CITIES AND THE GLOBAL

POLITICS OF THE ENVIRONMENT

Series Editors: Michele Acuto,
Joana Setzer and Elizabeth Rapoport

BLUE
BIOPHILIC
CITIES
Nature and Resilience
Along The Urban
Coast

Timothy Beatley
Cities and the Global Politics of the Environment

Series Editors
Michele Acuto
University College London
London, United Kingdom

Elizabeth Rapoport
Urban Land Institute
London, United Kingdom

Joana Setzer
London School of Economics and Political Science
London, United Kingdom
Aims of the Series
More than half of humanity lives in cities, and by 2050 this might extend
to three quarters of the world’s population. Cities now have an undeniable
impact on world affairs: they constitute the hinges of the global economy,
global information flows, and worldwide mobility of goods and people.
Yet they also represent a formidable challenge for the 21st Century. Cities
are core drivers not only of this momentous urbanisation, but also have a
key impact on the environment, human security and the economy. Building
on the Palgrave Pivot initiative, this series aims at capturing these pivotal
implications with a particular attention to the impact of cities on global
environmental politics, and with a distinctive cross-disciplinary appeal that
seeks to bridge urban studies, international relations, and global gover-
nance. In particular, the series explores three themes: 1) What is the impact
of cities on the global politics of the environment? 2) To what extent can
there be talk of an emerging ‘global urban’ as a set of shared characteristics
that link up cities worldwide? 3) How do new modes of thinking through
the global environmental influence of cities help us to open up traditional
frames for urban and international research?

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/series/14897
 Timothy Beatley

Blue Biophilic Cities

Nature and Resilience Along the Urban Coast
Timothy Beatley
School of Architecture
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, Virginia, USA

Cities and the Global Politics of the Environment

ISBN 978-3-319-67954-9    ISBN 978-3-319-67955-6 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67955-6

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 Preface and Acknowledgements

Blue Biophilic Cities builds upon and extends several earlier book projects,
including Blue Urbanism (2014), which was an initial attempt at fleshing
out some of the main ideas discussed here. The chapters that follow seek
to integrate more clearly the concepts of blue urbanism and biophilic cit-
ies, and also build on my earlier work on biophilic city planning and
design. I argue that coastal cities offer special opportunities to foster deep
connections to the wondrous marine environment around them—indeed
that we must begin to understand that “nature in the city” includes those
organisms, habitats and natural processes that may less obvious but are no
less important or worthy of wonder. As coastal cities take steps to recon-
nect to the marine realm, they will have chances to build, grow and design
in ways that will make them more resilient in the face of rising sea levels
rand climate change.
A special impetus for this book arises from an ongoing documentary
film project, which is nearing completion. With a tentative title similar to
this book (Ocean Cities), this collaboration has led to interviews with key
individuals, site visits to key blue cities, and much of the content in the
pages that follow. Many thanks are due to Chuck Davis, my filmmaker-­
colleague, who has helped shape the ideas in the film and who has worked
so creatively and diligently to make it a reality. It is hoped that this book
will serve as an important supplement or companion to the film, which
builds on an earlier documentary venture, The Nature of Cities, which
aired on many Public Broadcasting System stations around the USA. We
have similar high hopes for the new film. The latter relies heavily on

v
vi PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

interviews with blue–urban leaders around the country and the world,
and I thank these many people for their time and for sharing their con-
siderable insights.
A number of interviewees who shared their knowledge are due thanks.
These include Josh Byrne, James Cason, Carrie Chen, Calder Deyerly,
Murray Fisher, Heidi Hughes, Roland Lewis, Adam Lindquist, Theodora
Long, Alan Lovewell, Jane Lubchenco, Bruce Mabry, David McGuire,
Peter Malinowski, Wallace J. Nichols, Kate Orff, Bob Partrite, Orrin
Pilkey, Alexander Rose, Sandra St. Hilaire, Jason Scorse, Paul Sieswerda,
Peter Singer, Lindsey Stover, Stena Troyer, Harold Wanless and Julien
Zaragoza. Most of the interviews were in person, often in conjunction
with on-camera filming, and some were by phone.
In several places I draw from a Planning Magazine column I write
every other month called “Ever Green.” In Chap. 4, discussions of
Ocearch’s efforts at tagging and monitoring sharks draws on an earlier
longer draft of a column in Planning Magazine, as does a discussion of
Baltimore’s Healthy Harbor Initiative in the same chapter. A great many
stories and interviews are conveyed in the following pages to follow. I
hope I have represented them accurately, but as usual I take full responsi-
bility for any errors in fact or emphasis.
Some important ocean issues are not dealt with here, or only in pass-
ing. The problem of plastics and ocean garbage, and efforts to control
and collect them, are not addressed, nor are the many promising efforts
to generate power from the ocean. Readers specifically interested in these
topics are referred to the earlier book, Blue Urbanism.
 Contents

1 Future Cities: The Blue and Biophilic   1

2 Planning for the Balance of Danger and Delight  19

3 An Unsustainable Bounty from the Blue: Cities to

the Rescue?  39

4 Making the Marine World Visible: Fostering Emotional

Connections to the Sea  57

5 Rethinking the Blue–Urban Edge  79

6 Just Blue (and Biophilic) Cities 103

7 Conclusions and Trajectories: Future Cities that are

Blue and Biophilic 115

Bibliography 133

Index 137

vii
 List of Figures

Figs. 1.1 and 1.2 Singapore has emerged as an exemplar of a biophilic

city and has changed its official motto from Singapore
Garden City, to Singapore City in a Garden. Image
credits: Tim Beatley 4
Fig. 1.3 Blue biophilic cities seek to rethink the many ways
they impact or connect with the marine world,
including through the harvesting and consumption
of seafood. Image credit: Tim Beatley 8
Fig. 1.4 The sea lions on Pier 39 in San Francisco are a major
attraction, and a glimpse of blue wildness nearby.
Image Credit: Tim Beatley 11
Fig. 1.5 A goal of Blue Biophilic Cities is to provide extensive
contact and connection with the marine world. Here
joggers in Coogee Beach, near Sydney, Australia, enjoy
a remarkable coastal walkway with dramatic views.
Image credit: Tim Beatley 15
Fig. 2.1 New York City is expanding its water transportation
network in many ways, including through water taxis
and by doubling its ferry service. Image credit:
Tim Beatley 21
Fig. 2.2 Brooklyn Bridge Park, shown here, is one of New
York City’s new waterfront parks, and illustrates the
city’s new emphasis on physical and visual connections
to water. Image credit: Tim Beatley 24

ix
x List of Figures

Fig. 2.3 Mr Trash Wheel, shown here, is located in the

inner harbor of Baltimore, Maryland, where it
utilizes river current and solar energy to collect
waste and debris. Image credit: Adam Lindquist,
Healthy Harbor Initiative 27
Figs. 2.4 and 2.5 Miami Beach has been elevating roads in
neighborhoods such as Sunset Beach, shown here.
It creates an interesting physical disconnect between
street level and storefront entrances, and sometimes,
as shown on the right, a sheltered seating area for
customers. Image credit: Tim Beatley 30
Figs. 2.6 and 2.7 Rotterdam has employed a variety of urban design
strategies to retain and control water. Shown here is
the Bethemplein—a so-called “water plaza” that serves
to collect and retain rainwater, but on sunny days adds
a public space to the neighborhood. Image credit:
Tim Beatley 35
Fig. 3.1 The Pikes Place Fish Market is an iconic institution in
Seattle, Washington, and a popular tourist destination.
The market is now only selling fish that are sustainably
harvested. Image credit: Tim Beatley 42
Fig. 3.2 Along the edges of Sydney’s South Beaches there are
many opportunities to find and interact with marine
life. Shown here is one of the many signs erected by
Randwick Council to help residents look for and
identify some of the more common marine species
they are likely to see. Image credit: Tim Beatley 44
Fig. 3.3 The Fog Harbor Fish House Restaurant in San
Francisco has committed to serving only sustainably
harvested seafood. Here the general manager show
the author the so-called “white board” in the kitchen,
which summarizes and keeps track of all the seafood
purchased and served in the restaurant. Image credit:
Tim Beatley 46
Figs. 3.4 and 3.5 Calder Deyerley, shown here, is proud of his family’s
fishing heritage. He fishes along the Californian coast
near Monterey using sustainable techniques, and sells
his fish to local restaurants and to the local CSF.
Image credit: Tim Beatley 48
Fig 3.6 Oyster aquaculture is one promising and more
sustainable option for producing food from the sea.
In New York Harbor, the Billion Oyster Project is
 List of Figures 
   xi

attempting to use oysters to educate residents on

and connect residents to the harbor ecosystem, and
is directly engaging high school students in this
program. Image credit: New York Harbor School 53
Fig. 4.1 The release of “drift cards” shown here, is a way to
engage the public in studying how quickly and
extensively potential oil spills from tankers might
travel through the Strait of Georgia, near Vancouver,
British Columbia. Image credit: Andrea Reimer,
Georgia Strait Alliance 59
Fig. 4.2 The nonprofit Ocearch has been tagging and tracking
great white sharks and, through social media, helping
to educate about and build new emotional connections
to these majestic marine animals. Image credit: Ocearch 62
Figs. 4.3 and 4.4 One of the most effective ways to engage children in
the marine realm is to take them into the ocean.
Shown here are images from the so-­called Seagrass
Adventure, where fifth-graders are lead into the water
to see what kinds of marine life they can find. This is
one of the most popular programs of the Marjory
Stoneman Douglas Biscayne Nature Center, Miami.
Image credit: Tim Beatley 66
Fig. 4.5 Pier Into the Night, is an event in Gig Harbor,
Washington, where divers send images in real
time to a screen on a public pier. Here families are
mesmerized by what the divers are finding. Image
credit: Tim Beatley 69
Fig. 4.6 Billion Oyster Project engages high school students
from the New York Harbor School in the raising,
monitoring and studying of oysters placed in New York
Harbor. Image credit: New York Harbor School 74
Figs. 5.1 and 5.2 1 Hotel Brooklyn Bridge is an example of a growing
number of hotels that embrace sustainability. Most
impressively, it incorporates biophilic design principles
in many different ways, including through a prominent
green wall in its lobby. Image credit: Tim Beatley 82
Fig. 5.3 The water views walking across the Brooklyn Bridge
in New York City are spectacular. Image credit:
Tim Beatley 84
Fig. 5.4 The Sydney Harbor Bridge is a prominent landmark
in the city, and it is now possible to climb to its top.
Image credit: Tim Beatley 85
xii List of Figures

