either or both of the above collective-choice rights”) (Ostrom and Schlager, 1996: 133). The bundles of property rights are held by individuals with different positions, named accordingly.

160

J. Colding, S. Barthel / Ecological Economics 86 (2013) 156–166

propagated for in collaborative urban planning (e.g. Healy, 1998) to improve the quality of physical places by a widening of stakeholder involvement beyond traditional power elites. 3.2. Environmental Learning and Community Gardens Another example of collective green space management is community gardening, which depends upon collaborative efforts of a diverse set of individuals and/or interest groups to succeed (Colding, 2011b; Shinew, et al., 2004). Lands for community gardens often represent publicly or privately held vacant lots in cities where local residents grow food, flowers, or conduct urban greenery (Schukoske, 2000). In community gardening people work together on land usually located in the downtown of a city or in a low-density suburban area. Vacant-lot gardens are usually small in size, such as in New York City where gardens constitute 5-by-15 meter lots (Schmelzkopf, 1996). Especially in the U.S., community gardens are an extremely unstable land use, often representing an interim use for vacant land awaiting construction. For example, less than 2% of the U.S. community gardens were permanent in 1999 (Linn, 1999). Interestingly, lot lease durations correlate closely with the appearance of gardens, with gardens having long-term leases demonstrating a sense of permanency with an abundance of slow-growing trees, perennials, lawns and features such as benches, gazebos, and brick paths (Schmelzkopf, 1996). As property rights theory would predict, community residents are more willing to invest in gardens with longer leaseholds (Colding, 2011b). Of key importance for securing land for community gardens in the U.S. has been the backing up by various NGOs, such as the metropolitan gardening organizations (Janson Waddick, 2000). Moreover, the Trust for Public Land also secures public land for community gardens, and helps them establish themselves legally as non-profit organizations (Linn, 1999). Community gardens have been shown to promote positive place making in cities, community empowerment and development (SaldivarTanaka and Krasny, 2004), social integration and democratic values (Glover et al., 2005; Holland, 2004; Levkoe, 2006; Shinew et al., 2004), health benefits (Marcus and Barnes, 1999), and increase of property values (Been and Voicu, 2008). In the vast range of literature on community gardens, some recent articles are especially interesting within the ambit of resilience theory. For example, Krasny and Tidball (2009) found that community gardening provides opportunities for learning that addresses multiple societal goals, including creating a populace that is scientifically literate, that practices resource stewardship, and that is engaged in civic life. Community gardening education has also the potential to foster environmental outcomes such as environmentally responsible behaviors, opportunities for unstructured time in nature, positive youth development, understanding of linkages between global and local food security, and gardening skills (Krasny, 2009). For instance, the plants and insects in gardens offer opportunities for students to observe and perform experiments, thus acquiring content knowledge related to pollination. Moreover, community gardening involves learning about planting techniques, how to tend plants, as well as collaboratively developing rules related to plot allocation and pesticide use. This in turn provides opportunities for youth to become increasingly more skilled as members of a civic ecology community of practice. Such contributions can include fostering biological and cultural diversity and ecosystem services, such as food, pollination, and sites for reconnecting people with nature (Krasny and Tidball, 2009). 3.3. Social–ecological Memory in Allotment Gardens A third example of collective green space management is allotment gardening. An allotment garden contains multiple garden plots of equal size, often on municipally owned land, constituting well-managed flower-, bush-, and tree rich sites that provide lot holders with vegetables, fruits and ornamental flowers (Colding et al., 2006). There are currently around three million allotment gardens in Europe (Björkman,

2000). This form of gardening primarily originated as a response to food shortages during the transition from feudal agrarianism to urban industrialism (Barthel et al., 2010a,b; Barthel and Isendahl, this issue). In Sweden, allotment gardens were created to help ameliorate social problems resulting from mass migration from the countryside to urban areas, such as food shortages and meager living conditions (Lindhagen, 1916). In contrast to many community gardens, allotment gardens constitute quite a stable common-property rights regime (Colding, 2011b). This is reflected in that leaseholds usually are written on long-term basis between local allotment associations and local municipalities, with leaseholds up to 25 years in Sweden. Allotment gardens are characterized by several characteristics typically found in common property systems. The local allotment association sets up and enforces its own rules, although these need to comply with Swedish law (Barthel et al., 2010a). For instance, the local association determines size and form of cottages as well as the appearance of garden plots. Moreover, while individual gardeners hold operational-level property rights such as “access” and “withdrawal” rights (see Table 1), they also hold the right to “manage” their own plots relatively independently, although management is framed by the collective-choice rights of the association, which in turn holds the collective-choice right of “exclusion” (i.e. the right to determine who will have an access right to the plot and how that right may be transferred). Exclusion of outsiders is often physically embodied in that fences or hedges usually surround areas for allotments. While outsiders have the right to enter the common areas in most allotment areas (i.e. walking paths, etc.), entering individual gardens is a violation subject to the law of trespassing in Sweden and is thereby subject to fines in common law. As is the case in most common property systems, there exist informal institutions enforced by way of social pressure such as strong norms to exclude pesticides and synthetic manure (Barthel et al., 2010a). The effectiveness of such norms is evident in that 91% of the gardeners feel that their neighbors want them to act in accordance with them (Barthel et al., 2010a,b,c). Similar to common property systems in small-scale societies (Ostrom, 1990), the small size of allotments and the high number of people within the same piece of land make informal institutions effective for dealing with potential conflicts and for monitoring that rules are followed and effective sanctions meted out (Barthel et al., 2010a). Allotment gardens broadly represent knowledge ‘legacies’ of traditional household gardening practices, where the users' gardening knowledge has been passed on and socially retained for considerable time (Nolin, 2003). Hence, they serve as sites for conferring practical knowledge of urban agriculture. As argued by Barthel et al. (2010a,b) allotment gardens play a critical role in retaining and transmitting collective memories of how to grow food in urban settings and how to manage regulatory and supporting ecosystem services like pollination, water cycling, soil formation, and nutrient retention. While only individuals can be said to remember sensu stricto, individual memory processes derive from social interactions through gardening and are facilitated by supra-individual means such as sharing stories, artifacts, symbols, rituals, and written accounts (Barthel et al., 2010b). These collective repertoires tend to outlive the practices that first shaped them and function together as carriers of experiences, practices and knowledge. Over deep-time evolution, this creates, for example, locally adapted varieties of crops that have co-evolved with human practices and local environmental conditions (Fraser and Rimas, 2010). Because of the inherent feedback loops between human actions and ecological processes, we prefer to use the term social–ecological memory to describe the combined means by which knowledge, experience and practice of ecosystem management are captured, stored, revived and transmitted over time in allotment gardening as well as in other co-evolved cultural and natural management systems (Barthel, 2008; Barthel et al., 2010a). The double processes of participation and reification form a shared memory of a changing physical environment, linked to socio-economic fluctuations, and local responses to such fluctuations

