Putting a value on landscape

Robert Cooper, BSc, MA, Registered Landscape Architect
Senior Principal, CPG Australia Pty Ltd., Melbourne, Australia

Paper originally delivered to the 2010 International Urban Design Conference, Canberra

Abstract

‘Landscape’, is the totality of conditions in which our settlement takes place and is increasingly expressed in tradable terms - but is this to the detriment of ‘good design’?

Our historical refusal to value ecological, cultural and designed aspects of our ‘landscapes’ is addressed and contrasted with the focus on ‘landscape’ costs and benefits in economies founded on competition.  Melbourne, Australia, provides examples of frameworks for analysing, quantifying and prioritising the allocation of resources to ‘landscape’.  Green Infrastructure thinking and new design currencies are discussed.

It is concluded that ‘good’ urban design is possible and indeed facilitated by this direct participation on the economic playing field but a clear framework for urban design values assessment and application is still lacking.

Keywords
Grey to green, urban landscapes, green infrastructure.

Australian urban areas remain disconnected from the environment and urban design has a key role in reminding us what we need to value in our landscapes and the terms on which these values can be realised.  Green Infrastructure thinking offers urban design a framework with which to achieve this.

Our politico-economic system is such that ‘value’ has become a very frequently used word.  In urban design, ‘value’ usually refers to the worthiness and relative status of a proposition or element.  This usage has had to defer increasingly to ‘value’ translated into the absolute monetary or exchange units that seem to strengthen the credibility of urban design decisions.  The following discussion looks at this latter form of value in the context of impacts on local practice in Victoria, Australia and reveals that the other meaning of ‘value’ as moral principal and accepted behaviour also remains most relevant.

In the context of this paper, ‘urban design’ means the broad collaborative process of urban planning and shaping rather than the discrete discipline: ‘landscape’ refers to the totality of conditions, natural and constructed, physical and abstract, which not only pervade our urban areas but which also form the setting in which our settlement takes place.

Truly urban areas existed many thousands of years ago, the first domestication of plants and animals having encouraged the more permanent settlement that occurred in a slow but steady ‘urban revolution’.  However, early cities remained vulnerable to the same broad environmental and political change as the landscapes to which they were linked and they succeeded or failed accordingly, succumbing to sea, sand, climate and hostility.  This vulnerability disappeared when the relatively recent cities of the ‘industrial revolution’ suddenly acquired an ability to sustain themselves in apparent isolation from the environments of their supporting non-urban hinterlands.  These cities were cradles for the arrogant rejection of natural and human values that we still struggle to reverse.

Australian cities date from this time and thinking and having quickly freed themselves from reliance on sea communications they spread inland rapidly with a persistent disregard for environment.

Some time in the second half of the nineteenth century it became apparent that the values of cities as centres of creativity and innovation were being realised at an unacceptable cost to many of their inhabitants.  Early responses focused entirely on human health and welfare values, symbolised by the 1847 opening of the world’s first publicly funded urban park in Birkenhead, England.  With less fanfare yet with massive beneficial consequences the nineteenth century rise of the publicly funded municipal engineer, health officer and teacher brought about urban landscape improvement through improved sanitation, water supply, drainage, transport and education.

Relatively recently, in the second half of the twentieth century, this commendable concern for the environment of human wellbeing matured into complementary concerns for the massive impact that our urban / industrial systems are having on broader environmental values.  The 1962 publication date of Rachel Carson’s ‘Silent Spring’ ¹ is an often cited milestone.

In 1967, two years before we stepped out of our environment and on to that of the moon, the Smithsonian Institution addressed urban issues in a symposium entitled ‘The Fitness of Man’s Environment’.  The stated Premise of the symposium cautioned: ‘that something is somehow wrong with man’s relations with his environment’ and ‘our increased command over nature has not reinforced our humaneness’².  Architect Phillip Johnson’s paper³ bemoaned expenditure on ‘going to the moon’ and suggested that $US100 billion should be spent on United States city improvements over two years.  This was the nearest the Symposium came to putting monetary values on landscape but landscape architect Ian McHarg came closest to setting a new value system, one based on the ‘natural systems’ of his then uncompleted ‘Design with Nature’⁴: ‘We must abandon the value system of our inheritance which has so grossly misled us.  We must see nature as process within which man exists…⁵.