Figs. 5.5 and 5.6 One of the most spectacular and beautiful coastal
walks is from Bondi Beach to Coogee Beach, in Sydney,
Australia. It is popular with both residents and tourists.
Image credit: Tim Beatley 86
Fig. 5.7 Gordon’s Bay Underwater Nature Trail, near Sydney,
Australia, is very close to the shoreline and easily
accessible by visitors and residents. Image credit:
Tim Beatley 88
Fig. 5.8 Australian rookpools provide an unusual opportunity
for a more natureful swimming experience—one that
blends the experience of a municipal pool with that of
swimming in a more open ocean environment. Image
credit: Tim Beatley 90
Fig. 5.9 The “floating wetlands” have been placed in Baltimore’s
inner harbor. Adam Lindquist, shown here, runs the
Healthy Harbor program, which is responsible for
these floating wetlands. Image credit: Tim Beatley 95
Fig. 6.1 Through an initiative of the Baltimore Parks
Department, kids from underserved neighborhoods
learn all about kayaks, including how to sit in and steer
them, and then they experience being on the water
often for the first time. Image credit: Tim Beatley 105
Fig. 6.2 An alleyway in an underserved neighborhood in
Baltimore, Maryland, receives an “Alley Makeover.”
Image credit: photo by Adam Stab; alley art design
by Adam Stab and Leanna Wetmore 107
Fig. 6.3 A rendering of what the 11th Street Bridge Park in
Washington, DC, will look like when completed.
Image credit: Courtesy OMA + OLIN 109
Fig. 7.1 Students of the New York Harbor School help to
grow and monitor oysters as part of the Billion Oyster
Project. Image credit: New York Harbor School 118
Fig. 7.2 New York City has opened up many new parks along
its waterfront in recent years, including this one along
the Hudson River, adjacent to one of the city’s most
popular bike routes. Image credit: Tim Beatley 120
Fig. 7.3 Beach combing and shell collecting are some of the
many ways in which urban residents can enjoy nearby
marine environments. One of my family’s favorite
pastimes is collecting and creatively displaying colorful
coquina clam shells. Image credit: photo by Tim
Beatley; credit for the idea of displaying coquina’s
in this way, and by creatively framing them, goes to
Anneke Bastiaan 124
 List of Figures 
   xiii

Fig. 7.4 The blue urban nature pyramid provides a way to

begin to understand and visualize the minimum
amounts of daily marine nature we need and might
have available in a blue biophilic city. Image credit:
original concept by Tanya Denckla-Cobb; image by
Tim Beatley 126
Fig. 7.5 Octopus mural, Fremantle, Western Australia. Image
credit: Paul Weaver 129
 CHAPTER 1

Future Cities: The Blue and Biophilic

Abstract We live on the blue planet and, increasingly, an urban planet.

Yet we often don’t connect these realities. This chapter begins to explore
these important blue–urban connections and argues that marine nature
offers remarkable opportunities to promote wildness, health and healing,
and a deeper sense of place. Blue cities can be biophilic cities. Cities around
the world are beginning to seize these opportunities to overcome the
“ocean blindness” that is a major obstacle to these city-ocean connections.
Appreciation for nearby marine nature and wildness will continue to grow,
and planning and design will increasingly reflect this.

A recent story in The Economist declares in its opening sentence: “Earth

poorly named.”1 It ought to be called the water planet, or just blue. More
than two-thirds of the surface of the planet—a vast area of the planet’s
living space—is water, so we have named it poorly indeed. Much of our
experience as a species has been in the terretrial realm, where we have lived
and evolved, so perhaps it is understandable that we have taken a blinds
eye. Our expectation of the oceans has been for them to perpetually offer
up a bounty of seafood, to serve as receptacles for human pollutants of
many kinds, and act as transport highways, connecting cities and settle-
ments throughout the world, linking cultures and economies.

© The Author(s) 2018 1

T. Beatley, Blue Biophilic Cities, Cities and the Global Politics of the
Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67955-6_1
2 T. BEATLEY

These same qualities of invisibility, or “ocean blindness” as The

Economist calls it, are what largely explain why oceans today are in such
trouble. We have difficulty seeing the ramifications of the many ocean
degradations we have wrought and their long term cumulative effects
(though this is becoming increasingly evident). Out of sight, out of
mind—though marine health and marine life may be nearer to urban resi-
dents than we think (and potentially much more “seeable” and “know-
able,” this book will argue).
Just as we are the blue planet so too are we increasingly the urban planet.
As a city planner this does my heart good, and while cities today face a
range of problems and challenges, many believe they represent the best
hope for improving the quality of human life and expanding economic and
social opportunity. As we seek to create a more sustainable world, cities
must increasingly be a key element, perhaps the key element in such strate-
gies. We argue increasingly for the need for denser, more compact cities,
where it is possible to walk everywhere, reducing dependence on automo-
biles. We seek to develop more sustainable ways to feed and house urban
populations and we invite more sustainable forms of infrastructure, includ-
ing bikes paths, public transport and renewable energy.
The goal of creating more dense, compact cities in turn raises a ques-
tion of the role of nature in urban life. Can we design and build more
sustainable places in ways that maintain, indeed foster, new connections
with the natural world. At the core of this goal is a belief (a key one that I
hold, which will be explored in the pages that follow) that we need nature
in our lives. We need to have daily, indeed hourly contact with nature.
Nature is not something optional, but absolutely essential to leading
happy, healthy and meaningful lives.
At an intuitive level many of us appreciate the positive benefits of
nature. A stroll in the woods, or time spent tending a garden deliver clear
and visceral improvements in mood, in reducing stress and in inducing
more creativity. Evidence has been mounting showing that contact with
nature has substantial mental health benefits and is a potent antidote to
chronic stress.2 We also know there are many other benefits—evidence
from psychology suggests that we are more likely to be generous in the
presence of nature, more likely to cooperate and more likely to think lon-
ger term.
Rachel Carson wrote eloquently about the importance of wonder in our
lives, and here nature is uniquely suited to it. In her influential essay (later
published as a book) she hoped for every child to have an indestructible
 FUTURE CITIES: THE BLUE AND BIOPHILIC 3

sense of wonder “as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disen-
chantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are
artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.”3 For Carson, the
marine edge was an especially potent and powerful place for stimulating
this wonder, and for sharing it with others, in beautiful books such as The
Sea Around Us.4
In the terrestrial realm we are privileged that enjoying nature can take
many forms, such as watching birds and listening to their songs, walking
in an urban forest, planting and tending a garden, perhaps in one’s front
or back yard, or balcony if one lives in a high-rise building. But there are
also many forms of marine nature nearby that we must begin to better
recognize as opportunities for biophilic connection and that is one of the
key messages here. Much of marine nature is mysterious and difficult to
see because it is inaccessible, under water, far away. But in coastal cities
around the USA and the world, New York to San Francisco, from Seattle
to Rotterdam, from Singapore to Perth, urban populations have remark-
able amounts of blue nature, remarkable amounts of blue wildness nearby.
Such marine nature must be seen through the lens of biophilia, and cities
on the coastal or marine edge understood as blue biophilic cities.
E.O. Wilson, Harvard University biologist, entomologist and conser-
vationist, deserves much of the credit for introducing the concept of bio-
philia, first to the environmental and conservation community, then more
generally to broader society. Biophilia refers essentially to the innate con-
nection we have with nature, our innate affiliation and emotional bonds
with the natural world. We have co-evolved with nature, biophilia says, so
it is not at all surprising that we tend to be more at ease, happier and more
creative when we are surrounded by nature.
What are Biophilic Cities? They are cities that are nature-rich or nature-­
abundant, of course—cities with extensive numbers of trees and amounts
of greenery, where wildlife is welcomed in, where neighborhoods make it
easy to spend time outside. These are cities frequently described with ref-
erence to their natural qualities—cities that have achieved a high percent-
age of tree canopy cover, for instance, or a high percentage of residents
living in close proximity to a park or greenspace.
In 2013 we launched a new global Biophilic Cities Network in an effort
to connect cites putting nature at the center of their design and planning,
sharing stories, comparing notes about effective tools and helping to
inspire each other and to advance the global biophilic cities movement
(Figs. 1.1 and 1.2).5
4 T. BEATLEY

Figs. 1.1 and 1.2 Singapore has emerged as an exemplar of a biophilic city and
has changed its official motto from Singapore Garden City, to Singapore City in a
Garden. Image credits: Tim Beatley
 FUTURE CITIES: THE BLUE AND BIOPHILIC 5

A number of cities in the network, notably Singapore and Wellington,

have done much to study, raise awareness about, and conserve and protect
marine environments around them. They are inspiring stories, to be sure,
but they are only emerging examples of Blue Biophilic Cities. There is
much more to do and many more ways coastal cities especially can connect
with and support the marine realm.

The Blue City is a Biophilic City

How does, or how could, biophilia manifest in a marine or coastal urban
context? Blue Biophilic Cities can be described as cities that do not ignore
a marine context, but rather celebrate it. They are cities that seek to appre-
ciate marine nature and understand that much of the biodiversity and
nature around will be marine.
More specifically, blue cities that are Biophilic Cities—Blue Biophilic
Cities—could be described as follows:

• cities where residents actively spend time on, near, or underneath the
water near and around them, whether boating, sailing, strolling or
hiking near the water’s edge, participating in a variety of recreational
pursuits and hobbies, from scuba diving and snorkeling to ocean and
harbor swimming that bring them in close contact with the marine
world and help to shape a sense of connection to the marine
environment;
• cities that seek to maximize moments of awe and wonder and under-
stand the marine world as a nearby place of immense biodiversity and
majesty, recognizing it as a source of opportunities for urban experi-
ences that soften, uplift and deliver joy;
• cities that view nature and ecology holistically, that put marine life at
the core of their view of the natural world in which they sit;
• cities that actively connect residents to the marine world and that
embrace a sense of caring for and protecting marine life;
• cities that attempt to reduce individual and collective consumption
that negatively impacts the marine world, both near and far. Blue
Biophilic Cities understand they are duty-bound to take steps to
reduce the size of their ecological footprint on the world’s oceans.
There is an ethical duty to reduce the ecological impact but also an
affirmative responsibility to do what is possible to actively conserve
and protect the marine world. Blue Biophilic Cities establish marine
6 T. BEATLEY

protected areas where it is possible locally and do what they can to

assume active leadership and support for larger reserves, including
those potentially hundreds or even thousands of miles away;
• cities that work to include marine education in schools and that seek
to educate all citizens about marine life and the threats and pressures
currently being experienced. Achieving a basic (and even advanced)
level of marine literacy is an important goal in all Blue Biophilic
Cities.

