Natural Cities

According to the United Nations, by the end of 2008 half of the world's population will live in urban areas and by 2050 about 70 percent will be city dwellers. The latest U.N. estimate stated that the world's population is expected to rise from 6.7 billion in 2007 to 9.2 billion in 2050. Over the same span the total population of urban areas is projected to rise from 3.3 billion to 6.4 billion. These statistics illustrate the need, as the Charter of Calcutta urges, to "cease seeing the City as a problem. We must see the City as the solution."

With the growing public awareness of the importance of sustainable urban systems, including economic development, social advancement and greenspace, the time is ripe to extend natural resource protection and restoration from areas separated from humans to areas within human concentrations.

The Natural Cities Project provided UEI with a comprehensive toolset for targeting urban environmental improvements via a community-developed Action Plan supported by natural, social and legal data. The Natural Cities process builds off the lessons learned from a collaboration of nonprofit organizations, scientists, community organizers, and policy makers who piloted the first Natural Cities project in the Mystic River Watershed in the Greater Boston area.

The process proceeds through three phases that move from a holistic characterization of a study area to concise Action Plans for a small number of prioritized sites. Each phase includes several tools that address different social, ecological, and legal questions specific to the scale of study. Tools in Phase 1: Regional Analyses, are appropriate to a shallow survey of an entire study region while the more resource intensive tools of Phase 2: Rapid Assessments focus on a subset of sites selected from Phase 1. The final stage, Phase 3: Action Plans, provides tools for the most in-depth, site-specific analysis on the final, small number of most critical sites leading to the creation of protection and restoration plans.

This winnowing process enables groups with limited resources to gain a lot of information by allocating their resources wisely and gathering information in the most efficient way: small amounts of information on a large number of sites and in depth studies on a small number of sites. Strategic planning can occur on the most heavily studied sites but in addition, leads can be followed up on any site when the need arises, such as a new development proposal or residents’ concern about a recent oil leak.