Urban design over the last 50 years has consciously or otherwise participated in the translation of the Smithsonian ‘something is somehow wrong’ into efforts to value features and processes that remedy the rift between ‘city’ and ‘environment’.

During this time the notion of ‘ecosystem services’ has provided a broadening context and language for giving a value to landscape.  The term refers to the goods and services that are provided by the natural environment and was brought into prominence in the oil-shocked 1970’s to stimulate public support for biodiversity conservation.  ‘Services’ are extensive and can be summarised as; ‘Supporting’ (nutrient recycling, oxygenation, soil formation); ‘Provisioning’ (food, fuel, fibre, water); ‘Regulating’ (climate, water quality, flood mitigation) and ‘Cultural’ (education, recreation, aesthetic services).  These services are in poor shape - in 2005 the United Nations cautioned that ‘60% of the ecosystem services evaluated are being degraded or used unsustainably’⁶.

The need to change our approach to the urban areas in which most people live is obvious.  Unfortunately, ecosystem services do not readily translate into values directly usable in urban design or indeed into any sort of absolute or exchangeable values⁷.

Stemming from ecosystems services thinking, the relatively recent notion of ‘green infrastructure’ has, however provided both a spatial and a multi-layered values framework suited to urban design applications.  Described as ‘the next big thing in the green world’ to follow green building and green energy ⁸ it highlights the importance of the natural and the managed green areas in both urban and rural settings in decisions about land use planning strategy, design, development and maintenance.

As promoted by the AILA⁹ the power of the green infrastructure approach is that it assists the classification and maximisation of the environmental functions actually or potentially fulfilled by spaces and built elements.  Multifunctionality is stressed – that is, the integration and interaction of different environmental functions or activities on the same piece of land.  Unlike traditional, ‘grey’ infrastructure features such as roads and power lines, green infrastructure is often hard to visualise.  The ‘green’ values of farm land are similarly often under-appreciated.  A ‘grey-green continuum’ of thinking assists in the planning process: the functions of an area of intact woodland might result in it being a ‘very green’ component of an urban area and a local park a ‘green’ component with a cycle path ‘grey / green’.

The relevance of green infrastructure to urban design is highlighted by the fact that the term is in use in government and the broader market, appearing in budget headings and ascribed economic values particularly where it plays critical roles in ameliorating flood risk or poor air quality.  It applies as equally to water, soils, microclimate, flora and fauna systems as well as anthropocentric functions such as health, recreation and green buildings.

The Global Financial Crisis has highlighted the fragilities of economic values systems and diverted thought and expenditure away from environmental concerns.  However, at the time of writing activity at global, national, state and local level points to a continued, sincere drive to value the landscape of our urban areas.

At world level the UN has engaged former Deutsche Bank economist Pavan Sukhdev to head up the groundbreaking TEEB (The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity) report, dubbed the ‘Stern for Nature’.  Values at stake are immense with estimates that $45 billion per annum expenditure on environmental conservation will yield $4 to $5 trillion benefit per annum.  Sukhdev’s thinking on valuing environment is clear: ‘What you buy and sell is stuff that is able to be identified, privately owned and marketed. A market does not sell a public good. Pigs will fly before markets trade public goods. The only way you can get a public good into the marketplace is to first create a private liability or private asset’¹⁰.  This is a statement that has lessons for urban design.

At national level in March 2010 The Australian Federal Government in its ‘The State of Australian Cities’ stressed the health, wellbeing and biodiversity values realised by the design and better management of the urban environment¹¹.

At state level in Victoria in April 2010 the State Government Parks Victoria was a major supporter of the Healthy Parks Healthy People Congress¹² which was focused on the values of open space in terms of physical and mental health and the robustness of our communities.