It might also be said that these cities seek to shape a connection to

marine nature that is “whole of life.” That is, a connection that begins at
an early age, runs through childhood and extends into adulthood and into
one’s senior years. It is a love of the marine realm that is long-lasting, deep
and fairly continuous. Richard Louv has written compellingly about the
ways that children today grow up disconnected from nature—time spent
outside in nature replaced with screen time, an inability to recognize com-
mon species of flora and fauna, parental worries about safety and a shift
away from teaching natural history, among the many causes.6 In Biophilic
Cities exposure to and learning about nature starts at an early age and
continues throughout life. Schools include hands-on outdoor learning
and integrate nature into their curricula at every stage. And these oppor-
tunities continue in later years as we increasingly recognize the benefits
and meaning nature takes on. Opportunities to engage in blue nature, it is
argued here, ought similarly to be available throughout one’s life.
It is important to recognize the role of the blue in the biophilic, and
that is a major theme of this book. We are the blue planet, as Sylvia Earle
and others frequently tell us. And yet we seem to need constant reminding
of this. Cities, especially it seems, have little explicit recognition of their
marine position in the world, even when they are perched on the edge of
sea.
As former National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
administrator Jane Lubchenco said recently in an interview for our film
about blue cities, “Oceans are essential to all life on Earth.”7 Yet they are
in serious trouble and in quick decline in many ways and in many dimen-
sions. Oceans are “warmer, more acidic, hold less oxygen, [are] more
impoverished than ever,” and the biggest problem Lubchenco argues—
bigger than climate change and overfishing—is the lack of understanding,
the lack of public awareness about oceans and how essential they are to
our collective future. Half the world’s oxygen, she says, derives from
 FUTURE CITIES: THE BLUE AND BIOPHILIC 7

oceans, and some 3 billion people on the planet rely on the bounty of the
sea for their primary source of protein.
There is little doubt that ocean and marine environments are bearing
much of the brunt of population and development pressures. Contaminated
with immense volumes of plastic and other waste, and absorbing much of
the world’s carbon, it is showing many signs profound degradation and
decline—coral reefs dying in the face of acidification, fish and marine
organisms shifting in the face of rising sea temperatures.
July 2017 witnessed a dramatic event as an iceberg “the size of
Delaware” broke away from the Larsen C ice shelf in Antarctica.8 A 2016
study published in Nature sheds some light on the significance of melting
Antarctic ice. Modeling earlier climate eras, the ominous conclusion is that
a melting Antarctica gets much of the blame for those historic high sea
levels: “Antarctica has the potential to contribute more than a meter of sea
level rise by 2100 and more than 15 meters by 2500, if emissions continue
unabated.”9 Even a meter of sea level rise will be too much for cities such
as New York and Miami to handle (Fig. 1.3).
On the other hand, there are immense benefits and ecological services
we gain from oceans, though many may be in decline or diminished in the
future. The blue economy is worth about $21 trillion in annual income,
according to the UN.10 We can’t afford to ignore the ocean, ecologically
or economically.

Blue Wonder, Marine Magic

We need healthy oceans and I believe most people would care about them
if given the chance and if fully aware of their plight, what we are losing and
the impact their destruction is having on us. Why this lack of awareness?
Some of it, perhaps most of it, derives from the physical and emotional
disconnect from the watery, marine realm. It may not be far away in terms
of distance, but worlds away in terms of perception and emotional prox-
imity. “Out of sight, out of mind,” explains a lot says Lubchenco.
Filming recently on the waterfront in Vancouver, we heard from
Christianne Wilhelmsen, director of the Georgia Strait Alliance, about the
challenges of fostering ocean awareness even in a city where water is such
a given. “Look at any brochure of Vancouver, it will show water, guaran-
teed. Yet we still exist in a highly urbanized environment where people can
grow up never really recognizing that they are part of an ocean.” And as
Wilhelmsen says Vancouverites don’t necessarily see how an ocean context
 8
T. BEATLEY

Fig. 1.3 Blue biophilic cities seek to rethink the many ways they impact or connect with the marine world, including
through the harvesting and consumption of seafood. Image credit: Tim Beatley
 FUTURE CITIES: THE BLUE AND BIOPHILIC 9

affects them directly, and they don’t appreciate the many ways that their
actions and behaviors affect the condition of that ocean and the organisms
living in it. These are perennial challenges it seems.
The good news is that there is an urban marine renaissance under way,
a rediscovery of the urban marine setting, and that many cities around the
world are recognizing the importance of their water and ocean settings
and taking impressive steps to connect citizens to them.
Much of this work is happening through local governments, but a lot
of it is also happening through the remarkable work of nonprofits and
other local harbor and ocean conservation groups. These include the work
of the Georgia Strait Alliance in Vancouver, and Friends of the Seattle
Waterfront. They include the work of the Healthy Harbor Initiative in
Baltimore and the Waterfront Alliance in New York City, itself a coalition
of 950 organizations. And there are a variety of new and creative initiatives
under way to connect residents, to celebrate marine nature, as well as to
grow and build in ways that moderate future risks.
But there are immense obstacles of course. “Ocean blindness” charac-
terizes much of our official urban and environmental planning. Maps of
parks, green spaces and biodiversity rarely extend beyond the shore’s edge
and we carry with us, unfortunately, our mental maps that are highly ter-
restrial in their bias. In an interview with Murray Fisher, founder of the
New York Harbor School, Fisher spoke of these mapping and perceptual
biases. “When people are doing work about nature in New York City they
often forget about the harbor. We’re just trying to get that back at the
table, we want to have the harbor back at the table when discussing plan-
ning. And we’d love those maps [of urban nature] to go underwater and
to show what’s there.”11 We have a poor understanding of baseline marine
nature and biodiversity in cities such as New York. A blue biophilic focus
might (we hope) overcome these realities.
A major theme of this book is that the two realities—of a wondrous
marine nature, a therapeutic blue world that enhances the quality of urban
life on the one hand, and the increasing dangers of sea level rise and cli-
mate change—are indeed reconcilable. They are both real and important
streams of reality that coastal and marine cities must confront, and can.
Often the solutions (many I outline in this book) can respond to and
address these two realities at once—we can prepare and adapt to sea level
rise and the dangers of coastal living precisely through design and plan-
ning and other initiatives that bring us closer to the wonderful nature
around us.
10 T. BEATLEY

Cities, then, can and must aspire to a new more integrated vision of
becoming both blue and biophilic. Cities of the sea, as I am calling them here,
compellingly merge the principles of blue urbanisms and biophilic cities.

Why As Urbanists We Need and Must Care

for Oceans

That water is an immense asset for blue cities is undeniable. And evidence
is emerging about how deep and profoundly we are drawn to being around
water. Wallace J. Nichols, author of bestselling book Blue Mind has been
a pioneer in pulling together the evidence we have about the therapeutic
and health benefits of water.12 Blue Mind is the first book of its kind mak-
ing the case for contact with water in all of its different forms and formats,
from swimming pools to sensory float tanks to beaches and shorelines.
Few people have done more to emphasize the benefits of water than
Nichols and he convenes a conference every year that pulls together
researchers and activists with an interest in the power of water. Blue Mind
is a remarkable book that summarizes the literature and science surround-
ing how we experience and react to water in all its forms and places. It gives
a compelling case for beginning urban planning and design from a water’s
vantage point—oriented parks, public spaces, viewsheds, placement of
streets and buildings—in ways that maximize access and connection to
water. Many cities are taking this philosophy and approach (Fig. 1.4).
A sea turtle researcher and conservation advocate, J lives with his family
a few feet from the beach in Carmel-by-the-Sea, south of San Francisco. We
filmed J on that incredibly beautiful stretch of coastline, a place many are
drawn to walk and stroll. J speaks a lot of the contrast between what he calls
“red mind” and “blue mind.” Red mind refers to the too-oft state of mind
where we are harried and busy, worried, stressed out, struggling to meet
deadlines, scanning the multiple electronic screens we most likely possess.
Our blue mind is the opposite—a mental state where we are relaxed,
where we are replenished and restored. “We get this restorative quality,”
Wallace tells me, “from many different things. It could be a great meal, it
could be talking with our friends, or it’s art, or music.” But there is some-
thing especially beneficial about water. “Water seems to hold a special place.”
Nichols go on to explain the evolutionary basis for the restorative quali-
ties of water. Water has been an “imperative” for the human species, some-
thing essential for survival. “So when we’re by the water that itch is being
scratched, that need to be positioning ourselves relative to water.” Even
Fig. 1.4 The sea lions on Pier 39 in San Francisco are a major attraction, and a glimpse of blue wildness nearby. Image
FUTURE CITIES: THE BLUE AND BIOPHILIC

Credit: Tim Beatley

11
12 T. BEATLEY

more profoundly, Nichols understands water and water-rich settings are

the “backdrops for our lives”:

It gives us a backdrop to romance and big ideas. It allows us to hear our own
thoughts more clearly. It’s a source of solace, peace, a sense of freedom, a
place to grieve, to mourn…So it’s a backdrop to every great part of our lives.

Water, waves, beaches, harbors, rivers, all of those watery realms of life
that play such important roles are places we are hardwired to want to be
and to enjoy. “Water gives life, it makes life possible, but it also makes life
worth living,” Nichols says.
The academic research supports what we feel when we are near to water.
There is evidence from large panel studies that show we report higher levels
of health and wellbeing the closer we live to coastlines, controlling for other
variables.13 These effects seem especially apparent when we are living within
five kilometers of a shore’s edge. And at least some of this improved health
seems to be the result of coastal residents getting greater levels of physical
exercise.14 Many of the Blue Biophilic Cities described herein reflect com-
mitments to providing physical access and opportunities for time spent
strolling, walking, hiking, running, shell-­collecting, or just reflecting and
would confirm these research findings. There is a kind of blue medicine and
blue therapy in the waters and shore edges around blue cities.

Medicine and Wildness

Few stories are as convincing about blue therapy as some of those coming
out of the world of surfing. Nichols writes about the former army veteran
Bobby Lane who returned from war with post traumatic stress disorder
(PTSD) and an inability even to sleep. Suicidal, Lane participated in a surf
therapy program that changed his life and literally, he says, saved his life. I
heard Lane describe first hand these gut wrenching experiences at the Blue
Mind conference in Washington in 2015.
Operation Surf is the program Lane participated in, and is a terrific
example of the power of water. Aimed at veterans experiencing PTSD and
depression, and often with serious injuries, the program teaches partici-
pants to surf by pairing them with experienced surfers. The program takes
place over six days and is run by the nonprofit Amazing Surf Adventures
(ASA). At least one study shows that this form of “ocean therapy” leads to
a significant reduction in depression and in PTSD symptoms, even 30 days
later (though the reduction in symptoms lessens).15 This surf therapy also
 FUTURE CITIES: THE BLUE AND BIOPHILIC 13

leads to a significant increase in a sense of self-efficacy. A wonderful short

film (made by Kellen Keene) presented on the ASA website provides first
hand testimonials of the life-altering effects of Operation Surf. One vet-
eran speaks of how surfing changed his perception of his injury, while
another speaks of the smiles that spread over him. Lane speaks of the
“sense of peace” that he experienced and how he no longer had the desire
to commit suicide.16
Efforts in cities like Boston and Seattle to re-establish physical connec-
tions with water in part reflect this view of the profound health benefits
that contact with water provides. In Boston, the example of Spaulding
Rehabilitation Hospital is telling. Relocated from an older site, the new
facility seeks to take full advantage of its harborfront location. It faces the
water, with patient rooms maximizing views of the water and providing a
physical connection to Boston’s HarborWalk. The profound healing pow-
ers of the harbor are not lost on doctors, nurses and the designers of the
next generation of hospitals and medical facilities.
The blue provides elements of wildness and adventure that are hard to
find elsewhere. And wild spaces and places that are closest to where urban
residents live are often in the marine realm. Murray Fisher, founder of the
New York Harbor School, speaks passionately of the prospect of re-­wilding
marine environments, including New York Harbor. One of his signature
initiatives, the Billion Oyster Project, has this as a goal.
Marine environments, near and far, though with a history of degrada-
tion, remain remarkable places of wildness. As municipal sewage is better
controlled in cities like New York and Boston, and as water quality
improves, they become yet wilder. Fisher describes the re-wilding
New York Harbor, as a “powerful concept,” one that can bring inspire and
motivate and bring people together. And where else will re-wilding in cit-
ies be feasible? Harbors and near-to-city waters represent “one of the only
places where you could re-wild a natural area without disturbing the exist-
ing human uses.”17
Christianne Wilhelmsen speaks of the importance of this blue nature to
the health and quality of life in cities. Orca whales are residents of the
waters around Vancouver and are the logo for the Georgia Strait Alliance.
When the orcas appear, the “entire city shuts down and people run to the
shore.” It is clear that when given the chance urbanites respond to marine
nature in a deep emotional way.
Similarly the residents of New York City are re-cultivating a love of
whales, in this case humpback whales have been returning to the waters of
this city, and for a couple of years in a row, the city’s harbor. Summer of
14 T. BEATLEY

