Erika S. Svendsen

Stewardship, learning, and memory in disaster resilience

In this contribution, we propose and explore the following hypothesis: civic ecology practices, including urban community forestry, community gardening, and other self‐organized forms of stewardship of green spaces in cities, are manifestations of how memories of the role of greening in healing can be instrumentalized through social learning to foster social–ecological system (SES) resilience following crisis and disaster. Further, we propose that civic ecology communities of practice within and across cities help to leverage these memories into effective practices, and that these communities of practice serve as urban iterations of the collaborative and adaptive management practices that play a role in SES resilience in more rural settings. We present two urban examples to build support for this hypothesis: the Living Memorials Project in post‐9/11 New York City, and community forestry in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. These cases demonstrate what we refer to as a memorialization mechanism that leads to feedbacks critical to SES resilience. The process begins immediately after a crisis, when a spontaneous and collective memorialization of lost ones through gardening and tree planting ensues, following which a community of practice emerges to act upon and apply these memories to social learning about greening practices. This in turn may lead to new kinds of learning, including about collective efficacy and ecosystem services production, through a kind of feedback between remembering, learning, and enhancing individual, social, and environmental well‐being. This process, in the case of greening in cities, may confer SES resilience, through contributing to both psychological–social resistance and resilience and ecosystem benefits.

Organizing urban ecosystem services through environmental stewardship governance in New York City

Abstract How do stewardship groups contribute to the management of urban ecosystem services? In this paper, we integrate the research on environmental stewardship with the social–ecological systems literature to explain how stewardship groups serve as bridge organizations between public agencies and civic organizations, working across scales and sectors to build the flexible and multi-scaled capacity needed to manage complex urban ecosystems. Analyzing data collected from a survey of stewardship groups in New York City, combined with open-ended semi-structured interviews with representatives from the most connected civic “hub” organizations, we use a mixed-method approach to understand the specific activities of bridge organizations in the process of preserving local ecosystem services. This paper concludes that the role of bridge organizations in the management of urban ecosystem services in New York City is increasing, that these groups have a specific bi-modal role in the network, and that an initial presence of heterarchic organizational relations was crucial in their development. The paper ends with a discussion of the implications of these results.

The organisational structure of urban environmental stewardship

How is the organisational structure of urban environmental stewardship groups related to the diverse ways that civic stewardship is taking place in urban settings? The findings of the limited number of studies that have explored the organisational structure of civic environmentalism are combined with the research on civic stewardship to answer this question. By bridging these relatively disconnected strands of research and testing their expectations on a structured sample of civic groups that were surveyed in New York City, a statistically significant relationship is found between the organisational structure of groups and both the organisational characteristics, as well as the types of environmental work they are doing. How these findings advance the research on urban environmental stewardship is discussed, as well as what these results tell us about the ways civil society engages in urban stewardship more broadly.

Living Memorials: Understanding the Social Meanings of Community-Based Memorials to September 11, 2001

Living memorials are landscaped spaces created by people to memorialize individuals, places, and events. Hundreds of stewardship groups across the United States of America created living memorials in response to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. This study sought to understand how stewards value, use, and talk about their living, community-based memorials. Stewards were asked to describe the intention, use, and meanings of the memorials. Qualitative and quantitative methods of analysis were used to analyze 117 semi-structured interviews. Sacredness of space varied by a memorial’s site type and uses. This and other findings supported the notion of sacred space as contested space. Sacred space can be produced from acts of “setting aside” that ascribe meaning to a memorial site.

Living memorials project: year 1 social and site assessment

The Living Memorials Project (LMP) social and site assessment identified more than 200 public open spaces created, used, or enhanced in memory of the tragic events of September 11, 2001 (9-11). A national registry of these sites is available for viewing and updating online. Researchers interviewed 100 community groups using social ecology methods of observation, patterned discourse, and photo-narrative mapping. This publication includes findings associated with research conducted in the first year of the multi-year study. One of the findings was that after 9-11, communities needed space: space to create, space to teach, space to restore, space to create a locus of control. These social motivations formed the basis of patterned human responses observed throughout the nation. A site typology emerged adhering to specific forms and functions that often reflected a variance in attitudes, beliefs, and social networks.

Knowledge co-production at the research-practice interface: embedded case studies from urban forestry.

Cities are increasingly engaging in sustainability efforts and investment in green infrastructure, including large-scale urban tree planting campaigns. In this context, researchers and practitioners are working jointly to develop applicable knowledge for planning and managing the urban forest. This paper presents three case studies of knowledge co-production in the field of urban forestry in the United States. These cases were selected to span a range of geographic scales and topical scopes; all three are examples of urban researcher-practitioner networks in which the authors are situated to comment on reflexively. The three cases resemble institutional structures described in the knowledge co-production literature, including participatory research, a hybrid organization of scientists and managers, and a community of practice. We find that trust, embeddedness, new approaches by both practitioners and researchers, and blending of roles all serve to recognize multiple forms of capability, expertise, and ways of knowing. We discuss the impacts of knowledge co-production and the ways in which hybrid institutional forms can enable its occurrence.

