Urban Nature

Urban Nature

Over the past two decades, an "urban nature" movement has established itself throughout the country, identifying a new kind of community-based social and environmental justice advocacy. With an emphasis on community and on impacted groups, the movement has focused on park and open space development. Open space has long been an environmental buzzword, referring to places outside urban areas or at the urban edge where there is little or no development. Earlier open space battles sought to preserve environmental assets, such as habitat, wildlife, and other forms of bio-diversity. They had not been about built environments, where there is little or no existing green space, where density is high, where contamination of the land is often extensive, and where the acquisition of land for parks or recreation seems at best only a distant possibility.

Today, social and environmental justice advocates have begun to consider the idea that the term "Urban Nature" is not an oxymoron but refers instead to the need to re-envision community spaces and to reclaim rather than simply preserve such places. Programs such as community gardens, farmers' markets in low-income communities, re-landscaping projects, and park and recreational opportunities in dense areas are the arenas in which Urban Nature projects take shape. UEPI's Urban Nature Projects and publications reflect that process of re-envisioning the urban landscape.

Read Robert Gottlieb's article Urban Places: Nature and Community in the
City, a version of which appears in Forcing the Spring, Revised and Updated Edition: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement by Robert Gottlieb
(Island Press, June 2005)