At a local level in July 2010 Melbourne City Mayor Robert Doyle in reviewing the past ten years of the development of the massive Docklands area¹³ expressed the urban design view that too much attention had been given to the area’s buildings and not enough to the spaces between them and to community infrastructure.  Two additional hectares of this newly ‘designed’ inner urban suburb have subsequently been pledged for future recreation and open space, thereby promoting the value of such urban features.

World wide attention has focused on the value of carbon either as a liability or an asset.  At the time of writing, the local Australian debate on this value and how to reflect it through taxation or trading is without conclusion.  As a result direct urban design responses to carbon are without structure despite the supporting implementation framework offered by green infrastructure.

There are, however, other fundamental values under debate.

One of the first formal environmental values to affect urban design in Victoria emanated from Victoria’s ‘Native Vegetation Management – A Framework for Action’ which introduced the ’Net Gain’ concept¹⁴ and sought to be ‘a strategic, whole of landscape approach’.  One of the most immediate environmental effects of urbanisation is clearance of habitat.  The ‘Net Gain’ legislation is intended to place values on ecology that encourage retention and incorporation into the urban green infrastructure to yield ecosystem services benefits.  To do so, values have been exchanged into a new ‘currency’, the Habitat Hectare.  The State has been mapped to define the Ecological Vegetation Classes (EVC) or communities that would theoretically occur at any given place and vegetation is valued in terms of its degree of intactness compared to the relevant EVC.

For example, a hectare of woodland that through damage or other reasons is only half the ecological quality of what it theoretically could be achieves a value of 0.5 Habitat Hectares.  The ‘invoice’ for removal becomes the cost of establishing 0.5 Habitat Hectares elsewhere.  However, this tantalisingly simple equation has also been criticised for neutralising other legislation and devaluing the Habitat Hectare currency to a point where ‘trading’ should cease, to use the language of the market place.  It is often too readily overlooked that ‘Net Gain’ mandates a graduated approach.  Firstly all steps must be taken to ‘avoid’ loss of value by keeping assets intact, in-situ and relevant to the urban area.  Secondly, if impacts are unavoidable, they must be ‘minimised’ by foregoing or undertaking ‘less efficient’ development (in other words ‘payment in kind’) before the last resort of ‘offsetting’ which is funding the replacement of vegetation elsewhere.

Although urban design processes have for some time been conducted with a heightened awareness of ecological issues, these processes, even at initial strategic planning stages, have proven all too able to lead to the conclusion that desired urban layouts can be purchased, thus forfeiting green infrastructure values.  In practice the difficulty of revegetation and the maintenance of an ecological community to mature values are not properly emphasised.

This concern about the complexities of environmental balance sheets was highlighted by the Greens party in objecting to the recent formal expansion of Melbourne to a new Urban Growth Boundary¹⁵.  As part of the expansion the Victorian State government intends to acquire 15,000ha of grasslands on the edge of Melbourne to offset the loss of 6,900ha within the growth area, interpreted by the Greens as ‘In return for the guaranteed, irreversible destruction of high quality grasslands we are going to get a statement of intent to purchase other land and manage it’¹⁶.

Another  set of formal environmental values influencing urban design in Victoria in which the ‘currency’ analogy works better are those applied in the case of urban storm water management and indeed, Melbourne Water uses the word ‘currency’ in its literature¹⁷.

A statutory requirement under the Sustainable Neighbourhoods Clause 56 - Victoria Planning Provisions is that urban stormwater management systems for all new residential subdivisions and redevelopments are designed and managed to meet the current Best Practice Environmental Management objectives.  These objectives include the on-site retention of the following percentages of the typical urban storm water annual load: suspended solids 80%; phosphorus 45%; total nitrogen 45%; litter 70%. Similar provisions apply to industrial and commercial projects.  Nitrogen has been selected as the common currency of value assessment for the contribution as it is typically the limiting pollutant.

