This feature is adapted from Nature and Cities: The Ecological Imperative in Urban Design and Planning, edited by Frederick R. Steiner, George F. Thompson, and Armando Carbonell (Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, November 2016).

During the past 400 years, the land known as the United States of America has been transformed by massive public and private works projects and technological innovations intended to facilitate commerce, improve public health, and foster economic development. While these projects generated tremendous wealth for the nation, the gains were often to the detriment of the environment. The global realities of climate change—in combination with growing urbanization and associated poverty—have raised awareness of the ecological impact of such infrastructure. Americans are now at a unique moment in history when politics, economics, ecology, and culture (design) can all be part of a new movement. We need a WPA 2.0.

The WPA is the Works Progress Administration (1935–1943)—the largest and most ambitious program of U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal during the Great Depression. Much of the present-day infrastructure in the United States was built by either the WPA or the similarly named PWA (Public Works Administration). Almost every city, town, and community in America benefited from a new WPA- or PWA-built airport, bridge, dam, park, road, school, or other public building.¹

Let me now reflect, albeit briefly, on the history of public works projects in the United States to discern where the world’s richest nation is, today, in terms of its urban infrastructure. This will allow a glimpse into how landscape architects, architects, and planners are addressing the needs and opportunities that face not only American cities, but communities and cities throughout the world as they confront the pressing realities of global climate change.

Canals and Harbors

Early settlement in the United States showed patterns of towns and cities directly related to water resources. Navigable waterways, safe harbors, and access to fresh water for fire prevention, sanitation, power production, farming, and drinking were central to the development of major commercial centers. Construction of the Erie Canal (1817–1825), for example, made New York the financial capital of the world during the nineteenth century by opening up critical supply lines for timber, furs, minerals, and agricultural products that helped the North win the American Civil War (1861–1865). Since then, we have seen the gradual decoupling of urban transportation systems from the physical environment in the United States.

The Grid

Looking back to nineteenth-century America, ideals of Manifest Destiny and the agrarian myth fueled a need to organize and cultivate the nation’s western frontiers. The Land Ordinance Act of 1785 was a resolution written by Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), then a delegate from Virginia, to create a federal system for the survey and sale of federally owned land west of the Appalachian Mountains, intended to fund the federal government at a time when the government could not raise fiscal resources through taxation.² It was then that an uncoupling of environmental and development systems started to take place on a large scale: The public land survey system parceled land into gridded territories, townships, and sections without regard to the geomorphology or carrying capacity of the property. Territories (24 x 24 miles; 38.624 x 38.624 kilometers), townships (6 x 6 miles; 9.656 x 9.656 kilometers), and sections (1 x 1 mile; 1.609 x 1.069 kilometers) were numbered and organized boustrophedonically, an alternating pattern from the top right to the bottom left quadrant of a square, similar to the path a farmer might follow when plowing a field.³

Agriculture, Railroads, and the Grid

When Horace Greeley (1811–1872), the famous editor of The New York Herald Tribune, purportedly declared in an editorial (13 July, 1865), “Go West, young man, go West and grow up with the country,” he rallied the nation.⁴ Greeley was responding, in part, to the Homestead Act of 1862, which enabled veterans, freed slaves, and even women to file a claim to a half-section of land (640 acres; 260 hectares) if they agreed to live on it and improve it for five years, further promoting agrarian values that were part of an American nationalism, which developed during a time of rapid industrialization. Manifest Destiny and agrarian culture, as characterized decades earlier by de Crèvecoeur (1735–1813) in numerous books, mythologized farming, espousing rural life as the foundation of character.⁵ However, the gridding of America and subsequent development of national rail lines—enabled by government grants of more than 300 million acres (121,405,693 hectares) to rail companies—were not reliant on natural systems for their development; instead, both worked in opposition to the waterways and topography they encountered, some of them extreme.

Supremacy over the landscape had its limits. While rail lines could be drawn to previously inaccessible corners of the country, facilitating commerce, they required long, gradual grade change and abundant clean water to function, limiting universal access. Farms and towns located themselves on and near new rail lines, but land in more arid climates west of the 100th meridian did not have the carrying capacity characteristic of Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia.⁶ Parcels of half-sections needed to be combined and annexed to enable productive use for timber or cattle grazing, uses that have their own heavy impacts on indigenous landscapes. The scale of operations moved toward a more standardized practice, away from the ideals of the rural farm. Western settlers and transcendentalists alike thought nothing of the consequences of introducing nonnative plant communities to the detriment of the indigenous environment.

A hallmark of the Industrial Revolution in the United States was the first transcontinental linking of rail lines—the Union and Central Pacific Railroads at Promontory Summit in Utah Territory near present-day Brigham City—on 10 May, 1869. Infrastructure tied to natural systems for the first two and a half centuries of the nation’s development could now follow a much more flexible path. By 1910, there was a network of more than 250,000 miles (402,336 kilometers) of rail covering the United States. Coeval with this infrastructural growth, the nation’s waterways transitioned from being critical economic lifelines to convenient disposal sites. As Carolyn Merchant has observed, “In the United States, industrial chemicals and wastes, including sulfuric acid, soda ash, muriatic acid, limes, dyes, wood pulp, and animal byproducts from industrial mills contaminated waters in the Northeast.”⁷ Ongoing pollution of rivers, canals, and ports still leaves neighboring communities managing the consequences of years of environmental abuses, despite the benefits of the 1972 Clean Water Act.

As natural systems became less important for access, they remained critical for raw materials. The relationship between water rights and rail lines, for instance, was critical not only because clean water was necessary to power steam engines, but also because the relationship between agriculture and rail transport systems opened up new areas of the country for the development and trade of commodities such as corn and wheat, legacy crops to this day.

Combined Sewers

When English plumber Thomas Crapper (1836–1910) popularized the use of the flush toilet during the 1860s, he surely had no idea of the potential future impact upon municipal watermanagement systems. His work triggered a cascade of events leading to the degradation of global waterways 150 years later. Rapid urbanization in the United States during the nineteenth century created the need for collective management of sanitary waste. In search of innovation, the United States looked to Europe, where a new form of infrastructure—the combined sewer—was developed to manage increased sanitary waste coming from more flush toilets. Combined sewer overflows (CSOs) release a witch’s brew of surface-water runoff and sanitary sewage into neighboring waterways when there is too much effluent for treatment plants to manage. Today, New York City, like 772 U.S. cities, has a combined sewer system where—in even a light rain—sanitary and storm wastes combine, releasing excrement, prophylactics, oil, pesticides, and heavy metals into New York’s harbor and rivers.

Around the world the combined sewers that unite sewage and stormwater in a common pipe—once a transformative infrastructure solution—have reached their limit. Growing urban populations and increased impermeable surfaces perpetually overload the sewage-treatment systems in cities globally. With sewage ever more frequently overflowing into waterways and a rise in sea level further compromising the outfall systems, policy makers and even private funders need to empower designers to rethink the design and management of urban stormwater and sanitary water systems. More severe and frequent storms resulting from global climate change will increasingly affect the hardened, postindustrial waterfront. Innovative urban design that can dissipate the forces of storm surge, manage flooding, reduce surface-water runoff, and reduce a heat-island effect need to be worked into an adaptation plan for waterfront cities. Without major changes to technology, the natural and human resource management of global health and productivity will be compromised.

The New Deal

Beginning in 1933, during the depths of the Great Depression, political leaders in the United States put forward programs under the New Deal that offered targeted relief for the massive number of unemployed and poor Americans, gradual recovery in the economic sector, and reform of the financial system. Significantly, New Deal programs also transformed the nation’s critical infrastructure. Roads, water-management structures, and pathways for electrification provided access, sanitation, and power to formerly undeveloped areas of the country. Parks, public buildings, bridges, airports, and other civic projects followed. Under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the WPA employed millions of unemployed people, including women and minorities, constructing a renewed cultural identity for the nation.

A hallmark of the New Deal programs—valued at $20 billion (more than $347 billion at current value)—was the work of artists, writers, landscape architects, architects, and other creative professionals who helped shape the look and cultural literacy of the country during the twentieth century. Legions of laborers guided by designers and bureaucrats worked locally with a regional palette of materials to create extraordinarily beautiful yet practical work that reflected national pride and civic awareness. The work was modern and aspirational and showcased indigenous character and material. President Roosevelt understood the need for large-scale government action to help get the country back on its feet and headed in a new direction.

The Federal Highway System

Two decades later, in the aftermath of World War II and the Korean War, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 into law. Also known as the National Interstate Defense Highways Act, the transcontinental highway system was presented to the public as essential to national defense systems and was funded at a cost of $25 billion through a tax on gasoline and diesel fuel. The term “infrastructure,” which developed during World War II to describe military logistical operations, became one of the president’s most visible and longlasting initiatives in the form of the U.S. interstate highway system. Eisenhower, the five-star general and supreme commander of Allied forces in Europe during the war, admired the efficiency of the German autobahns and sought to create a similar system in the United States. The unified design standards for the nation, consistent with the tenets of modernism, suggested the potential of technology to overcome geophysical obstacles in the landscape with hard engineering. The project catalyzed the development of sprawling new mega-regions of the late twentieth century.

Uncoupling

The sociologist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929), in his 1999 essay “The Uncoupling of System and Lifeworld,” suggested that the processes of differentiation and specialization inherent to modernism are undemocratic and that a democratic system of leadership in advanced capitalistic societies such as the United States enables decision making that is unreflective of society’s broader voice:

But political domination has socially integrating power insofar as disposition over means of sanction does not rest on naked repression, but on the authority of an office anchored in turn to legal order. For this reason, laws need to be inter-subjectively recognized by citizens; they have to be legitimated as right and proper. This leaves culture with the task of supplying the reasons why an existing political order deserves to be recognized.⁸

Through a democratic system, leaders are empowered to make massive decisions about the shape of their country with what I might characterize as “blind faith” in paternalistic power, which, when coupled with postwar fear and fatigue, is further enhanced. Technology reigned in the post–World War II period, and American culture was such that an uncoupling of the systems (such as interstate highways) from the life-world (the social and physical environment)—when presented by a war hero turned president—carried the necessary balance of paternalism and idealism to enable political support for the largest public works project in U.S. history.

As repressed groups, stifled by modernism’s systems-based approaches, found voice in the later twentieth century, the need for “different voices” (to borrow Carol Gilligan’s term) infused culture.⁹ The women’s movement, civil rights movement, and modern environmental movement each lent local and personal voices against the unsupportable rationality of current power structures. For the environmental movement, this contributed to important legislation such as the Clean Air Act of 1963 and the Clean Water Act of 1972.

The Problem

Many of the projects completed during the New Deal era are at the end of their lifespan. As James L. Oberstar has concluded:

Nearly sixty years after much of the interstate highway system was constructed in the 1950s and 1960s, we are now seeing many facilities become stretched to the limit of their design life and beyond. The world-class surface transportation system passed on by previous generations of Americans has reached the age of obsolescence and now needs to be rebuilt.¹⁰

Many canals and harbors are no longer used for commerce with the same intensity they once were, and they are, in many cases, decayed, underutilized, polluted, and subject to rising sea level and storm surge. Less than half of the original 300,000 miles (482,803 kilometers) of rail corridors across the United States are still in use for rail.¹¹ America’s 772 cities have combined sewers that still dump significant amounts of sewage effluent into waterways. Highways and bridges are in similarly poor condition. The repair and replacement of these monumental infrastructure systems in their current configurations do not reflect social, environmental, and technological advances that have occurred during the last half century.

Every four years, the American Society of Civil Engineers issues a report card on America’s infrastructure. Here are the grades given in 2013 and 2009:

Categories	2013	2009
Aviation/Airports	D	D
Bridges	C+	D
Dams	D	D
Drinking Water	D	D-
Energy	D+	D+
Hazardous Waste	D	D
Inland Waterways	D-	D-
Levees	D	D-
Ports	C	(N.A.)
Public Parks and Recreation	C-	C-
Rail	C+	C-
Roads	D	D-
Schools	D	D
Solid Waste	B-	C+
Transit	D	D
Wastewater	D	D-
Overall Grade	D+	D

D = Poor; C = Mediocre; B = Good.¹²

An unprecedented combination of deeply troubling environmental problems, political evolution, and new design and technology now present an unparalleled opportunity to improve America’s infrastructure. Given the realities of global climate change and increased urbanization and population growth, interdisciplinary teams of thinkers must develop models of urban design that work with the hydrologic, transportation, ecologic, economic, and cultural systems that will make cities better-performing and more compelling places to work, live, and raise families. It is unclear whether this work will be driven primarily by the federal government, as it is in France or the Netherlands, or through the public-private partnership models common in the United States. The crucial role of design in the public realm is undervalued and attitudes need to change.

Understanding how physical geography, ecology, and climate function is critical to the development of new types of infrastructure that are more responsive to the forces of nature. The idea of using natural systems to provide public amenities and health benefits is not new. Frederick Law Olmsted (1822–1903), for example, used tidal flows to reduce pestilence and pollution in his design and plan for the Back Bay Fens of Boston during the late 1880s. With advances in technology in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution, engineered solutions were seen as superior to historical precedent. Viewing infrastructure as a machine was the answer. As we observed in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina (2005), Irene (2011), and Sandy (2012), engineered systems are inflexible and can fail with catastrophic consequences as the severity, frequency, and intensity of storm events increase.

