1.  THE IMPERATIVE

The message of this book is that conservationists will be a lot more effective if they take cities and the people who live in them much more seriously. 

Cities have a bad name in many quarters of the conservation community, even though conservationists live in cities for the most part and depend on urban people for political and financial support. Conversely, the conservation movement has a bad name among many who work on urban problems, even though protected areas safeguard the larger ecosystems on which cities depend. The truth is that protecting nature and improving city life are interdependent goals. Conservation and urban leaders are natural allies. The challenge is in making the right connections.

Innovative programs exist in a number of countries, but little has been done to exchange experience and ideas. The workshop on which this book is based was a small step in that direction.

2.  TWO CRITICAL TRENDS

Two global trends have important implications for the conservation community: urbanization and separation of people from nature.  

A rapidly urbanizing world

The distribution of the world’s population between rural and urban areas is changing fast. Globally, the proportion of people living in cities rose from about 30 percent in 1950 to 47 percent in 2000, and is projected to reach 50 percent in 2007 and 61 percent by 2030. Contrary to a commonly held belief, the proportion of people living in “megacities” (urban agglomerations of 10 million inhabitants or more) is small, less than 4 percent. Most urban dwellers live in settlements with fewer than half a million inhabitants, and some of the fastest growing cities have relatively small populations.

The world regions show marked differences in the level and pace of urbanization. In the Americas, Europe, and Oceania, the proportion of people living in urban areas is already over 70 percent. Although the figures for Africa and Asia are currently much lower, 38 and 37 percent, respectively, many cities in those regions will double their populations in the next fifteen years (UN 2004). 

Almost all the global population increase expected during 2000-2030 will be absorbed by the urban areas of the less developed regions. Based on current trends, most of these new urban dwellers will live in overcrowded slums, often situated on marginal and dangerous land, without sanitation or easily accessible access to clean water. According to the Cities Alliance, a World Bank-based partnership of official development agencies and global associations of local authorities, “ignoring this policy challenge risks condemning hundreds of millions of people to an urban future of misery, insecurity, and environmental degradation on a truly awesome scale” (CA 2004).    

Separation of people from nature

City dwellers gain appreciation for nature less through conventional education than through outdoor experiences. In fact, without direct experience of nature early in life, teaching about environmental issues can actually breed cynicism about the environment (Finger 1994; Schultz 2000; Schultz 2002). Growing scientific evidence indicates that direct experience of nature early in life is essential for healthy intellectual, emotional, and even moral development (Kahn and Kellert 2002).    

Unfortunately, people in cities tend to be less and less familiar with nature and the benefits of natural resources. This phenomenon cuts across social groups. The urban poor often have no access to nature. The more affluent are experiencing what Bob Pyle calls “the rise of the virtual in place of the real,” as television, computer games, the Internet and “other forms of second-hand entertainment have come to occupy an ever more enormous portion of childhood’s hours” (Pyle 2002, 317). As a consequence, not only does the quality of urban dwellers’ lives suffer, they may behave irresponsibly toward the environment, albeit unknowingly, and over the long run may be less inclined to provide political support for conservation.

3.  THE PAPERS

All but a few of the formal presentations given at The Urban Imperative workshop are represented in this volume. In addition, four papers are included that do not reflect formal workshop presentations: David Goode and Martin Storksdieck unfortunately had to cancel their trips to Durban at the last moment, and Judy Ling Wong and Todd Miller expanded on their informal workshop remarks in writing.

Authors were asked to submit their contributions after the workshop so they could benefit from discussions at the World Parks Congress. Some papers were revised just before the book went to press and include updates. Thus, technically speaking, The Urban Imperative is not a proceedings volume but part of an ongoing process of forming a community around a powerful set of ideas.

The book is directed primarily to people whose main focus is on conservation of hinterlands, or large-scale ecosystems that include cities. This includes most people in the traditional conservation movement and many of those involved in the succeeding but overlapping environmental and sustainability movements (Trzyna 2005). Those engaged mainly in “greening” cities may not be, or at least feel, part of any of these movements, but rather come from neighborhood activist, urban planning, architecture, landscape architecture, or other backgrounds. However, as I mention elsewhere, clearly both groups would benefit from working together more closely. 

One question that often arises is: Where do you draw the line between urban natural areas and conventional urban parks? It is clear that sports fields are not urban protected areas, while wildlands abutting a metropolis are. In between these two extremes is a wide grey area. A more definitive answer may be needed in specific places for specific reasons, but for the purpose of international dialogue it is probably not necessary or even possible.

