Nature for Resilience? The Politics of Governing Urban Nature

Abstract

Transcending initial efforts to make cities “climate smart” by focusing on the potential of new technologies and infrastructural interventions, various actors are increasingly interested in deploying nature to help achieve urban resilience. In this context, rather than taking resilience as a given property of particular systems or entities, it is important to examine why, how, with what implications, and for whom resilience is being enacted. We examine how and why nature-based solutions are being mobilized as a means for governing the resilience of cities and what this means for the ways in which urban resilience is imagined and enacted by different actors. Recognizing that behind different approaches to resilience are diverse ways of valuing nature, we identify four value positions through which nature comes to be understood, given meaning, form, and purpose. Drawing on systematic document analysis and sixty-six interviews from Cape Town, Mexico City, and Melbourne, we discuss how these four value positions of nature are manifested in nature-based interventions for resilience, as well as the implications both for the politics of resilience interventions and the opportunities for enabling social benefit through nature-based solutions. We find that the integration of intrinsic values for nature opens opportunities for nature-based solutions to enable social benefits through an increased focus on the means through which they are implemented. We conclude that urban-nature-as-resilience interventions serve to embed values and the socionatures they produce within the city, creating fundamentally different consequences for the forms and politics of nature-based interventions designed to realize urban resilience.

Key Words:

• climate change
• nature
• resilience
• urban
• values

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Janice Astbury for her research on the Mexico City case. We would also like to thank the research participants who generously shared their time and insights.

Notes

1 Melbourne (twenty-three), Cape Town (twenty-one), and Mexico City (twenty-two).

Additional information

Funding

Research was funded by the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme of the European Union under Grant Agreement Number 730243.

Notes on contributors

Laura Tozer

LAURA TOZER is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies in the Department of Physical and Environmental Sciences, University of Toronto Scarborough, Toronto, ON M1C 1A4, Canada. E-mail: [email protected]. Her research focuses on climate change and urban sustainability governance and politics.

Harriet Bulkeley

HARRIET BULKELEY holds joint appointments as a Professor in the Department of Geography, Durham University, Durham, DH13lE UK, and at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development, Utrecht University, The Netherlands. E-mail: [email protected]. Her research focuses on environmental governance and the politics of climate change, energy, nature, and sustainable cities.

Bernadett Kiss

BERNADETT KISS is a Lecturer and Researcher at the International Institute for Industrial Environmental Economics, Lund University, Lund, SE 22100, Sweden. E-mail: [email protected]. Her research interest lies in sustainable urban transformation, through environmental governance and innovation in energy efficiency and nature-based solutions.

Andrés Luque-Ayala

ANDRÉS LUQUE-AYALA is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography, Durham University, Durham DH13lE, UK. E-mail: [email protected]. His research interests include digital and computational cities, the politics of urban sustainability, and the crossovers between infrastructures and the urban Anthropocene.

Yuliya Voytenko Palgan

YULIYA VOYTENKO PALGAN is an Associate Professor at the International Institute for Industrial Environmental Economics, Lund University, Lund, SE 22100, Sweden. E-mail: [email protected]. Her research interests include sustainable urban transformation and sustainable consumption with empirical focus on sharing cities, nature-based solutions, and urban living labs.

Kes McCormick

KES McCORMICK is an Associate Professor at the International Institute for Industrial Environmental Economics, Lund University, Lund, SE 22100, Sweden. E-mail: [email protected]. His research interests include nature-based solutions in cities and the role of governance in shaping and driving sustainable transformations.

Christine Wamsler

CHRISTINE WAMSLER is a Professor at Lund University Center for Sustainability Studies and Director of the Contemplative Sustainable Futures Program, Lund University, Lund, SE 22100, Sweden. E-mail: [email protected]. Her research interests include sustainable cities, disaster risk reduction, climate change, resilience, and associated individual, cultural, and policy transformation processes.