Within-city green infrastructure can offer opportunities and new contexts for people to become stewards of ecosystem services. We analyze cities as social-ecological systems, synthesize the literature, and provide examples from more than 15 years of research in the Stockholm urban region, Sweden. The social-ecological approach spans from investigating ecosystem properties to the social frameworks and personal values that drive and shape human interactions with nature. Key findings demonstrate that urban ecosystem services are generated by social-ecological systems and that local stewards are critically important. However, land-use planning and management seldom account for their role in the generation of urban ecosystem services. While the small scale patchwork of land uses in cities stimulates intense interactions across borders much focus is still on individual patches. The results highlight the importance and complexity of stewardship of urban biodiversity and ecosystem services and of the planning and governance of urban green infrastructure.

This study seeks to contribute to a more complete understanding of how urban form influences biodiversity by investigating the effects of green area distribution and that of built form. We investigated breeding bird diversity in three types of housing development with approximately the same amount of tree cover. No significant differences in terms of bird communities were found between housing types in any of the survey periods. However, detached housing, especially with interspersed trees, had more neotropical insectivores and higher overall diversity of insectivores. Based on our results and theory we suggest a complementary approach to managing biodiversity in urban landscapes - instead of maximising the value and quality of individual patches efforts could go into enhancing over-all landscape quality at the neighbourhood scale by splitting up part of the green infrastructure. The relatively small differences in bird communities also suggest that different stakeholder groups may be engaged in management.

Urban infrastructure will require transformative changes to adapt to changing disturbance patterns. We ask what new opportunities hybrid infrastructure—built environments coupled with landscape-scale biophysical structures and processes—offer for building different layers of resilience critical for dealing with increased variation in the frequency, magnitude and different phases of climate-related disturbances. With its more diverse components and different internal logics, hybrid infrastructure opens up alternative and additive ways of building resilience for and through critical infrastructure, by providing a wider range of functions and responses. Second, hybrid infrastructure points toward greater opportunities for ongoing (re)design at the landscape level, where structure and function can be constantly renegotiated and recombined.

Ett gammalt industriområde vid Stockholms universitet kan bli ett föredöme för hur byggprojekt kan ge mer till naturen än vad det förstör. Men om området byggs för tätt förstörs viktiga värden i Nationalstadsparken, varnar kritiker.

Dolt värde av enorma mått. Ett nytt miljonprogram kan förskräcka, men kan vara just vad Sverige behöver. Men vi ska inte upprepa misstagen från förra gången. I stället måste politikerna nu ta fasta på denna unika chans att ta itu med vår tids stora utmaningar som integration, tillväxt och hållbarhet, skriver sex forskare.

As urban ecologists we support developing smoother traffic systems, providing citizens with more easily accessible information, and of course promoting citizen-participation and local democracy in political decision-making. However, and as is normally the common destiny when new models for sustainable development are appearing, investments in these “smarter” models run the risk of making people blind to problems that need more immediate concern. In short, governance is a matter of prioritizing among different goals. Governance is also about making sure that strong and powerful enterprises and business interests do not hijack the public debate

Urban green spaces provide socially valuable ecosystem services. Through an historical analysis of the development of the National Urban Park (NUP) of Stockholm, we illustrate how the coevolutionary process of humans and nature has resulted in the high level of biological diversity and associated recreational services found in the park. The ecological values of the area are generated in the cultural landscape. External pressures resulting in urban sprawl in the Stockholm metropolitan region increasingly challenge the capacity of the NUP to continue to generate valuable ecosystem services. Setting aside protected areas, without accounting for the role of human stewardship of the cultural landscape, will most likely fail. In a social inventory of the area, we identify 69 local user and interest groups currently involved in the NUP area. Of these, 25 are local stewardship associations that have a direct role in managing habitats within the park that sustain such services as recreational landscapes, seed dispersal, and pollination. We propose that incentives should be created to widen the current biodiversity management paradigm, and actively engage local stewardship associations in adaptive co-management processes of the park and surrounding green spaces. Copyright © 2005 by the author(s). Published here under license by the Resilience Alliance.

In these times of global pandemics and climate crisis, social sustainability has become a crucial issue within diverse sectors and disciplines. This article aims to broaden the discussions on social sustainability in general, and in relation to community work within professional social work in particular.

