Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
and maintain as many as possible of these natural features, adding paths and family
picnic areas in the natural areas to allow walking and biking—usually with tarmac
pathways in high volume areas to reduce erosion on these routes and to encourage
pedestrian travel. In some cases lakes or golf courses have been created within the
new residential units to provide a core of additional recreational facilities, although
they are more frequent in the higher value areas and use may be restricted to the
local residents (Davies and Herbert
1993
).
Some cities have also deliberately encouraged the preservation and even the ad-
dition of wooded areas within the urban boundary, not only for recreational use, but
also in recognition of the ability of woods to help absorb carbon dioxide emissions
and also to help mitigate the urban heat island effect—a product of the heat genera-
tion and retention in all the urban concrete and brick structures and roads. Other
cities have been fortunate to have large areas of woodland because these were origi-
nally areas of common land preserved from the land market and eventually taken
over by the municipality who took responsibility for the area, such as in the Com-
mon in what is now part of the inner city of Southampton in England. Advocates
of a strong ecosystem policy also argue that particular types of areas around towns
should be preserved from development and kept for public use, namely: prime
agricultural land because of their value in producing food crops; ridges because
of their panoramic views; coastal strips, river banks and flood plains to avoid the
probability of flooding that will occur in most of these areas at some time in the fu-
ture, unless, in the case of rivers, adequate reservoirs for flood prevention schemes
have been built further upstream. Chapter 9 (Resilient Cities) will describe the way
that the experience of earthquakes, typhoons, tornadoes, volcanoes, tsunamis and
floods have led to more support for policies to protect settlements from these natu-
ral events. In the case of flood plains in particular, it must be admitted that local
developer pressure, and even the bribery of public officials in some countries, has
led to a great deal of building in such areas as well as vulnerable coastal areas, with
disastrous consequences when the inevitable inundation occurs.
Urban development, even when green areas are provided, also effectively slice-
up pre-existing habitats, which isolate these areas. So the development of parks
or protected areas has usually created separate environmental niches. Ecologically
they become like islands in oceans; ecocity advocates have noted that such areas
will eventually have far lower numbers and diversity of species (Register
2006
).
So there is increasing support for what amounts to
green connectivity
policies that
connect formerly separate green areas throughout a city. This not only improves
human recreational access and use, but enables animals and birds to more easily
move throughout the area, ensuring the species do not get isolated and suffer the
island syndrome problem. To some extent the green finger or wedge development
described above in Copenhagen and Helsinki has long provided a variation of this
policy. This connectivity principle has been an objective of parks policy in Calgary
(Canada), although designed initially to improve human recreational use, rather
than for ecological reasons. The city has one of the most extensive green parkway
systems in western cities, with almost 800 km of pathways and 10,000 ha of park-
land occupying 12 % of the city (City of Calgary
2012
). Although praiseworthy, it is