It is time to rethink the nineteenth- and twentieth-century engineering model and consider options that can again work in concert with the natural environment. Roads were traditionally aligned with rivers in many rural areas because they were cheaper to build, but roads and bridges in Vermont were destroyed in minutes by the flood-swollen rivers during Hurricane Irene. In metropolitan New York, highways, train yards, tunnels, and public housing located in floodplains along the postindustrial waterfront, where the land was cheap, were severely flooded during Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Replacement of New Jersey’s PATH trains and rebuilding of flooded tunnels and other public and private property in areas subject to more frequent inundation is costing taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars a year when states of emergency are declared so frequently. Miami sits on a permeable bed of limestone at the interface of saltwater and freshwater and faces frequent hurricanes and flooding from upland and coastal sources that threaten not only its major industry—tourism—but also the ecological health of the Everglades.¹³

In many cities across the United States, combined sewer systems were an economical solution to sanitary engineering until climate change and population growth changed the balance sheet. Today, designers and public officials often look to Europe for water-management technology. American municipalities first looked at examples of combined sewers in France and Germany, and they now look to the Dutch for flood control. The Netherlands translates literally to “low lands,” and its strategy of planning includes 200 years into the future (long term), while constantly reconstructing dikes, dams, and polders (short term) is seen as necessary to protect not only the built environment, but also the agricultural economy dependent on sweet water (the Dutch term for fresh nonsaline water). In the United States, municipalities need to look further to the future and realize there are real opportunities to develop new innovations based on the nation’s geographic diversity. The prominent American geographer Gilbert F. White (1911–2006), in addressing the 1934 national flood-control policy, suggested that the multi-billion-dollar program to build reservoirs, canals, levees, and deeper river channels did not reduce flood losses decades later. In his words:

By assuming that only engineering works were needed to curb the cost of unruly streams, other possibly effective means were neglected. Little or no attention was paid to such alternatives as land use regulation or flood-proofing of buildings. By assuming the engineering works would do what the benefit-cost calculations had solemnly estimated they would do, without attempting to verify the practical results in land use, the public reaped quite different effects.¹⁴

America’s reliance on water-management structures thus provides a false sense of security in relation to availability, cost, and protection from catastrophic flooding. White suggested further that the “single purpose levee may set a confident scene for later catastrophe; a single-purpose reservoir may appropriate a unique dam site without assuring complete reduction in flood losses.”¹⁵ In many of White’s essays—written over a period of 60 years as a professor of geography and esteemed government advisor on natural hazards and flooding—he advocated a more holistic approach to design and planning and a testing of applied technology to gauge effectiveness.

Solutions

We know that gradual, buffered waterfront edges and barrier islands can dissipate wave energy, contain saltwater inundation, and make habitat that also helps to sequester carbon. The function of barrier reefs, salt marshes, and cypress swamps can thus inspire new models for an ecosystem’s management. Planning and designing for the periodic swells of rivers and streams may well necessitate an incentivized plan such as Zone (A)ir to relocate homes, towns, roads, communities, and businesses. It is critical that we adapt the architecture (buildings) and landscape architecture (infrastructure and outdoor space) by rethinking the porosity of the landscape, the materials of construction, the relocation of mechanical systems, and access. To the point: Our roads can soak up water, our highway trenches can be covered with parks that clean the air and provide recreational space, our waters’ edges can have an alternating combination of hard edges to facilitate commerce and softer edges to protect valuable upland real estate. Key to all of this thinking is the interface between human occupation and the environment.

The beginnings of this work in ecological design and planning are already apparent in Chicago, Philadelphia, and Portland, Oregon, where sidewalk swales and porous paving are becoming part of the standard streetscape. New York City is also taking on pilot projects to test the effectiveness of new materials and ideas, but testing takes time when action is needed. In floodplains along the Mississippi River, communities with low populations are being relocated and spillways opened to flood farmlands so that population centers downstream are safer. We cannot contain the force of water, as we once believed. Long-term, large-scale planning and actions that reduce our impact on the land, work in concert with natural systems, and enable new systems of exchange are necessary if we are to lessen the impacts of nature’s force.

Gilbert White long ago suggested a holistic and integrated regional approach to sound water management, but his voice fell on deaf ears, as single-purpose engineering solutions to local problems were constructed without consideration of watersheds and “sewersheds.” As towns and cities now work to manage aging infrastructure that is unable to handle impacts of more frequent storms and a rising sea, they have a huge opportunity to embrace new thinking and technology that, more than four decades after the federal Clean Water Act became law, will ameliorate day-to-day and storm-related wastewater loads with new and holistic gray/green engineered approaches.¹⁶ The costs of new infrastructure are real: Presently, approximately $95 billion will be needed to mitigate combined sewer overflows to bring cities in compliance with the 1972 law. Simultaneously, hundreds of billions will be needed to protect communities and cities against future flooding. Resources to address these issues should be combined for cost-effectiveness and efficiency.

Expansion of new green infrastructure networks—where hard surfaces are removed, utilities are protected, and stormwater is channeled for the irrigation of public parks, gardens, and wetlands—can also help mitigate and absorb floodwaters. Green (nature-based) infrastructure systems allow us to rethink not only the overarching functions of infrastructure, but also our experience of nature in the city. Municipalities have an opportunity to design and plan in the most comprehensive and cost-effective manner. The survival of towns and cities that currently exist at or just above sea level depends on aggressive, widespread rethinking of infrastructure for resilience to climate change and destructive storms. As we know, even if all 196 nations honor the commitments each made in Paris, in December 2015, to mitigate the effects of climate change, the global sea levels will rise at least 3 to 4 feet (0.914 to 1.219 meters) within a century, and all areas along the world’s coasts with elevations under 15 feet (4.572 meters) are extremely vulnerable to high tides and storm surge.¹⁷

WPA 2.0: A New Natural Infrastructure System

In response to the 285 deaths and widespread devastation (more than $50 billion in damage) caused by Hurricane Sandy (2012), three levels of U.S. government—federal, state, and local— established commissions, task forces, special initiatives, white papers, 12-point plans, plenary panels, and waterfront revitalization programs, all with vaguely military overtones that would convey action and strength. But will anything come of their recommendations? How can their ambitious designs and plans for modifications and improvements to make our city, state, and national infrastructure resilient to regular and extreme weather impacts be financed? To mitigate and counter the effects of an aging and ill-equipped infrastructure, to prepare now for global climate change, and to finance a new resilient defense network, I propose WPA 2.0 as a timely and much-needed solution.

The new infrastructure needed to adapt the nation’s cities, communities, and rural countryside to the realities of flooding and global climate change will require reconstruction on a massive scale of both gray and green infrastructure systems. Traditional, inflexible “gray” engineering approaches—which require waterproofing of transit systems, tunnels, and utilities or redirecting water with levees, dikes, and barriers—will work better in tandem with more resilient, ecological “green” approaches, including using currents and wind to distribute sediment for new barrier islands, reusing dredge materials to create shallows for wetlands, redesigning streets to absorb and filter stormwater, propagating a range of aquatic plants to make an ecologically rich buffer to storm surge, expanding natural flood zones (and buying out the people and businesses in them) that also function as parks most of the time, taking stormwater from highways and capturing sheet runoff in sponge parks, among other stormwater-capture systems.

As noted earlier, during the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal programs brought sturdy, high-quality, and beautiful designs to public infrastructure with a national expenditure of $20 billion at a time when the gross domestic product was only $73 billion. The programs created millions of jobs, helped to restore economic stability, and offered financial reform to a flawed banking system. The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) was the largest New Deal enterprise. It was formed to harness and manage waterways of the Tennessee River watershed in seven states, create a public utility, and direct numerous resources to an impoverished region of the nation. Along with water management to prevent annual flooding and to manage navigation, President Roosevelt’s signing of the TVA Act created dams for the production and delivery of lower-cost electricity in an era when private utility companies were seen to be exploiting already financially stressed customers. And while the TVA was an electric utility that harnessed the power of water to deliver power, by the 1950s it added coal-burning power plants and, by the 1970s, nuclear power plants to deliver more power to meet growing demands. Energy production is at the root of global warming.

The need for greater urban climate resilience is a consequence of global warming, and emissions from combustion are a primary source. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), created in 1970 by executive order of President Richard M. Nixon, power plants, refineries, and chemical manufacturing accounted for almost 84 percent of total reported emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and fluorinated gases in 2013.¹⁸ A modest tax on the companies that are responsible for the majority of climate-affecting pollution, including electric utilities, auto companies, oil companies, and other industrial polluters, could yield revenues necessary to create a Natural Defense Fund and finance a plan for climate change–resilient infrastructure for the next century. The idea of taxing carbon is not new. A tax on the largest carbon emitters and water polluters could bankroll a fund dedicated to urban and rural climate resilience. And the corporations can afford it: Even with energy prices at historic lows, the 10 largest power utility companies, for example, reported sales of more than $17 billion in 2014, and in the Fortune 500 list the top 10 oil refining companies alone had profits of nearly $67 billion in 2015.

In 2014, the U.S. government authorized nearly $50 billion to repair the damages from Hurricane Sandy. Although no monies were created for new defense systems, President Barack Obama included $1 billion in his 2015 budget for a climate-resilience fund. This was a good start. In fiscal year 2015, the Federal Highway Budget included $48.6 billion for repairs of an infrastructure system nearing the end of its designed lifespan. In the next two decades, cities across the country will need to spend at least $100 billion to clean up stormwater runoff and to reduce combined sewer overflows (CSOs) to comply with the Clean Water Act of 1972. It is unlikely that either local communities or the federal government will come up with the funds needed from taxpayers. Thus, by applying a minor tax on the industries whose practices have led to global climate change, a Natural Defense Fund can be created. If a related Natural Infrastructure System had the funding equivalent to the WPA of the New Deal, there would be a level of funding for resilient public works for the next century and beyond that would actually make a difference. As with the efforts to fight wars or help the nation recover from the Great Depression, a major program of renewal and development of the nation’s infrastructure will ensure the survival of cities, towns, and rural areas and lead to tens of thousands of permanent jobs in the public and private sectors, in the design, building, and maintenance of a new infrastructure for stormwater alone.

In 2005, I founded DLANDstudio, an interdisciplinary design firm based in Brooklyn, New York, where we have been developing systematic interventions and adaptations of urban infrastructure that address many of the issues described above. The work, funded with a combination of grants and public funding, involves pilot projects that are relatively small in relation to the enormity of the problem. The idea behind them is to find small pilots that, when applied on a broad scale, can have a large impact. Our projects are mostly in New York, but our planning stretches around the world. One of our most important projects is the Gowanus Canal Sponge Park, which operates to absorb, hold, clean, and filter surface water in one of the most polluted bodies of water in the United States.

Gowanus Canal Sponge Park

The Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, has a rich history. Originally a large marshy wetland, the area was the site of early Dutch settlement, important Revolutionary War battles, and industry, including the energy and construction sectors. In recent decades, the canal has been better known for the lingering effects of industrial pollution and municipal waste.¹⁹

Planners today envision the area as a new site for large residential development, a controversial proposal in the face of projections of a rising sea level from climate change. In this context, working closely with local community organizations, government agencies, and elected officials, DLANDstudio initiated and designed a new kind of public open space called Sponge Park™.²⁰

In New York City, 0.10 inch (2.54 millimeters) of precipitation (especially rain) triggers a combined sewer overflow. The Hudson and East rivers, New Town Creek, Long Island Sound, Jamaica Bay, and Gowanus Canal are some of the key bodies of water impacted by these spills. Sponge Park™ redirects, holds, and treats stormwater runoff to minimize the volume of overflows that occur within the Gowanus Canal, and it serves as a model for similar street-ends that sheet-drain into canals, rivers, and other bodies of water in cities everywhere.

The Sponge Park™ design equally values the aesthetic, programmatic, and productive importance of treating contaminated water flowing into the Gowanus Canal, an EPA Superfund site. The park is designed as a working landscape that improves the environment of the canal over time. This innovative plan proposes modular strategies to divert stormwater runoff for use in the public park along the canal, thereby reducing the input of stormwater into the sewer system. The plants and engineered soils included in our design draw heavy metals and toxins out of contaminated water.

While most urban infrastructure projects have their challenges, the Sponge Park project had to confront not only geomorphic layers, but also layers of bureaucracy. We had to work with no fewer than nine different federal, state, and city agencies, each with overlapping ownership and regulatory oversight. As part of our creative response to those challenges,DLANDstudio raised all of the design and construction funding for the project from the New York State Council on the Arts, U.S. Congress, New York City Council, New England Water Pollution Control Commission, New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, and New York State Environmental Facilities Corporation. Through the use of grant funding, we were able to innovate in a way that would be impossible through normal procurement procedures. Because the project was seen as a pilot and was led by an outside entity but with the cooperation of government, we were able to create an innovative and replicable system. The first street-end absorbs 2 million gallons of stormwater per year. If Sponge Parks were built on every street-end in New York’s five boroughs, upward of 270 million gallons of water would be absorbed and cleaned before entering New York Harbor.