J. Colding, S. Barthel / Ecological Economics 86 (2013) 156–166

(Barthel et al., 2010a,b,c). In this sense, harnessing the power of the diverse social–ecological memories of various landscape stewards in urban settings can play an important role in the resilience making of cities since it contributes in helping renew and reorganize such systems in times of crises (Folke et al., 2003). 4. Discussion As was proposed earlier, a common interest can be a sufficient condition for making use of cultural diversity in cities. Moreover, the existence of a supporting spatial urban morphology, or arena, has been proposed to be critical for cultural integration to come about (Zanoni and Janssens, 2009). Here we have provided insights on collective land management systems, i.e. urban green commons, representing such a combination of interest and physical spaces in cities. While we have not explicitly dealt with the cultural diversity of the individuals and/or groups partaking in land management, there are good reasons to believe that UGCs hold considerable potential in promoting cultural integration. As Bendt (2010: 8) concludes in his study of Berlin PAC-gardens: “people must interact as they garden”, and mutual engagement is what creates membership in communities of practice3 (Wenger, 1998). Mutual engagement through working together does not, however, require homogeneity among members, but rather creates similarities as well as differences. Wenger refers to such specialization within a community of practice as “engaged diversity” (Wenger, 1998:73). In the Berlin-study by Bendt (2010), many respondents talked about their parks and gardens as places where people from different backgrounds and local neighborhoods met through their interest in gardening. However, these green areas also represent community space for concerts, art performances, film screenings and workshops initiated by the group members themselves. In this way, PAC-gardens represent places promoting cultural integration and exchange at many levels. PAC-gardens also bring people together around certain problems that may arise in local neighborhoods as well as bring people with different ethnic backgrounds together, with some gardeners claiming that they never had interacted with migrants prior to taking up gardening (ibid). In the Burgergarten Laskerwiese garden, for example, respondents mentioned how gardening involved people from both former East and West Germany, giving rise to fruitful cultural exchanges, as well as conflicts, as these divided historical backgrounds were interlaced in the practice of developing the garden and park. Several respondents mentioned how the garden at times was a place where political positions were formulated and expressed, promoting learning along multiple political dimensions. Likewise, community gardens hold potential for social integration, such as building a sense of community among neighbors and fostering positive interracial relationships (e.g. Lewis, 1992; Linn, 1999; Schmelzkopf, 1996; Shinew et al., 2004). In Stockholm city, for example, there are allotment areas having members of foreign origin in the tens and over (Oddsberg, 2011), indicative of what a diverse cultural setting they sometimes constitute. The same is true in the U.K., where allotments hold a high diversity of people of different age, race, and sex (Crouch and Ward, 1997; Select Committee, 1998).

161

membership by way of occupation in an organization or by way of residency in a community. Moreover, people have different motives for partaking in voluntary land management, e.g. social relation building, recreation, food acquisition, sense-of-place, therapeutic reasons, and environmental concerns (Andersson et al., 2007; Oddsberg, 2011; Tidball et al., 2010). In addition, the time people are willing to spend in land-management activities is important to consider in order to create effective participatory designs. For example, PAC-gardens involved people interacting on a regular basis (daily) to those rarely participating, with some gardens having new participants coming and going continuously. The level of boundary interaction4 thus varied greatly among the gardens, as well as the diversity of actors with which they interacted. For example, the two gardens with more formal associational structures displayed less boundary activity than the other two that employed looser frameworks for participation (Bendt, 2010; Bendt et al., in press). The Berlin case study prompts questions concerning the suitability of fixed institutional frameworks for participation in land management. In developing participatory environmental arenas in cities it may therefore be important to consider trade-offs between property-rights arrangements which enable fluid forms of participation and thus reach out to a large number of people and groups, and more formal forms (e.g. allotment areas) which involve fewer people but require more obligations on behalf of participants and which may foster deeper learning and social–ecological memory (see e.g. Andersson et al., 2007; Barthel et al., 2010a). Following Ostrom's (1990, 1996) prerogatives for building social capital, Rydin and Pennington (2000) argue that positive social capital can be developed when local communities are encouraged to build up their own institutional arrangements and not have these institutions imposed from above. There is, however, a notable difference to what degree UGCs can be viewed as self-organized stewardship systems. For example, Krasny and Tidball (2009) and Ruitenbeek and Cartier (2001) argue that community gardens have a tradition of being self-organized and self-emergent, i.e. being initiated by the stakeholders themselves within the community. This is also true for the Berlin Burgerparks, having given rise to considerable high institutional and organizational diversity in green-space management (Bendt, 2010). In contrast, allotment areas appear to have a considerable more rigid organizational and institutional structure, likely due to their historical ties with local governments and experiences of organizing through several cycles of hunger and economic depression (Barthel et al., in press-a,b).

4.2. Conditions for the Emergence of UGCs

Sharing a common interest and the enjoyment of collective efforts in land management appear to be a strong incentive for civic participation in environmental management of cities. For one thing, people participate by way of free will in this activity in contrast to having formal

It is a striking fact that the UGCs dealt with herein increase in numbers during periods of socio-economic hardships. For example, European allotment areas increased substantially in numbers during the two World Wars as well as in the 1930s economic depression (Parker, 2003; Select Committee, 1998). Community gardens in the U.S. are widely recognized as an effective grassroots response to urban disinvestment and decay (Kurtz, 2001) and have been used to promote economic development in many cities (Bonfiglio, 2009). For example, in Detroit – a city greatly impacted by the loss of job opportunities – community gardens have over time been used for the purpose of supplementing unemployed workers and their families with food supply (Warner, 1987), and as a way to promote regional economic development by increasing the local tax base and the number and variety of jobs available to local people (Bonfiglio, 2009). Since the first organized community garden program emerged in Detroit in 1893, the city has invested heavily in urban garden programs during periods of economic recession (Bassett, 1981).