How cities and protected areas depend on each other

To conservationists, it is obvious that protected areas provide important benefits to city dwellers, ranging from education and healthy recreation to watershed protection, biodiversity conservation, food and fuel, and income from tourism. However, these benefits have rarely been cataloged or presented in clear terms, and urban residents generally have a poor understanding of them. Research documenting such benefits can be very useful in showing the value of protected areas to decision-makers, as the three papers in Part 1 of the book demonstrate.

In Part 1, Cities Depend on Protected Areas, Nigel Dudley and Sue Stolton show how many of the world’s largest cities draw a substantial proportion of their drinking water from protected forests. In a world in which an estimated one billion city dwellers lack clean water, this is a powerful argument for preserving and restoring forests. 

Nicholas Conner reports on an effort by the state government of New South Wales in Australia to develop quantitative indicators to assess the contribution of protected areas to the quality of life in an urban community. However, he sees this as only a first step toward a “broader approach to influencing communities and decision-makers to support protected areas and conservation.”

Debra Roberts and her colleagues in the Durban city government in South Africa describe their effort to examine the economic value of ecosystem goods and services from the city’s extensive open space system. This was in response to a need to realign environmental planning with new development goals emphasizing poverty alleviation and economic opportunity.

Less obvious to many conservationists is the other side of the coin: As cities depend on protected areas, urban dwellers are essential to building broader support for protected areas. Throughout the world, political power, opinion-makers, and communications media are concentrated in cities. It follows that protected area agencies need a presence there. 

In Part 2, Protected Areas Depend on Cities, Brazilian diplomat and conservationist Pedro da Cunha e Menezes makes this point eloquently: “The fight for the conservation of the Amazon will not be won in the depths of the Amazon forest. It can only be won in Rio de Janeiro, São Paolo, Brasilia, and the other large Brazilian metropolises. In democracies, no matter how obvious management decisions are, they must always be decided by the will of the citizens, and citizens will not decide or care about the unfamiliar.”

Fook-Yee Wong, who directs Hong Kong’s world-class system of Country and Marine Parks, describes how strong public support has made it possible for his city, where almost 7 million people live in an area of little more than a thousand square kilometers, to maintain 40 percent of its territory in well-protected areas. 

John Reynolds, from the perspective of senior positions in the United States National Park Service, tells about a special relationship between California cities and Yosemite National Park, the birthplace of the national park idea that led to Yellowstone and thousands of other protected areas around the world. He concludes that throughout its history “Yosemite has needed cities – or, more accurately, the people who live in cities – to survive and evolve.”       

Pamela Parker and Michael Punturiero, coming from different points of view (she a conservation biologist; he a citrus grower and local community leader), conclude that the main reason for the success of a partnership between a protected area in South Australia and the towns that adjoin it is transfer of skills from professional biologists and land managers to community volunteers through “learning by doing” and adaptive management. Their case illustrates two other points: First, urban institutions can have significant conservation roles in other countries, even at great distances: In this instance, the Chicago Zoological Society, which runs one of the world’s premier zoos, Brookfield, is a key player. Second, although The Urban Imperative workshop focused on large cities, people in smaller settlements often have a vital role in conservation.              

Strategies: Making the right connections

Part 3, Strategies for Linking Cities and Protected Areas, consists of nine case studies of innovative approaches:   

David Goode’s chapter on London’s Biodiversity Strategy deserves special mention for two reasons. First, the Strategy is an example of what can be accomplished by intelligence, imagination, and fortitude combined with enlightened political leadership. The document evolved out of work that Goode began in 1982 in local government and continued for many years in an officially sanctioned NGO. Then, after Ken Livingstone was elected London’s first Mayor in 2000, he made Goode Head of Environment for the Greater London Authority and the Strategy became part of the official London Plan. Second, the Strategy is as much a social as an environmental document. As Goode states, “New approaches with a strong social dimension, that may at first have seemed a radical departure from traditional nature conservation, have now been adopted as an integral part of city management.” For example, access to nature for people living in disadvantaged or heavily built-up parts of London is often given priority even where sites are of relatively low ecological quality. Other goals are ensuring that more people know the location of their local green space and can get there easily, and helping people understand and enjoy contact with nature.     

Mark Lellouch portrays Paris-Nature, a series of municipal initiatives that aim to make Parisians at large, and primary schoolchildren in particular, better aware of their natural urban environment. By showing how the different elements (air, water, soil, fauna, and flora) come together to form an integrated whole, Paris hopes to motivate its citizens to live in greater harmony with and preserve their natural surroundings.