Hold System

Highway Overpass Landscape Detention Systems, or HOLD Systems, collect and filter stormwater from highway downspouts. HOLD Systems are planted, modular, green infrastructure systems that absorb and filter pollutants such as oil, heavy metals, and grease out of contaminated outfalls, rendering runoff much cleaner as it is released into drains and waterways. The system’s ability to retain water during heavy rain also improves the water quality of adjacent bodies of water. Plant palettes selected for each site help to break down or absorb copper, lead, cadmium, hydrocarbons, zinc, and iron commonly found in runoff. Specially calibrated soils maximize plant productivity and create the ideal level of drainage for citywide stormwater management needs.

HOLD Systems are designed for easy transport and deployment, and they can be quickly and easily installed in hard-to-reach, hard-to-drain areas along interstate highways. HOLD Systems can remediate the impact that a highway infrastructure makes on the hydrologic cycle of neighboring areas. Three modular systems—two in the ground and one above ground—have already been developed by DLANDstudio to adapt to water-table height, permeability, site toxicity, and the availability of sun. These systems are currently being deployed in three locations in New York City—two in Flushing Meadows–Corona Park under the Van Wyck Expressway and one in the Bronx under the Major Deegan Expressway—with funding and other support from the New York City Department of Environmental Protection, Long Island Sound Futures Fund, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

MoMA: “A New Urban Ground”

“A New Urban Ground” was developed by DLANDstudio with ARO (Architecture Research Office) of New York City, as part of the Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) “Rising Currents” exhibition in 2010. In the proposal, we offered an integrated and reciprocal organization of natural and hard-infrastructure systems. A combination of strategies—including wetlands on the perimeter, a raised edge, and sponge slips (water-management landscapes in old boat slips)—were paired with new street infrastructure systems away from the water’s edge in order to protect Lower Manhattan from flooding in the event of another large storm such as Hurricane Sandy, which was but a Category One hurricane when it hit the New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut shores.

The proposal consists of two components that form an interconnected system: porous green streets and a graduated edge. Porous streets will absorb typical rain events and help keep surface water out of the city’s combined sewer system. In larger storms, the streets filter and carry water to new perimeter wetlands to enrich coastal ecologies.

Three interrelated, high-performance systems are constructed on the Atlantic Coast to mitigate the expected rise in sea level and the force of a storm surge: a park network, freshwater wetlands, and brackish marshes. “A New Urban Ground” offers a new way for urban design and planning that brings together natural ecologies with engineered infrastructure systems to transform the city in both performance and experience. This plan, which was proposed almost two years before Hurricane Sandy flooded Lower Manhattan, Staten Island, Red Hook, and the Rockaways, has been cited internationally as a viable model for new civic approaches in resilience to storm surge and sea level rise.²¹

BQGreen

Highway infrastructure systems across the United States are designed for one primary purpose: to move people and goods quickly from one place to another. But, as a society, it is time to rethink this singular, limited view and consider how infrastructure systems can also become productive corridors of beauty, culture, ecology, and recreation. The BQGreen project considers one such corridor—the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (BQE)—and examines in depth two sites along its 11.7-mile (18.829-kilometer) length.

The BQE was originally proposed by the Regional Plan Association during the mid-1930s to relieve traffic congestion, facilitate industrial development, and strengthen the connection between the boroughs of New York City. The BQE differed from the city’s other parkways by accommodating both commercial and noncommercial traffic. City planner Robert Moses (1888–1981), as the chairman of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, charted its path from the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel near Red Hook to Grand Central Parkway in Queens. Construction of the BQE left a trail of divided neighborhoods in its wake.

We know from examples such as Riverside Park (1875 and 1937) in Manhattan, a hybrid Olmsted- and Moses-era park constructed on a concrete box over a major rail corridor, that it is possible to layer transportation with extraordinary public parks. Density is an urban concept that is tied to economics. As the land that infrastructure systems occupy becomes more valuable, it makes sense to layer. As environmental impacts and benefits begin to be assessed in economic terms, the value of making significant alterations to our roadways becomes more attractive at a time when America’s highway infrastructure is near the end of its lifespan and in need of significant repair. As these old systems are replaced, why not reexamine them and consider how they might serve economic, ecological, recreational, public health, and pedestrian-friendly circulation needs in addition to transportation?

Since 2005, DLANDstudio has examined two sunken sections of the BQE. The project began on a theoretical level with a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts to look at tiny Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens before expanding to study a very different neighborhood in SouthSide Williamsburg, with funding from then City Councilwoman Diana Reyna. The latter study went into great detail about the economic, social, and public health consequences of adding a park to the impoverished neighborhood. Extensive community outreach included visits to neighboring playgrounds, church events, and performances to make sure we recognized the voice of the community. Data were developed regarding the financial feasibility of capping costs—including ventilation and structural costs—as well as analysis of job creation, real estate value, and even the bump in retail sales at neighboring bodegas. We studied public health issues and discovered very high asthma and obesity rates as well as a relative dearth of open recreational space for kids in the vulnerable preadolescent stage. We discovered gang territories defined by the trench and imagined blurring the boundaries with new soccer and baseball fields. We helped the community to dream and then engaged the agencies to help fulfill that vision, with formal support for the proposal from New York City’s Departments of Transportation, Environmental Protection, and Parks and Recreation. Outreach to Congressional Representative Nydia Velázquez and U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand also yielded positive support. To realize this vision will take the collaboration of city, state, and federal agencies; through the master plan we are making a strong argument for why this is the right project for all to support, as we work to make our communities and cities more efficient, livable, and environmentally productive.

The insertion of quality open space has the capacity not only to improve the aesthetics of neighborhoods, but also to serve as a catalyst for ecological and economic improvements to the urban environment. This project establishes a vision of the BQE as a place of opportunity where new open space can be created by introducing an environmental and recreational corridor and turning a former eyesore into a public amenity.

QueensWay

Already, 20,000 miles (32,187 kilometers) of abandoned rail corridors have been turned into bicycle and pedestrian greenways across the United States.²² The QueensWay Vision Plan, commissioned by the Trust for Public Land (TPL), a nonprofit organization founded in 1972, is one of TPL’s several current national initiatives to transform former rights-of-way in cities into active and engaging community greenways. The project involves the conversion of a former Long Island Rail Road line into a new open-space corridor for the public.

The history of land development in Queens is largely defined by the numerous rail lines that subdivided open tracts of land during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The QueensWay appropriates one of these infrastructural lineaments to opposite effect, as a unifying device. Each of the three main segments of the QueensWay—northern, central, and southern—possesses a distinct physical character that creates unique staging opportunities for the interaction of urban and natural space. Along its 3.5-mile (5.633-kilometer) length, the former right-of-way transforms from an elevated embankment to a ravine to an elevated steel viaduct. The adjacencies along the QueensWay also vary, with Little League baseball fields along the northernmost end; big-box-store parking lots, residential neighborhoods, and a public park in the middle; and crossing train lines, commercial corridors, and parking lots to the south. Issues such as safety, security, and the privacy of adjacent properties are directly tied to how the former railway line moves through the urban landscape. A quiet presence in the city, camouflaged by school-bus parking, overgrown vines, light industry, and limited access, the QueensWay has the potential to be a beautiful recreational and ecological amenity for the community.

The Future

John Wesley Powell (1834–1902)—among America’s greatest geologists, scientific surveyors, and explorers—in his famous 1878 “Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States,” called for a clearer understanding of the climate and carrying capacity of the American Southwest, recognizing that not all landscapes and their capacities for human development are the same:

To a great extent, the redemption of all these lands will require extensive and comprehensive plans, for the execution of which aggregated capital or cooperative labor will be necessary. . . . It was my purpose not only to consider the character of the lands themselves, but also the engineering problems involved in their redemption, and further to make suggestions for the legislative action necessary to inaugurate the enterprises by which these lands may eventually be rescued from their present worthless state.²⁴

Powell wrote at a time when massive changes and their resultant impacts upon the American landscape were only beginning to be understood. We are at a similar stage in history when global climate change and an overall recognition of the impacts of people on the natural environment are yielding potentially catastrophic consequences. Powell, Gilbert White, and Jürgen Habermas, writing in different eras, all called for the integration of disciplinary and social thinking about our interaction with the physical world, beginning with the inherent, natural capacities of an environment to perform. Though they approached issues from different perspectives, they also understood a need for a multivalent, interdisciplinary approach to our occupation of the planet that involves ecological, economic, sociological, and artistic metrics.

The unprecedented and unrepeated investment in the American landscape during the New Deal and post–World War II periods provides replicable models from which to develop new systems of infrastructure that will help ameliorate the impacts of urbanization and climate change. New technologies and approaches to infrastructure that value working with natural systems can help create systems that grow stronger and more resilient over time. Collective will, new financing models—public or private—and strong leadership are needed to make WPA 2.0 a natural infrastructure system that can reduce human impact on the global biota.

 

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Susannah Drake is the founding principal of DLANDstudio Architecture and Landscape Architecture, whose “Rising Currents New Urban Ground” proposal is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art and Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum. Since 2005, she has taught at Harvard, IIT, FIU, CCNY, Syracuse, Washington University in St. Louis, and The Cooper Union. Her work and writings have appeared in National Geographic and The New York Times, and she has contributed to Infrastructural Urbanism (DOM Publishers, 2011), Under the Elevated (Design Trust for Public Space, 2015), DEMO:POLIS (Akademie der Künste, 2016), and Nature and Cities: The Ecological Imperative in Urban Design and Planning (Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2016).

Drawing courtesy of DLANDstudio Architecture + Landscape Architecture, PLLC.

 

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1. The WPA and the PWA were both New Deal programs during the Great Depression. Despite their similar-sounding names, they have critical distinctions: First, WPA laborers were hired directly by the government, while the PWA contracted much of their work to private entities. Second, the WPA engaged primarily in smaller projects with local governments such as schools, roads, sidewalks, and sewers, while PWA programs included large-scale bridges, tunnels, and dams. See: Leighninger, Robert D. “Cultural Infrastructure: The Legacy of New Deal Public Space.” Journal of Architectural Education, Volume 49, No. 4 (May, 1996): 226–236.

2. Carstensen, Vernon, “Patterns on the American Land,” Publius: The Journal of Federalism, Vol. 18, No. 4 (Fall 1988): 31–39.

3. Stilgoe, John R., Common Landscape of America, 1580 to 1845 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983), 104.

4. The origins of this famous phrase about Manifest Destiny in America are disputed. Fred R. Shapiro, the editor of the Yale Book of Quotations, comments on the origins in the Yale Alumni Magazine (September/October 2008); see http://www.archives.yaleulumnimagazine.com.

5. See, for example, de Crèvecoeur, J. Hector St. John, Letters from an American Farmer (London, UK: T. Davies, 1782).

6. See Hudson, John C., Plains Country Towns (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), which won the first John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize of the Association of American Geographers.

7. Merchant, Carolyn, The Columbia Guide to American Environmental History (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2002), 112.

8. Habermas, Jürgen, “The Uncoupling of System and Lifeworld,” in Elliott, Anthony, ed., The Blackwell Reader in Contemporary Social Theory (Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 1999), 175.

9. Gilligan, Carol, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).

10. Oberstar, James L., special comments in LePatner, Barry B., Too Big to Fall: America’s Failing Infrastructure and the Way Forward (Lebanon, NH: Foster Publishing, in association with the University Press of New England, 2010), xi.

11. Tracy, Tammy, and Hugh Morris, Rail-Trails and Safe Communities: The Experience on 372 Trails (Washington, D.C.: Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, 1998); available online at http://www.railstotrails.org/resources/documents/resource_docs/Safe%20Communities_F_lr.pdf.

12. See http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org.

13. See, for example, Kolbert, Elizabeth, “The Siege of Miami,” The New Yorker (December 21 and 28, 2015): 42–46 and 49–50.

14. White, Gilbert F., “The Changing Role of Water in Arid Lands,” in Kates, Robert W., and Ian Burton, eds., Geography, Resources, and Environment: Vol. 1, Selected Writings of Gilbert F. White (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 137.

15. Ibid.

16. As defined by the EPA, “gray” infrastructure is “conventional piped drainage and water treatment systems” and “green” infrastructure is “designed to move urban stormwater away from the built environment [and] reduces and treats stormwater at its source while delivering environmental, social, and economic benefits.” See EPA, “What is Green Infrastructure”; available at https://www.epa.gov/green-infrastructure/what-green-infrastructure.

17. See, for example, Ganis, John, with essays by Liz Wells and James E. Hansen, America’s Endangered Coasts: Photographs from Texas to Maine (Staunton, VA: George F. Thompson Publishing, 2016).

18. See http://www3.epa.gov for an update.

19. See Alexiou, Joseph, Gowanus: Brooklyn’s Curious Canal (New York, NY: NYU Press, 2015).

20. For an overview of Sponge Park, see Foderaro, Lisa W., “Building a Park in Brooklyn to Sop Up Polluted Waters: Site Will Treat Thousands of Gallons near Canal,” The New York Times (December 16, 2015): A27 and A29.