Urban environmental stewardship and changes in vegetative cover and building footprint in New York City neighborhoods (2000–2010)

This study explores the connections between vegetation cover change, environmental stewardship, and building footprint change in New York City neighborhoods from the years 2000 to 2010. We use a mixed-methods multidisciplinary approach to analyze spatially explicit social and ecological data. Most neighborhoods lost vegetation during the study period. Neighborhoods that gained vegetation tended to have, on average, more stewardship groups. We contextualize the ways in which stewardship groups lead to the observed decadal- and neighborhood-scale changes in urban vegetation cover. This multidisciplinary synthesis combines the strengths of quantitative data to identify patterns, and qualitative data to understand process. While we recognize the complexity of cities and the potential confounding factors, this exploratory analysis uses sound theory and data from a mixed methodological approach to show the role of urban environmental stewardship in affecting the New York City landscape.

Linking science and decision making to promote an ecology for the city: practices and opportunities

Abstract To promote urban sustainability and resilience, there is an increasing demand for actionable science that links science and decision making based on social–ecological knowledge. Approaches, frameworks, and practices for such actionable science are needed and have only begun to emerge. We propose that approaches based on the co‐design and co‐production of knowledge can play an essential role to meet this demand. Although the antecedents for approaches to the co‐design and co‐production of knowledge are decades old, the integration of science and practice to advance urban sustainability and resilience that we present is different in several ways. These differences include the disciplines needed, diversity and number of actors involved, and the technological infrastructures that facilitate local‐to‐global connections. In this article, we discuss how the new requirements and possibilities for co‐design, co‐production, and practical use of social–ecological research can be used as an ecology for the city to promote urban sustainability and resilience. While new technologies are part of the solution, traditional approaches also remain important. Using our urban experiences with long‐term, place‐based research from several U.S. Long‐Term Ecological Research sites and U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service Urban Field Stations, we describe a dynamic framework for linking research with decisions. We posit that this framework, coupled with a user‐defined, theory‐based approach to science, is instrumental to advance both practice and science. Ultimately, cities are ideal places for integrating basic science and decision making, facilitating flows of information through networks, and developing sustainable and resilient solutions and futures.

Storyline and design: how civic stewardship shapes urban design in New York City

Our interest in reshaping the natural world to enhance human life can be traced back thousands of years to the earliest urban civilizations. From irrigation projects of the Indus Valley to the Roman aqueducts to designing integrated systems of landscaped parks and stream valleys, humans have sought to harness the capacity of nature to advance public well-being, prosperity and urban development. Throughout this history one fi nds a wide range of social actors in competition over urban land not only as it becomes scarce but as the meaning of nature shifts in concert with changing social and economic conditions. Environmental historians have remarked that the period from the late nineteenth through the twentieth century is distinct as it re fl ects rapid and unprecedented changes in human settlements, technology, and global markets that have dramatically restructured the relationship between society and nature (Cronon 1991, 1995 ; McNeill 2003 ) . Civil society and the state, at different historical moments, have united over a shared concern for the urban environment and the provision of public goods, noting that land use and consumption patterns have produced many bene fi ts as well as unexpected risks to human health and prosperity. Over the past century, local civic groups throughout the United States have worked alongside government agencies and the private sector to address a wide range of land use issues including access to parks, gardens, trails, waterways and other urban wildlife and habitat experiences (e.g. Burch and Grove 1993 ; Westphal 1993 ; John 1994 ; Weber 2000 ; Sirianni and Friedland 2001 ; Andrews and Edwards 2005 ;

Community-Based Memorials to September 11, 2001: Environmental Stewardship as Memory Work

This chapter investigates how people use trees, parks, gardens, and other natural resources as raw materials in and settings for memorials to September 11, 2001. In particular, we focus on ‘found space living memorials’, which we define as sites that are community-managed, re-appropriated from their prior use, often carved out of the public right-of-way, and sometimes for temporary use. These memorials are created as part of traditional mourning rituals and acts of remembrance, but are not limited to formally consecrated sites or the site of the tragedy. They are dispersed throughout the city in everyday and highly public landscapes such as traffic islands, sidewalks, waterfronts, and front yards, demonstrating how ordinary spaces can become sacred. We present several forms of found space community-based living memorials in and around New York City: shrines, viewshed parks, gardens in the public right-of-way, and tree plantings. These cases provide evidence that community-managed memorials are self-organizing, democratic processes which develop independently of state-led memorial initiatives.