2017 saw humpbacks return to the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco,
offering similar delight to residents there.
We now have evidence about our innate attraction to nature, our desire
and need to affiliate with nature and living systems, the core of the idea of
biophilia. Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson has done much to make this idea
mainstream, and much research has been done lately in psychology, medi-
cine and public health, even economics, to bolster the evidence.18
The reactions of New Yorkers or San Franciscans seeing humpback
whales, or Vancouverites seeing orcas, are visceral demonstrations of the
power of nature, and the innate pull it has on us. We don’t often talk
about wonder and awe in urban planning circles, but we should. The
marine life all around us can serve as a constant source if we let it and if we
actively work to cultivate and foster a sense of awareness of, and care
about, nature.
It is telling that some of the biggest draws in coastal cities involve some
connection to marine nature. The California sea lions on Pier 39, in San
Francisco, draw hundreds of visitors every day, for instance. Originally
they showed up unexpectedly, lounging on the boat docks of the marina.
Being heavy animals, the pier now has a special set of reinforced floating
docks to accommodate them, recognizing their permanent status as occu-
pants of the San Francisco waterfront.
An equally important dimension of a blue biophilic city is a more ethi-
cal one. While we can and must emphasize the mental and physical health
benefits of a proximity to water, and the many other benefits we gain from
the oceans, we must be careful not to leave our argument there. It is a key
premise of this book that ocean nature is a significant ingredient in creat-
ing a meaningful urban life. Yet, we hope that by fostering and strengthen-
ing these connections with the marine world we will begin to see and
understand an ethical obligation to protect it, to conserve it and to exer-
cise restraint on how we use and treat the marine habitats around us.
There is a biocentric ethical sensibility—a recognition of the intrinsic
moral worth of marine nature that must be given importance alongside
the many more anthropocentric reasons. This larger urban–ocean ethic
can in turn serve as the basis for supporting (and advocating for) ocean
species, habitats that may exist many hundreds or thousands of miles away
and for which direct personal connections may be harder to see. I have
much hope that in fostering new connections to the nearby sea, a larger,
ethic and ethos will emerge (Fig. 1.5).
Fig. 1.5 A goal of Blue Biophilic Cities is to provide extensive contact and connection with the marine world. Here jog-
gers in Coogee Beach, near Sydney, Australia, enjoy a remarkable coastal walkway with dramatic views. Image credit: Tim
FUTURE CITIES: THE BLUE AND BIOPHILIC

Beatley
15
16 T. BEATLEY

Many cities around the world are re-discovering their harbor and coastal
settings and investing in them. There is a growing re-assessment of marine
nature as an incredible resource to fully take advantage of the opportunity
for urban residents to connect to wild nature and the opportunity for awe
and wonder in daily urban living. Investments in blue–urban nature pays
immense dividends, in terms of quality of life, opportunities for recre-
ation, and mental health benefits. The water around us in cities offers
remarkable respite and therapy, even a passing glimpse of water provides
important benefits.
That the planet is grappling with serious environmental and social chal-
lenges goes without saying, and the future vision and agenda of blue bio-
philic cities will fall within this larger global frame and challenge. In 2015,
countries adopted the Agenda for Sustainable Development, and 17
Sustainable Development Goals.19 Several of these goals are of special rel-
evance given the topic of this book, including Goal 11 (Sustainable Cities
and Communities) and Goal 14 (Ocean Conservation). There is every
hope and expectation that the specific ideas contained in this book—and
the vision of cities more connected with, and working to actively conserve
and cherish the marine nature around them, will help in many ways to
advance these goals.

Some Concluding Thoughts

The concept of biophilia holds that as a species we have co-evolved with
nature and that we carry with us our ancient brains that reflect this deep
evolutionary history. We are happier, healthier, able to lead more mean-
ingful lives when in close contact with nature. The evidence mounts that
we are even likely to be better human beings when we have nature around
us: we are more likely to be generous, to be cooperative, to think longer
term when we are in the presence of nature. The nature we need must be
all around us where we live and work, not only in a distant site we visit
once or twice a year. We need daily, even hourly doses of nature. The
insight of biophilia has ignited a global urban movement called biophilic
cities, the vision is one of compact, dense cities that are sustainable and
resilient, but immersed in nature. Biophilic cities put nature at the center
of design and planning and take a whole-of-city approach that recognizes
the necessity of nature at all urban scales—from room or rooftop to region
and all the spaces in between.
 FUTURE CITIES: THE BLUE AND BIOPHILIC 17

The marine realm represents a complex, wondrous place of nature near

where millions of urban residents live and work. There is great potential
for this blue nature to shape and influence in many positive ways the qual-
ity of future urban life. We know, and there is increasing supporting evi-
dence of, the many ways in which the urban blue is biophilic. Blue cities
are biophilic cities, I have argued here. In the chapters that follow I tell
some of the many stories of coastal cities designing with this marine nature
in mind. There are now many inspiring stories of cities connecting resi-
dents to this wondrous nearby marine world, but also effectively preparing
for the serious perils presented by climate change and sea level rise. It is an
exciting and daunting time for advancing this new important model of
global urbanism that is both blue and biophilic.

Notes
1. “How to Improve the Health of the Ocean,” The Economist, May 27,
2017.
2. For a review of this evidence see Timothy Beatley, Handbook of Biophilic
City Planning and Design, Island Press, 2017.
3. Rachel Carson, “Help Your Child to Wonder,” 1956.
4. Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us, Oxford University Press, 1951. Carson
herself spent many hours exploring the Maine coast where she owned a
small cabin and spent her summers.
5. More details about the Biophilic Cities Network can be found at www.
biophiliccities.org. Cities joining the network must indicate the ways they
are already biophilic and goals and steps they plan to undertake in the
future; they must select and monitor over time a certain number of bio-
philic indicators; and they must adopt an official proclamation or resolu-
tion stating intent to join the network and to aspire to being a biophilic
city.
6. See Richard Louv, Last Child in the Forest.
7. Interview with Jane Lubchenco, at the University of Virginia, March 20,
2017.
8. “Iceberg About the Size of Delaware Breaks off Antarctica,” NBC News,
found at: http://www.nbcnews.com/science/environment/iceberg-about-
size-delaware-breaks-antarctica-n782096
9. Robert M. DeConto and David Pollard, “Contribution of Antarctica to
Past and Future Sea Level Rise,” Nature, 531, 591–597, March 31, 2016.
10. http://www.un.org/pga/71/2017/02/13/press-release-preparations-
for-the-ocean-conference/
18 T. BEATLEY

11. Interview with Murray Fisher, at the Harbor School, Governor’s Island,
New York City, May 8, 2017.
12. Wallace J. Nichols, Blue Mind: The Surprising Science That Shows How
Being Near, In, On, or Under Water Can Make You Happier, Healthier,
More Connected, and Better at What You Do, Back Bay Books, 2014.
13. Mathew White, Ian Alcock, Benedict Wheeler, and Michael DePledge,
“Coastal Proximity, Health and Wellbeing: Results from a Longitudinal
Panel Survey,” Health and Place, 23, 97–103, September 2013.
14. Mathew White, Benedict Wheeler, Stephen Herbert, Ian Alcock, and
Michael DePledge, “Coastal Proximity and Physical Activity: Is the Coast
an Under-Appreciated Public Health Resource?” Preventive Medicine,
69C, pp. 135–140.
15. Russell Crawford, “The Impact of Ocean Therapy on Veterans with
Posttraumatic Stress Disorder,” undated, found at: http://amazingsurfad-
ventures.org/asa/wp-content/themes/asa/pdf/Crawford-Report-
Summary.pdf
16. The film can be found here: http://amazingsurfadventures.org/programs/
operation-surf/
17. Murray Fisher, on-camera interview and site visit, The Harbor School,
New York City, May 8, 2017.
18. For example, see Wilson, Biophilia, Harvard University Press, 1984.
19. “17 Goals to Transform Our World,” found at: http://www.un.org/sus-
tainabledevelopment/#
 CHAPTER 2

Planning for the Balance of Danger

and Delight

Abstract As a species, we are drawn to water and to marine edges and we

gain many benefits from the blue, including wonder, enjoyment, stress
reduction and greater meaning in life. Yet there are corresponding dangers
associated with proximity to water, and climate change and sea level rise
represent serious physical (and social and economic) design and planning
challenges. The vision and practice of blue biophilic cities understands the
need to balance the danger and delight: not only to provide new connec-
tions to water, but also creatively seek to adapt in ways that will make a city
more resilient in the face of these physical forces.