21. See, for example, Palazzo, Danilo, and Frederick R. Steiner, Urban Ecological Design: A Process for Regenerative Place (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2011), 6; and “Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront to Respond to Climate Change,” Landscape Architecture China, Vol. 11, No. 3 (June 2010): 70–75.

22. The origins of the rails-to-trails movement was brilliantly presented by Charles E. Little in his now-classic book, Greenways for America (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, in association with the Center for American Places, 1990).

23. Carbonell, Armando, Mark Pisano, and Robert Yaro. 2005. Global gateway regions. September. New York, NY: Regional Plan Association. http://www.america2050.org/pdf/globalgatewayregions.pdf.

24. Powell, J. W., “Report on the Lands of the Arid Regions of the United States, with a More Detailed Account of the Lands of Utah” (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, April 2, 1878), viii.
 

The Chesapeake Bay is a cultural icon, a national treasure, and a natural resource protected by hundreds of agencies, nonprofit organizations, and institutions. Now with unprecedented accuracy, a new ultra-high-resolution digital mapping technology, developed by the Chesapeake Conservancy and supported by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, is pinpointing pollution and other threats to the ecosystem health of the bay and its watershed, which spans 64,000 square miles, 10,000 miles of shoreline, and 150 major rivers and streams. At one-meter-by-one-meter resolution, the “precision conservation” mapping technology is gaining the attention of a wide range of agencies and institutions that see potential applications for a variety of planning purposes, for use throughout the United States and the world. This new land cover dataset, created by the Conservancy’s Conservation Innovation Center (CIC), has 900 times more information than previous datasets, and provides vastly greater detail about the watershed’s natural systems and environmental threats—the most persistent and pressing of which is pollution of the bay’s waters, which impacts everything from the health of people, plants, and wildlife to the fishing industry to tourism and recreation.

“The U.S. government is putting more than $70 million a year into cleaning up the Chesapeake but doesn’t know which interventions are making a difference,” says George W. McCarthy, president and CEO of the Lincoln Institute. “With this technology, we can determine whether interventions can interrupt a surface flow of nutrients that is causing algae blooms in the bay. We can see where the flows enter the Chesapeake. We’ll see what we’re getting for our money, and we can start to redirect the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Department of Agriculture, and multiple agencies that might plan strategically but not talk to each other.”

The nonprofit Chesapeake Conservancy is putting finishing touches on a high-resolution map of the entire watershed for the Chesapeake Bay Program. Both organizations are located in Annapolis, Maryland, the epicenter of bay conservation efforts. The program serves the Chesapeake Bay Partnership, the EPA, the Chesapeake Bay Commission, and the six watershed states of Delaware, Maryland, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia—along with 90 other partners including nonprofit organizations, academic institutions, and government agencies such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. Geologic Survey (USGS), and the U.S. Department of Defense.

On behalf of this partnership, EPA in 2016 invested $1.3 million in state and federal funding in the Conservancy’s high-resolution land cover project, which is being developed with the University of Vermont. Information gleaned from several precision mapping pilot programs is already helping local governments and river partners make more efficient and cost-effective land-management decisions.

“There are a lot of actors in the Chesapeake Bay watershed,” says Joel Dunn, president and CEO of the Chesapeake Conservancy. “We’ve been working on a very complicated conservation problem as a community over the last 40 years, and the result has been layers and layers and many institutions built to solve this problem.”

“Now it’s not a collective will problem but an action problem, and the whole community needs to be partnering in more innovative ways to take restoration of the watershed’s natural resources to the next level,” he adds.

“Conservation technology is evolving quickly and may be cresting now,” Dunn says, “and we want to ride that wave.” The project is an example of the Conservancy’s efforts to take its work to new heights. By bringing “big data” into the world of environmental planning, he says, the Conservancy is poised to further innovate as “conservation entrepreneurs.”

What Is Precision Mapping Technology?

Land use and land cover (LULC) data from images taken by satellites or airplanes is critical to environmental management. It is used for everything from ecological habitat mapping to tracking development trends. The industry standard is the USGS’s 30-by-30-meter-resolution National Land Cover Database (NLCD), which provides images encompassing 900 square meters, or almost one-quarter acre. This scale works well for large swaths of land. It is not accurate, however, at a small-project scale, because everything at one-quarter acre or less is lumped together into one type of land classification. A parcel might be classified as a forest, for example, when that quarter-acre might contain a stream and wetlands as well. To maximize improvements to water quality and critical habitats, higher resolution imaging is needed to inform field-scale decisions about where to concentrate efforts.

Using publicly available aerial imagery from the National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP), combined with LIDAR (or Light Detection and Ranging) land elevation data, the Conservancy has created three-dimensional land classification datasets with 900 times more information and close to a 90 percent accuracy level, compared to a 78 percent accuracy level for the NLCD. This new tool provides a much more detailed picture of what’s happening on the ground by showing points where pollution is entering streams and rivers, the height of slopes, and the effectiveness of best management practices (BMPs) such as bioswales, rain gardens, and forested buffers.

“We’re able to translate raw imagery to a classified landscape, and we’re training the computer to look at what humans see at eye level,” and even to identify individual plants, says Jeff Allenby, director of conservation technology, who was hired in 2012 to leverage technology to study, conserve, and restore the watershed. In 2013, a $25,000 grant from the Information Technology Industry Council (ITIC) allowed Allenby to buy two powerful computers and begin working on the digital map. With support from the Chesapeake Bay Program, his geographic information system (GIS)-savvy team of eight has created a classification system for the Chesapeake watershed with 12 categories of land cover, including impervious surfaces, wetlands, low vegetation, and water. It is also incorporating zoning information about land uses from the Chesapeake Bay Program.

The Technology’s Potential

Precision mapping “has the potential to transform the way we look at and analyze land and water systems in the United States,” says James N. Levitt, manager of land conservation programs for the department of planning and urban form at the Lincoln Institute, which is supporting the Conservancy’s development of the technology with $50,000. “It will help us maintain water quality and critical habitats, and locate the areas where restoration activities will have the greatest impact on improving water quality.” Levitt says the technology enables transferring “nonpoint,” or diffuse and undetermined, sources of pollution into specific identifiable “point” sources on the landscape. And it offers great potential for use in other watersheds, such as the Ohio and Mississippi river systems, which, like the Chesapeake watershed, also have large loads of polluted stormwater runoff from agriculture.

It’s a propitious time to be ramping up conservation technology in the Chesapeake region. In February 2016, the U.S. Supreme Court decided not to consider a challenge to the Chesapeake Bay Partnership’s plan to fully restore the bay and its tidal rivers as swimmable and fishable waterways by 2025. The high court’s action let stand a ruling by the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that upheld the clean water plan and reinforced restrictions on the total maximum daily load, or the permissible limit of pollution from substances like nitrogen and phosphorus. These nutrients, found in agricultural fertilizers, are the two major pollutants of the bay, and are addressed under federal water quality standards established by the Clean Water Act. The ruling also allows EPA and state agencies to fine polluters for violating regulations.

The Chesapeake Bay’s water quality has improved from its most polluted phase in the 1980s. Upgrades and more efficient operations at wastewater treatment plants have reduced nitrogen going into the bay by 57 percent and phosphorus by 75 percent. But the watershed states are still in violation of clean water regulations, and increasing urban development calls for constant assessment and pollution reduction in water and critical habitats.

Pilot Project No. 1: Chester River

Backed by funding from ITIC’s Digital Energy and Sustainability Solutions Campaigns, the Conservancy completed a high-resolution land classification and stormwater runoff flow analysis for the entire Chester River watershed on Maryland’s eastern shore. Isabel Hardesty is the river keeper for the 60-mile-long Chester River and works with the Chester River Association, based in Chestertown, Maryland. (“River keeper” is an official title for 250 individuals worldwide who serve as the “eyes, ears, and voice” for a body of water.) The Conservancy’s analysis helped Hardesty and her staff understand where water flows across the land, where BMPs would be most effective, and which degraded streams would be best to restore.

Two-thirds of the Chester River watershed’s land cover is row crops. Row-crop farmers often apply fertilizer uniformly to a field, and the fertilizer runs off with stormwater from all over the site. This is considered nonpoint pollution, which makes it harder to pinpoint the exact source of contaminants flowing into a river—compared to, say, a pile of manure. The Conservancy’s team mapped the entire Chester watershed, noting where rain fell on the landscape and then where it flowed.

“With the naked eye, you can look at a field and see where the water is flowing, but their analysis is much more scientific,” says Hardesty. The map showed flow paths across the whole watershed, in red, yellow, and green. Red indicates higher potential for carrying pollutants, such as flow paths over impervious surfaces. Green means water is filtered, such as when it flows through a wetlands or a forested buffer, making it less likely to carry pollution. Yellow is intermediary, meaning it could go either way. The analysis has to be “ground-truthed,” says Hardesty, meaning the team uses the GIS analysis and drills down to an individual farm level to confirm what’s happening on a specific field.

“We are a small organization and have relationships with most of the farmers in the area,” says Hardesty. “We can look at a parcel of land, and we know the practices that farmers use. We’ve reached out to our landowners and worked with them on their sites and know where pollution may be entering streams. When we know a particular farmer wants to put a wetland on his farm, this land use and water flow analysis helps us determine what kind of BMP we should use and where it should be located.” The value of precision mapping for the Chester River Association, says Hardesty, has been “realizing that the best place to put a water intercept solution is where it’s best for the farmer. This is usually a fairly unproductive part of the farm.” She says farmers generally are happy to work with them to solve the problem.

The Chester River Association is also deploying the technology to use resources more strategically. The organization has a water monitoring program with years of watershed data, which the Conservancy team analyzed to rank streams according to water quality. The association now has GIS analysis that shows the flow paths for all stream subwatersheds, and is creating a strategic plan to guide future efforts for streams with the worst water quality.

Pilot Project No. 2: York County Stormwater Consortium BMP Reporting Tool

In 2013, the Conservancy and other core partners launched Envision the Susquehanna to improve the ecological and cultural integrity of the landscape and the quality of life along the Susquehanna River, from its headwaters in Cooperstown, New York, to where it merges with the Chesapeake Bay in Havre de Grace, Maryland. In 2015, the Conservancy selected the program to pilot its data project in York County, Pennsylvania.

Pennsylvania has struggled to demonstrate progress in reducing nitrogen and sediment runoff, especially in places where urban stormwater enters rivers and streams. In 2015, EPA announced that it would withhold $2.9 million in federal funding until the state could articulate a plan to meet its targets. In response, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection released the Chesapeake Bay Restoration Strategy to increase funding for local stormwater projects, verify the impacts and benefits of local BMPs, and improve accounting and data collection to monitor their effectiveness.

York County created the York County–Chesapeake Bay Pollution Reduction Program to coordinate reporting on clean-up projects. The Conservancy’s precision mapping technology offered a perfect pilot opportunity: In spring 2015, the York County Planning Commission and the Conservancy began working together to improve the process for selecting BMP projects for urban stormwater runoff, which, combined with increased development, is the fastest growing threat to the Chesapeake Bay.

The planning commission targeted the annual BMP proposal process for the 49 of 72 municipalities that are regulated as “municipal separate storm sewer systems,” or MS4s. These are stormwater systems required by the federal Clean Water Act that collect polluted runoff that would otherwise make its way into local waterways. The commission’s goal was to standardize the project submittal and review processes. The county had found that calculated load reductions often were inconsistent among municipalities because many lacked the staff to collect and analyze the data or used a variety of different data sources. This made it difficult for the commission to identify, compare, and develop priorities for the most effective and cost-efficient projects to achieve water-quality goals.

 

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How to Use the York County Stormwater Consortium BMP Reporting Tool

To use the online tool, users select a proposed project area, and the tool automatically generates a high-resolution land cover analysis for all of the land area draining through the project footprint. High-resolution data is integrated into the tool, allowing users to assess how their project would interact with the landscape. Users also can compare potential projects quickly and easily, and then review and submit proposals for projects with the best potential to improve water quality. Users then input their project information into a nutrient/sediment load reduction model called the Bay Facility Assessment Scenario Tool, or BayFAST. Users enter additional project information, and the tool fills in the geographic data. The result is a simple, one-page pdf report that outlines the estimated project costs per pound of nitrogen, phosphorus, and sediment reduction. See the tool at: http://chesapeakeconservancy.org/apps/yorkdrainage/.

 

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The Conservancy and planning commission collaborated to develop the user-friendly, web-based York County Stormwater Consortium BMP Reporting Tool (above), which allows different land use changes and restoration approaches to be compared and analyzed before being put into place. The Conservancy, commission, and municipal staff members collaborated on a uniform template for the proposals and data collection, and they streamlined the process with the same data sets. The Conservancy then trained a few of the local GIS professionals to provide technical assistance to other municipalities.

“It’s easy and quick to use,” explains Gary Milbrand, CFM, York Township’s GIS engineer and chief information officer, who is a project technical assistant for other municipalities. In the past, he says, municipalities typically spent between $500 and $1,000 on consultants to analyze their data and create proposals and reports. The reporting tool, he says, “saves us time and money.”