By means of a cross-disciplinary bricolage approach – with a focus on the commons – we aim to construct a holistic view of urban social sustainability. Beginning with the Anthropocene concept, which recognizes the human impact on the Earth’s natural systems and hence highlights the need to include the natural environment as a determinant of good and fair living conditions for all, we remix arguments and examples relating to social sustainability with environmental and spatial dimensions to develop an urban green commons. Our cross-disciplinary perspective extends beyond contemporary social policy by bringing together natural resource management, public health, and spiritual aspects of the commons. In order to fit the plurality of urban contexts across the planet, further critical deliberations are needed, focusing on social sustainability and collective action for sustainable change in each context. 

Many ecosystem services are in decline. Local ecological knowledge and associated practice are essential to sustain and enhance ecosystem services on the ground. Here, we focus on social or collective memory in relation to management practice that sustains ecosystem services, and investigate where and how ecological practices, knowledge and experience are retained and transmitted. We analyze such social-ecological memory of allotment gardens in the Stockholm urban area, Sweden. Allotment gardens support ecosystem services such as pollination, seed dispersal and pest regulation in the broader urban landscape. Surveys and interviews were preformed over a four-year period with several hundreds of gardeners. We found that the allotment gardens function as communities-of-practice, where participation and reification interact and social-ecological memory is a shared source of resilience of the community by being both emergent and persistent. Ecological practices and knowledge in allotment gardens are retained and transmitted by imitation of practices, oral communication and collective rituals and habits, as well as by the physical gardens, artifacts, metaphors and rules-in-use (institutions). Finally, a wider social context provides external support through various forms of media, markets, social networks, collaborative organizations, and legal structures. We exemplify the role of urban gardens in generating ecosystem services in times of crisis and change and conclude that stewards of urban green areas and the social memory that they carry may help counteract further decline of critical ecosystem services. .

It is well known that urban allotment gardens provide important ecosystem services. Their potential to act as sources of local resilience during times of crisis is less appreciated, despite the role they have played as areas of food security during times of crisis in history. Their ability to provide such relief, however, requires that the skills and knowledge needed for effective gardening can be transmitted over time and across social groups. In short, some portion of urban society must remember how to grow food. This chapter proposes that collectively managed gardens function as ‘pockets’ of social-ecological memory in urban landscapes by storing the knowledge and experience required to grow food. Allotment gardeners operate as ‘communities of practice’ with ecosystem stewardship reflecting long-term, dynamic interactions between community members and gardening sites. Social-ecological memories about food production and past crises are retained and transmitted through habits, traditions, informal institutions, artifacts and the physical structure of the gardens themselves. Allotment gardens thus serve as incubators of social-ecological knowledge with experiences that can be accessed and transferred to other land uses in times of crisis, contributing to urban resilience. Conversely, failure to protect these pockets of social-ecological memory could result in a collective ‘forgetting’ of important social-ecological knowledge and reduce social-ecological resilience.

We analyse environmental learning in public-access community gardens (‘PAC-gardens’) in Berlin, representing public green spaces that are collectively managed by civil society groups. Through extensive fieldwork, and drawing upon social theories of learning, we describe learning communities in four PAC-gardens and analyse factors that influence participation and boundary interaction, that is when experiences brought in from the outside encounter socially defined competences. Results show that these PAC-gardens have self-generated social and physical structures, which to different degrees inhibit or facilitate boundary interactions, whereas skills of individuals to put those to work, in combination with the quality of the surrounding neighbourhoods, can be ascribed for creating broader participation and greater diversity in the content of learning about local sustainability. Identified learning streams included learning about gardening and local ecological conditions; about urban politics, and about social entrepreneurship. We discuss results in relation to environmental learning that combats the generational amnesia in cities about our dependence on nature, where PAC-gardens clearly distinguish themselves from more closed forms of urban gardening such as allotment gardens and gated community gardens. We conclude that PAC-gardens that intertwine gardening with social, political and economic practices can create broader and more heterogeneous learning about social–ecological conditions, and help develop sense-of-place in degraded neighbourhoods.

Indigenous groups offer alternative knowledge and perspectives based on their own locally developed practices of resource use. We surveyed the international literature to focus on the role of Traditional Ecological Knowledge in monitoring, responding to, and managing ecosystem processes and functions, with special attention to ecological resilience. Case studies revealed that there exists a diversity of local or traditional practices for ecosystem management. These include multiple species management, resource rotation, succession management, landscape patchiness management, and other ways of responding to and managing pulses and ecological surprises. Social mechanisms behind these traditional practices include a number of adaptations for the generation, accumulation, and transmission of knowledge; the use of local institutions to provide leaders/stewards and rules for social regulation; mechanisms for cultural internalization of traditional practices; and the development of appropriate world views and cultural values. Some traditional knowledge and management systems were characterized by the use of local ecological knowledge to interpret and respond to feedbacks from the environment to guide the direction of resource management. These traditional systems had certain similarities to adaptive management with its emphasis on feedback learning, and its treatment of uncertainty and unpredictability intrinsic to all ecosystems.