We are drawn to coastlines and to the wonder and solace of beaches and
marine environments. As argued earlier, proximity to water connects with
our evolutionary past, it delivered considerable evolutionary benefits and
it is no surprise that we find healing power in activities such as surfing,
snorkeling and beach combing, or just sitting and watching and listening.
Yet the paradox today is that especially with accelerating sea level rise these
areas are increasingly hazardous as well. Increased flooding and the impact
of coastal storms are ever-present dangers that need planning and adaptive
design.
Many of the best emerging blue cities understand the need not only to
enhance and expand access to the medicine and wonder of the sea but also

© The Author(s) 2018 19

T. Beatley, Blue Biophilic Cities, Cities and the Global Politics of the
Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67955-6_2
20 T. BEATLEY

to work to minimize long term exposure of people and property to harm

in extreme events such as hurricanes and long term shoreline erosion.
Cities such as New York have emerged as wonderful examples of places
that are rediscovering their waterfronts and waterscapes. This has hap-
pened through spectacular new waterfront parks, such as Brooklyn Bridge
Park, and by opening up new vistas of the water. In New York, thanks to
the concerted advocacy of groups like the Waterfront Alliance, there has
been a major expansion to the ferry service, providing routes to under-
served neighborhoods and for many residents significantly reducing travel
times to the city.
We watched and experienced directly the advantages of the new ferry
service as we traveled to meet Roland Lewis, founder and director of the
Waterfront Alliance at Brooklyn Bridge Park. The trip from midtown
Manhattan was close to an hour. The return was a quick five-minute ferry
crossing on the city’s new ferry service. Lewis is understandably proud of
his role in creating the new NYC Ferry, which has doubled the number of
neighborhoods in the city now served by ferry. This is good investment,
much less expensive than rail or bus: and “so people in transit-starved
neighborhoods such as the Rockaways or Soundview up in the Bronx can
get to work or pleasure for a reasonable fare at a reasonable speed.”1
(Fig. 2.1).
Partly the strategies of New York are intended to ensure that enjoyment
of the water, and the benefits of water, are enjoyed equally by all residents
of the city. Mayor Bill de Blasio was one of the keynote speakers at the
city’s premier water event—the Waterfront Conference held each year on
a boat (the Hornblower Infinity), organized by the Waterfront Alliance.
De Blasio noted that day the high levels of ridership already seen on the
new Rockaway to Wall Street route and declared that a citywide ferry ser-
vice “can redefine how people get around. It’s got limitless potential.”2
There is still much to be done, de Blasio told the 500 or so attendees:
“This city is surging forward. We’re going to make sure the water is for
everyone.”3
An important part of the story of New York City—which has rediscov-
ered its city motto of City of Water—is the power of organizing and of
bringing together disparate groups and organizations around a powerful
vision for the future of the city. The Waterfront Alliance shows what is
possible to do in a decade. From its small beginnings as a project started
under the umbrella of the Municipal Arts Society, it is now a large and
robust coalition of some 950 organizations. About two years ago it further
 PLANNING FOR THE BALANCE OF DANGER AND DELIGHT 21

Fig. 2.1 New York City is expanding its water transportation network in many
ways, including through water taxis and by doubling its ferry service. Image credit:
Tim Beatley

strengthened its brand, shortening its name from the Metropolitan

Waterfront Alliance, to just Waterfront Alliance, and designing a new,
visually striking logo.
The vision of this coalition is a powerful and compelling one, and one
that could be embraced by other marine cities around the country and the
world.
22 T. BEATLEY

We believe the harbor and waterways of New York and New Jersey should
reflect the vitality and diversity of the great metropolis that surround them.
We envision a harbor and waterways alive with commerce and recreation:
where sailboats, kayaks, and pleasure craft share the waterways with com-
muter ferries, barges, and container ships; where parks and neighborhoods
are connected by affordable waterborne transit; where exciting waterfront
destinations reflect the vitality and diversity of a great metropolis; where the
waterfront is no longer walled off by highways and rails or by private luxury
residences, but is a shared resource for all; and where our coastal city—a city
of islands—intelligently and resolutely prepares for the reality of sea level rise.4

The Waterfront Alliance has worked in many ways to raise awareness

about the harbor and to generate enthusiasm for re-connecting to water.
There is the annual fundraising event, “Heroes of the Harbor,” which
occurs every October and is an opportunity to recognize some of the
incredible leaders and work under way in New York. Recipients are given
a “personalized ring buoy.” Along with the dinner there is the “Parade of
Boats.” These types of events tend to demonstrate what Lewis argues is
the role of his organization to educate, nudge, cajole. He points out that
few mayors come into office with a harbor or waterfront plan. Groups like
the Waterfront Alliance, Lewis believes, provide an essential “civic voice”
about how the water should be used. As New York continues to transition
away from its gritty, industrial waterfront past, this voice is greatly needed:
“we might replace those businesses and piers and chain link fences with
another series of barriers, like luxury buildings if there wasn’t a strong
voice for access, water quality, and jobs too.”5
There are e-newsletters (the WaterWire), an annual harbor festival
every July called City of Water Day, a harbor camp for kids that runs dur-
ing the summer and, of course, a lot of policy and advocacy work. There
is also the development and implementation of a unique set of coastal
design guidelines, affectionately known as WEDG (Water Edge Design
Guidelines).
In May 2017 the Waterfront Alliance issued its first “Harbor
Scorecard.” There is some good news here—many urban locations have
access to water, and more than three-quarters of the water samples taken
passed Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) safe swimming
standards. On the other hand, the city still discharges more than 17 billion
gallons of raw sewage each year as a result of its combined sewer over-
flow problem. And the number of residents likely to experience flooding
is considerable, with a high percentage of these residents being
 PLANNING FOR THE BALANCE OF DANGER AND DELIGHT 23

­ economically and socially v­ ulnerable.”6 New York’s scorecard in many

“
respects encapsulates the current conditions of many blue cities—improv-
ing water access and connections, improving water quality, but with trou-
bling pollution and vulnerability remaining (or even increasing, in the
case of sea level rise).
Living and working in New York today is quite different than just a few
decades ago, as the city rediscovers its waterfront. Central Park has been
described as an effort to create nature as far away as possible from the
edges of Manhattan, recognizing the gritty, grimy environment that was
the working waterfront and not necessarily a place to relax or seek out for
recreation (Fig. 2.2).
Many other cities are similarly seeking to re-establish connections to
the water, to gain some of these blue mind benefits. Seattle, Washington,
is another city where we have been filming and is another impressive blue
urbanist story. Here the city is taking down the viaduct—the city’s ele-
vated highway, long serving to physically separate the city from its bay and
sound. In its stead, the city is developing a 26-block park along Elliott Bay,
a plan developed by James Corner of Field Operations and advocated by
the nonprofit Friends of Waterfront Seattle.
The plan involves rebuilding Pier 62 and replacing the Elliott Bay sea-
wall, and much of this has already happened. It is a “once-in-a-century”
chance, says Friends of the Seattle Waterfront, “to create a park that will
physically and psychologically reconnect us to our urban shoreline and
Elliott Bay.”7
Heidi Hughes, executive director of Friends of the Seattle Waterfront,
spoke with me about this audacious plan as we walked along the begin-
nings of this new waterfront promenade. It will add some 20 new acres of
waterfront public space and represents a return of residents to the water-
front, long a place more for tourists and visitors. Much of the work will
involve improving intersections and making better pedestrian connections
with the gridded streets that will feed into the waterfront. Hughes
describes the vision of the waterfront as a kind of amphitheater, facing the
city towards Elliott Bay and Puget Sound. “It’s a real pivot from the city
putting its back to the waterfront. Seattle will now reclaim its identity as a
waterfront city.”8
And it is a chance to do things differently and to experiment. In rebuild-
ing the Elliott Bay seawall it has been re-imagined as a surface that will
support a diversity of marine life, with special crevices and indentations to
serve as new homes for algae and small marine organisms and the seawall
 24
T. BEATLEY

Fig. 2.2 Brooklyn Bridge Park, shown here, is one of New York City’s new waterfront parks, and illustrates the city’s new
emphasis on physical and visual connections to water. Image credit: Tim Beatley
 PLANNING FOR THE BALANCE OF DANGER AND DELIGHT 25

itself will serve as a salmon movement corridor. This is a new way to think
of a seawall—an opportunity to enhance marine life at the same time as
protecting against predicted sea level rise. “So you can imagine this whole
park becoming a laboratory for families, teachers, kids, to reconnect with
the shore, the ocean, and we can really expand what the Seattle Aquarium
is doing throughout the waterfront.” An expansion of the aquarium is also
part of these ambitious plans.
Hughes makes a major point about the accessibility of this new park—
like many other parks in the city, it will be easily reachable by all residents.
“This will be the most accessible park for the whole city.” And that makes
sense—it is the water, and the extensive watery edges, that will bind a city.
It will be easily accessible by transit and there will be new dedicated bicycle
tracks connected to a regional network of bikeways.
Access to urban amenities and economic opportunities in cities has not
always been fair. Equity issues of course loom large in some of these places.
Baltimore is another example of a harbor city seeking renewal and restora-
tion, though not without the challenges of crime, ethnic conflict and eco-
nomic inequalities. How do all residents of the city enjoy the benefits of
water and the jobs and income derived from it? We spent a September
morning with kids from a nearby disadvantaged neighborhood who were
learning how to kayak under a special program run by the city’s Parks and
Recreation department. The goal was to get kids on the water and to allow
them to experience first hand this different place. First they sat in the kay-
aks on land, then eventually, and with guidance and encouragement from
Parks and Recreation staff, they carefully navigated around in the water. As
we learned that day few of these kids had ever been on the water, even
though they lived in neighborhoods not far away.
Baltimore’s inner harbor has the distinction of being an important
proving ground for demonstrating cultural return to the water. Visionary
developer James Rouse built one of the first successful commercial harbor
projects—Harborplace—here some four decades ago, setting an example
for other cities and demonstrating that indeed there was a desire for peo-
ple to spend time, to visit, to play along urban waterfronts. A remarkable
plan for the inner waterfront, prepared by Wallace, Roberts and Todd in
the 1960s, made much of this possible and helped set an example for other
cities to plan for a re-discovery of their waterfronts. These early Baltimore
visions are now finding new expressions and new manifestations.
One of the main advocacy groups in Baltimore is the Healthy Harbors
Initiative run by the Waterfronts Partnership. The partnership is itself a
26 T. BEATLEY

coalition of different local organizations with a stake in the harbor. It runs

essentially as a business improvement district (BID), but with an unusual
mission: serving as the harbor’s “chief advocate, promoter and steward.”
This is on top of the other more typical services provided by a BID (such
as litter control, visitor assistance and landscape management).
One key member of the partnership is Baltimore National Aquarium.
As a pre-eminent urban aquarium, it is re-thinking its mission in the urban
age. With the help of Chicago architect Jeanne Gang the aquarium has
launched a plan for its re-design and expansion. The new plans will better
connect it to surrounding water and will include an urban wetland as a key
feature and focal point.
Most of the focus of the Healthy Harbor Initiative has been on reach-
ing the goal of a swimmable and fishable harbor. The intent is to reach this
goal by 2020, and they are a long way off. Yet there is creative work being
carried out and good progress being made. Among the creative steps
taken so far are the installation of floating wetlands in a number of places,
and support for the growing of oysters in the harbor, a crop that helps to
clean the water.
One of the projects that has gained the most attention is one with a
humorous slant—the design of a one-of-a-kind inner harbor water wheel.
Affectionately dubbed “Mr Trash Wheel” it is a structure that sits on the
water in the harbor with a rotating water wheel that is turned partly by
solar power, but mostly by the river current. It scoops up a remarkable
amount of trash and debris: some 182 tons so far (including bottles, plas-
tic bags and more than 4 million cigarette butts). You can follow Mr Trash
Wheel on Twitter (with the handle @MrTrashWheel he has more than
12,000 followers!). In the latest development, the solid waste collected
and prevented from entering the harbor is being used as fuel to generate
power in a local waste-to-energy plant (Fig. 2.3).
Growing oysters in a city harbor is a clever way to engage the popula-
tion. The young oysters (spat) are found in cages in the water at promi-
nent locations around the harbor, tethered by ropes. Some cages are
sponsored by schools, others by local companies or corporations, and peri-
odically volunteers show up to pull up the cages and clean them.
We watched Adam Lindquist, who heads the Healthy Harbor Initiative,
pull up several cages and immediately a small crowd of tourists formed.
They appeared fascinated by what appeared mysteriously from the shal-
lows and proceeded to pepper Adam with questions. It was a visceral dem-
onstration of just how interested people can be and how potent a tool
Fig. 2.3 Mr Trash Wheel, shown here, is located in the inner harbor of Baltimore, Maryland, where it utilizes river cur-
rent and solar energy to collect waste and debris. Image credit: Adam Lindquist, Healthy Harbor Initiative
PLANNING FOR THE BALANCE OF DANGER AND DELIGHT
27
28 T. BEATLEY

oysters could be in educating and inspiring about a healthier blue future.