The commission required all regulated municipalities to submit BMP proposals using the new technology by July 1, 2016, and proposals will be selected for funding by late fall. Partners say the municipalities are more involved in the process of describing how their projects are working in the environment, and they hope to see more competitive projects in the future.

“For the first time, we can compare projects ‘apples to apples,’” says Carly Dean, Envision the Susquehanna project manager. “Just being able to visualize the data helps municipal staffs analyze how their projects interact with the landscape, and why their work is so important.” Dean adds, “We’re only just beginning to scratch the surface. It will take a while before we grasp all of the potential applications.”

Integrating Land Cover and Land Use Parcel Data

The Conservancy team is also working to overlay land cover data with parcel-level county data to provide more information on how land is being used. Combining high-resolution satellite imagery and county land use parcel data is unprecedented. Counties throughout the United States collect and maintain parcel-level databases with information such as tax records and property ownership. About 3,000 out of 3,200 counties have digitized these public records. But even in many of these counties, records haven’t been organized and standardized for public use, says McCarthy.

EPA and a USGS team in Annapolis have been combining the one-meter-resolution land cover data with land use data for the six Chesapeake states to provide a broad watershed-wide view that at the same time shows highly detailed information about developed and rural land. This fall, the team will incorporate every city and county’s land use and land cover data and determine adjustments to make sure the high-resolution map data matches local-scale data.

The updated land use and cover data then will be loaded into the Chesapeake Bay Watershed Model, a computer model now in its third of four beta versions of production and review. State and municipal partners, conservation districts, and other watershed partners have reviewed each version and suggested changes based on their experience in stormwater mitigation, water treatment upgrades, and other BMPs. Data will detail, for example, mixed-use development; different agricultural land uses for crops, hay, and pasture; and measures such as how much land produces fruit or vegetable crops. That’s where the conversion from land cover to land use comes in to help specify the pollution load rates.

“We want a very transparent process,” says EPA’s Rich Batiuk, associate director for science, analysis, and implementation for the Chesapeake Bay Program, noting that the combined land cover and land use data will be available online, at no cost. “We want thousands of eyes on land use and cover data. We want to help state and local partners with data on how we’re dealing with forests, flood plains, streams, and rivers. And we want an improved product that becomes the model for simulations of pollution control policies across the watershed.”

Scaling Up and Other Applications

As the technology is refined and used more widely by watershed partners, the Conservancy hopes to provide other data sets, scale up the work to other applications, and conduct annual or biannual updates so the maps reflect current conditions. “This data is important as a baseline, and we’ll be looking at the best way to be able to assess change over time,” says Allenby.

Watershed partners are discussing additional applications for one-meter-resolution data, from updating Emergency-911 maps, to protecting endangered species, to developing easements and purchasing land for conservation organizations. Beyond the Chesapeake, precision mapping could help conduct continental-scale projects. It offers the conservation parallel to precision agriculture, which helps determine, for example, where a bit of fertilizer in a specific place would do the most good for plants; the two combined could increase food production and reduce agriculture’s environmental impact. The technology could also help with more sustainable development practices, sea level rise, and resiliency.

Many people said it wasn’t feasible for a small nonprofit to do this kind of analysis, says Allenby, but his team was able to do it for a tenth of the cost of estimates. The bigger picture includes making land use and cover data available to the public for free. But that’s an expensive proposition at this point: The data needs backup, security, and a huge amount of storage space. Working with Esri, a Redlands, California-based company that sells GIS mapping tools, as well as Microsoft Research and Hexagon Geospatial, the Conservancy team is transferring the data. The process now runs linearly one square meter at a time. On a cloud-based system, it will run one square kilometer at a time and distribute to 1,000 different servers at once. Allenby says this could allow parcel-level mapping of the entire 8.8 million square kilometers of land in the United States in one month. Without this technology, 100 people would have to work for more than a year, at much greater cost, to produce the same dataset.

Precision mapping could bring greater depth to State of the Nation’s Land, an annual online journal of databases on land use and ownership that the Lincoln Institute is producing with PolicyMap. McCarthy suggests the technology might answer questions such as: Who owns America? How are we using land? How does ownership affect how land is used? How is it changing over time? What are the impacts of roads environmentally, economically, and socially? What changes after you build a road? How much prime agricultural land has been buried under suburban development? When does that begin to matter? How much land are we despoiling? What is happening to our water supply?

“Can it solve big social problems?” queries McCarthy. One of biggest outcomes of precision mapping technology would be to develop better ways to inform land use practices, he says, especially at the interface between people and land, and water and land. Land records are needed to use this technology most effectively, which might be challenging in some places because these records don’t exist or are inconsistent. But it’s a methology and technology that can be used in other countries, he says. “It‘s a game changer, allowing us to overlay land use data with land cover data, which could be hugely valuable to rapidly urbanizing places like China and Africa, where patterns and changes will be seen over the land and over time. It’s hard to exaggerate the impact.”

“Our goal is the world, to use this technology for transparency and accountability,” says McCarthy. “The more information planners have access to, the better stewards we can be for the planet.” The tool should be shared with “people who want to use it for the right purposes, so we’re making the value proposition that this is a public good that we all need to maintain,” he says, similar to the way USGS developed GIS.

“We need the right public-private arrangement, something like a regulated public utility with public oversight and support that will maintain it as a public good.”

 

Kathleen McCormick, principal of Fountainhead Communications, LLC, lives and works in Boulder, Colorado, and writes frequently about sustainable, healthy, and resilient communities.

Image by The Chesapeake Conservancy

The government of China has been concerned about its ability to continue feeding its growing population since the mid-1990s. It has targeted conversion of farmland to industrial and residential uses, especially in the most productive agricultural regions, as the chief threat to the nation’s continued capacity to produce adequate levels of staple cereal crops. China is land poor. Only about one-third of its total land area, which is roughly equal to that of the United States, can be utilized productively for agriculture. Several measures have been introduced with the aim of protecting farmland, especially farmland with the greatest production potential. For example, current regulations require each province to keep 80 percent of its land currently designated as primary farmland under cultivation. Other policies require each province to take measures to ensure self-sufficiency in grain production and to draw up farmland protection plans.

Cultivated Land versus Farmland

Most attention has been focused on “cultivated” land, that is, land used to grow major food grains, feed grains, soybeans, and tubers. Not included is land used for horticultural crops and aquaculture, which would be categorized as farmland in most countries. Roughly 20 to 25 percent of the observed reduction in cultivated land in China in recent years was due to its conversion to orchards and fish ponds (Smil 1999; Ministry of Land and Resources 2003).

Reallocation of cultivated land from cereals and tubers to fruits, vegetables, and fish is a natural accommodation to changing consumer demand and increased income rather than a sign of an inability to maintain staple food production. Urban Chinese households consume much less grain than rural households (Gale 2002). Thus, changes in diets caused by rural-to-urban migration have resulted in less consumption of grains in China between 1995 and 2002, even though total population increased by about one-eighth during that period.

Farmland and Food Security

Even after correcting for reallocations of cultivated land to other food products, China has lost a significant amount of cropland, although the exact amount is difficult to determine because of the poor quality of historical statistics. Estimates of gross cropland losses between 1987 and 1995 have ranged from 3 to 5 million hectares out of a total estimate of 125 to 145 million hectares. Some of that loss consisted of land that was marginal in terms of agricultural productivity, but was highly vulnerable to erosion, desertification, and other forms of land degradation; much of this land was subsequently allowed to revert to more sustainable uses, such as pasture, grassland, and forest. Because the productivity of this land was quite low, its removal from cultivation represents little reduction in agricultural production capacity.

Most observers believe that China can remain largely self-sufficient in food production because of its ability to increase the agricultural productivity of land. For example, China’s agricultural research system has been quite successful in developing and promulgating new crop varieties and cultivation methods that have increased potential grain yields an average of 1.5 to 2.5 percent annually (Jin et al. 2002). A study conducted under the auspices of the International Food Policy Research Institute indicates that China’s ability to remain self-sufficient in food production depends more on investment in irrigation, flood control, and agricultural research infrastructure than on farmland preservation (Huang, Rozelle, and Rosegrant 1999).

Water is likely to be more of a bottleneck than land. Many farming regions face shortages of water for irrigation, so farmers who rely on groundwater have been pumping at unsustainably high rates, causing water tables to fall rapidly. Even regions with abundant water resources have shortages because of poor maintenance and operation of irrigation systems. Improved flood control is also sorely needed to prevent natural disasters that affect cropland losses.

Impacts of Urbanization

Even if the loss of cultivated land does not threaten China’s food security, there are substantial inefficiencies in land allocation generally, and in the conversion of farmland to urbanizing areas in particular. The most worrisome aspect is that farmland conversion has been concentrated in the most productive farming areas of the country, notably the coastal and central provinces that have both fertile soils and climates that allow multiple crops and harvests. Net losses of cropland in these provinces alone between 1985 and 1995 were on the order of 2 to 4 million hectares. Urbanization, industrialization, infrastructure, and other nonagricultural uses have been the primary cause of farmland loss in these rapidly industrializing provinces.

The two sites selected for a recent Lincoln Institute/Ministry of Land and Resources farmland protection study illustrate the scope of this problem. Most of the land around Pinghu City, located halfway between Hangzhou and Shanghai in Zhejiang Province, is prime agricultural land that can be harvested two or three times a year. Cultivated land and orchards account for about two-thirds of the total land area, and little land is left unused. Land taken for construction increased eightfold between 1998 and 2001. The local government has used consolidation of plots to meet its “no net loss” requirements, but the scope for further gains from consolidation is quite limited. Recorded conversion of farmland to urban uses during this period of rapid growth amounted to almost 2 percent of Pinghu City’s 1998 farmland.

Jingzhou City, located in the Yangtze River basin west of Wuhan in Hubei Province, shows the limited impact of urbanization outside of the rapidly growing coastal provinces. Cultivated land and orchards together account for about half of the total land area. Between 1997 and 2003, cultivated land in Jingzhou also decreased by almost 2 percent, but only a tenth of that loss was due to transportation infrastructure and other urban uses. Over half of the loss was due to an increase in areas covered by water caused by flooding and new aquaculture facilities. The remainder was largely due to abandonment of marginal land brought under cultivation prior to 1978, which was either allowed to revert to forest or was simply left unused.

Institutional Impediments

The greatest impediments to China’s ability to maintain adequate levels of food production are not physical but institutional. Inefficient uses of existing farmland arise from policies that affect income generation from farming, including the lack of tenure security, water shortages and poor irrigation management institutions, and the lack of adequate marketing infrastructure.

Tenure Security: Economists have long argued that secure tenure is essential for efficient land use, including appropriate levels of investment in maintaining and enhancing land productivity as well as allocating land to the most efficient uses and/or users. Rural and suburban land in China belongs to village collectives and is administered by the village committee or economic organization, subject to oversight by township, provincial, and in some cases state entities. Rural collectives have the authority to allocate land to alternative uses.

Farmland is leased to households under contractual arrangements in which the household pays a fee to the collective in return for a residual claim on the products of the land. The contract may contain other stipulations as well (for example, requirements that the land be farmed and maintained in good condition). The size of each household’s allocation is based on the size and composition of the household, and may be altered as those factors change. Tenure insecurity has been documented as a deterrent to investing in agricultural improvements (Jacoby, Li, and Rozelle 2002; Deininger and Jin 2003).

Concerns over adverse effects of insecure tenure on long-term investment in land productivity have led the Chinese government to experiment with lengthening the duration of farmland contracts. In 1984 collectives were urged by the state to contract with member households for a period of 15 years, and in 1993 the state urged an extension of standard contracts to 30 years. Revisions to the Land Management Law in 1998 explicitly required that all farmland contracts be written and be effective for a term of 30 years with few or no adjustments allowed.

Farmers also have acquired some ability to alter land allocations by exchanges or subcontracting Exchanges of land among villagers to consolidate holdings were declared legal in 1986, and subcontracting of land to outsiders, subject to approval of two-thirds of the village membership, was declared legal in 1998. Fully implementing these enhanced tenure security and transferability measures remains difficult, however, because they run contrary to longstanding practices and principles of administration in China. For example, they limit the power of the village leadership, and may also result in less equitable land allocations by ruling out reallocations to accommodate demographic or other changes in circumstances.

Ensuring that farmland reforms take hold and preventing abandonment of productive farmland are likely to be increasingly important for maintaining agricultural productivity, especially in areas experiencing rapid urban growth. Urban employment opportunities for working-age men are widely available in fast-growing coastal areas, leaving the farm labor force to be composed primarily of women and the elderly. As many as 80 percent of the young men in the environs of Pinghu City (and 20 percent in Jingzhou) worked in industrial jobs in nearby cities. Lack of urban residency rights keeps farm-based families tied to the land, but since their main source of income is now nonagricultural, they have little incentive to invest in maintaining and enhancing land productivity. Moreover, limitations on labor time and capacity may induce them to leave some land uncultivated.