The expectations placed on the storm water drainage infrastructure of both new and rejuvenated urban areas have changed radically in a short time.  Developers have a choice of either meeting requirements on site or making a financial contribution for treatment elsewhere.  The commercial and social appeal of the associated green infrastructure has led urban designers to expect support for the accommodation of elements of the ‘water sensitive urban design’ treatment train whether working on a regional or a street scale.

It is tempting to believe that the visual appeal of the open water and indigenous plants used in water quality control, the likely continuity with existing drainage corridors and the potential for networking with other open space systems are all seen as worthy and positive values that lead to the creation of wetlands and adjacent open space.  In reality, drainage functions are valued because they are strongly prescribed by laws that protect life and property and command more adherence than those defining ecological values.

However, whether dealing with redeveloped urban street rain gardens or new regional scale wetlands, the task of the urban designer in maximising integration and multi-functional benefits can be undertaken in a positive atmosphere of acceptance.  This contrasts to practice not long ago when the engineers in an urban design team were only tasked to size and hide required drainage pipes or provide the dimensions of the grassed bowls necessary to accommodate and retard flows in times of heavy rain.

Whilst the values of ‘EVC’ and Nitrogen’ remain somewhat intangible they have been more readily locked into the urban design process than seemingly more abstract yet scientifically supported ‘health’ values.  The recent Healthy Parks, Healthy People Congress in Melbourne focused on the physical and mental well-being costs / benefits of the provision of access to open space.  The Congress was supported by significant speakers and sponsors¹⁸ and it revisited in more empirical and more prolific form the arguments behind the creation of the world’s first urban park referred to above.

In concert with this Congress, the State Premier, John Brumby, announced free entry to the State’s parks from 1 July 2010.  Although the Premier did not put it this way, he was responding to the need to readjust aspects of the green infrastructure values system to reflect not merely the economic value of access to open space but to also express his government’s ‘values’ in the sense of accepting the moral principal that people have a right to open space. 

Recent debate on ‘values’ in Melbourne’s new urban growth areas has focused on the Growth Areas Infrastructure Contribution (GAIC)(19), a levy on land value increases that is expected to fund up to 15% of the cost of state funded transport and social infrastructure (including parks) in growth areas.

Government estimates in 2009 put the value of a hectare of unzoned farm land at $15,000 to $35,000 and when rezoned at $225,000 to $450,000 ($365,000 on average)¹⁹.  In this context the cost of providing land for and building a new one hectare local open space (currently over $1.2M) is reasonable.  Although reference to ‘a million dollar park’ may draw attention, the property development industry routinely undertakes this sort of planned green infrastructure provision as an acknowledged essential part of building new urban areas.  The actual average expenditure by developers on growth area public domain provision, excluding land costs, works out at an economical $5,000 per residential building lot.

There is, therefore, broad acceptance of the value of expenditure on ‘landscape’ – but there is just cause to question if an adequate ‘landscape’ values framework is yet in place to guide expenditure.  In addition, the affect of the GAIC on the urban design of new areas and their multi-functional environmental values is yet to be seen.

The greyer the infrastructure the more easily it seems its green qualities are valued.  A recent, unpublished Melbourne urban design study of a road / rail grade separation proposal showed that although the infrastructure costs were in the order of $50M, there would be a benefit / cost ratio of 1 to 1.9.  A wide range of benefits were costed and included reduced congestion and therefore reduced vehicle emissions, reduced accidents and associated social costs, urban consolidation and business efficiency benefits and the amenity values of a more appropriately provisioned and vibrant public environment.

This accounting uses recognised government valuation techniques, discounted cash flow analysis and includes parameters connected to urban design quality with which urban designers are familiar.  Infrastructure projects proceed or hold on the basis of such information.  As reviewed above, local and global thinking is at a point where this form of consolidated accounting needs to be more formally extended to ‘landscape’ using a spatial values framework such as that offered by a green infrastructure approach, supported by an appropriate project ‘scorecard’ review system.