3 The defining elements of a CoP are (1) a ‘joint enterprise’ of vigor in learning about a particular enterprise (e.g. gardening), (2) ‘mutual engagement’ through which people bond and build social capital, and (3) a ‘shared repertoire’ of rules, jargon, and artifacts that enable a community to reflect upon and understand its own state of development and to move forward (Wenger, 1998, 2000).

4 Shared practices create boundaries in communities of practice, important for learning by connecting different communities that offer learning opportunities (Wenger, 2000). Boundary interactions represent the frontiers where learning happens as long as the divide between experience and competence is not too wide or too close (ibid).

4.1. Civic Participation in Urban Land-management

162

J. Colding, S. Barthel / Ecological Economics 86 (2013) 156–166

The self-emergence of many types of UGCs is not only correlated to periods of food shortage. Equally important is that available physical spaces exist in cities. For example, the fall of the Berlin wall and the subsequent unification of the city created an abundance of unused urban spaces (Brachen). This was paralleled by a lack of public funds to maintain them, making local politicians more in favor of civic management of green spaces (Rosol, 2010). For these reasons various forms of temporary usage (Zwischennutzung) proliferated across Berlin as brown fields and former industrial areas were turned into alternative usage, including green areas and parks that developed into community gardens (Bendt, 2010). In the U.S., there also appears to be a close correlation between community gardening and the availability of vacant lots in cities (Bowman and Pagano, 1998; Schukoske, 2000). For example, a shrinking city like Detroit with ample community gardens holds up to 70,000 vacant lots, comprising about 27% of the city cover (Bonfiglio, 2009). While the availability of physical urban space appears to be an important factor for the proliferation and spread of UGCs in cities, the role of environmental movements (Barthel et al., in press-b; Ernstson and Sörlin, 2009) should not be underestimated. For example, in densely built neighborhoods in New York, local inhabitants have a long tradition of squatting vacant land awaiting construction, giving rise to the Green Guerillas in the 1970s (Colding, 2011b). This environmental movement triggered similar squatting projects in other cities throughout the world. Hence, the lack of green spaces in cities and people taking local action to change this situation is important for understanding the emergence of UGCs. Suffice to say, the emergence of UGCs is closely related to the reorganization of cities after some kind of crises. For example, this was the case in the redevelopment of urban gardens in Cuba as a response to the food shortage crisis set about with the collapse of the Soviet socialist bloc in 1989 (Altieri et al., 1999). Prior to the crisis, urban agriculture was virtually absent in Cuba as urban gardening was perceived as a sign of poverty and under-development. Very few of Cuba's gardeners were acquainted with the small scale, highly diverse, garden techniques that now are widely used, but through organizing they facilitated the dissemination of information and knowledge, involving the education of people on organic gardening (Altieri et al., 1999). In the complete absence of social–ecological memory of urban gardening on Cuba, it would have been considerably more difficult to reinvent urban agriculture at such a grand scale — indicative of what role “pockets” of social– ecological memory can play in the resilience building of urban systems (Barthel et al., in press-a,b). Framed within the context of resilience thinking (sensu Berkes et al., 2003), UGCs appear to hold particular bearing in the release and reorganization phases of the adaptive renewal cycle, i.e. when needs are high to address pertinent and emerging problems such as socio-economic change, or when populations in cities shrink or when cities become too densely built and therefore lack green spaces. 4.3. ‘Cognitive Resilience Building’ for Ecosystem Services The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment concluded that about 60% of the global ecosystem services have become degraded or are used unsustainably, ascribed mainly due to the demands of urban populations (Grimm et al., 2008; MA, 2005). It has been suggested that rapid urbanization is removing perceived and experienced links between people and nature as modern life-styles are adopted and people cease to depend on local ecosystems (Miller, 2005; Stokes, 2006). This may lead to ‘extinction-of-experience’ of nature in cities (Pyle, 1978) and to increase ‘environmental generational amnesia’ among urban populations (Miller, 2005). As people in cities fail to reconnect to local ecosystems they fail to understand their dependency upon them (Samways, 2007). Studies also show that ecological knowledge is decreasing among urban populations and that active land management promotes ecological learning and

environmental awareness among individuals (e.g. McDaniel and Alley, 2005; McKinney, 2002; Theodori et al., 1998). One may therefore ask whether the majority of the population will be willing to invest in protecting something they no longer regard as directly relevant to their lives? The gravity of the issue is highlighted by the fact that 2/3 of the global population is projected to live in urban landscapes within just a few decades. It is therefore critical to broaden city-inhabitants' understanding of their dependence on ecosystem services both inside and outside urban landscapes. Hence, urban designs that make visible the links between people and nature in cities are important to develop at larger scales (Colding, 2007). Urban green commons, as dealt with herein, represent examples of such designs, where people in cities learn about functions in nature by way of active land management. In reference to the issue above and to the global loss of ecosystem services, it is critical to promote what we here refer to as cognitive resilience building. In lack of a better term, we define cognitive resilience building as the mental processes of human perception, memory and reasoning that people acquire from interacting frequently with local ecosystems, shaping peoples' experiences, world views, and values towards local ecosystems and ultimately towards the biosphere. This is in line with arguments to link local systems more closely to planetary boundaries and the biosphere (Argüelles, 2011: 9; Folke et al., 2011). The notion of cognitive resilience building is closely linked to what Berkes and Folke (1994) refer to as cultural capital, 5 although we stress that it involves social learning and retention of ecological knowledge (explicitly or tacitly) among individuals to alleviate extinction of experiences in urban landscapes. It further builds on insights in sociology and anthropology where it is highlighted not only that cognitive frames are socially situated, but also that the material world, objects and therefore urban space in itself strongly influence cognitive frames (Durkheim, 1997; Halbwachs, 1926 (1950); Wenger, 1998), hence the link between cognitive resilience building and common property rights of physical urban green spaces (Barthel et al., 2010a,b,c). Designs of UGCs do not need to be confined to vacant lots, parks or allotment areas, but could as well be part of other built-up structures in urban areas, e.g. university campuses (see e.g. Barthel et al., 2010c), or to promote biodiversity conservation at business/industrial sites (see Snep et al., 2011). Such designs may involve volunteers in management such as local NGOs, employees, and even students. UGCs may also involve residents in multi-family dwellings that are given management rights to lands (Fig. 2). From an urban resilience perspective, policy makers and planners need to increasingly plan cities in relation to energy deficiencies and collapses of supply lines (see Barthel and Isendahl, this issue; Barthel et al., 2010b). As this synthesis shows, UGCs holds a potential to play an even larger role in urban agricultures, supporting locally generated food and reducing costs for fossil fuel-based energy transports. Moreover, UGCs could also be part of specific conservation targets in urban settings to support ecosystem services that are in decline or under threat in urban areas (Colding, 2007; Goddard et al., 2010; Snep et al., 2011). 4.4. The Importance of Institutional Diversity As was discussed and proposed earlier, broader public participation in UGCs depends on a diversity of institutional arrangements in order to match different peoples' ability and motives for participating in them. Creating conditions for their self-organization and self-emergence appear also to be important, although this may not be easy in practice, especially not in urban settings that lack ample green space. However, green roofs, green walls, and park management could be created in densely built urban settings that could be developed around designs of UGCs. 5 This term refers to factors that provide human societies with the means and adaptations to deal with the natural environment and to actively modify it.