Cape Town has long been a hotbed of innovation in nature conservation, and in recent years it has also become a laboratory for relating social to environmental issues in an urban context. Tania Katzschner and several of her colleagues in the city government describe Cape Town’s Biodiversity Strategy and challenges in implementing it. George Davis of the South African National Biodiversity Institute illustrates how biodiversity conservation can be a “social bridge,” even in places like the Cape Flats where many people live well below South Africa’s poverty line of U.S.$45 per month and lack proper supply of water, electricity, or sanitation.

Jessica Memon relates how a project called Mosaic has succeeded in building links between ethnic communities and national parks in the United Kingdom. Mosaic is a partnership between two NGOs: the Council for National Parks and the Black Environment Network. The project originated at a conference held to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Britain’s national parks law. At that event, Judy Ling Wong, BEN’s UK Director (see her “Reflections” on page 7) stated, “People cannot care about what they have not experienced. Neither will they have much interest in paying the taxes or providing the political support which is necessary to maintain viable national parks for the next 50 years.” Her listeners went away asking themselves, “Why are we not engaging ethnic communities already?”

I give a brief account of how an unusual protected area agency, California’s Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, is creating “natural parks” in poor inner-city neighborhoods of Los Angeles well outside its traditional zone of activity.

John Senior and Mardie Townsend describe “Healthy Parks, Healthy People,” an initiative of the park agency of the Australian state of Victoria. The idea that protected areas provide substantial health and other social benefits to urban people is not a new one. However, only recently have these benefits started to be examined critically and systematically. Victoria compiled strong scientific evidence showing that access to nature in urban settings can reduce crime, foster psychological well-being, reduce stress, boost immunity, enhance productivity, and aid community cohesion and identity.       

Bittu Sahgal chronicles Kids for Tigers, a program he founded as publisher of India’s leading wildlife magazines, with support from a major business corporation and the involvement of the Government of India ministry responsible for protected areas. In India, the tiger is a symbol for all of nature. Kids for Tigers aims at turning large numbers of urban children, and through them their parents, into “proactive defenders of protected areas.” As Sahgal puts it, “Our story was simple and direct and children understood it easily: ‘We cannot save the tiger unless we save its forests. If we save its forests we wind up saving the subcontinent’s most precious water sources. And if we save our water sources, we save ourselves.’”      

Todd Miller describes the urban farmland protection program in Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA. Often overlooked as conservation opportunities, farms within city boundaries sustain the incomes of local farmers and their workers, conserve wildlife habitat and scenic landscapes, and provide opportunities for urban dwellers to connect with their agricultural heritage. Not incidentally, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, 200 million urban farmers grow food for 700 million people worldwide. 

Models of partnerships

Part 4, Making Partnerships Work, focuses on five models of partnerships that connect protected area agencies with urban institutions and people.

Although all the programs described in Part 3 rely to some degree on such partnerships, these five models offer lessons particularly useful to protected area agencies in connecting with city people. Moving from general to specific, they are: comprehensive environmental partnerships, metropolitan umbrella organizations, urban cooperating associations, nongovernmental initiatives leading to governmental action, and corps of volunteers.

I report on a British environmental partnership organization called Groundwork that has been highly successful in bringing together the governmental, business, and voluntary sectors in clearly defined geographic areas to achieve social and economic benefits at the same time as achieving conservation benefits. Groundwork concentrates on the poorest areas of the UK, primarily in urban and urban-fringe settings.  

Lucy Hutcherson describes Chicago Wilderness, a metropolitan umbrella organization that promotes cooperation systematically in a broadly delineated urban region. Its over 170 members include local, state, and national agencies; zoos, museums, botanic gardens, and an aquarium; colleges and universities; and NGOs ranging from branches of major national associations to small neighborhood groups. Four teams carry out collaborative activities in science, land management, education and communication, and sustainability.

Brian O’Neill, General Superintendent of San Francisco’s Golden Gate National Parks, and Greg Moore, Executive Director of the parks’ cooperating association, the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, discuss how the nongovernmental conservancy “leverages” the role of its governmental partner by raising money, engaging volunteers, and raising public awareness. The conservancy’s goal is to “elevate parks to the same level of community importance as other civic assets: as basic as schools; as essential as libraries; as necessary as hospitals; as valuable as clean air and water; as culturally important as symphony halls, opera houses, and museums.”