I would learn later about an even more ambitious effort—the Billion
Oyster Project—run by the New York Harbor School (and discussed in
some detail in Chap. 5), showing how urban residents and harbor visitors
could find excitement and fascination in the watery nature around them.
Planting oysters helps to clean our marine waters and it can also serve
as a form of adaptive response and mitigation tool in the face of sea level
rise and coastal storms. Landscape architect Kate Orff has been pioneering
the idea of “oyster-tecture,” utilizing oysters and oysterbeds in cities like
New York to enhance habitat, serve as protection barriers to storms and
flooding, and to engage the public. Her ideas are now being applied in a
large way along the southern shore of Staten Island.
How to adapt to sea level rise and climate change in Blue Biophilic
Cities remains a major challenge and an open question. But we are finding
some emerging models for guidance and inspiration. Increasingly, cities
recognize the value in maintaining and enhancing natural systems to
respond to sea level rise. There will be the chance to expand and enhance
natural habitats at the same time that more dynamic and resilient shore-
lines are designed and installed.
Cities such as New York are investing in innovative projects including
Orff’s Living Breakwaters project and the so-called Dryline, another proj-
ect funded following hurricane Sandy. As these new approaches demon-
strate, every adaptive response and investment should seek to advance
multiple goals—not just achieve flood mitigation, as a seawall or revet-
ment might, but also provide recreation, habitat restoration and new
visual and physical connections to water and the marine realm. And per-
haps other goals as well—the generation of renewable energy, for example,
or eventually the sustainable and local production of seafood.
Some Blue Biophilic Cities will have a harder time with climate adapta-
tion than others, and here Miami Beach stands out. It is a city with a spe-
cial position on the very front line of climate change and sea level rise. We
recently spent time in this barrier-island city speaking with officials about
what the future holds there and the efforts being made to effectively adapt
to long term sea level rise.
Many coastal mayors and leaders are in denial about sea level rise. This
has not been the case in Miami Beach. The current mayor, Philip Levine,
even campaigned on the issue, famously appearing in a commercial (with
his boxer dog Earl) paddling through flooded streets in a kayak. Levine
declares proudly that he was not swept into office but “floated into office.”
 PLANNING FOR THE BALANCE OF DANGER AND DELIGHT 29

Cities like Miami Beach will definitely have their work cut out for them.
The severity and swiftness of sea level rise that coastal cities will experience
is still unclear and hotly debated, but as ice sheets melt more quickly than
expected, the prognosis is not optimistic. One scientist who has been vig-
orously sounding the alarm is Professor Harold (or Hal) Wanless, Professor
and Chair of the Geology Department at the University of Miami. Wanless
points to the NOAA 2012 National Climate Assessment predicting global
sea level rise of between at least 4.1 and 6.6 feet by 2100.
He argues that we are clearly in one of those “very rapid pulses” of
accelerated sea level rise seen following the last ice age about 18,000 years
ago. South Florida has already seen a foot sea level rise since 1930, so this
is anything but hypothetical. Wanless describes the way that oceans are
absorbing global heat, leading to rising sea temperatures which in turn
perilously penetrate and melt ice sheets and global fjords, leading to a
damaging positive feedback loop.
“We probably should be anticipating at least 7–30 feet of global sea
level rise by the end of the century regardless of what we do. Even if we
stopped burning fossil fuels tomorrow, the greenhouse gases in the atmo-
sphere will keep warming the atmosphere for at least another 30 years.
More than 90 % of this global warming heat is ending up in oceans.”9
What to do? Wanless says, among other things: “Terminate long-term,
infrastructure-intensive development of barrier islands and low-lying
coastlines…and divert public money from hard and soft shore-protection
measures into funds for relocation assistance, clearing low-lying polluted
lands, and removing storm-damaged development and infrastructure.”10
And we need to do a lot more getting ready for these changes, a lot
more planning. Wanless argues that we need to establish thresholds for say-
ing no: for terminating financial commitments to provide services and
infrastructure, and we need to prepare in advance of storms and hurricanes
to say no to re-building in many dangerous places following future storms.11
What can a city like Miami Beach in fact do? What are the potential
planning and design options open to them? The cities of South Florida
actually have fewer options than other coastal cities to the north. Miami
Beach sits on geology made up of porous limestone. That means building
seawalls to protect this city will not work, at least not in the long run.
City engineer Bruce Mowry explained to me that much of the flooding
seen here is what can be called “rainy day flooding,” that is flooding that
results not from a storm or high tide necessarily, but simply a result of
backflow from the city’s antiquated stormwater pipes (Figs. 2.4 and 2.5).12
30 T. BEATLEY

Figs. 2.4 and 2.5 Miami Beach has been elevating roads in neighborhoods such
as Sunset Beach, shown here. It creates an interesting physical disconnect between
street level and storefront entrances, and sometimes, as shown on the right, a shel-
tered seating area for customers. Image credit: Tim Beatley

The city is implementing a $400 million program of investments in

adaptive infrastructure, championed by its mayor, Philip Levine.13 The
first thing Mowry recommended doing (when the mayor told him he
needed to eliminate rainy day flooding in a year) was to install new check
values in some 70 locations in the city to prevent backflow. But this of
 PLANNING FOR THE BALANCE OF DANGER AND DELIGHT 31

Figs. 2.4 and 2.5 Continued

course is not enough and the city has embarked on major effort to shift
away from its inadequate and antiquated gravity based stormwater system
to one involving pumps. The city will likely eventually have installed some
60 to 80 new pumping stations around the city, the precise number, Mowry
tells me, is not yet known. He’s moving the city towards pumps that are
lower horsepower but higher capacity—able to pump some 80,000 or
more gallons per minute. Around 20 of these pumps have been installed
already, with another 12 in construction, so the city is about halfway
through building the new network of pumping stations it needs.
Another key part of the city’s short term strategy is to gradually elevate
roads and sidewalks. The city has recently completed a major road eleva-
tion, of the order of 2.5 feet, in the neighborhood of Sunset Harbor and
is beginning work on several other neighborhoods. Walking around the
Sunset Harbor neighborhood the road elevation is obvious, as most store
and restaurant entrances now require a pedestrian to step down. In several
cases this has created not unpleasant new patio and seating spaces that are
separated from the street above.
32 T. BEATLEY

Seawalls are also similarly being raised. The city has floated bonds to
cover the initial phase of these infrastructure investments and has raised
household stormwater fees by a modest amount ($7 per household).
We visited and filmed this neighborhood in January 2017. The eleva-
tion of the road meant that many of the shops and restaurants now had
entrances that were below the street and had to be accessed from stairs
leading down from the sidewalk and road above. In many cases this has
lead to the creation of shielded areas of tables and seating, in the case of
restaurants: not a bad result, actually, with a feeling of being more separate
and protected from street traffic. If properly explained to residents and
visitors these areas could also be a source of discussion about expected sea
level rise and the city’s efforts to plan for it.
The city is exploring other ideas as well. Mowry spoke of promoting
the idea of “adaptable architectural features,” especially in new commer-
cial structures. One idea Mowry described was a kind of movable first
floor, made possible by designing higher than normal ceilings. As sea level
rises and as streets and sidewalks are elevated over time, the usable first
floors of buildings would also be raised.
There is also a recognition that the city’s beach re-nourishment efforts
must continue. One of the nation’s first coastal communities to re-­nourish,
or replenish it beaches, this has been a continuing and ongoing expense, but
understood as necessary to continue to support its tourism industry. Visit
Miami Beach’s Ocean Drive on any day and you will see a vibrant and popu-
lar destination, with many of the qualities of great built environments—
sidewalk life, high walkability and a creative mix of uses and activities.
While there is understandable stress and pessimism about the future of
Miami and South Florida, there are many who are attracted to its closeness
to the ocean. The beach (re-nourished as it is) is beautiful, and the nearby
ocean is luminous and beautiful. The majesty and wonder of a remarkable
marine biodiversity is not far away, indeed it is all around, as residents and
visitors scan the seascape for signs of dolphins.
And there are remarkable efforts to connect residents and visitors to the
abundant marine life that lives in the shadow of this high-rise coastal para-
dise. The Marjory Stoneman Douglas Biscayne Nature Center (described
more fully in Chap. 5) is one such place that has been doing this for decades.
There is little illusion in Miami Beach that that these interim steps will
protect the city in the long run. The mayor, city engineer and others have
framed these investments as necessary adaptations that will carry the city
30 to 40 years into the future. Beyond that there is a sense of optimism
about what new physical designs and technology might help the city. The
 PLANNING FOR THE BALANCE OF DANGER AND DELIGHT 33

city is not giving up and will not go away, that is the clear message of lead-
ership there.
Mayor Levine is quoted in Miami New Times expressing this
optimism:

I know that human innovation is so incredible. If I told you 30 years ago

that an iPhone could Facetime with a friend in Europe now in real time,
you’d think I was out of my mind. The opportunity for entrepreneurs is
unlimited. They’ll come up with solutions we can’t even think of today.
Deep-water injection pumps below the aquifer? Who the hell knows.14

City engineer Mowry echoed these sentiments in his interview with me.
“The goal is that we’re going to be here forever…Retreat is not consid-
ered here as an option.”
The city was formed from the swamp 100 years ago and it will find a
way to sustain and reinvent itself even in the face of rising seas. “Why can’t
we for the next 100 years do the same thing but do it in a little different
fashion? We’re not going from a swamp to a city, we’re going from a city
to a different city and who says that our culture should be the same? And
who says we shouldn’t be more water-based, who says we may not have
elevated transportation, who says we may not have buildings on piers that
embrace the water, and that actually allow the water to come in, but we
build structures over the water as a city?”
Serious retreat is framed as a giving up on the city. “We believe in our
city.” Engaging in retreat suggests we don’t love our city and we are “will-
ing to use it up and get out.” Here we see both a failure to confront the
realities of the magnitude of sea level rise and the sentiments of love and
fidelity towards a place that is in many ways quite admirable.
We need to be open to many new ideas, says Mowry, and he places a lot
of positive stock in design studios and students from Harvard Graduate
School of Design and Florida Atlantic University who are imagining cre-
ative design solutions to this high-water future. He tells them, “don’t look
at boundaries.”
Not far away in Coral Gables, home to the University of Miami, there
is a similarly daunting sea level challenge. Here a quarter of the city’s
property value lies below 4 feet in elevation. Here we met and filmed the
Republican party mayor of Coral Gables, Jim Cason, who, like Levine, is
not in denial but seeks to understand and get ready for sea level rise. This
is a city with a history of building and living in ways intimately connected
to water, including an original network of Venice-like canals.
34 T. BEATLEY