Such flows of labor out of farming can be accommodated by consolidating plots into larger operational units to exploit economies of scale, thereby lowering land productivity investment costs and increasing farming income sufficiently to make such investments worthwhile. But secure, transferable use rights are essential to accomplish these goals. In areas like Pinghu, for example, wages in urban employment are so much higher than income from farming that farmers have little incentive to invest in the maintenance and enhancement of land productivity by applying organic fertilizer or keeping irrigation and drainage systems in good repair.

Secure tenure rights can also serve as a check on the arbitrary exercise of authority by village leaders who have been known to expropriate land from farmers in order to lease it to rural enterprises or sell it to local governments, often without paying compensation and in many cases pocketing the returns themselves. Illegal land development of this kind has become a national scandal in China, and millions of farmers are known to have lost land as a result. According to the Ministry of Land and Resources (2003), farmers were owed at least $1.2 billion in compensation and relocation fees.

Water Management: The second type of institutional impediment to agriculture relates to water shortages, notably (1) lack of clearly delineated and enforced use-rights for water; (2) inadequate financing of water delivery infrastructure; and (3) failure to price water at its opportunity cost. The lack of clear use-right assignments results in upstream users taking too large a share of the water available, leaving inadequate supplies for downstream users—a phenomenon that applies at both the provincial level, where upstream provinces divert excessive quantities of stream flow, and the farm level, where farmers with land at the heads of delivery canals take excessive amounts, leaving little or nothing for those at the tails of those canals.

Funding for construction, maintenance, and operation of irrigation systems has been inadequate because these activities have no dedicated funding source, and maintenance varies with the overall status of government finances. According to local officials in Pinghu and Jingzhou, for instance, maintenance of irrigation and drainage systems virtually ceased around 1980. Recent attempts to remedy the neglect by investing in repair and upgrades of irrigation systems are hampered by lack of funds. In Jingzhou, for instance, officials estimate that at current funding levels it will take 50 years to repair all irrigation systems currently in need. Many systems that have been repaired recently are likely to require further maintenance before systems currently in need of repair have been upgraded.

Additional inefficiencies in water use arise in China because water prices are set below opportunity costs, leading to overuse. Many farmers are charged for water according to the amount of land farmed rather than the amount of water used. Charges may be set to raise revenue for the township or provincial treasury rather than to induce economically efficient water use. Experiments with water pricing indicate that farmers’ use of water conservation methods is quite price-responsive, so that water price reform has a significant potential to alleviate water shortages.

Marketing Institutions: Inadequate marketing infrastructure and institutions are the third major impediment to realizing potential gains from regional specialization as well as a deterrent to investment in agriculture in many localities. China has a long tradition of promoting self-sufficiency at the local and provincial levels, yet this self-reliance can become an impediment to economic growth by limiting the scope for gains from specialization. China has been moving away from this traditional stance. Grain trading, for example, has been partially liberalized and grain traders are creating more integrated national markets.

Greater market liberalization could contribute to farmland preservation and the maintenance of food production capacity generally. More closely integrated national markets should increase average prices and decrease price volatility, making farming more attractive relative to other forms of employment. Greater market integration should be especially beneficial in poorer inland areas where incentives to migrate toward fast-growing coastal cities have been especially strong.

This market liberalization will require significant investment in infrastructure, however. China’s transportation network has not expanded fast enough to keep pace with the growth of trade volume, and the country lacks sufficient warehouse and cold storage facilities. China has sufficient cold storage capacity to accommodate only 20 to 30 percent of demand, resulting in spoilage losses of perishable freight on the order of one-third (Gale 2002). Increases in such capacity could increase food availability substantially by reducing both spoilage losses and price volatility, giving farmers an incentive to increase their production of vegetables and other perishable products. Expanded provision of electricity could further increase the effective food supply by allowing consumers to reduce spoilage losses by refrigerating produce.

Urban Policies on Farmland Conversion

The current urban policy structure encourages municipal and regional governments to convert farmland, even in areas where the central government has made farmland preservation a top priority. Policies influencing government finance, residential construction, and urban land transactions combine to create a high demand for land. Policies governing payment for land also make farmland conversion the most attractive means of meeting that demand.

Urban land is allocated by a combination of administrative and market mechanisms that create substantial arbitrage opportunities for private enterprises and government entities. Private enterprises can lease land from municipal governments in return for payment of a conveyance fee. Local governments can acquire land by paying a compensation package set according to administrative formulas based on agricultural income, which is typically far lower than the conveyance fee. Revenue from land transactions is a major source of funding for local governments; according to some estimates, it can account for between a quarter and a half of all municipal revenue. As a result, local governments have strong incentives to expand into rural areas in order to finance their ongoing obligations in the areas of infrastructure and housing.

Current regulations also make it more attractive for local governments to provide housing for growing populations by expanding into rural areas rather than increasing density within existing urban boundaries. Redevelopment of existing municipal land requires governments to pay compensation to current tenants and to cover resettlement expenses. Compensation paid to current residents is much higher than that paid to rural inhabitants. In Beijing, for example, land costs (primarily compensation) make up as much as 60 percent of the redevelopment cost of existing urban areas compared to 30 to 40 percent of the cost of developing converted rural land. Tenants may also resist displacement tenaciously, which at the very least creates significant delays. In addition, it is more expensive to provide infrastructure to areas already densely developed.

Industrial development is widely seen as the key to economic growth and a rising standard of living for municipalities. Low land costs have encouraged local governments to acquire and set aside land for industrial development speculatively, in the hope of attracting industrial investment. Much of that land has remained idle as hoped-for investment failed to materialize. By 1996, there were roughly 116,000 hectares of idle, undeveloped land in economic development zones, over half of which was converted farmland that could no longer be converted back.

Low administratively set compensation levels for rural land also create incentives for illegal land transactions that allow rural collectives, rather than urban governments, to profit from conversion, thereby undermining the state’s control over land use. These low compensation levels also create incentives for other types of illegal land transactions, notably forcible takeovers by local officials of land whose owners are unwilling to sell.

Conclusion

The central government’s attempts to limit farmland conversion by administrative measures are likely to continue to be ineffectual as long as local governments and rural collectives continue to have such strong incentives to convert farmland. Institutional reform is thus critical for improving farmland preservation efforts and increasing land use efficiency in general. Reform efforts are also hampered by fragmentation of authority. The Ministry of Land and Resources has jurisdiction over land but not residential construction, industrial development, or local government finance; the latter are overseen by various ministries, each of which has its own distinct set of interests and concerns. Reform requires a cooperative effort that takes these diverse interests into account.

 

Erik Lichtenberg is a professor in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Chengri Ding is an associate professor of Urban Studies and Planning at the University of Maryland, College Park, and is director of the Chinese Land Policy and Urban Management Program cosponsored by the University of Maryland and Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

This article summarizes their 2004 Lincoln Institute working paper, Farmland Preservation in China: Status and Issues for Further Research, which is available here.

 

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References

Deininger, K., and S. Jin. 2003. The impact of property rights on households’ investment, risk coping, and policy preferences: Evidence from China. Economic Development and Cultural Change, 851–882.

Gale, F., ed. 2002. China’s food and agriculture: Issues for the 21st century. Agriculture Information Bulletin No. 775, Economic Research Service, US Department of Agriculture, Washington, DC (April).

Ho, S.P.S., and G.C.S. Lin. 2004. Converting land to nonagricultural use in China’s coastal province. Modern China 30: 81–112.

Huang, J., S. Rozelle, and M.W. Rosegrant. 1999. China’s food economy to the twenty-first century: Supply, demand, and trade. Economic Development and Cultural Change, 737–766.

Jacoby, H. G., G. Li, and S. Rozelle. 2002. Hazards of expropriation: Tenure insecurity and investment in rural China. American Economic Review 92: 1420–1447.

Jin, S., J. Huang, R. Hu, and S. Rozelle. 2002. The creation and spread of technology and total factor productivity in China’s agriculture. American Journal of Agricultural Economics 84: 916–930.

Ministry of Land and Resources. 2003. Communique on Land and Resources of China, 2002. Beijing.

Smil, V. 1999. China’s agricultural land. The China Quarterly, 414–429.

The fast pace of farmland conversion in the People’s Republic of China is causing alarm among top leaders concerned with food security and China’s ability to remain self-reliant in crop production. This loss of farmland is a direct result of China’s remarkable success in economic development over the past two decades, which has resulted in rapid urbanization and the conversion of enormous amounts of farmland into residential, industrial, commercial, infrastructure and institutional uses. Nearly a decade ago, Lester Brown asked, “Who Will Feed China?” in a book that drew attention to the importance of farmland preservation.

At first glance, visitors to China may not realize there is any problem with food supply or farmland protection because food seems to be abundant. Moreover, concern over China’s acute housing shortage has prompted many economists to prefer a policy that makes more farmland available for housing. Their arguments may be sound in theory. When one looks deeply at China’s land resources and projected growth, however, it becomes easier to understand the rationale for the country’s rigorous efforts to preserve its declining supply of farmland and recognize the farm-related issues and policy challenges that can be expected in the foreseeable future.

Tensions between Land and People

A map of China gives the false impression that land is abundant. Even though the total land mass of China is similar to that of the United States (9.6 and 9.4 million square kilometers, respectively), land suitable for human habitation in China is limited. About one-fifth of China’s territory is covered by deserts, glaciers and snow. Areas that average more than 2,000 meters above sea level and mountainous regions each account for one-third of China’s land, indicating a high level of land fragmentation. Thus, less than one-third of China’s land area is composed of the plains and basins where more than 60 percent of the population of 1.3 billion lives. There are fewer farms in China per capita than in almost any other country. China’s rate of per capita farmland occupation is 0.26–0.30 acre (depending on which official data are used), less than 43 percent of the world average. It is a staggering accomplishment that China is able to feed 20 percent of the world’s population with only 7 percent of the world’s farmland.

The relationship between the Chinese people and their land is further complicated by the uneven distribution of the population. The eastern part of China represents 48 percent of the nation’s territory, but includes 86 percent of China’s total farmland and nearly 94 percent of its population. By contrast, the western provinces feature vast and mostly unusable land. Henan Province, located near the center of China, has the nation’s highest population density. Henan is only one-sixtieth the size of the U.S., but its population is more than one-third of the U.S. population.

This east-west division also reflects striking differences in farmland productivity. In the east, farms generally reach their maximum potential yield, whereas farm productivity in the west is low, and it is difficult and expensive to improve productivity there. More than 60 percent of China’s farms have no irrigation systems, and most of those farms are located in the west. Regions with more than 80 percent of the nation’s water resources have less than 38 percent of the farmland. Around 30 percent of all farmland suffers from soil erosion, and more than 40 percent of farmland in arid and semi-arid regions is in danger of turning into desert.

It seems inevitable that the tensions between the Chinese people and the use of their land will only escalate in the next decade or two, driven in large part by the ambitious socioeconomic development goals set up by the Sixteenth Communist Party Congress in 2003. Those goals call for China’s GDP to be quadrupled and the rate of urbanization to reach 55 percent by 2020. Given the projected population growth from 1.3 billion to 1.6 billion, Chinese cities will become home to 200 to 350 million new urban residents. This remarkable increase in development will require land for all kinds of human needs: economic development, housing, urban services and so forth.

Farmland Preservation Laws

Two principal laws govern farmland preservation efforts in China. The Basic Farmland Protection Regulation, passed in 1994, requires the designation of basic farmland protection districts at the township level and prohibits any conversion of land in those districts to other uses. It also requires that a quota of farmland preservation should be determined first and then allocated into lower-level governments in the five-level administrative chains (the state, province, city, county and township). This important act represents the first time China has imposed a so-called zero net loss of farmland policy. This policy affects only basic farmland, so the total amount of basic farmland will not decline due to urbanization.

 

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Components of Basic Farmland

• Agricultural production areas (such as crops, cotton, edible oils and other high-quality agricultural products) approved by governments
• Farmland with high productivity and good irrigation that have been exploited
• Vegetation production areas for large and mid-sized cities
• Experimental fields for science and educational purposes

 

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There are two kinds of basic farmland protection districts. The first level consists of high-quality farmland with high productivity that cannot be converted to nonagricultural uses. The second level is good-quality farmland with moderate productivity that can be converted to nonagricultural uses, usually after a planned period of five to 10 years. The regulation further stipulates (1) if the conversion of land within farmland districts is unavoidable in order to build national projects, such as highways, energy production or transportation, the state must approve the conversion of land parcels of more than 82.4 acres and the provincial governments must approve those of less than 82.4 acres; and (2) the same amount of farmland lost to conversion must be replaced by new farmland somewhere else.

The second law, the 1999 New Land Administration Law, is intended to protect environmentally sensitive and agricultural lands, promote market development, encourage citizen involvement in the legislative process, and coordinate the planning and development of urban land. The law has two important clauses. Article 33 extends the application of the zero net loss farmland policy in the Basic Farmland Protection Regulation to all farmland. It stipulates that “People’s governments . . . should strictly implement the overall plans and annual plans for land utilization and take measures to ensure that the total amount of cultivated land within their administrative areas remains unreduced.” Article 34 requires that basic farmland shall not be less than 80 percent of the total cultivated land in provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities directly under the central government.