A common perspective until recently was that our problem-solving abilities have been improving over the years. In the area of resource and environmental management, for example, there was a great deal of faith in our growing scientific understanding of ecosystems, our bag of increasingly sophisticated tools and technologies, and the application of market mechanisms to problems such as air pollution control and fishery management through individually allocated quotas. However, the experience over the last few decades does not support such optimism (e.g., Clark and Munn, 1986; Ludwig, Hilborn, and Walters, 1993; Gunderson, Holling, and Light, 1995). Many of our resource and environmental problems are proving resistant to solutions. A gap has developed between environmental problems and our lagging ability to solve them. This is coming at a time when the Earth has become an increasingly human-dominated system. Many of the changes in the biosphere, including the modification of landscapes, loss of biodiversity and, according to some, climate change, are driven by human activities. Furthermore, changes are occurring at an increasingly faster rate than previously experienced in human history.

There is an emerging consensus regarding the need to look for broader approaches and solutions, not only with resource and environmental issues but along a wide front of societal problems. A survey of senior American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) scientists revealed an intriguing insight.

Disturbances such as fire, cyclones, and pest outbreaks create variation in natural systems and ecosystem renewal that may be important for the maintenance of biological diversity. Many natural disturbances are inherent in the internal dynamics of ecosystems, and often set the timing of ecosystem renewal processes fundamental for maintaining resilience in ecosystems (Holling et al., 1995).

By disturbance we mean ‘any relatively discrete event in time that disrupts ecosystem community or population structure and changes resources, substrate availability, or the physical environment’ (White and Pickett, 1985: 7). We distinguish between abiotic and biotic disturbances. Abiotic disturbances are those where the direct cause of disturbance is generated by nonbiotic agents. Examples include fires, hurricanes, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, flooding, and drought. Examples of biotic disturbances include insect and pest attacks, predators, invasion of exotic species, and the grazing and browsing of herbivores.

Conventional resource management, based on economic production targets, commonly seeks to reduce natural variation in target resources, because fluctuations impose problems for the industry dependent on the resource (Holling and Meffe, 1996). Control of resource stock variability and flows can be achieved in a number of ways. For instance, by increasing financial investments in technologies for harvesting, a modern fishing industry can invest in larger fleets and more effective gear in order to maintain an even flow of production. Maintenance of high and even flows of monoculture crops in large-scale agriculture may be achieved by investing in various energy inputs, such as insecticides, pesticides, and irrigation.

In the effort towards sustainability, it has become increasingly important to develop conceptual frames to understand the dynamics of social and ecological systems. Drawing on complex systems theory, this book investigates how human societies deal with change in linked social-ecological systems, and build capacity to adapt to change. The concept of resilience is central in this context. Resilient social-ecological systems have the potential to sustain development by responding to and shaping change in a manner that does not lead to loss of future options. Resilient systems also provide capacity for renewal and innovation in the face of rapid transformation and crisis. The term navigating in the title is meant to capture this dynamic process. Case studies and examples from several geographic areas, cultures and resource types are included, merging forefront research from natural sciences, social sciences and the humanities into a common framework for new insights on sustainability.

A weekly magazine on business development issued an analysis of Madonna, the pop star, and raised the question ‘How come Madonna has been at the very top in pop music for more than 20 years, in a sector characterized by so much rapid change?’ A few decades ago, successful companies developed their brand around stability and security. To stay in business this is no longer sufficient, according to the magazine. You must add change, renewal, and variation as well. However, change, renewal, and variation by themselves will seldom lead to success and survival. To be effective, a context of experience, history, remembrance, and trust, to act within, is required. Changing, renewing, and diversifying within such a foundation of stability and maintaining high quality have been the recipe for success and survival of Madonna, and for rock stars such as Neil Young and U2. It requires an active adaptation to change, not only responding to change, but also creating and shaping it. In the same spirit, Sven-Göran Eriksson, coach of several soccer teams in Europe, claimed that it is the wrong strategy not to change a winning team. A winning team will always need a certain amount, but not too much, of renewal to be sustained as a winning team. Sustaining a winning team requires a context for renewal, or ‘framed creativity,’ borrowing from the language of the advertiser.

