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We ask how environmental justice and urban ecology have influenced one another over the past 25 years in the context of the US Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) program and Baltimore Ecosystem Study (BES) project. BES began after environmental justice emerged through activism and scholarship in the 1980s but spans a period of increasing awareness among ecologists and environmental practitioners. The work in Baltimore provides a detailed example of how ecological research has been affected by a growing understanding of environmental justice. The shift shows how unjust environmental outcomes emerge and are reinforced over time by systemic discrimination and exclusion. We do not comprehensively review the literature on environmental justice in urban ecology but do present four brief cases from the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia, to illustrate the global relevance of the topic. The example cases demonstrate the necessity for continuous engagement with communities in addressing environmental problem solving.

 

This perspective emerged from ongoing dialogue among ecologists initiated by a virtual workshop in 2021. A transdisciplinary group of researchers and practitioners conclude that urban ecology as a science can better contribute to positive futures by focusing on relationships, rather than prioritizing urban structures. Insights from other relational disciplines, such as political ecology, governance, urban design, and conservation also contribute. Relationality is especially powerful given the need to rapidly adapt to the changing social and biophysical drivers of global urban systems. These unprecedented dynamics are better understood through a relational lens than traditional structural questions. We use three kinds of coproduction—of the social-ecological world, of science, and of actionable knowledge—to identify key processes of coproduction within urban places. Connectivity is crucial to relational urban ecology. Eight themes emerge from the joint explorations of the paper and point toward social action for improving life and environment in urban futures.

 

Cities need to take swift action to deal with the impacts of extreme climate events. The co-production of positive visions offers the potential to not only imagine but also intervene in guiding change toward more desirable urban futures. While participatory visioning continues to be used as a tool for urban planning, there needs to be a way of comparing and evaluating future visions so that they can inform decision-making. Traditional tools for comparison tend to favor quantitative modeling, which is limited in its ability to capture nuances or normative elements of visions. In this paper, we offer a qualitative method to assess the resilience, equity, and sustainability of future urban visions and demonstrate its use by applying it to 11 visions from Phoenix, AZ. The visions were co-produced at two different governance scales: five visions were created at the village (or borough) scale, and six visions were created at the regional (or metropolitan) scale. Our analysis reveals different emphases in the mechanisms present in the visions to advance resilience, sustainability, and equity. In particular, we note that regional future visions align with a green sustainability agenda, whereas village visions focus on social issues and emphasize equity-driven approaches. The visions have implications for future trajectories, and the priorities that manifest at the two scales speak of the political nature of visioning and the need to explore how these processes may interact in complementary, synergistic, or antagonistic ways.

 

Our urban systems and their underlying sub-systems are designed to deliver only a narrow set of human-centered services, with little or no accounting or understanding of how actions undercut the resilience of social-ecological-technological systems (SETS). Embracing a SETS resilience perspective creates opportunities for novel approaches to adaptation and transformation in complex environments. We: i) frame urban systems through a perspective shift from control to entanglement, ii) position SETS thinking as novel sensemaking to create repertoires of responses commensurate with environmental complexity (i.e., requisite complexity), and iii) describe modes of SETS sensemaking for urban system structures and functions as basic tenets to build requisite complexity. SETS sensemaking is an undertaking to reflexively bring sustained adaptation, anticipatory futures, loose-fit design, and co-governance into organizational decision-making and to help reimagine institutional structures and processes as entangled SETS.

 

Transitioning infrastructure governance for accelerating, increasingly uncertain, and increasingly complex environments is paramount for ensuring that critical and basic services are met during times of stability and instability. Yet the bureaucratic structures that dominate infrastructure organizations and their capacity to respond to increasing complexity remain poorly understood. To change infrastructure governance, it is critical to understand current conditions, the barriers to change, and the strategies needed to shift priorities and leadership strategy. The emergence of modern infrastructure bureaucratic and organizational structure is first explored. The need to rethink infrastructure as knowledge enterprises capable of making sense of changing conditions, and not simply as basic service providers, is discussed. Next, transformation of infrastructure governance is presented as both a challenge of organizational change as identity and power and leadership capacity to shift between stable and unstable conditions. Infrastructure bureaucracies should create capabilities to shift between periods of stability and instability, emphasizing flexibility where ad hoc teams are given power to make sense of changing conditions and steer the organization appropriately. Additionally, several critical factors must be addressed within organizational power structures, identities, and processes to facilitate change. Allowing infrastructure governance to persist in its current form is likely increasingly problematic for the future and may result in an increasing inability to maintain relevance. 

The unprecedented number of devastating disasters recently experienced in the United States is a clarion call to revisit how we understand our vulnerability in the face of global change, and what we are prepared to do about it. We focus on the case of Hurricane María’s impact in Puerto Rico to underscore five critical concerns in addressing vulnerability and adaptation planning: (i) vulnerability as a product of flows; (ii) how our beliefs about the capacities of ourselves and others affect local vulnerability; (iii) the role uncertainty, politics, and information access play in amplifying vulnerability and complicating adaptation; (iv) the need for a better distribution of risk and responsibility in adaptation; (v) and the challenge of seizing the opportunity of disasters for transformative change. These five issues of concern were particularly evident in the case of Puerto Rico where Hurricane María’s 155 mph winds exposed existing infrastructural vulnerabilities, institutional incapacities, and socio-economic disparities. We argue that addressing these issues requires fundamental shifts in how we prepare for environmental change and disasters in the 21st century. We discuss promising approaches that may assist researchers and practitioners in addressing some of the underlying drivers of vulnerability, stemming from cross-scalar dynamics, systemic interdependencies, and the politics and social relations associated with knowledge, decision-making and action. We argue that society needs to broach the difficult topic of the equity in the distribution of risk in society and the burden of adaptation. Addressing these challenges and response imperatives is a central task of this century; the time to act is now.