The law reinforces farmland preservation efforts by requiring approval from the State Council for any conversion of basic farmland; conversion of other farmland larger than 86.5 acres; and conversion of other land larger than 173 acres. It further encourages land development in areas that are considered wasteland or that feature low soil productivity. Although the law requires the zero net loss of farmland policy to be implemented at provincial levels, it is actually carried out at the city, county and sometimes township levels.

Assessment of the Farmland Policy

The goals of the farmland preservation laws are to limit development on farmland and to preserve as much existing farmland as possible. Land development patterns and urban encroachment into farmland continue unabated, however. Approximately 470,000, 428,000 and 510,000 acres were converted to urban uses in 1997, 1998 and 1999 respectively, and in 2001–2002 some 1.32 percent of remaining farmland was lost. The actual rate of farmland loss was probably far greater than those officially released numbers. For example, seven administrative units at the provincial level (Beijing, Shanghai, Guangdong, Hunan, Congqing, Jiangxi and Yunnan) reported net farmland losses in 1999.

On closer inspection, the negative impacts of China’s farmland preservation laws may outweigh the gains. These laws have been questioned because they affect other actions that create urban sprawl and the merging of villages and cities; destroy contiguity of urban areas; raise transportation costs; and impose high social costs resulting from clustering of incompatible land uses. More important, they push economic activities into locations that may not provide any locational advantage and adversely affect urban agglomeration, which ultimately affects the competitiveness of the local economy.

The designation of basic farmland is based primarily on the quality of soil productivity; location is not a factor. Because existing development has occurred near historically high-productivity areas, that land is likely to be designated as basic farmland whereas land farther away is not. New development thus results in leapfrogging development and urban sprawl and raises transportation costs, but also creates mixed land use patterns in which villages are absorbed within cities and cities are imposed on villages. These patterns are common in regions with high population density and fast growth rates, such as the Pearl Delta of Guangdong Province. The mixed village and city pattern aggravates an already underfunctioning urban agglomeration that results from a relatively high level of immobility in the population because of the hukou system, which gives residents access to certain heavily subsidized local amenities, such as schools.

By using soil productivity as the criterion for designating basic farmland, site selection for economic development projects becomes constrained, making business less competitive. This policy is also responsible for the ad hoc land development process and the creation of a chaotic and uncoordinated land development pattern. As a result, existing infrastructure use becomes less efficient and it costs more for local government to provide urban services. Overall, the urban economy is hurt.

Furthermore, developers have to pay high land prices, which they eventually pass on to consumers through higher housing prices or commercial rents. Land becomes more expensive because the law requires developers who wish to build on basic farmland to either identify or develop the same amount of farmland elsewhere, or pay someone to do so. The cost of this process will rise exponentially as the amount of land available for farmland is depleted, making housing even less affordable. In Beijing, for instance, land costs alone account for 30–40 percent of total development costs if a project is developed on farmland, but 60–70 percent if the project is developed in existing urban areas.

Perhaps one of the worst aspects of the farmland preservation laws is that they treat farmers unfairly. Land development is far more lucrative than farming, so farmers rigorously pursue real estate projects. In the early 1990s, for example, selling land use rights to developers could generate incomes that were 200–300 times higher than the annual yields from farm production. Farmers and village communes, eager to benefit from booming urban land markets, are lured to develop their farmland. The problem is that farmers whose land is considered basic farmland are penalized by this institutional designation that denies them access to urban land markets, even if their farms may enjoy a location advantage. Farmers from areas not designated as basic farmland are not similarly constrained. This inequitable treatment makes it difficult for local governments to implement effective land management tools and creates social tensions that complicate the land acquisition process, lead to chaotic and uncoordinated development, and encourage the development of hidden or informal land markets.

There are four reasons for the general failure of China’s farmland preservation policy. First, farmland preservation laws fail to give sufficient consideration to regional differences. Even at a provincial level some governments have difficulty maintaining a constant amount of farmland in the face of rapid urbanization. Land resources are extremely scarce in some provincial units, such as Beijing, Shanghai and Zhejiang, where development pressures are strong.

The second reason is the requirement that each of the five administrative levels of government (the state, provinces, municipalities, countries and townships) must maintain an arbitrarily determined percentage (80 percent) of basic farmland without the ability to adjust to pressures of demand and market prices. In some regions, demand is so high that officials look for various alternative ways to convert farmland into urban uses. The most common approach is through establishment of industrial parks, economic development zones or high-tech districts, usually on quality farmland areas at the urban fringe. This occurs for two reasons: to attract businesses and to raise land revenues by leasing acquired farmland to developers. There is a striking difference between the prices paid to farmers for their land and the prices for that same land when sold to developers.

Third, local officials almost always give economic development projects top priority and are easily tempted to sacrifice farmland or rural development to achieve a rapid rate of economic growth. As a result, farmland preservation efforts are doomed to fail wherever development pressure is present. This is not surprising since the farmland preservation laws fail to employ any price mechanisms or provide any financial incentives for either local governments or individual farmers to protect farmland.

The fourth problem is the absence of land markets or land rights in rural areas where Chinese governments tend to rely solely on their administrative power to preserve farmland but ignore emerging market forces in determining uses of resources.

Policy Challenges

In recognition of the importance of food security to China and the pressure of urban development on land supply, the Lincoln Institute is collaborating with the Ministry of Land and Resources on a project called Farmland Preservation in the Era of Rapid Urbanization. The objective of the project is to engage Chinese officials in evaluating this complicated issue and to design and implement farmland preservation plans that recognize regional differences and development pressures, and that introduce price mechanisms and respect for farmers’ rights.

First, three fundamental questions need to be addressed:

• Would a policy to have zero net loss of farmland on a regional basis be better than separate policies in each of the five administrative levels of government, as is currently the case? If so, how are regions to be defined and how can Chinese officials make a regionwide policy work?
• Is it better to have a policy of zero net loss of farmland productivity or a policy of zero net loss of land used for farming? If the former, how can such a policy on productivity be implemented?
• How can farmland be preserved within the context of emerging land markets in rural areas and within a new institutional framework in which the rights of farmers are recognized?

For those interested in land use policies, few countries in the world offer as many dynamic and challenging issues as China. Engagement and dialogue between Chinese and American scholars, practitioners and public officials on these topics will be crucial to the final outcome.

 

Chengri Ding is associate professor in the Urban Studies and Planning Department at the University of Maryland and director of the Joint China Land Policy and Urban Management Program of the University of Maryland and the Lincoln Institute.

 

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Reference

Brown, Lester R. 1995. Who will feed China?: Wake-up call for a small planet. Washington, DC: Worldwatch Institute.

Old-timers in Detroit like to recall the 1950s and ’60s as a Golden Age of urban planning. Under Charles Blessing, the city’s charismatic head planner from 1953 to 1977, Detroit carried out a series of ambitious attempts to reshape its urban landscape. Sweeping aside a century’s worth of tenements and small commercial structures, it created the Mies van der Rohe–designed Lafayette Park residential development just east of downtown, a light industrial park west of downtown, and block after block of low-rise moderate-income housing on the north side. Edward Hustoles, a retired veteran planner of those years, recalls how Blessing enjoyed such status as Detroit’s visionary that over lunch at a nice restaurant he would sketch his plans all over the tablecloth; if a server complained, Blessing would roll it up and tell her to put it on his bill.

Times change. Blessing retired in the 1970s, and by then Detroit was mired in its long-agonizing slide into Rust Belt ruin. The twin scourges of deindustrialization and suburban sprawl, which hurt so many cities in the American heartland, hit Detroit particularly hard. Numerous factories, so modern when they were built in the early 20th century, looked obsolete by the 1950s and ’60s, and were mostly abandoned by the end of the 1980s. The new car-enabled culture of suburbia, aided and abetted by federal highway building and other measures, encouraged hundreds of thousands of residents to flee the city for Birmingham, Troy, and other outlying communities. The exodus was hastened by fraught race relations, which grew especially toxic after the 1967 civil disturbances. Without inhabitants, Detroit’s vast stock of small wood-frame worker housing moldered; arson, crack, metal stripping, blight, and other ills corroded entire neighborhoods, forcing the city to raze block after block of homes in the 1990s and 2000s—a trend accelerated by the 2007–2008 real estate crisis, which compounded a vicious cycle of property tax delinquency and foreclosure, decimating what remained of Detroit’s housing market. Today, the best estimates suggest that at least 24 square miles of Detroit’s 139-square-mile land area are empty, and another six to nine square miles have unoccupied buildings that need to come down. Add in municipal parks that the city no longer maintains and abandoned rights-of-way like old railroad lines, and 25 percent of Detroit—an area larger than Manhattan—is vacant.

By the 1990s, urban planning had become obsolescent as a focus and a guide. A series of mayors tended to latch onto whatever showcase projects came along—the much-maligned Renaissance Center in the 1970s, or casino gaming in the late 1990s. Detroit’s municipal planning department found a new role administering federal community development block grants, and, in recent years, the department had more accountants than planners. But in 2010, then-Mayor David Bing initiated a strategic attempt to address the problem of widespread vacancy and the burden it placed on municipal services and budgets. That effort culminated in 2013 with the publication of Detroit Future City, the 354-page comprehensive framework for how Detroit might strengthen and regrow its troubled neighborhoods and repurpose its empty lots and buildings over the coming decades. Advocating widespread “greening” strategies—including “productive landscapes” that would put vacant land to new use through reforestation, rainwater retention ponds, the installation of solar panels, and food production—Detroit Future City won praise as a visionary new way to think about older industrial cities and to include ordinary citizens in the conversation about their future. “In the annals of civic engagement and community planning, Detroit Future City is probably the most extensive community outreach and planning exercise that I’ve ever encountered,” said George W. McCarthy, president and CEO of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Origins and Essence

By 2010, three years before Detroit would file the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history, the population had dwindled to 700,000 from its peak of 1.85 million in 1950. Then-Mayor David Bing needed to realign city services to account for the diminished tax base and thinning of the urban streetscape. His initial suggestion to reporters that he would move the few remaining inhabitants out of some of Detroit’s most abandoned “ghost” neighborhoods drew blistering comparisons to the urban renewal projects of the past and even hoots of “ethnic cleansing”; the idea was quickly shelved. Also that year, the mayor and top aides staged a series of community meetings called Detroit Works to elicit a dialogue with citizens about the need to rethink how the city should operate in the future. But residents had other ideas. The meetings quickly devolved into chaotic complaint sessions where hundreds of residents demanded better street lights, police protection, and other city services fast.

McCarthy, who was then with the Ford Foundation and a supporter of Detroit’s revitalization efforts, said leaders should have known better. “When you bring normal citizens into the planning process, they enter the exercise as if it’s a public meeting and the way to be heard is to shout the loudest,” he said. “If you’re sincere about civic engagement, you have to take the time to train citizens to be planners. You have to devote a significant amount of time and attention to get people to understand that planning is about making difficult decisions in a constrained environment.”

With funding from the Kresge Foundation and other sources, the city regrouped and hired teams of consultants, including nationally respected planning staffers such as Project Director Toni L. Griffin, professor and director of the J. Max Bond Center on Design for the Just City at the Spitzer School of Architecture at the City College of New York. Under Griffin’s leadership, they began to map out the document that would become Detroit Future City.

The group took pains to avoid the word “plan” when they presented it to the public. Unlike a conventional master plan, which basically creates a map of what uses will go where before the private sector comes in to fill it out with development, Detroit Future City is a strategic framework for thinking about different neighborhood types and how each might evolve given existing trends.

“We did not want to leave the city with static illustrative pictures of what their city could look like,” Griffin says. “There were already lots of those around. We wanted to leave the city with a tool that would enable people to manage change, because as you know Detroit is still very much in flux in terms of its governance, fiscal structures, city services, population loss, and ever-changing composition of land vacancy.”

The framework had to enable decision makers to act as that change was occurring over various periods of time. “It offers different decision-making structures that allow someone to say, if this is your condition today, here are the kinds of options you might think about to move that condition from A to B,” Griffin says. To simplify: If a neighborhood is showing a significant and growing level of vacancy but still retaining some useable housing and commercial stock, the vacant land there could be converted to food production or to a solar panel field to power local businesses. But a neighborhood with little vacancy and with much higher levels of density might plan infill development for its few vacant lots. Rather than suggesting that the corner of Woodward Avenue and 7 Mile Road ought to get a shopping center, the framework offers a series of examples of what might take place given certain neighborhood typologies. The mantra became “every neighborhood has a future, just not the same future.”

Detroit Future City’s greening strategies were particularly important and drew the most attention because of the huge amount of vacant land where development is not a realistic option and probably won’t be for many years to come; perhaps one-third of the entire city cries out for some new purpose and use. The more vacant spots on the map could be rendered productive by the installation of fields of energy-producing solar panels, reforestation, farming, or “blue infrastructure,” such as rainwater retention ponds, bioswales, and canals that provide water for agriculture and that redirect rainwater and snowmelt away from Detroit’s already overburdened combined sewer system. Almost all these uses presumably would be private endeavors but would require city permitting and perhaps other assistance, including zoning changes or partnerships with various philanthropic or nonprofit groups. “You need to have a greening strategy, so you can use this land in ways that, at a minimum, don’t drag down existing populated areas and, at a maximum, enhance the quality of life, economic productivity, and environmental quality for the people of Detroit,” says Alan Mallach, a Detroit Future City consultant, nonresident fellow of the Brookings Institution, and author of Regenerating America’s Legacy Cities, published by the Lincoln Institute.