River flooding and urbanization are processes of different character that take place worldwide. As the latter tends to make the consequences of the former worse, together with the uncertainties related to future climate change and flood‐risk modeling, there is a need to both use existing tools and develop new ones that help the management and planning of urban environments. In this article a prototype tool, based on estimated maximum land cover roughness variation, the slope of the ground, and the quality of the used digital elevation models, and that can produce flood ‘uncertainty zones’ of varying width around modeled flood boundaries, is presented. The concept of uncertainty, which urban planners often fail to consider in the spatial planning process, changes from something very difficult into an advantage in this way. Not only may these uncertainties be easier to understand by the urban planners, but the uncertainties may also function as a communication tool between the planners and other stakeholders. Because flood risk is something that urban planners always need to consider, these uncertainty zones can function both as buffer areas against floods, and as blue‐green designs of significant importance for a variety of ecosystem services. As the Earth is warming and the world is urbanizing at rates and scales unprecedented in history, we believe that new tools for urban resilience planning are not only urgently needed, but also will have a positive impact on urban planning.

A hypothetical model was built, using the STELLA II software program, to test several hunting options for a human hunting group. Different outcomes of possible hunting modes are analysed, such as a change in hunting rate, prey hunted, or species avoided or not avoided by taboos. The model consists of five sectors that reflect a short food chain in an upper Amazonian ecosystem. There is a vegetation sector, a predator sector, and two sectors consisting of browsers and grazers. The last sector represents a human group, known as the Ecuador Achuar. The critical factor analysed is how differences in hunting rate affect a target resource, and how this resource may be affected by general food taboos. The major results of the model are that general food taboos may not be an adaptive short term strategy for hunters, but that a 'moderate' hunting mode may be the most effective option for the human group. Since the model is a simplification of the real world, no general conclusions for management should be drawn from the results.

Over half the world's population currently lives in urban areas; by 2030, nearly five billion people are expected to live in cities (Ash et al. 2008). Between 2010 and 2030, the amount of the built mass on the earth is predicted to double, creating ever-greater demands on the services that nearby and distant ecosystems provide (Grimm et al. 2008). With a greater proportion of humans living in metropolitan areas, urban ecosystems will experience increased land-use and land-cover change. Currently, urbanisation endangers more species and is more geographically ubiquitous than any other human activity; urban sprawl is rapidly transforming critical habitats of global value, such as the Atlantic Forest Region of Brazil, the Cape of South Africa and coastal Central America (Elmqvist et al. 2008). Urbanisation leads not only to increased homogenisation of fauna and flora (McKinney 2002) but also to an impoverished biology in metropolitan areas, which arguably serves as a constant reminder of the presumed unimportance of biodiversity and so may contribute to ‘environmental generational amnesia’ among the greater public (Miller 2005). To gain the much-needed broad-based public support for a sustainable use of ecosystems, both within and outside cities, the places where people live and work need to offer opportunities for meaningful interactions with functioning ecosystems (Rosenzweig 2003, Miller 2005, Andersson et al. 2007, Colding 2007). In this respect, and to help mitigate the growing disconnection of urban residents from nature (Pyle 1978, 1993), the dynamics of property rights determining human relationships to land can have powerful ramifications and be worthy of scholarly analysis to provide propositions about both the manner in which land ownership in cities evolves (Webster 2003) and its potential outcomes, such as the provision of the ecosystem services critical to human well-being (Daily 1997, Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2005). It is increasingly recognised that today's institutions match current changes in ecosystems and their dynamics poorly (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2005, Folke et al. 2007).

Trots att grönområden har stor betydelse för städers klimat och för människors välbefinnande är kunskap om detta bristfällig bland stadsplanerare. Pollinering av växter och grödor, fröspridning eller vatten- och luftrening är arbete som naturen utför och som vi är beroende av i våra samhällen. Hur man med hjälp av ekosystemtjänster kan planera och bygga mer hållbara städer studeras i ett stort internationellt projekt SUPER (Sustainable Urban Planning for Ecosystems Services and Resilience).

Trots att grönområden har stor betydelse för städers klimat och för människors välbefinnande är kunskap om detta bristfällig bland stadsplanerare. Pollinering av växter och grödor, fröspridning eller vatten- och luftrening är arbete som naturen utför och som vi är beroende av i våra samhällen. Hur man med hjälp av ekosystemtjänster kan planera och bygga mer hållbara städer studeras i ett stort internationellt projekt SUPER (Sustainable Urban Planning for Ecosystems Services and Resilience).

