Green Urban Scenarios: Co-Constructing Eco-Urban Futures
Part.1
This is the second of a series of posts on a framework we built within the TreesAI project.
In the first series, we highlighted our underlying thinking. First, we explained how urban forests are a critical part of urban infrastructure, presenting our change model in complex systems that combine policy intervention, planning, impact forecasting, and monitoring. Then, we looked into creating a digital twin of urban forests to estimate systemic benefits to a city. Since models are abstractions of reality, we responded to critical questions such as: how granular can our model be? And how does it aim to capture complexity? In the last post, we discussed the inherent problems of such models and how we address them.
In this second series, Seowoo Nam discusses how the Green Unified Scenarios (GUS) can take more-than-human perspectives.
Bulent Ozel, PhD
Digital technologies shape what a forest is and what it can be.
Cities worldwide are increasingly digitalizing transport, buildings, energy, and communications, and urban nature is no exception. Smart forests are now featured as technologies to manage and mitigate environmental change. By and through processes of digitalizing forests, urban forests are viewed and constructed as green infrastructures that provide diverse ecosystem services to both people and the planet. Smart cities program green as well as gray infrastructure (Gabrys, 2022).
Smart forests refer to the numerous digital technologies and infrastructures that are now monitoring, networking, managing, and remaking forests as they attempt to observe environmental change, optimize forests for resource management, and intervene in sites of forest loss (Gabrys et al., 2022). With diverse sensing, data analytics, and automation technologies, forests are now represented through a set of data. Such data not only changes our understanding of what a forest is but also the way forests are managed, and thereby shapes what a forest could be.
In many smart cities, data is used as key indicators and justifications for strategies and actions to manage urban forests. For example, canopy data is often a key indicator for monitoring forest growth. Coupled with general tree information such as tree species and locations, canopy data is utilised to set targets, plan required actions, and assess outcomes. Often, the goals are set to maintain or increase overall canopy cover. In such a way, digital technologies inform decisions to plant which tree and where. Under the management logic of smart infrastructures, urban forest vegetation and its ecologies are programmed and transformed into uniquely efficient and responsive urban organisms (Gabrys, 2022).
Smart forest do not always ensure equitable, sustainable, and inclusive urban forest governance.
Too often, these decisions are seen to be “less vulnerable to politicization” (Joppa, 2017). Yet as extensive research in digital social research and science and technology studies demonstrates, the use of digital technologies does not elide politics but rather informs and extends politics into new engagements (Gabrys, 2020). Smart forest approaches are largely utilized in urban forest policies to justify, enhance, and influence goals and actions and in some projects to facilitate stakeholder engagement towards collaborative goals (Prebble et al., 2021). It should be heeded that digital technologies and data practices that they operate mobilise certain political agendas, often by experts or elites, through processes of control, transaction, appropriation, and territorialisation. In particular, anthropocentric programs of efficiency have the potential to exacerbate extractive economies and social/multispecies inequalities that amplify and materialize through the “Internet of nature” (Gabrys, 2022).
Forests have long been construed and constituted as carbon stores for offsetting, biodiversity reserves for staving off extinction, and commodity chains for making forests productive (Gabrys et al., 2022). Nonetheless, diverse types of “forests” can emerge through digital technologies, which differently sense, value, and assess forest processes and relations (Gabrys, 2012). It is now time to question what other “forests” we can imagine by and through digital technologies.
How to make a forest for cyclists, trees, glowworms, and future residents?
Urban forests are complex systems where diverse human and non-human actors are intricately connected. However, urban politics and planning have yet to embrace the urban as a multispecies, multi-thing reality in which non-humans are active participants alongside in shaping cities and places (Quinn, 2020). In the process of creating and designing smart urban forests, there exists a general lack of consideration for non-human entities beyond the focus on trees (Prebble et al., 2021). Under such exclusion, the diverse needs of the non-humans in urban forests are vented out silently, building up tensions with other actors.
The case of Vliegenbos, in Amsterdam, well illustrates how the interests of cyclists, trees, glowworms, the tennis club, the chemical factory, and future residents collide. Located in Amsterdam North, Vliegenbos is the oldest urban forest in Amsterdam and the largest elm-rich deciduous forest in Western Europe. While the Vliegenbos Foundation launched its ‘vision 3.0’ that the forest must become greener and darker (Klinkenberg, 2022) for non-human species living in the forest (e.g. glowworms, foxes, hedgehogs, martens, hawks, and kingfishers), the tension has arisen with other actors (e.g. tennis club, chemical factory Albemarle, increasing future population in Amsterdam North, and cyclists). The forest foundation wants to get rid of the park-like parts of the forest, whereas residents and cyclists want to build a new cycling route that passes through the North and South part of the forest (Loke, n.d.). Moreover, the nearby chemical factory Albemarle and the tennis club do not want to leave despite their impact on urban wildlife (Van Zoelen, 2022).
While everyone has their own notion of what the forest is and should be, how can we make a smart forest for everyone? In the next post, we will introduce our idea of using multiagent-based simulations to explore, experiment, and enable plural futures.
Seowoo Nam
Reference
Yarra City Council (2017). Urban forest strategy. https://www.yarracity.vic.gov.au/-/media/files/ycc/services/cleaning-and-maintenance/urban-forest-strategy.pdf (Accessed 7/2/2023).
Gabrys, J. (2012). Sensing an experimental forest: Processing environments and distributing relations. Computational Culture, 2.
Gabrys, J. (2020). Smart forests and data practices: From the Internet of Trees to planetary governance. Big data & society, 7(1), 2053951720904871.
Gabrys, J. (2022). Programming nature as infrastructure in the smart forest city. Journal of Urban Technology, 29(1), 13–19.
Gabrys, J., Westerlaken, M., Urzedo, D., Ritts, M., & Simlai, T. (2022). Reworking the political in digital forests: The cosmopolitics of socio-technical worlds. Progress in Environmental Geography, 1(1–4), 58–83.
Joppa, L. N. (2017). The case for technology investments in the environment. Nature, 552(7685), 325–328.
Klinkenberg, K. (2022, December 1). De toekomst van het Vliegenbos: “Meer groen, meer duister.” Al Het Nieuws Uit Amsterdam-Noord. Retrieved February 9, 2023, from https://www.rodi.nl/amsterdam-noord/320630/de-toekomst-van-het-vliegenbos-meer-groen-meer-duister-
Loke, E. (n.d.). Samen door het Vliegenbos. Petities.nl. Retrieved February 9, 2023, from https://samendoorhetvliegenbos.petities.nl/
Prebble, S., McLean, J., & Houston, D. (2021). Smart urban forests: An overview of more-than-human and more-than-real urban forest management in Australian cities. Digital Geography and Society, 2, 100013.
Van Zoelen, B. (2022, November 21). Tennisclub verbaasd over plannen vliegenbos in noord: ‘We zijn niet van plan hier weg te gaan.’ Het Parool. Retrieved February 9, 2023, from https://www.parool.nl/amsterdam/tennisclub-verbaasd-over-plannen-vliegenbos-in-noord-we-zijn-niet-van-plan-hier-weg-te-gaan~bb87255d/
Quinn, R. (2020). Contracts, Seagrass, and Discourses: nonhuman mediators in the planning of the Mangles Bay Marina. Australian Geographer, 51(1), 1–18.