Maria Virginia De Francesco relates how her NGO, the Argentine partner of BirdLife International, took the lead in assessing opportunities for government to do more with urban nature reserves in metropolitan Buenos Aires, especially by involving leaders from neighboring communities.

Shin Wang of National Taiwan University depicts the sophisticated and extensive volunteer program at Yangmingshan National Park outside Taipei. Volunteers go through a formal training and certification program and receive substantial material benefits. They include many highly educated retired professionals. 

At The Urban Imperative workshop, another interesting model came to our attention: the urban biosphere reserve. This concept is described in Note 1.

Evaluation    

Part 5, Evaluation, consists of a single paper on this important subject. In the course of organizing The Urban Imperative workshop, I talked with many people involved in linking cities and conservation. Without exception, they emphasized how difficult it is to make a case for funding their activities. The main reason they gave is that funders increasingly want formal evaluations based on measurable objectives. In the case of involving urban populations in protected areas, results are hard to measure because they take place over years, and urban people are often mobile and hard to follow over time; also, results have to do with changes in people’s values, which are not easy to calculate. In the case of acquiring land for natural parks in and near cities, usually a costly proposition, benefits occur over many decades, even centuries, and are not quantifiable in conventional terms.

Museums have pioneered in sophisticated evaluation of programs aimed at urban populations.  Martin Storksdieck, Senior Research Associate at the Institute for Learning Innovation, which specializes in promoting and evaluating “free-choice learning” – defined as “the type of learning guided by a person’s needs and interests” (ILI 2005) – kindly agreed to write about what the protected areas community might learn from museum evaluation. (My special thanks to Martin, who I met by happenstance on a museum visit with my grandson Tim.)

4.  THE WORKSHOP, ITS ORIGINS, AND ITS OUTCOMES

World Parks Congress workshop

A few years ago, several people long active in IUCN, the International Union for Conservation of Nature, started talking seriously about the almost total absence of the urban dimension on the global conservation agenda. We were inspired by IUCN Chief Scientist Jeff McNeely, who gave a paper on cities, nature, and protected areas at a symposium in Barcelona in 1995 and then proposed and edited a special number of IUCN’s Parks journal on “Cities and Parks” (McNeely 2001). We were also inspired by Adrian Phillips, who, as Chair of IUCN’s World Commission on Protected Areas, presented a paper titled “Nature in an Urban Light” at a conference in Rio de Janeiro in 2000 (Phillips 2000). We found others had been thinking along the same lines, notably groups from Cape Town and Rio that started exchanging visits on urban protected areas in 1999. 

Cities are on the agendas of national conservation organizations in some countries, and they are certainly given priority by many local conservation organizations, but we could not remember any major international conservation conference where urban issues had a prominent place on the program.

Our informal group took the opportunity of IUCN’s Vth World Parks Congress (IUCN 2003), held in Durban, South Africa, in September 2003, to organize a workshop on the subject. Our topic was especially appropriate for this Parks Congress, whose theme was “Benefits beyond Boundaries.”

Held over three days, The Urban Imperative workshop was one of the liveliest and best-attended workshops at the Congress. It became an opportunity to discuss plans and recruit members for a proposed IUCN task force. Our informal group also secured approval of a World Parks Congress Recommendation that IUCN take cities seriously (see the Appendix).

An IUCN task force

In February 2004, IUCN’s World Commission on Protected Areas established a Task Force on Cities and Protected Areas. The task force is concerned with the many links between human settlements and larger environments, focusing on the special role of protected areas.

The following month the task force held its first event, a four-day workshop in Malibu, California, to plan its overall program, as well as a theme on cities and conservation in the world’s five Mediterranean-type regions (these regions are extraordinarily rich in biodiversity and many parts of them are threatened by urbanization). This resulted in the Malibu Declaration (IUCN 2004a).

In November 2004, at the Third IUCN World Conservation Congress in Bangkok, Thailand, the task force organized three formal events in cooperation with the IUCN Commission on Ecosystem Management. These were on links between coastal cities and large ecosystems, cities and conservation in Mediterranean-type regions, and the importance of the urban connection for the conservation movement.

In addition, the Bangkok Congress passed two motions resulting from the task force’s work: Resolution 49 calls for reviewing the 2005-2008 IUCN Programme in terms of connections between cities and larger environments. Recommendation 22 calls for action to protect Mediterranean-type ecosystems in the face of rampant urbanization (IUCN 2004b).