The starting point of this paper was the disconnection between urban areas and the environment.  We are still looking for a values framework to facilitate this connection.  Whereas the local urban design community has clear goals for the preservation and creation of water quality and public realm values, the immobility and connectivity of ecological values and the time and resources required to create them means that it remains difficult to incorporate or recreate these values within urban areas.  There is clearly more work to do to establish and agree what ‘landscape’ values our urban areas require and a need to move from a two-dimensional plan view of these values as interruptions to the urban form and on to a four dimensional view of what further benefits they may yield for future communities.

Careless talk of markets and currencies suggests we are nearer a solution to the Smithsonian ‘something is somehow wrong’ than we really are.  Ian Thompson, a philosopher and landscape architect²⁰, in looking for ‘sources of values in landscape architecture’ began by commenting that ‘Money only works because there are other sorts of value which are worth having in their own right.  Another way of putting this is to say that money is a proxy for some sorts of values’.  We urban design practitioners continue to design urban areas but do not yet have a clear vision of what values we want to see in our cities and why.

Notes

1. Carson, Rachel (1962), Silent Spring, Houghton Mifflin – a book that revealed not only the misuse of pesticides and the environmental damage created but also, in its aftermath, the unwillingness of industry to accept criticism.

2. Smithsonian Institution (1968), The Fitness of Man’s Environment – papers delivered at the annual symposium, February 16-18 1967, Smithsonian Institution Press.

3. Ibid. paper by architect Phillip Johnson, ‘Why We Want Our Cities Ugly’.

4. McHarg, Ian (1967), Design With Nature, Natural History Press.

5. Smithsonian Institution op. cit. paper by Ian McHarg, ‘Values, Process and Form’.

6. The United Nations Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2001 to 2005 synthesised existing data to appraise the state of the environment, determine trends and guide actions.

7. Hertzler, G. (2009) Dynamic non-market valuation of ecosystem services. Final Report to Australian Government, Land & Water Australia – contains detailed mathematics and some candid comments, for example ‘In general, we can’t value ecosystem services without first measuring the values that people have for the environment. We have a dilemma….A much simpler and theoretically more satisfying approach consults a citizen jury to estimate a schedule for the social price of natural capital under realistic policies’.

8. New Civil Engineer, February 2009 – ‘Engineers are pretty clued up on green buildings now. We understand the concept of green energy. But are we up to speed on the subject of green infrastructure?  Green infrastructure is the next big thing in the green world. It turns the focus of attention to improving the management of the "bits between the buildings" as modern economies struggle to upgrade their performance on all things environmental’.

9. Australian Institute of Landscape Architects ‘Adapting to Climate Change - Green Infrastructure’ Policy Statement 2009

10. Pavan Sukhdev interviewed by Tom Levitt, news editor of The Ecologist, 22nd January, 2010.

11. Report by the Australian Federal Government, Infrastructure Australia, March 2010, The State of Australian Cities.

12. The inaugural International Healthy Healthy People Congress, Melbourne April 2010

13. Speaking at Docklands: The Second Decade, summarised in the Victorian State Government press release 8 July 2010.

14. DNRE (2002) (the then Victorian State Department of Natural Resources and Environment) Victoria’s Native Vegetation Management – ‘A Framework for Action’.

15. Victorian State Government Growth Areas Authority Information Sheet, July 2010, announcing that the GAIC Provisions are in force from 1 July 2010.

16. Greens Greg Barber, MLC, Member for Northern Metropolitan Region, Upper House of the Victoria State Parliament, 25 May 2010, speaking against the GAIC.

17. Urban Stormwater: Best Practice Environmental Management Guidelines CSIRO 1999 (electronic edition published by CSIRO publishing 2006).

18. Healthy Parks, Healthy People op cit – sponsors included the Victoria State parks and open space organisation, Parks Victoria and Beyond Blue, an organisation dealing with mental welfare and in particular the illnesses referred to collectively as ‘Depression’.

19. Victorian State Government Growth Areas Authority Information Sheet, June 2009, Supplementary Information on GAIC related to land costs.

20. Thompson, Ian (2000), Ecology, Community and Delight – Sources of Values in Landscape Architecture, E & F N Spon.