In the year 2003, the Stockholm Urban Assessment (SUA) was selected as a sub-global assessment within the global Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA, Ecosystems and human well-being: synthesis. Island Press, Washington, DC, 2005). This chapter revisits SUA and fills in important knowledge gaps in the assessment as well as provides insights on urban resilience building. The chapter applies a critical perspective on the present urban development trajectory of the Stockholm metropolitan area. It emphasizes the need to understand ways in which informally managed green spaces contribute to ecological functions in urban settings. The chapter provides a background of the Stockholm region and the current challenges it faces, followed by a synthesis of the major insights conveyed in SUA related to informal ecosystem management. The chapter concludes by proposing policy recommendations of general implications for urban resilience building.

This thesis analyze local institutions and management practices related to natural resources and ecosystem dynamics, with an emphasis on "traditional ecological knowledge" systems. Papers I, II and III analyze ‘resource and habitat taboos’ (RHTs) with the objective to synthesize knowledge about informal institutions behind resource management. Papers IV and V focus on resource management practices and social mechanisms with a capacity to confer resilience in ecosystems. Ecological resilience is the buffering capacity of ecosystems to incorporate disturbance and yet continue to provide biodiversity and ecological services critical to societal development. Cases for the synthesis were mainly derived from the literature. Examples of RHTs could be grouped in six different categories depending on their potential management and conservation functions. These included both use-taboos and non-use taboos. The former regulates access to, and methods and withdrawal of subsistence resources. These appear to be closely related to traditional ecological knowledge, as it is defined in this thesis. The latter prohibits human use of species and habitats, and is closely related to religious and cosmological belief systems. As discussed, both groups of taboos can be comparable to ethics of academic conservation biology, although rationales behind such ethics differ. RHTs have effects that may contribute to the conservation of habitats, local subsistence resources, and ‘threatened’, ‘endemic’ and ‘keystone’ species, although some may run contrary to conservation and notions of sustainability. It is asserted that under certain circumstances, RHTs, and possibly other types of informal institutions may offer advantages relative to formal measures of conservation. These benefits include non-costly, voluntary compliance features. Results of papers IV and V revealed that there exists a diversity of traditional practices for ecosystem management. These include multiple species management, resource rotation, ecological monitoring, succession management, landscape patchiness management, and practices of responding to and managing pulses and ecological surprises. Social mechanisms behind these practices included a number of adaptations for the generation, accumulation, and transmission of knowledge; dynamics of institutions; mechanisms for cultural internalization of traditional practices; and the development of appropriate world views and cultural values. These traditional systems had certain similarities to adaptive management with its emphasis on feedback learning, and its treatment of uncertainty and unpredictability to ecosystems. Furthermore, there existed practices that seem to reduce social-ecological crises in the events of large-scale natural disturbance. These included practices that create small-scale ecosystem renewal cycles, practices that spread risks, and practices for nurturing sources of ecosystem renewal. These practices are linked to social mechanisms such as flexible user rights and land tenure. It is concluded that ecological monitoring appears to be a key element in the development of many of the practices. Management practices in local communities are framed by a social context, with informal institutions and other social mechanisms, and supported by a worldview that does not de-couple people from their dependence on natural systems. Since management of ecosystems is associated with uncertainty about their spatial and temporal dynamics and due to incomplete knowledge about such dynamics, these practices may provide useful ‘rules of thumb’ for resource management with an ability to confer resilience and tighten environmental feedbacks of resource exploitation to local levels. To link local institutions in cross-scale polycentric co-management arrangements may be a viable option for improving current resource management systems.

Urban sprawl is often characterised as a serious land use problem. It refers to the spread of urban congestion into adjoining suburbs and rural areas, often resulting in the loss of ecosystems and their services. This chapter reviews two of the most prevalent planning strategies proposed to combat urban sprawl, i.e. smart growth (or new urbanism) and green infrastructure planning. The former is predominantly derived from a frustration over the failure of American planning projects, and is increasingly adopted among planners in North American and European metropolitan regions. The latter is predominantly proposed by ecologists and biodiversity conservationists, and has shaped conservation planning in many countries. Both planning strategies propose compact urban development as a way to combat adverse effects of urban sprawl. However, and as pointed out in this chapter, many types of ecosystem services are generated in the developed landscape, also in sprawling suburban settings. It is also important to account for ecosystem services in smart growth projects and to engage a wider set of urban residents in management of these services in order to mitigate ecological illiteracy. The chapter elucidates some of the key characteristics and propositions of both approaches and provides examples of urban designs that hold potential to work as frameworks in contributing to sustainable governance of ecosystem services.