The task force is drawing up a strategy that will likely include both IUCN activities and projects implemented by coalitions of IUCN members and other organizations. Its progress can be followed at www.InterEnvironment.org/pa.

5.  NEEDED POLICIES

At the World Parks Congress and in subsequent discussions, several needed policies and actions have become clear. 

First of all, two fundamental policy changes are needed to meet the needs of city dwellers and build stronger urban constituencies for nature conservation. These are: adopting an ecosystem approach to managing cities and their surroundings, and making a serious commitment to provide ways for urban people to gain access to nature. 

Adopting an ecosystem approach to managing cities and their surroundings

The disconnections between cities and protected area systems are part of a bigger problem.  What is needed first and foremost is an ecosystem approach to policy-making and policy implementation that recognizes the interdependence of cities and the larger environment. An ecosystem approach to natural resource management treats a region as a system of interrelated parts – environmental, social, economic – and embraces the major governmental and other interests affected. In some places, the larger environment is simply the local watershed. In other places, cities reach much farther afield. Los Angeles, for example, receives its water supply from protected areas many hundreds of kilometers away.

The barriers to ecosystem management are mainly political. Responsibility for environmental matters is fragmented among levels of government and single-purpose agencies. Each agency acts within its own framework of laws, purposes, constituencies, and organizational culture. Highly effective tools are now available to support integrated decision-making. These include sophisticated methods of collaborative problem-solving, as well as geographic information systems that show the interrelationships in a region as never before possible (CIPA 2001). None of these methods will work, however, without the political will to change, and this depends on an informed public.

Making a serious commitment to provide urban dwellers with access to nature

All levels of government need to make a serious commitment to providing urban dwellers with access to nature, with particular attention to serving the needs of disadvantaged people. This commitment should be formalized in legislation and plans. An excellent example is the London Mayor’s Biodiversity Strategy.

Many kinds of public agencies can contribute to this goal, ranging from traditional protected area and wildlife agencies to municipal park departments and schools. Much of this work can be done most effectively in partnership with NGOs. In addition, many activities can be carried out by NGOs on their own initiative. The private sector can also contribute, for example, in the way businesses landscape and provide access to their lands.

Many examples of ways of providing access to nature are given in this volume.            

6.  ACTIONS REQUIRED

Several kinds of actions are required to put these policies into place and implement them:

Educating the conservation community

Interest in cities is not widespread in the conservation community. One reason for this is that many people are attracted to conservation careers because they want to spend their lives in the countryside. Another reason is a feeling that involvement in cities detracts from what is perceived as the main task of conservation, protecting biodiversity, even though research in many parts of the world shows that urban and periurban areas are exceptionally rich in indigenous species, and that threats to such species are usually higher in these places. Another important barrier to getting conservationists more interested in cities may be resistance to becoming involved with urban social issues for which they are unprepared.

The conservation community needs to be educated about the “why” and “how” of links with urban institutions and city dwellers. This can be done most effectively by those who are succeeding in making those links. Some prominent examples are described in this book.   

Bringing urban and conservation actors together

With few exceptions, separate sets of people and institutions work on urban issues and on conservation. At local, national, and international levels each side would benefit from better understanding the concerns of the other. Both would benefit from identifying common goals and working toward them together. 

A good place to start is dialogue at international and local levels between conservationists on one hand and urban officials, managers, and planners on the other. At the global level, international conservation organizations such as IUCN could invite prominent mayors and leaders of the major associations of local authorities, city planners, and related professions to major events such the quadrennial World Conservation Congress. Conservation organizations could arrange for speakers and panels at conferences of city-oriented associations. These international activities should be complemented by meetings of local leaders from both sides of the conservation-urban equation, beginning with experiments in a few carefully chosen cities. All these discussions should be aimed at setting up and reinforcing partnerships. 

In addition, IUCN, whose membership is dominated by traditional conservation organizations, should follow a recommendation of the World Parks Congress that it “recruit as members organizations engaged in urban environmental issues, and invite prominent leaders and experts in urban management to participate in the work of IUCN (IUCN 2004b).” 

Training leaders

Leadership development is critical. This should include an international short course for leaders with high potential, as well as leadership forums in selected cities. In both cases, participants should come from urban institutions as well as conservation organizations. Participants would learn from local and international speakers, share experiences, and build networks of individuals and institutions. 

Assembling a toolkit

A toolkit is needed for practitioners responsible for linking conservation and urban issues, and for instructors training those who want to engage in such activities. Toolkits typically include case studies and guidelines drawn from them, along with other material about specific methods. 