Coral Gables has a huge problem as well, with some $15 billion in
property at risk. The steps this city has undertaken to be prepared and get
ready include more detailed LIDAR maps showing the city’s vulnerability;
a careful assessment of critical facilities at risk; and even commissioning a
paper that explores the legal aspects of hazard mitigation and retreat (as
Cason tells us, to be clear what the city’s duties and options might be
“when your streets are underwater and it’s too expensive [to rebuild
them]”).15 Cason explains further, there are many things the city can do to
reduce greenhouse gas emissions and the city is doing many of them
through an ambitious sustainability plan, including shifting to electric
vehicles, mandating LEED-certified construction, more energy-efficient
municipal lighting, among other actions.
The city of Coral Gables is already taking steps to adapt to sea level.
Cason tells of a recent bridge renovation where the structure was raised
two additional feet. “We need to start making sure that everything we do
in the future that has to do with construction or rehabing takes sea level
rise into account,” Cason told us.
Cason seems proudest of his efforts to raise awareness and start conver-
sations about the sea level rise that is coming. “Physics is physics,” he
declared. “It’s not a partisan issue, it’s a fact. We see it everyday.” This is
refreshing candor from a mayor who sees addressing these challenges as an
important leadership dimension.
“For us it’s a reality. It’s a leadership issue. It’s an obligation. We’ve all
got grandkids. We’ve got to tell them not only what’s going to happen but
also what they can do in their individual lives.” A relatively small community,
with around 50,000 permanent residents, Coral Gables shows some of the
essential steps blue cities can and must start to take, beginning with informa-
tion and candid community discussion about what to expect down the road.
These sea level rise challenges are being faced by many coastal cities
around the world, of course, and international examples of big and small
cities, provide additional hope and ideas. Rotterdam is one coastal city, in
a nation that has a long history of keeping back the sea, that continues to
offer inspiration. Its goal is to be “climate-proof,” by 2025, and it has
undertaken an unusual array of strategies to address the management of
flooding and water. In an interview, Chief Resilience Officer Arnoud
Molenaar emphasized the approach of “no-regrets” solutions: essentially
steps that could be taken, projects designed and built that would be ben-
eficial even if not protective or needed for climate adaptation. In the sum-
mer of 2016, I visited some of these. They include designing new parking
structures to retain stormwater, and the installation of so-called “water
 PLANNING FOR THE BALANCE OF DANGER AND DELIGHT 35

plazas” that can serve to hold rainwater during times of storms and flood-
ing, but would all other times serve as public spaces and community gath-
ering spots. A visit to one of the first suggests these spaces are interesting
and well designed. Here there are stepped edges, places for kids to play
and a sunken basketball court (Figs. 2.6 and 2.7).

Figs. 2.6 and 2.7 Rotterdam has employed a variety of urban design strategies
to retain and control water. Shown here is the Bethemplein—a so-called “water
plaza” that serves to collect and retain rainwater, but on sunny days adds a public
space to the neighborhood. Image credit: Tim Beatley
36 T. BEATLEY

Figs. 2.6 and 2.7 Continued

Many of the things envisioned by the city as a way to retain and control
water are also biophilic. The city has encouraged and subsidized the instal-
lation of many green rooftops. Several of these I visited, including one
large one.
The Dutch have famously pioneered the idea of “floating communi-
ties,” where entire neighborhoods of new homes are able to rise and fall
with the water levels. Rotterdam has envisioned an entire floating neigh-
borhood in the inner port, and has installed model structures that show
what is possible when designing with special lighter building materials.16
And there is also the now-famous DakPark (or roof park) in Rotterdam,
essentially a large park, on top of shops and businesses. It is in a sense a very
large green roof and a quite beautiful, if slightly unusual, municipal park.
The city has encouraged and subsidized the installation of green roofs with
considerable success: there are now more than 220,000 square meters
installed. The DakPark is a dramatic example but there are many other
places in the city that sport such resilient, biophilic design features. These
are steps similar to those taken by the Dryline in New York that demon-
strate clearly that it is possible to live in a green and biophilic city, to advance
a vision of biophilic urbanism that will also address the long term dangers.
 PLANNING FOR THE BALANCE OF DANGER AND DELIGHT 37

Some Concluding Thoughts

Coastal cities, blue cities, face at once daunting challenges and exciting
opportunities. Climate change and sea level rise will represent ominous
threats to be sure. But many cities, from New York to Seattle, recognize
the possibility of taking design and planning steps that will adapt and
respond to future sea rise and coastal flooding, but will also see that
humans are drawn to water. New water-oriented parks and shoreline and
harborfront public spaces, such as Brooklyn Bridge Park, reflect the
increasing desire to be near, on or in the water. It is the premise of this
chapter (and book) that cities can respond to both impulses, both
challenges.
The ability to see and be near water, to enjoy marine environments,
responds to a deep biophilic need and we know that we will be happier,
healthier and lead more wondrous, meaningful lives through daily contact
with the marine nature around us. In short, Blue Biophilic Cities revel in
the delight and magic of the marine world, but also must plan for and
adapt to the increasing dangers associated with proximity to water.

Notes
1. Personal interview with Roland Lewis, president and CEO, Waterfront
Alliance, May 9, 2017.
2. “Nuggets of Wisdom at the Waterfront Conference,” Waterfront Alliance
e-newsletter, May 12, 2017.
3. Ibid.
4. “Our Vision,” found at: http://waterfrontalliance.org/who-we-are/
about-us/
5. Personal interview with Roland Lewis, Brooklyn Bridge Park, May 8,
2017.
6. Waterfront Alliance, “Harbor Scorecard,” found at: http://waterfrontal-
liance.org/what-we-do/harbor-scorecard/
7. Friends of Seattle Waterfront, Annual Report 2016.
8. Personal interview, Heidi Hughes, Executive Director, Friends of Seattle
Waterfront, January, 2017.
9. Harold Wanless, 2015, p. 2.
10. Wanless, 2015, p. 4.
11. Wanless says ominously, “Without planning, there will come a point in
society and civilization as we know it will collapse into chaos.” Ibid.
12. Interview with Bruce Mowry, City Engineer, Miami Beach, Florida,
January 25, 2017.
38 T. BEATLEY

13. Jessica Weiss, “Miami Beach’s $400 Million Sea Level Rise Plan is
Unprecedented, But Not Everyone is Sold,” Miami New Times, April 19,
2016.
14. Weiss, Jessica, “Miami Beach’s $400 Million Sea-Level-Rise Plan is
Unprecedented, But Not Everyone is Sold,” Miami New Times, April 19,
2016.
15. Personal interview with Mayor James Cason, in Coral Gables City Hall,
January, 2017.
16. For more about this see Beatley, Blue Urbanism, Island Press, 2014.
 CHAPTER 3

An Unsustainable Bounty from the Blue:

Cities to the Rescue?

Abstract What (and how) we grow, harvest or extract from the ocean has
significant implications for long term sustainability of this immense eco-
system. Our current industrial approach to seafood harvesting is clearly
not sustainable and cities can and must take the lead in developing new
approaches. Urbanites must begin to shift their consumer and political
power behind more sustainable ideas and practices. Some of these new
approaches are explored here, including support for smaller scale, locally
based fishing (and new mechanisms such as Community Supported
Fisheries [CSFs]), and a shift towards more sustainable and humane forms
of shellfish aquaculture and ocean vegetable farming.

The ocean has been an immensely important storehouse (or stock of

assets) for the human species. We pull many things from the ocean (or
from under the ocean), oil and gas, sand, minerals and of course we har-
vest seafood. None of these is especially sustainable and, as recent major
oil spills suggest, drilling for oil is not a wise form of stewardship for plan-
etary oceans. We have depended on the global bounty of seafood for mil-
lennia and, in theory at least, it might be possible through careful limits
and management to harvest seafood in a sustainable way. That is not the
reality in most parts of the world and the prognosis for global fisheries is
not very encouraging.

© The Author(s) 2018 39

T. Beatley, Blue Biophilic Cities, Cities and the Global Politics of the
Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67955-6_3
40 T. BEATLEY

Few marine biologists have been as creative in understanding the

human impact as Daniel Pauly, who heads the Sea Around Us Center at
the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. I interviewed him in
January 2017 about his groundbreaking work attempting to more accu-
rately understand the extent to which we extract fish from the ocean. His
numbers are alarming. Engaging in something he and his colleagues call
“catch reconstruction,” it is a painstaking effort to more accurately and
fully account for all the fish extracted from the sea.
Pauly’s conclusions suggest that we have extracted more than we previ-
ously thought—the global seafood catch likely peaked, he believes, in
around 1996 at 130 million metric tons, significantly higher than the
(official) estimates of global catch put forth by the Food and Agriculture
Organization (FAO) of the United Nations (UN). And even more alarm-
ing the decline in total global catch since that time has been more rapid
than previously thought.
Why the sharp decline in fisheries globally? Pauly is especially critical of
what he refers to as the “fishing industrial complex.” Analogous in many
ways to the rise of agribusiness and a corporate land-based farming system,
we are increasingly subsidizing a fishing industry that employs increasingly
larger ships and equipment to go after increasingly farther-out, deeper sea
species. Pauly estimates the subsidy of the US fishing industry at $30 bil-
lion annually.
He likens the whole system to a “giant ponzi scheme.” There are many
more fishing vessels, he says, than the marine resource base can sustain or
support, and they simply shift and move to other, more marginal and
more remote fisheries when others become commercially exhausted.
Part of the challenge of responding to diminished fisheries is a phenom-
enon that Pauly coined, “shifting baselines.” It explains why we seem not
be as alarmed as we should about the catches we’re seeing in certain fisher-
ies. We compare the decline we see to near term metrics and fail to com-
pare with longer term, historic conditions that would show more clearly
how much we have lost. The longer timeframe might be (should be) hun-
dreds of years, but we are likely to compare changes with those seen only
over the course of one’s lifetime.
Stronger regulatory systems and more stringent management of fisher-
ies would accomplish much. Jane Lubchenco, former NOAA administra-
tor, speaks optimistically of the potential to strengthen management and
the prospect of re-building and restoring depleted fisheries. We need to
“fish smarter, not harder.” She offers the USA as a case in point, seeing a
 AN UNSUSTAINABLE BOUNTY FROM THE BLUE: CITIES TO THE RESCUE? 41

number of fisheries experience “remarkable turnarounds.” She offers the

example of the west coast groundfish fishery, a fishery that includes some
90 different species, including cod, rockfish and whiting). A “catch shares”
system, implemented in 2011, has led to its remarkable recovery. Changing
the economic signals and giving fisherman a direct personal stake in
responsible management can lead the way. Lubchenco is encouraged,
moreover, by new, innovative approaches (Fig. 3.1).1
How quickly could we restore fisheries? Quite quickly Lubchenco says,
in as little as 10 years. This dose of optimistic thinking is necessary, and the
development of more stringent and innovative fish management regimes
is essential. Cities and city political and environmental leadership can push
and agitate for these new rights-based systems. But the global trends and
pressures will make it hard to bring about this scenario of restored, replen-
ished and sustainable global fisheries. The expansion of industrial fishing,
the growing size and range of boats and the increasing destruction
wrought by technology, coupled with a rise in global demand for fish,
make the rosier scenarios less realistic. And even the best management
regimes will face new challenges, such as the shifting movement of fish
stocks in response to warming waters.
Pauly and Lubchenco agree on the importance of expanding marine
protected areas and that must be one part of the answer as well. Lubchenco
notes the positive trends here—on a global scale marine protected areas
amount to only 2 % of the surface of the planet, yet we have seen this
increase dramatically in a short period of time (from less than 0.2 % a
decade ago). Thanks to the leadership at federal level, and the personal
support of former President Barack Obama, the extent of US waters in
marine protected areas has grown considerably, now at about 23 %. What
should this figure be globally? Coastal nations around the world have
committed to protecting 10 % of their respective ocean areas by 2020—
this is a good start, certainly.2 Lubchenco and other marine conservations
say it will take at least 30 %, but perhaps in line with E.O. Wilson’s half-­
earth concept the percentage should be even higher.
The other good news is that research clearly shows that fish stocks
recover in no-fish areas, and marine protected areas can play a significant
role in helping to re-stock fisheries. There is also evidence that marine
ecosystems, including coral reefs, tend to be more resilient (less likely to
experience bleaching) when embedded in larger marine reserves.3
Urbanites and cities must support and lobby for the designation of larger
protected areas.
 42
T. BEATLEY