J. Colding, S. Barthel / Ecological Economics 86 (2013) 156–166

a

163

b

Fig. 2. Urban Green Commons (UGCs). Urban green commons could to a greater degree be designed in areas where people live and work. For example, UGCs may involve residents in multi-family dwellings that are given management rights to lands where they live, although land ownership may be municipal or private. The figure shows how a traditional yard in a city could be transformed into a lush, biodiversity-rich garden where dwellers could collectively take care of and manage diverse micro-habitats, promoting sense of place, social integration, and cognitive resilience building in urban settings.

Urban policy makers and planners need to increasingly address the fact that more and more land and resources in cities become privatized, resulting in that urban residents increasingly lose access— and use rights to land in cities (Colding, 2011b). This trend decreases people's options to have meaningful interaction with nature in cities, alienate people from local ecosystems and reducing opportunities for cognitive resilience building. Moreover, as institutional research suggest, it is important to nurture a diversity of property rights regimes since no single type of regimes (i.e. state-, private, or common property rights) can be prescribed as a remedy for resource overuse or environmental degradation (Ostrom, 2005). Rather, policy should focus on establishing a multitude of property rights regimes that are designed to fit the cultural, economic, and geographic context in which they are to function (Hanna et al., 1996). Diversity in property rights regimes in cities can also result in diversified ecosystem management (Fig. 3), and this can have considerable conservation outcomes (Andersson et al., 2007; Barthel et al., 2010a,b, c; Colding et al., 2006). It should also be recognized that there is a positive correlation between funding and management capability, implying that local governments with restricted financial means to a larger degree should consider voluntary land-management approaches like those offered by UGCs (see e.g. Colding et al., 2006; Oldfield et al., 2003). For example, the lack of governmental funding to maintain parks in Berlin after Germany reunified leads to the development of the civically managed Burgerparks (Rosol, 2010). Hence, UGCs could build resilience even in economic terms by reducing impacts during periods of budget deficiencies and economic recession in cities. 5. Conclusions Further analysis is required to fully comprehend all the issues and aspects related to urban green commons (UGCs). For instance, the facets of enclosure, inclusion and exclusion in UGCs need to be more fully understood (but see Kurtz, 2001). Considering the limited analyses made on urban common property systems, the major purpose of this paper has been to synthesize recent insights on such systems. As proposed herein, the increase of cultural diversity at the global level of

a

b

cities, resulting from urbanization, needs not be positive per se, but depends on wise governance, management, and appropriate designs to channel and nurture it in productive ways, i.e. supporting local ecosystem services and cognitive resilience building related to the challenges of the Anthropocene (Steffen et al., 2011). As shown here, attention to property rights arrangements involving urban green commons holds potential to promote cultural integration in cities through civic participation in urban land management. Urban green commons, hence, represent arenas for management and development of interlinked biocultural diversity in urban landscapes. More explicitly urban green commons hold relevance for endorsing different types of learning streams and values that is important to nurture in cities, e.g. environmental and ecological learning, and learning related to social organization, the politics of urban space, social entrepreneurship, as well as positive place making, community empowerment, restorative environments, and for fostering of democratic values. Moreover, they also hold relevance for interlinked processes of self-emergence of diverse urban social–ecological systems that on aggregated spatial scales can enhance urban biodiversity, and which on global scales produce urban ecosystems that differ between cities. To conclude, broader participation in urban green commons is more likely to succeed when a diversity of institutional options exists for their arrangement in a city. Such diversity provides a better matching of different individuals' preferences and motives for participating in collective green-area management. Hence, policy makers and planners should stimulate the self-emergence of different types of UGCs, and support their evolvement in urban areas through creating institutional space, e.g. in conjunction of restoring depraved neighborhoods. There are ample of municipally owned land in cities to which urban residents could be given management rights (i.e. not necessarily ownership rights). In recognition of that diversity in property rights regimes can result in a diversification of ecosystem management with positive conservation outcomes, and when restoring degraded urban lands, policy makers and planners need to carefully consider the fundamental value of promoting institutional diversity in cities. In recognition of that the homogenization of property rights (i.e. privatization) may further increase the homogenization of biota in contemporary cities (Colding,

c

Fig. 3. Diversity of property rights and ecosystem management. Diversity of property rights regimes in cities can result in diversified ecosystem management practices that in turn can promote biodiversity. For example, Andersson et al. (2007) found that management practices in allotment areas (c) resulted in higher pollinator abundance and that these held a different community structure of seed dispersing and insectivorous birds than compared government-managed cemeteries (a) and urban parks (b).