Case studies and guidelines are widely accepted models for international sharing of experience among conservationists. They are usually very helpful to practitioners and educators. However, case studies are best written by people who have not participated in the cases being described, which is rarely so. And, as Martin Storksdieck points out in his paper on evaluation, it is from failures that we learn the most. 

A toolkit for linking urban dwellers to protected areas, and promoting the larger concept of managing cities as parts of larger ecosystems, should also include advice on such methods as collaborative decision-making and use of such technical resources as satellite imagery and geographic information systems. 

Conducting exchanges, study tours, and technical assistance

Although toolkits are useful, they are not a substitute for direct sharing of experience through exchanges, study tours, workshops, and technical assistance. Such sharing can be among cities within a country or world region, or by theme or language. An initiative on cities and conservation in the world’s five Mediterranean-type ecosystems is already underway (IUCN 2005).             

Cities are particularly suited to international cooperation because they often have more in common with each other than with their hinterlands. Cities in industrialized countries have much to learn from those in developing countries, as well as vice versa. Examples of this are India’s Kids for Tigers and South Africa’s Cape Flats Nature project.

Reaching political leaders

More needs to be done to reach elected and senior appointed government officials. First of all, a better case must be made for connecting urban dwellers with nature. A substantial body of scientific evidence supports the value of nature programs in cities, but it is compartmented in different disciplines. This research should be synthesized and translated into points easily understood by busy decision-makers.

Second, it is important for conservationists to talk face-to-face with senior officials and show them how things work on the ground. Visiting places like the nature reserves on the Cape Flats in South Africa, or the Hawkins Natural Park in inner-city Los Angeles can be mind-changing experiences. For particularly important political figures, study tours in which they meet with counterparts in other countries and see what is being accomplished on the ground can be especially valuable.  

7.   CROSS-CUTTING THEMES

Although the general policies and actions outlined above seem clear, much remains to be understood about what works in different circumstances and, indeed, about the whole range of relationships among cities as places, urban people, and hinterlands. More analysis and synthesis are needed. Meanwhile, several cross-cutting themes have come up repeatedly before, during, and after the Durban workshop and deserve mention here:

Conservationists must move from urban outreach to urban engagement. As a matter of fact, I now believe “urban outreach” was an unfortunate choice of words for the workshop’s subtitle. A key ingredient of success in almost every case described in this book has been maximizing citizen involvement. Pamela Parker and Michael Punturiero make this point forcefully in their paper, referring to Sherry Arnstein’s eight-rung Ladder of Citizen Participation. The Ladder starts at the bottom with manipulation, moves up through consultation and then partnership, and ends at the top with delegated power and eventually citizen control. There are many cases where lower levels of participation are appropriate, and certainly governmental agencies are often constrained in delegating authority. However, pushing toward higher levels of participation makes it much more likely that positive cultural change will occur. 

Ideas are important, too. Citizen involvement without ideas of what is possible, and concrete examples, can be counterproductive or at best a waste of time for all concerned. In their classic book on city planning, Communitas, Paul and Percival Goodman wrote about the downside of such citizen participation: If you ask people what kind of town they want to live in, “the answers reveal a banality of ideas that is hair-raising, with neither rational thought nor real sentiment, the conceptions of routine and inertia rather than local patriotism or personal desire, of prejudice and advertising rather than practical experience and dream” (1960, 13). One of the roles of international networks is to help put practitioners in touch with a wide range of such ideas and experience, and make sense of them. 

Conservationists can contribute to poverty reduction in cities as well as rural areas. As protected area agencies and their allies become more involved in cities, they soon realize that environmental, social, and economic issues are intertwined. One question they face is how far to go in meeting the needs of poor people in the neighborhoods where they work. In rural areas, especially in developing countries, conservationists routinely work to improve the circumstances of local people. This started mainly because it was understood that helping people would motivate them to cooperate in protecting wildlife and protected areas. Eventually, in many cases, it was done because it was the right thing to do. Now it is happening in urban settings like Cape Town, London, and Los Angeles. A separate series of workshops at the World Parks Congress examined opportunities and limitations for integrating protected areas and poverty reduction strategies, giving examples from rural settings (Scherl et al. 2004). These questions also need to be addressed in terms of protected areas in and near cities.

Local governments are important for conservation in urban settings. Rarely do national (or state or provincial) conservation agencies succeed in urban settings without working closely with local authorities. In addition, some local authorities have extensive natural park systems of their own. Unfortunately, local governments are rarely represented in international conservation forums.

