Urban Greening - Opinion
Here at WildEast we believe passionately that, in order to increase levels of natural abundance, we must green every part of society, including ourselves.
With increasing numbers of people becoming urbanised, it is imperative that we act now to create greener cities that can keep temperatures down, floodwaters at bay, and provide us with food grown on our doorstep.
WildEast Founder Argus Gathorne-Hardy - an architect by trade - shares his thoughts on how we can do it.
The main driving force behind WildEast is to put nature recovery within East Anglia on the Map. Both literally on our evolving Map of Dreams but also metaphorically, shining a light on the great and small projects that are creating the change we need at every scale to reverse the loss in abundance we have seen over the last 50 years.
The iconic habitat creation and landscape scale projects are the ones that have the most immediate impact and gain the most headlines- wetland creation, heathland restoration, rewilding -but what will bring about a seismic change is encouraging natural regeneration at every scale and across every landuse rural and urban.
Key to this is connectivity and a mosaic of habitats but also a change in mind set. We are all increasingly aware of our carbon footprint, the impact of the extra car journey, airmiles on our food, the small bell that rings in your head on an over packaged exotic fruit in plastic wrapping.
WildEast is about us all becoming aware of our natural footprint, and specifically the regional impact of our choices -from an urban point of view this is often seen as a consumer choice -buy local, ask questions, choose products with the simplest stories. This month’s newsletter focuses on urban greening -how scale and impact can also be achieved within an urban context.
Nature is mobile and in flux, species migrate whether on a micro scale -invertebrates and amphibians from damp woody corners to forage and hibernate to marsh and open water to breed, to birds with their great migratory routes, as over wintering birds or summer visitors to our coast, rivers and gardens. A mosaic of habitats allows these migrations.
This can be on the landscape scale habitats of our great estuaries and wetlands, alive with waders and over-winterers this time of year or more prosaic field corners, ponds, scrubby roadsides and urban parks and gardens. Buglife’s B-lines, another beautiful mapping solution to the problem of biodiversity loss, has seen the creation of a series of imaginary pollinator highways across the country.
In East Anglia these follow river valleys and looser boundaries across existing biodiversity hotspots over coast, heathlands, breck and broad. Drawn as corridors the lines make no distinction for landuse, rural or urban, following the course of rivers through village, town and city and the wider landscape.
Where possible the intention is to provide connectivity but the reality relies on encouraging an expanding a mosaic of habitats allowing species to leapfrog across the region.
The importance of this leapfrog mosaic is as important in urban centres as the wider rural countryside with gardens, allotments, urban parks and the very unsung but equally exciting urban wasteland providing important habitat not just for bug life but all species.
This months sees a series of Nature Recovery projects that are applying the same approach to natural regeneration and community action through urban greening. East Anglia is not a densely populated region but all our urban centres are rapidly growing and the case studies show that urban greening can not only change the look of our towns and cities but create important micro habitats within them.
The Felixstowe Community Nature Reserve, with nearly 2,000 members, has created a network of dispersed micro habitats the size of a football pitch within the town. Sue Nally’s notes of a lazy gardener (clearly an unfair description from the amazing pictures of her garden) shows the pleasures of letting an area of your garden grow wild and the species that turn up from subtly adjusting your planted areas.
The Colchester Woodland and Biodiversity Project shows other upsides on another urban greening project involving multiple community groups. The project has seen the town transformed through an amazing diversity of projects from Treescape, a multi-Council project, No-Mow engagement, Tree Guardian Groups and many others, all adding to the habitats across the city.
The project has also seen different groups brought together and offered important well-being benefits for those who often have limited access to green spaces. Rebecca Ward believes that the impact of projects such as this are multi-faceted, not just bringing communities together, storing carbon but also importantly mitigating some of the local impacts of Climate Change.
“As our climate changes, we may be increasingly exposed to more extreme weather events such as heatwaves and droughts, but also severe storms and floods. By increasing the amount of urban planting and making nature part of the city environment, the worst impacts of the weather can be counteracted.”
Norwich Farmshare has taken Urban Greening to another level, showing that growing food and providing greening and habitat creation within an urban setting is not just for those lucky enough to have a garden or an allotment. The group are proving that large-scale food production can happen within the busiest of settings. Not only this but they are setting a template for regenerative food production that should be the envy and template of any East Anglian farmer -their guiding values have been to produce healthy food without synthetic chemicals, short supply chains and very strong links between the growers, the land, the people who would be eating the food and the wider community. As the project has grown it has expanded beyond into volunteer’s gardens -increasing not only the output but also the mosaic of habitat the patchwork of vegetable plots and small rotations produce again all in an urban centre.
Beth Nichols highlights the importance of groups such as this: “In a world of increasing urbanisation in both the developing and developed worlds, producing food in and around cities has the potential to improve both nutritional and health outcomes, alleviate poverty and simultaneously provide habitat for wildlife and create sustainable cities.”
This is the core of the WildEast message -whatever the scale, whatever the landuse, what ever the location, rural or urban- any action towards a wetter, woodier or wilder east all adds to the mosaic. The case studies also show that within a wilder east, nature recovery is, as ever, happening in the most unexpected places!
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