164

J. Colding, S. Barthel / Ecological Economics 86 (2013) 156–166

2011a), we urge mayors, landowners and urban practitioners to consider the benefits of adopting UGCs in urban settings. We conclude by elucidating the following key insights on UGCs and their role in promoting urban resilience building: • UGCs offer arenas for management of cultural diversity, promoting cultural integration; hence, could reduce potential social conflicts in cities • UGCs provide active land-management systems for a greater set of urban residents, important for social–ecological resilience building • UGCs represent institutional re-development designs for cities to deal with fast-changing variables such as re-emerging temporal crises (e.g. unemployment, economic recessions, underfunding of green area management) • UGCs represent institutional re-development designs for cities to deal with slow-changing spatial variables such as when cities shrink or become too densely built • Long-enduring UGCs (e.g. allotment gardens) can promote social– ecological memory in cities, important during periods of crises and/ or urban renewal and reorganization • UGCs promote the ability to build capacity for learning and adaptation in urban settings, e.g. through cognitive resilience building • UGCs may provide economic benefits for local governments to manage urban green space by drawing upon civic voluntary management; hence, reduce economic vulnerability

Acknowledgments This research is part of the SUPER-project within the URBAN-NET program, funded by the European Commission's Framework 6 Programme under the European Research Area Network (ERA-NET) initiative. It is also part of the Urban Form-project and FORMAS Green Wedge project. Johan Colding's and Stephan Barthel's research has been funded through support and grants received from the Swedish Research Council for Environment, Agricultural Sciences and Spatial Planning (FORMAS). Thanks also to Mistra (the Foundation for Strategic Environmental Research) for support to the Stockholm Resilience Centre, and to the Department of History, Stockholm University, in the support of Stephan Barthel's contribution. We also thank Jonas Adner for his nice artwork with Figs. 2 and 3 of this paper. References Abadie, A., Gardeazabal, J., 2003. The economic costs of conflict: a case study for the Basque Country. American Economic Review 93, 113–132. Alesina, A., La Ferrara, E., 2005. Ethnic diversity and economic performance. Journal of Economic Literature 43, 762–800. Altieri, M., Nelso Companioni, A., Cañizares, K., Murphy, C., Rosset, P., Bourque, M., Nicholls, C.I., 1999. The greening of the “barrios”: urban agriculture for food security in Cuba. Agriculture and Human Values 16, 131–140. Andersson, E., Barthel, S., Ahrne, K., 2007. Measuring social–ecological dynamics behind the generation of ecosystem services. Ecological Applications 17, 1267–1278. Argüelles, J., 2011. Manifesto for the Noosphere: The Next Stage in the Evolution of Human Consciousness. North Atlantic Books9781583943038. Baleé, W., 1993. Indigenous transformation of Amazonian forests. L'Homme 126–128, 231–254. Barthel, S., 2006. Sustaining urban ecosystem services with local stewards participation in Stockholm (Sweden). In: Tress, B., Tres, G., Fry, G., Opdam, P. (Eds.), From Landscape Research to Landscape Planning, Aspects of Integration, Education and Application: Wageningen UR Frontis Series, vol. 12, pp. 305–320. Barthel, S. 2008. Recalling Urban Nature: Linking City People to Ecosystem Services. PhD Thesis, Dept of Systems Ecology, Stockholm University, Stockholm. ISBN 978-91-7155-741-4. Barthel, S., Isendahl, C., this issue. Urban gardens, agricultures and waters: sources of resilience for long-term food security in cities. Ecological Economics. http://dx. doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2012.06.018 Barthel, S., Colding, J., Folke, C., Elmqvist, T., 2005. History and local management of a biodiversity rich urban cultural landscape. Ecology and Society 10 (2), 10 ([online] URL: http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol10/iss2/art10/). Barthel, S., Folke, C., Colding, J., 2010a. Social–ecological memory in gardening: Retaining the capacity for management of ecosystem services. Global Environmental Change 20, 255–265.