Management of local protected areas is often not coordinated with national (or state or provincial) authorities. This is sometimes the case even when areas under different jurisdictions adjoin each other.   

Local protected areas in urban settings are underreported. Locally run areas are not always included in listings of protected areas. A case in point, actually the key one, is the official World Database on Protected Areas maintained by the United Nations Environmental Programme’s World Conservation Monitoring Centre (WCMC 2005).

     There are three problems, and I will give examples of each from California, which I know best. First, there are some local areas that clearly meet all criteria for the database but are not included in it. This is because WCMC depends on one central source of information for each country, and in large countries with federal systems, areas can be overlooked. Good examples are several sizeable natural parks in California’s East Bay Regional Park District, including the 3,700-hectare Ohlone Wilderness.

     Second, substantial areas with de jure but unconventional protection are omitted from this database. An example is the California state regulatory regime that protects San Francisco Bay and its shoreline, the largest estuary along the Pacific Coast of the Americas (Trzyna 2001).

     Finally, while many urban protected areas are too small to meet WCMC’s formal criteria – criteria quite understandable given the large number of sites involved – these areas can be critical from the standpoint of biodiversity, let alone social and political benefits. And taken together in cities like Los Angeles or London, they can amount to sizeable pieces of territory. Underreporting of local protected areas can result in their being less visible to policy-makers and donors.    

The term “protected areas” can give the wrong impression. For many urban residents, it implies these places are off-limits. “Conservation areas” might be a better choice of words.

City governments can be international conservation actors. The best example of this that has come to our attention is London, whose Biodiversity Strategy states: “The Mayor will promote London as a world centre for biodiversity conservation, working with London’s world-class organizations for greater influence globally and to learn from experience at home and abroad.” See Note 2 for details.

Smaller cities and towns can be very important for conservation. Although The Urban Imperative workshop focused almost exclusively on large cities, Australia’s Michael Punturiero argued that citizens in smaller settlements can have an important role in conservation. This is particularly so of small cities and towns adjacent to areas of high conservation value, especially seats of regional governments. I was reminded of this last year when asked to keynote the dedication of a new municipal nature park in La Paz, capital of the Mexican state of Baja California Sur. The long Baja California peninsula and the Sea of Cortés that divides it from the Mexican mainland are of great interest to Mexican and international conservation organizations. Although La Paz has well under a quarter-million people, it is a long way from the national capital, physically and psychologically, and important decisions are made there about the state’s future.    

The urban-rural distinction is becoming less meaningful. For centuries, city and country have been seen as opposites. Now, in much of the world, differences between urban and rural communities are becoming blurred as advanced technologies and the global economy penetrate areas formerly considered remote, and urban and rural areas become more linked and interdependent. Steve Bass, Chief Environment Adviser in the UK’s Department for International Development, calls for “Ditching the Dichotomy” in terms of development strategies (Bass 2004) and points out that it has become hard to even define the terms “urban” and “rural.” David Hales, former Director of the Global Environment Center in the U.S. Agency for International Development, noted at the World Parks Congress that “Once the wilderness surrounded us; now we surround the wilderness.”   

Chances are it’s not “already being done.” An all-too-typical response to hearing about an innovative program is “we’re already doing that,” or “it’s already being done.”

     Involving local citizens? “It’s already being done.” But a close look at the Parker-Punturiero (Australia) and De Francesco (Argentina) papers shows how thoughtful, sustained efforts are leading toward levels of citizen participation rarely found around protected areas.

     Reaching out to poor people? “It’s already being done.” But look at the unusual strategies described by Goode (UK) and Davis (South Africa).

     Nature experiences for children? “We’re already doing that.” But read the papers by Lellouch (France) and Sahgal (India) and learn how carefully designed and well-organized programs can reach hundreds of thousands of city kids each year.

     Getting groups to cooperate?  “No problem.” But read what Hutcherson (USA) says about a metropolitan umbrella organization that facilitates collaboration systematically.

     And note these examples are from six continents, from countries that cover most of the global economic spectrum.      

8.  CONCLUSIONS

An urbanizing world poses new challenges for protected areas, but also new opportunities. Broad support from urban dwellers may be the most important goal conservationists can adopt to preserve and expand protected areas everywhere. However, building such support means paying more attention to the needs of city people and the places where they live. 

For individual conservationists, this means changing long-established attitudes – without compromising core values – and acquiring new skills. For conservation organizations, it requires adopting an enlarged, but not radically different, perspective.