But the plan also envisions significantly greater population densities in those areas of Detroit already undergoing a rebirth, such as the Greater Downtown area, where young professionals have sparked a recent residential boom and where companies led by Quicken Loans, which moved downtown in 2010, have filled up previously vacant office towers. It suggests that Detroit’s existing hospital and manufacturing corridors could and should see concentrated new investment to beef up job training opportunities and new residential and retail development in those nodes. Key employment districts could be linked by new public transit options, such as the M-1 Rail streetcar line now under construction along Woodward Avenue, the city’s main street, thanks to public-private financing. Construction began in mid-2014 on the $140-million, 3.3-mile line, which will connect downtown from Jefferson Avenue to the city’s New Center area, another hub of activity, running through the rapidly revitalizing Midtown district. The line is expected to be finished in late 2016. If voters approve a new property tax millage expected to be on the ballot in 2016, M-1 could be followed by a regionwide bus rapid transit system to be built out over the next several years.

Mallach describes Detroit Future City “as a reality check against what’s actually happening, against how you’re spending your money, where you’re making your investments, what you’re prioritizing, and so forth.”

“Detroit Future City offers a menu,” he adds. “It doesn’t say this site should become an urban farm; it lays out the options.”

Civic Engagement

Deciding what would happen where would be left to the political process—with neighbors, city leaders, and other stakeholders all taking part. Thus, public input would be critical to success.

In 2012, the Detroit Future City team hired Dan Pitera, a professor at the University of Detroit Mercy (UDM) School of Architecture, to design a new and better civic engagement strategy to harness and direct residents’ desire for change. Efforts ranged from informal chat sessions at a “roaming table,” designed by UDM architecture students and set up at various locations in town, to a series of meetings at community centers, where 100,000 residents engaged in discussions that informed the urban rehabilitation.

During this planning stage in 2012 and early 2013, a new walk-in office in the Eastern Market district allowed residents to meet staffers, see plans, take surveys, and the like. Those working at the office included staffers from UDM’s Detroit Collaborative Design Center, directed by Pitera, and the nonprofit Community Legal Resources. Pitera’s group also created a mobile phone app to encourage community involvement. And the team created 25 color posters keyed to city issues, such as vacant land or community gardens, for distribution by the thousands throughout the city.

During one Saturday morning meeting in 2012 at the Detroit Rescue Mission, some 50 residents got a peek at what various neighborhoods might become depending on current conditions and residents’ desires. Some of the attendees gave positive reviews. “The conversation is just what we need to get back to the real issues,” said Phillis Judkins, 65, of the North End district. And Larry Roberts, 70, who lives in Detroit’s Indian Village neighborhood, said the 2012 public meetings were more productive than the somewhat chaotic mass meetings Detroit Works held in the fall of 2010. “Today it looks like there are people with ideas that can move forward,” he said.

Some skepticism remained, of course, about how many of the good ideas would become policy in the cash-strapped city, and how many might ever be carried out. “If the city government buys into this plan and communicates to us what they’re going to do, I think it will work out all right,” Roberts said.

Under current Mayor Mike Duggan, who took office in 2014, a roster of neighborhood offices have opened to deal more closely with citizens and their concerns than previous administrations had done. The level of community involvement to date has been evidence that Detroiters have not given up on their neighborhoods, even in the hardest hit areas.

Rubber Hits the Road

Happily, concerns that Detroit Future City would sit on the shelf gathering dust like so many previous documents in Detroit seem unfounded. With Kresge’s financial backing and leadership, the Detroit Future City (DFC) Implementation Office was established as a nonprofit charged with realizing the plan’s visions and suggestions. Dan Kinkead, an architect who helped to write Detroit Future City, was appointed director of projects. The group now has a fixed location in Detroit’s New Center district and a staff of about 12, including staffers available through various fellowship programs underway in the city. Kenneth Cockrel, a former president of the Detroit City Council who briefly served as interim mayor after then-Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick resigned in disgrace in 2008, was hired at the end of 2013 to be director of the implementation office.

In early 2015, the implementation office had multiple pilot projects underway in partnership with other organizations. These include:

Solar Fields. Working with Focus: HOPE, a nonprofit job training facility in the city, and a small start-up, the DFC team is planning to cover some 15 acres of vacant land with solar panels. Kinkead estimates that the field could produce five megawatts of energy—enough to power several hundred houses. Planners hope to start the project this year or next, but it was unclear how many people it might employ.

Rainwater Retention Ponds. On Detroit’s east side, the DFC staff is considering the creation of a series of rainwater retention ponds in a residential neighborhood to keep rainwater out of the sewer system. The neighborhood, known as Jefferson Village, had been targeted for new single-family housing some 15 years ago, but that project stalled for lack of funding, leaving dozens of vacant lots and little demand for them. So with funding from the local Erb Foundation, and consulting with the Detroit Water & Sewerage Department, the DFC team is targeting several dozen vacant lots for the treatment. They envision that nearby homeowners could see a rate reduction on their water bills, because the department will no longer have to build and maintain as much big-pipe infrastructure to clean up rainwater that mixes in with wastewater. If the effort proved successful, they would expand it citywide.

Roadside carbon buffers. With the nonprofit Greening of Detroit tree-planting organization, one of DFC’s recommendations—to plant trees as carbon buffers alongside major roads and highways—saw one of the city’s largest-ever tree-planting blitzes in late 2014 on Detroit’s west side near the Southfield Freeway, a major north-south connector. Volunteers planted some 300 trees in one day along a few blocks. When mature, they will absorb at least some of the carbon emissions from the freeway.

Trish Hubbell, a spokesperson for the Greening of Detroit, said that partnering with the DFC implementation team on such efforts raises the visibility of each project, which in turn helps with fundraising. And the DFC team brings a wealth of knowledge on land use issues to any effort.

“Their biggest value is that they have the framework, and so they help steer where things go,” Hubbell said. “The framework adds value to all the opportunities out there.”

 

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The Urban Farming Controversy

One controversial land use the office has championed stems from a trend Detroit is already well-known for—urban agriculture. Over the past 15 years, Detroit has seen well over 1,000 small community gardens started, including such nationally recognized projects as Earthworks and D-Town Farm, each of which covers a few acres. But currently volunteers perform almost all the farming activity, and the food is consumed by neighbors, donated to food banks, or in a few cases sold at local farmers markets. Detroit has undertaken a lively debate in recent years over the possibility of expanding into large-scale for-profit agriculture. Projects like Hantz Farms and RecoveryPark have mapped ambitious plans to convert hundreds of acres to food production. But each effort remains relatively small scale at the moment, as the debate on the wisdom of large-scale farming continues.

Nevertheless, the DFC team seems committed to much greater food production inside the city, both on vacant land and in abandoned factories where hydroponic farming could take place. The DFC team, for example, is working with the RecoveryPark effort to plan a rainwater retention system to help water crops.

At the very least, farming inside the city could help some local food entrepreneurs grow their businesses, create some jobs, and strengthen the tax base, if only on a modest scale. Food production also helps knit communities together around a purposeful activity, raises nutrition awareness, and puts blighted vacant lots and factories to a productive new use. “Detroit has the opportunity to be the first globally food-secure city,” Kinkead said.

But city officials have yet to sign off on large-scale for-profit farming, fearing that nuisance problems including dust, noise, and odors, will get out of hand. Others question whether the tough economics of farming—back-breaking labor performed mostly by minimum-wage migrants—would ever produce the sort of revenue and jobs to justify the effort. McCarthy remains one of the skeptics. “I thought it was a bad idea to try to grow food,” he says. “The economics just aren’t there; the costs are prohibitive, given the fact that you don’t have to drive that far to get out into perfectly good farmland outside Detroit at one tenth the cost.” So the debate continues, with the DFC implementation team working toward greater use of Detroit’s vacant land for food production.

 

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Consensus Building

Rather than ignoring Detroit Future City as the product of a previous administration, Mayor Duggan has publicly embraced it as his guide. His top aide for jobs and the economy refers to his well-worn copy of Detroit Future City as his “Bible” for reshaping the city.

Jean Redfield, CEO of NextEnergy, a Detroit nonprofit working toward a sustainable energy future for the city, keeps a copy of Detroit Future City on her desk. “I use it a lot to go back to specific language they use to talk about specific options,” she said. “I use some of the maps and statistics pretty regularly.” And NextEnergy teams up with the DFC implementation team in planning a variety of green-and-blue infrastructure projects. “Our paths cross pretty often,” she said. “Whenever there’s a Department of Energy or City of Detroit question or challenge around land use, energy infrastructure, street lighting, or solar projects, we’re often working side by side with the folks there.”

As mentioned, the implementation team acts more as a lead advisor to other agencies, such as Greening of Detroit or the city’s Water & Sewerage Department, than as a primary actor. DFC Implementation Director Kenneth Cockrel calls the team a “nongovernmental planning agency.” He explains, “We inform decision making, but we are not decisions makers. Ultimately, what’s in the framework is going to be implemented by the mayor and by city council if they so choose to buy into it. They’re the ones who are going to drive implementation.”

Continuing, Cockrel likens the implementation of Detroit Future City “to what happens when a book gets made into a movie. You don’t film the book word for word and page for page. Some stuff gets left out, other stuff winds up on screen. I think that’s ultimately probably going to be the approach that the Duggan administration will take.”

Like any new organization, the DFC team continues to refine its role and search for where it can contribute most. Kinkead agrees their role may best be captured in a paraphrase of the old BASF corporate slogan: the DFC team doesn’t do a lot of the innovative projects in Detroit; it just makes a lot of those projects better.

“We exist in a squishy world,” Kinkead says. “It’s a different kind of ballgame, but our ability to help others is how we do what we do.”

In early 2015, it seemed clear that many of the innovative ideas at the heart of Detroit Future City—greening strategies, energy production, trees as carbon buffers, new development targeted toward already dense districts—ideas that seemed far-fetched even in 2010, when then-Mayor Bing launched his Detroit Works effort, now approach mainstream status.

“Now, it’s not just the environmentalists or the climate change folk talking about carbon forests; it’s residents and the executive directors of community development corporations,” Griffin says. “Business leaders and philanthropists are talking about the importance of this. A broader spectrum of constituents talking about issues that aren’t necessarily central to their wheelhouse is a very important outcome of the work.”

Perhaps just as important is the widespread realization that Detroit needs to deliver municipal services in a different way, given the realities of the city’s financial woes and population loss. The city successfully emerged from bankruptcy in late 2014, but at best that gave Detroit some breathing room to begin to grow again. If and when growth resumes, the city has to guide it more smartly than in past periods of expansion, when development sprawled across the landscape in haphazard fashion.

The Road Ahead

One reason why the city and its people were ready for a document like Detroit Future City was the deep understanding that deindustrialization and suburban sprawl had led to Detroit’s problems. “Residents began to understand that they were effectively subsidizing the sprawl and disinvestment. They began to think about ways to change these systems to be more efficient,” Griffin says.

As this article was being prepared for publication, Detroit took another big step toward revitalizing its long-dormant planning activities. Mayor Duggan announced that he had recruited Maurice Cox—the highly regarded director of the Tulane City Center, a community-based design resource center for New Orleans, and associate dean for Community Engagement at the Tulane University School of Architecture—to serve as Detroit’s new director of planning. In New Orleans, Cox facilitates a wide range of partnerships among Tulane University, the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority, and the City of New Orleans. In Detroit, among other activities, he will help turn some of Detroit Future City’s general framework into specific planning recommendations.

If innovative planning is back in style, as it appears to be, it’s more decentralized, less focused on big projects, and more attuned to how conditions on the ground might demand different solutions in each neighborhood. And the number of voices heard in planning discussions is greater than ever before. Perhaps Detroit Future City’s final and most important contribution is that it has empowered neighborhoods and citizens as equal partners with high-level professional planners in deciding the future direction of the city.

Indeed, Detroit Future City launched a new age of planning, and it will look little or nothing like that of Blessing’s era. “Planning has certainly returned, but it’s fundamentally different from how it was 50 years ago,” says Kinkead. “In the 1950s and ’60s, the city’s broader planning objectives were often manifest from a single municipal government elite.”

“To move the city forward it takes everybody,” Kinkead says. “It’s not just Detroit Future City. It’s not just the government. It’s not just the business sector. It’s everybody working together.”

John Gallagher covers urban development issues for the Detroit Free Press. His books Reimagining Detroit: Opportunities for Redefining an American City and Revolution Detroit: Strategies for Urban Reinvention are available from Wayne State University Press.

 

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References

Detroit Future City. 2012. Detroit Future City: 2012 Detroit Strategic Framework Plan. Detroit, MI: Inland Press.

Mallach, Alan and Lavea Brachman. 2013. Regenerating America’s Legacy Cities. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Skidmore, Mark. 2014. “Will a Greenbelt Help to Shrink Detroit’s Wasteland?” Land Lines 26 (4): 8–17.