Barthel, S., Sörlin, S., Ljungqvist, J., 2010b. Innovative memory and resilient cities: echoes from ancient Constantinople. In: Sinclair, P., Herschend, F., Isendahl, C., Nordquist, G. (Eds.), The Urban Mind. Uppsala University Press, Uppsala, pp. 391–405. Barthel, S., Colding, J., Ernstson, H., Marcus, L., Erixon, H., Thorsvall, J., 2010c. Qbook4Hållbarthet, Albano Resilient Campus. Akademiska Hus, Stockholm, Sweden. Barthel, S., Parker, J., Folke, C., Colding, J., in press. Urban Gardens-Pockets of Social–Ecological Memory, in: Tidball, KG and ME Krasny, (Eds.) Greening in the red zone: Disaster, resilience, and urgent biophilia. Dordrecht: Springer. ISBN 978-90-481-9946-4 Barthel, S. Parker, J. Ernstson, H., in press-b. Food and Green Space in Cities: A Resilience Lens on Gardens and Urban Environmental Movements. Urban Studies. Barthel, S., Crumley, C., Svedin, U., Folke, C., in review. Pockets of social–ecological memory: combating bio-cultural erosion in landscapes of food production. Ecology and Society. Barzel, Y., 1997. Economic Analysis of Property Rights. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, MA. Bassett, T.J., 1981. Reaping on the margins: a century of community gardening in America. Landscape 25, 1–8. Been, V., Voicu, I., 2008. The effect of community gardens on neighboring property values. Real Estate Economics 36, 241–283. Bellini, E., Ottaviano, G.I.P., Pinelli, D., Prarolo, G., 2008. Cultural diversity and economic performance: evidence from European regions. HWWI Research Paper. 1861504X, 3–14. Hamburg Institute of International Economics (HWWI) (42 pp.). Bendt, P., 2010. Social learning and diversity of practice in community gardens in Berlin. Master Thesis, Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, Stockholm, pp. 73. Bendt, P., Barthel, S., Colding, J., in press. Civic greening and environmental learning in publicaccess community gardens in Berlin. Landscape and Urban Planning. http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1016/j.landurbplan.2012.10.003. Berkes, F., 1989. Common Property Resources. Ecology and Community-Based Sustainable Development. Belhaven, London. Berkes, F., Folke, C., 1994. Investing in cultural capital for the sustainable use of natural resources. In: Jansson, A.-M., Hammer, M., Folke, C., Costanza, R. (Eds.), Investing in Natural Capital. Island Press, Washington, D.C., pp. 128–149. Berkes, F., Folke, C., 1998. Linking Social and Ecological Systems. Management Practices and Social Mechanisms for Building Resilience. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Berkes, F., Colding, J., Folke, C., 2000. Rediscovery of traditional ecological knowledge as adaptive management. Ecological Applications 10, 1251–1262. Berkes, F., Colding, J., Folke, 2003. Navigating Social–Ecological Systems: Building Resilience for Complexity and Change. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, U.K. Björkman, L., 2000. Vad betyder koloniträdgårdar för den urbana människan i Stockholm? Länkar mellan fritidsodling i staden, ekologisk kunskap och uthållig samhällsbyggnad. Master thesis. Department of Sytems Ecology, Stockholm University, Stockholm. Blair, R.B., 2001. Birds and butterflies along urban gradients in two ecoregions of the U.S. In: Lockwood, J.L., McKinney, M.L. (Eds.), Biotic Homogenization. Kluwer, Norwell, MA, pp. 459–486. Blomley, N., 2008. Enclosure, common right and the property of the poor. Social and Legal Studies 17, 311–331. Bonfiglio, O., 2009. Delicious Detroit. The city is plowing resources into its extensive vacant land. : Planning. American Planning Association, pp. 32–37 (August/September 2009). Bowman, A., Pagano, M.A., 1998. Urban l in the United States. Working paper, WP98AB1. Lincoln Land Institute of Land Policy, Boston, MA. Boyer, L., Roth, W.-M., 2006. Learning and teaching as emergent features of informal settings: an ethnographic study in an environmental action group. Science Education 90, 1028–1049. Campbell, L., Wiesen, A., 2009. Restorative Commons: Creating Health and Well-being through Urban Landscapes. USDA Forest Service, PA, USA. Castells, M., 1989. The Informational City. Blackwell, Oxford. Colding, J., 2007. ‘Ecological land-use complementation’ for building resilience in urban ecosystems. Landscape and Urban Planning 81, 46–55. Colding, J., 2011a. The role of ecosystem services in contemporary urban planning. In: Niemelä, J. (Ed.), Urban Ecology. Patterns, Processes and Applications. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 228–237. Colding, J., 2011b. Creating incentives for increased public engagement in ecosystem management through urban commons. In: Boyd, E., Folke, C. (Eds.), Adapting Institutions: Meeting the Challenge of Global Environmental Change. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK. Colding, J., Folke, C., 2001. Social taboos: invisible systems of local resource management and biodiversity conservation. Ecological Applications 11, 584–600. Colding, J., Elmqvist, T., Olsson, P., 2003a. Living with disturbance: building resilience in social–ecological systems. In: Berkes, F., Colding, J., Folke, C. (Eds.), Navigating Social–Ecological Systems: Building Resilience for Complexity and Change. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 163–185. Colding, J., Folke, C., Elmqvist, 2003b. Social institutions in ecosystem management and biodiversity conservation. Journal of Tropical Ecology 44, 25–41. Colding, J., Lundberg, J., Folke, C., 2006. Incorporating green-area user groups in urban ecosystem management. Ambio 35, 237–244. Colding, J., Lundberg, J., Lundberg, S., Andersson, E., 2009. Golf courses and wetland fauna. Ecological Applications 19, 1481–1491. Collier, P., 2001. Implication of ethnic diversity. Economic Policy 32, 129–166. Crouch, D., Ward, C., 1997. The Allotment: Its Landscape and Culture, 2nd ed. Five Leaves Publications. Crumley, C.L., 1994. Historical Ecology—Cultural, Knowledge and Changing Landscapes. School of American Research Press, Santa Fe, NM, USA. Crumley, C.L., 2000. From the garden to the globe-Linking time and space to meaning and memory. In: McIntosh, R.J., Tainter, J.A., McIntosh, S.K. (Eds.), The Way the