But change is imperative. As Groundwork cofounder John Davidson said at the World Conservation Congress, “This has to get into the bloodstream” of the international conservation movement; otherwise the movement “will struggle for relevance in the next decades. We are talking about the human race and its future on the planet.”     

Urban pioneers in the conservation movement have strived toward this goal for many years. A new generation of leaders can move us much closer. Those more seasoned in this exciting new arena must do all they can to help them do so.    

9.  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Although I took responsibility for putting together The Urban Imperative workshop, it was very much a collective effort. John Davidson, Jeff McNeely, and Adrian Phillips were involved from the earliest conceptual stages. The circle gradually widened.        

The California Institute of Public Affairs received financial support for the project from the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy; the Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority; the Chief Scientist's Office of IUCN, the International Union for Conservation of Nature; and GTZ – Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit GmbH. The Institute provided additional support from its own funds.

The authors of the papers in this volume and their employers made substantial in-kind contributions. Mark Lellouch ably served as the project’s principal consultant. John Waugh and Frederik Schutyser assisted with workshop logistics.

John Davidson, George Davis, and Pedro Menezes now serve with me on the steering group of the IUCN Task Force on Cities and Protected Areas and it seems we are in touch almost daily. Along the way, many others have been involved. My great thanks to them all.

10.  NOTES

Note 1: Urban biosphere reserves

In December 2003, several people who were at The Urban Imperative workshop participated in a small invitational conference in New York organized to discuss the concept of urban biosphere reserves.  

Biosphere reserves are areas that are interna- tionally recognized within the framework of UNESCO’s Man and the Biosphere Programme. They consist of a core protected area, or cluster of such areas, a buffer zone, and an outer transition area. Groups in several countries are taking the biosphere reserve concept, typically used in rural areas, and applying it to urban settings. 

Under UNESCO guidelines, each biosphere reserve is intended to fulfill three complementary functions: (1) conservation of landscapes, ecosystems, species, and genetic variation; (2) local economic development that is culturally, socially, and ecologically sustainable; and (3) research, monitoring, education, and information exchange related to local, national, and global issues of conservation and development.

Biosphere reserves bring together stakeholders ranging from conservation agencies and scientists to economic interests and local authorities. In addition, one of their main purposes is to foster international exchange of information and experience. UNESCO has set up a network of committees for this purpose (UNESCO 2004).

Although several biosphere reserves exist in urban areas, their role has generally been limited to coordinating conservation activities. The idea of a distinct category of urban biosphere reserve is being considered in several countries. In October 2003, an international conference was held by Columbia University and UNESCO in New York to discuss the concept (CUBES 2004). Proposals for urban biosphere reserves are most advanced in Cape Town, New York, and Seoul. 

The Cape Town Urban Biosphere Group has suggested that guidelines for such areas provide for cultural, as well as natural, cores; include protection of human and cultural, as well as natural, diversity; and allow for applying the zoning system (core, buffer, transition) “in a functional way, and not necessarily spatially specific as with traditional rural biosphere reserves” (CUBES CT 2003; Stanvliet et al. 2004). 

The proponents of the new category of urban biosphere reserve are a lively and creative group.  They offer a different perspective on the people-city-nature triad. Their ideas and energy could also help to invigorate the biosphere reserve concept, a good idea that has yet to reach its potential.

Note 2: Local governments as international conservation actors: The case of London

Although most organizations active in international conservation are based in large cities, few of them make connections between their international work and urban conservation in their own cities. And it is rare for local governments to become involved in international environmental matters, except in cases where transboundary issues affect them directly.   

London is an unusual exception. One of the fourteen policies in its Biodiversity Strategy states that “The Mayor will promote London as a world centre for biodiversity conservation, working with London’s world-class organizations for greater influence globally and to learn from experience at home and abroad.” 

This is elaborated as follows: “The Mayor will foster working links and exchanges with international bodies and organizations in other major cities, to give a lead in urban greening and biodiversity conservation. The Mayor will support enterprising new flagship projects for urban nature conservation and people’s enjoyment of the natural world, which may further London’s reputation as a World City. The Mayor will encourage the formation of a partnership for excellence in global biodiversity conservation, harnessing the skills and expertise of London’s centres of excellence.”

This partnership includes the Greater London Authority, the London Zoo, the Natural History Museum, the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust, and the UK Environment Agency (London, 2002).

Other major cities might well follow London’s example.

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