J. Colding, S. Barthel / Ecological Economics 86 (2013) 156–166 Wind Blows-Climate, History and Human Action. Historical Ecology Series. Colombia University Press, NY, USA. Durkheim, E., 1997. The Division of Labour. The Free Press, USA. Elmqvist, T., Folke, C., Nyström, M., Peterson, G., Bengtsson, J., Walker, B., Norberg, J., 2003. Response diversity, ecosystem change, and resilience. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 1, 488–494. Elmqvist, T., Colding, J., Barthel, S., Borgström, S., Duit, A., Lundberg, J., Andersson, E., Ahrné, K., Erntson, H., Folke, C., Bengtsson, J., 2004. The dynamics of social–ecological systems in urban landscapes: Stockholm and the National Urban Park, Sweden. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1023, 308–322. Emanuelsson, U., 2010. Europeiska kulturlandskap-hur människan format Europas natur. Fälth and Hässler, Värnamo, Sweden. ISBN 978-91-540-5977-5. Ernstson, H., Sörlin, S., 2009. Weaving protective stories: connective practices to articulate holistic values in Stockholm National Urban Park. Environment and Planning A 41, 1460–1479. Florida, R.L., 2002. The Rise of the Creative Class and How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life. Basic Books, New York. Folke, C., Jansson, A., Larsson, J., Costanza, R., 1997. Ecosystem appropriation by cities. Ambio 26, 167–172. Folke, C., Colding, J., Berkes, F., 2003. Synthesis: building resilience and adaptive capacity in social–ecological systems. In: Berkes, F., Colding, J., Folke, C. (Eds.), Navigating Social–Ecological Systems: Building Resilience for Complexity and Change. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 352–387. Folke, C., Jansson, Å., Rockström, J., Olsson, P., Carpenter, S., Chapin, F., Crépin, A.S., Daily, G., Danell, K., Ebbesson, J., Elmqvist, T., Galaz, V., Moberg, F., Nilsson, M., Österblom, H., Ostrom, E., Persson, Å., Peterson, G., Polasky, S., Steffen, W., Walker, B., Westley, F., 2011. Reconnecting to the biosphere. Ambio 7444–7447. Fraser, E.D.G., Rimas, A., 2010. Empires of Food. Feast, Famine and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations. Random House Books, New York, USA. Geertz, C., 1993. The Interpretation of Cultures. Fontana Press, London . (1973). Gehl, J., 2010. Cities for People. Island Press, Washington DC. Glover, T., Shinew, K., Parry, D., 2005. Association, sociability, and civic culture: the democratic effect of community gardening. Leisure Sciences 27, 75–92. Goddard, M., Dougill, A., Benton, T., 2010. Scaling up from gardens: biodiversity conservation in urban environments. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 25 (2), 90–98. Grimm, N.B., Faeth, S.H., Golubiewski, N.E., Redman, C.L., Wu, J., Bai, X., Briggs, J.M., 2008. Global change and the ecology of cities. Science 319, 756–760. Halbwachs, M., 1926. On Collective Memory. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, USA. [1950]. Hanna, S.S., Folke, C., Mäler, K.-G., 1996. Rights to Nature. Ecological, Economic, Cultural, and Political Principles of Institutions for the Environment. Island Press, Covelo, California. Hansen, A.J., Defries, R., Turner, W., 2004. Land use change and biodiversity: a synthesis of rates and consequences during the period of satellite imagery. In: Gutman, G., Justice, C. (Eds.), Land Change Science: Observing, Monitoring, and Understanding Trajectories of Change on the Earth's Surface. Springer Verlag, New York, NY, pp. 277–299. Healy, P., 1998. Collaborative planning in a stakeholder society. Town Planning Review 69, 1–22. Holland, L., 2004. Diversity and connections in community gardens: a contribution to local sustainability. Local Environment 9, 285–305. Jacobs, J., 1961. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Random House, New York. Janson Waddick, C., 2000. Metropolitan Gardening Organizations: planning for sustainable communities. PUBP 8500. Research Seminar in Public Policy, pp. 1–36. Krasny, M., 2009. Children jump into community gardens: what springs out? In: Tidball, K.G., Krasny, M., Faurest, K. (Eds.), The Case for a Community Greening Research Agenda. American Community Gardening Association, Columbus, OH, pp. 49–60. Krasny, M., Tidball, K., 2009. Community gardens as contexts for science, stewardship, and civic action learning. Cities and the Environment 2, 1–18. Kurtz, H., 2001. Differentiating multiple meanings of gardening and community. Urban Geography 7, 656–670. Larsson, Marie. 2009. Stadsdelsträdgård - plats för gemenskap och kreativa processer. Doctoral diss. Dept. of Landscape Architecture, SLU. Acta Universitatis agriculturae Sueciae vol. 2009:40. Lee, S., Webster, C., 2006. Enclosure of the urban commons. GeoJournal 66, 27–42. Levkoe, C., 2006. Learning democracy through food justice movements. Agriculture and Human Values 23, 89–98. Lewis, C.A., 1992. Effects of plants and gardening in creating interpersonal and community well-being. In: Relf, D. (Ed.), The Role of Horticulture in Human Well-being and Social Development: A National Symposium, 19–21 April 1990, Arlington, Virginia. Timber Press, Portland, pp. 55–65. Lindhagen, A., 1916. Koloniträdgårdar och planterade gårdar (Allotment gardens and planted gardens). Rekolid, Stockholm, Sweden. Linn, K., 1999. Reclaiming the sacred commons. New Village 1, 42–49. Ljungqvist, J., Barthel, S., Finnveden, G., Sörlin, S., 2010. The Urban Anthropocene: Lessons for Sustainability from the Environmental History of Constantinople. In: Sinclair, Paul, Herschend, Frands, Isendahl, Christian, Nordquist, Gullög (Eds.), The Urban Mind, cultural and environmental dynamics Studies in Global Archaeology, 15. University Press, Sweden, Uppsala, pp. 368–394. Low, B., Ostrom, E., Simon, C., Wilson, J., 2003. Redundancy and diversity: do they influence optimal management. In: Berkes, F., Colding, J., Folke, C. (Eds.), Navigating Social–Ecological Systems: Building Resilience for Complexity and Change. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 83–114. (MA) Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005. Ecosystems and Human Well-being: Synthesis. Island Press, Washington, D.C.

165

Maffi, L., Woodley, E., 2010. Biocultural diversity conservation. A global source book. Earthscan, London. Marcus, C., Barnes, M., 1999. Healing Gardens: Therapeutic Benefits and Design Recommendations. John Wiley & Sons, New York. McDaniel, J., Alley, K.D., 2005. Connecting local environmental knowledge and land use practices: a human ecosystem approach to urbanization in West Georgia. Urban Ecosystems 8, 23–38. McIntosh, R.J., 2000. Social memory in Mande. In: Mcintosh, R.J., Tainter, J.A., McIntosh, S.K. (Eds.), The Way the Wind Blows: Climate, History, and Human Action. Columbia University Press, New York, pp. 141–180. McKinney, M.L., 2002. Urbanization, biodiversity, and conservation. BioScience 52, 883–890. Miller, J.R., 2005. Biodiversity conservation and the extinction of experience. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 20, 430–434. Milliken, F.J., Martins, L.L., 1996. Searching for common threads: understanding the multiple effects of diversity in organizational groups. Academy of Management Review 21, 402–433. Nolin, C., 2003. Koloniträdgårdsrörelsen i Stockholm: Dess förutsättningar och uppkomst vid 1900-talets början, in: Nordiska Muséets och Skansens Årsbok (Ed.), Stadens odlare. Nordiska Muséets Förlag, Värnamo, Sweden. North, D.C., 1990. Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Oddsberg, J., 2011. An analysis of the potential of local stewardship as a management mode for increasing and enhancing ecosystem services in the urban landscape. Master's thesis 2011. Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, Sweden. Oldfield, T.E.E., Smith, R.J., Harrop, S.R., Leader-Williams, N., 2003. Field sports and conservation in the United Kingdom. Nature 423, 531–533. Ollman, B., 1971. Alienation—Marx conception of Man in Capitalist Society. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Ostrom, E., 1990. Governing the Commons. The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Ostrom, E., 1996. Crossing the great divide: coproduction, synergy and development. World Development 24, 1073–1087. Ostrom, E., 2005. Understanding Institutional Diversity. Princeton University Press, New York. Ostrom, E., Schlager, E., 1996. The formation of property rights. In: Hanna, S., Folke, C., Mäler, K.-G. (Eds.), Rights to Nature. Island Press, Washington D.C., pp. 127–156. Ottaviano, G.I.P., Peri, G., 2006. The economic value of cultural diversity: evidence from US cities. Journal of Economic Geography 6, 9–44. Parker, J.N., 2003. The Rise of the Allotment Movement in Europe: An Historical Overview with Theoretical Implications. The Department of Systems Ecology Stockholm University, Sweden. Pyle, R.M., 1978. The extinction of experience. Horticulture 56, 64–67. Ricketts, T., Imhoff, M., 2003. Biodiversity, urban areas, and agriculture: locating priority ecoregions for conservation. Conservation Ecology 8, 1 (http://consecol.org./ vol8/iss2/art1). Rindos, D., 1980. Symbiosis, instability, and the origins and spread of agriculture: A new model. Current Anthropology 21, 751–772. Rosol, M., 2010. Public participation in post-Fordist urban green space governance: the case of community gardens in Berlin. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 34, 548–563. Roszak, T., 1973. Where the Wasteland Ends. Doubleday Anchor, New York. Ruitenbeek, J., Cartier, C., 2001. The invisible wand: adaptive co-management as an emergent strategy in complex bio-economic systems. Occasional Paper. Center for International Forestry Research, Bogor, Indonesia (34 pp.). Rydin, Y., Pennington, M., 2000. Public participation and local environmental planning: the collective action problem and the potential of social capital. Local Environment 5, 153–169. Sala, O.E., Chapin, F.S.I., Armesto, J.J., Berlow, E., Bloomfield, J., Dirzo, R., Huber-Sanwald, E., Huenneke, L.F., Jackson, R.B., Kinzig, A., Leemans, R., Lodge, D.M., Mooney, H.A., Oesterheld, M., Poff, N.L., Sykes, M.T., Walker, B.H., Walker, M., Wall, D.H., 2000. Global biodiversity scenarios for the year 2100. Science 287, 1770–1774. Saldivar-Tanaka, L., Krasny, M., 2004. Culturing community development, neighborhood open space, and civic agriculture: the case of Latino community gardens in New York City. Agriculture and Human Values 21, 399–412. Samways, M., 2007. Rescuing the extinction of experience. Biodiversity and Conservation 16, 1995–1997. Sassen, S., 1994. Cities in a World Economy. Pine Forge Press, Thousand Oaks, US. Scarborough, V.L., 2008. Rate and process of societal change in semitropical settings: the ancient Maya and the living Balinese. Quaternary International 184, 24–40. Schlager, E., Ostrom, E., 1992. Property-rights regimes and natural resources: a conceptual analysis. Land Economics 68, 249–262. Schmelzkopf, K., 1996. Urban community gardens as a contested space. Geographical Review 85, 369–381. Schukoske, J.E., 2000. Community development through gardening: State and local policies transforming urban open space. Legislation and Public Policy 3, 351–392. Select Committee, 1998. The United Kingdom Parliament, Select Committee on Environmental, Transport, and Regional Affairs Fifth Report to The House of Commons . (1998). Shinew, K.J., Glover, T.D., Parry, D.C., 2004. Leisure spaces as potential sites for interracial interaction: community gardens in urban areas. Journal of Leisure Research 36, 336–355. Sinclair, P., Frands Herschend, F., Nordquist, G., Isendahl, C., 2010. The urban mind, cultural and environmental dynamics. Studies in Global Archaeology, 15. Uppsala University Press, Uppsala, Sweden. Snep, R.P.H., WallisdeVries, M.F., Opdam, P., 2011. Conservation where people work: a role for business districts and industrial areas in enhancing endangered butterfly populations? Landscape and Urban Planning 103, 94–101.

166

J. Colding, S. Barthel / Ecological Economics 86 (2013) 156–166

Steffen, W., Persson, Å., Deutsch, L., Zalasiewicz, J., Williams, M., Richardson, K., Crumley, C., Crutzen, P., Folke, C., Gordon, L., 2011. The anthropocene: from global change to planetary stewardship. Ambio 7444–7447. Stokes, D., 2006. Conservators of experience. BioScience 56, 7–8. Sukopp, H., Trautmann, W., Korneck, D., 1979. The soil flora and vegetation of Berlin's wastelands. In: Laurie, I. (Ed.), Nature in Cities. John Wiley, Chichester. Theodori, G.L., Luloff, A.E., Willits, F.K., 1998. The association of outdoor recreation and environmental concern: reexamining the Dunlap-Heffernan thesis. Rural Sociology 63, 94–108. Thorns, D.C., 2002. The Transformation of Cities: Urban Theory and Urban Life. Palgrave McMillan, Houndmills, Basingstoke. Tidball, K.G., Krasny, M.E., (in press). From risk to resilience: expanding the role of community greening and civic ecology in urban stability, security, transition and reconstruction contexts, in: Tidball, K.G., Krasny, M.E. (Eds.), Greening in the Red Zone: Disaster, Resilience, and Urgent Biophilia. Springer, Dordrecht. ISBN 97890-481-9946-4.

Tidball, G.K., Krasny, E.M., Svendsen, E., Cambell, L., Helphand, K., 2010. Stewardship, learning and memory in disaster resilience. Environmental Learning Research 16 (5–6), 591–609. UNESCO, 2008. Links between biological and cultural diversity —concepts, methods and experiences. Report of the International Workshop. UNESCO, Paris . (2008). Warner, S.B., 1987. To Dwell is to Garden: A History of Boston's Community Gardens. Northeastern University Press, Boston. Webster, C.J., 2002. Property rights and the public realm: gates, green-belts and gemeinshaft. Environment and Planning B 29, 397–412. Wenger, E., 1998. Communities of Practice. Learning, Meaning and Identity. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, U.K. Wenger, E., 2000. Communities of practice and social learning systems. Organizaton 7, 225–246. Zanoni, P., Janssens, M., 2009. Sustainable DiverCities. In: Janssens, M., Pinelli, D., Reyman, D.C., Wallman, S. (Eds.), Sustainable Cities. Diversity, Economic Growth and Social Cohesion. Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, UK, pp. 3–25.