Fig. 3.1 The Pikes Place Fish Market is an iconic institution in Seattle, Washington, and a popular tourist destination.
The market is now only selling fish that are sustainably harvested. Image credit: Tim Beatley
 AN UNSUSTAINABLE BOUNTY FROM THE BLUE: CITIES TO THE RESCUE? 43

Much of the work (and legal authority) of establishing new marine

protected areas falls of course to national governments. Nevertheless, cit-
ies and states can do much to advocate for them and connect them to
efforts at establishing more local marine parks and integrated land–sea
parks or “bluescapes.” California has a remarkable story, one to be very
proud of, establishing an extensive network of marine protected areas
through the Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA), and adjacent cities and
communities have now adopted them as their own, taking active steps to
monitor and enforce the protected areas. “It is possible to use the ocean
without using it up,” Lubchenco says, and the California story makes this
clear. Many cities may have the chance to establish marine protected areas
very close to where residents live. Indeed, the new waterfront or ocean-
front park must be re-imagined as an opportunity to integrate land and sea
and to protect important nearshore marine environments, many of which
have been negatively impacted by terrestrial activities such as vegetation
clearance and non-point-source pollutants (Fig. 3.2).
Any trip to Seattle or to San Francisco might not feel complete without
eating seafood, and there are many ways that the choices of seafood we
consume can make a significant difference.
There are now efforts to certify sustainably managed fisheries, for
instance, through the highly successful Marine Stewardship Council, and
there are many efforts by restaurants and others to source and feature
more sustainable seafood choices. The San Francisco Bay Area has become
an epicenter for these efforts, especially through the work of the Monterrey
Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch program. The aquarium used to publish
small cards (I kept one for many years in my wallet) providing guidance on
which fish and seafood to avoid buying, either because of the condition of
the fishery or the methods used to catch the fish. Now this information is
mostly delivered through a free Seafood Watch app.4
We visited and filmed a San Francisco restaurant that has been highly
involved in actively sourcing and selling more sustainable seafood. On a
day in March we sat down with Bob Partrite CEO and manager of the Fog
Harbor Fish House Restaurant, an established seafood restaurant located
on Pier 39 in the heart of the San Francisco waterfront. The messaging to
patrons here begins with the menus which state clearly the importance of
sustainable seafood. Partrite clearly has a passion for sustainable seafood
and took personal pride in telling us what they serve and the steps he and
his staff take to ensure responsible sourcing of what they buy. They try to
follow religiously the standards and guidance of Seafood Watch. At the
 44
T. BEATLEY

Fig. 3.2 Along the edges of Sydney’s South Beaches there are many opportunities to find and interact with marine life.
Shown here is one of the many signs erected by Randwick Council to help residents look for and identify some of the more
common marine species they are likely to see. Image credit: Tim Beatley
 AN UNSUSTAINABLE BOUNTY FROM THE BLUE: CITIES TO THE RESCUE? 45

end of our interview, Partrite took me back to the kitchen to show me the
“white board,” a pretty impressive and complex listing of all the fish and
seafood served, with specific information about its sourcing. I could
immediately see the value of this and how working there it would be easier
to answer the questions concerned customers might have. I could also get
a strong sense of how empowered (proud even) I might be working at this
restaurant (Fig. 3.3).
On that day and during our conversation with Partrite we ordered a few
items off the menu, including the Dungeness crab, an important locally
sourced seafood. Partrite described in detail how it was fished and the con-
dition the fishery was/is in, and the fact that little or no bycatch resulted
from the harvesting of this seafood. I also ordered a grilled salmon salad
and the story here was a bit more complicated. There is wild caught salmon
available some of the year, Partrite told us, but not at the moment. The
salmon that arrived on my salad was from a salmon farm in Denmark, but
one where the fish are raised in a closed-circle, recirculating system, with
fewer of the negative impacts associated with open-ocean salmon farms.
The interview that day was both optimistic and reassuring about the
potential power of consumers, and consumers educated and led to better
choices through passionate restaurateurs like Bob Partrite. However, it
also reinforced just how difficult it is to get sustainable seafood right.
The Fog Harbor Fish House Restaurant is part of a larger consortium
of restaurants, managed by the Aquarium of the Bay. Carrie Chen, d ­ irector
of education and conservation at the aquarium spoke about the initiative
and how it includes some 30 restaurants.
One way we are responding is through expanding aquaculture; but all
aquaculture is not the same and it is alarming that there is not a better
general awareness (for instance by restaurant owners and servers) about
how ecologically damaging much aquaculture can be. One recent experi-
ence ordering seafood at a restaurant in Florida was telling. I asked about
the “Scottish salmon” on the menu—what did the waiter know about its
provenance, and specifically was it wild caught? I suspected it wasn’t, but
was surprised at what the waiter said on returning to the table: “It’s kind
of like wild because they’re raised in pens in the water.”
A month later I met with the pre-eminent fisheries ecologist, Professor
Daniel Pauly, from the University of British Columbia. Pauly’s work shows
that we suffer from what he calls “shifting baselines”—that is, we judge
and perceive the status of things like fish abundance through a very limited
time lens.
46 T. BEATLEY

Fig. 3.3 The Fog Harbor Fish House Restaurant in San Francisco has commit-
ted to serving only sustainably harvested seafood. Here the general manager show
the author the so-called “white board” in the kitchen, which summarizes and
keeps track of all the seafood purchased and served in the restaurant. Image credit:
Tim Beatley
 AN UNSUSTAINABLE BOUNTY FROM THE BLUE: CITIES TO THE RESCUE? 47

This unfortunately is the kind of aquaculture that Pauly calls “carnivore

farming”: highly damaging and like fattening cattle it is not very efficient
in the use of limited fish catches. “It takes…pounds of [wild fish feed]…
to produce one pound of salmon,” says Pauly. Pauly supports stronger
catch quotas and more marine protected areas where fishing is limited.
It is clear that our collective knowledge about seafood and fisheries is
scant and indeed our ocean literacy overall is disturbingly inadequate.
Pauly argues that we must reduce the overall global harvest of fish and
that, counterintuitively perhaps, will lead to increased fish production. We
have to fish less to catch more, he says. We need to allow stocks to rebound,
through stricter quotas and more extensive no-fish zones.
Still he says, “humanity cannot depend on fish,” to feed itself. We
should begin to consume fish further down the food chain—instead of the
inefficient practice of fishing species like Peruvian anchovies or mackerel
to feed other fish, we should return to directly consuming them (perhaps
re-kindling an appetite for such smaller, but flavorful fish).
Pauly spoke of the possibility of a shift in how we see eating fish, the
possibility at least in the wealthier North of moving away from seeing fish
as a staple and rather more of what Pauly calls a “ritual food,” something
we eat only occasionally and perhaps only at special events or occasions.
Would we reduce the fishery-exhausting, damaging consumptive patterns,
while also infusing greater meaning to the fish we do eat? It is hard to
know, but given declining global catches and the need to protect local
fisheries for local people, movement away from a staple of fish seems to be
something in our future.
Pauly offers a somewhat hopeful vision about a more sustainable rela-
tionship with the fisheries around where we live. “I would like to dream
of an economy where we are all locavores,” Pauly says. What he has in
mind may be something analogous to what we have seen around the slow
food movement. Perhaps “slow fish” could emerge as an equally attractive
idea, that we seek to learn about the provenance of the fish we eat, we
support local fishermen and suppliers and we relish and savor the taste and
enjoyment that comes from eating more locally sourced fish with a deeper
story.
Part of the answer must be new mechanisms for even more directly
connecting local urban consumers with local and regional fishermen.
There is much benefit to be had on both sides. New mechanisms like CSFs
hold promise. Modeled after the land-based Community Supported
Agriculture (CSA) in which residents buy shares that entitle them to a
48 T. BEATLEY

weekly allocation of fish, this mechanism connects the fishermen directly

with the consumer. That has the potential to promote learning about the
fishery and to foster a sense of emotional connection with fishermen, and
also (like a CSA) helps fishermen financially—more of the profit from fish-
ing is kept by the fisherman, and the urban consumer helps to finance and
underwrite some of the risk involved in a fishing operation.
One CSF that operates along the Californian coast in the small fishing
village of Moss Landing, is the Real Good Fish CSF, co-founded and run
by Alan Lovewell. On a visit there we also had the chance to meet and
interview a local fisherman, Calder Deyerly, who sends much of his catch
through the Real Good Fish CSF. Later in the day watched as he
unloaded what he had caught earlier. It was quite a contrast to the image
of industrial fishing with mammoth boats and legends of workers. It was
just Deyerly working alone. Later he received a little help from dock
crew, lifting the several relatively small crates of fish he brought back
(Figs. 3.4 and 3.5).

Figs. 3.4 and 3.5 Calder Deyerley, shown here, is proud of his family’s fishing
heritage. He fishes along the Californian coast near Monterey using sustainable
techniques, and sells his fish to local restaurants and to the local CSF. Image credit:
Tim Beatley
 AN UNSUSTAINABLE BOUNTY FROM THE BLUE: CITIES TO THE RESCUE? 49

Figs. 3.4 and 3.5 Continued

Here was a scale where you could see and comprehend everything and
you could personally get to know your fisherman as we did that day.
Deyerly had nothing to hide, was proud of what he was doing and spoke
passionately of the fishing heritage he inherited from his fisherman father
and that he hoped to pass down to his own 5-year-old son. This was the
face of a fishing industry that we could support and be proud of, I thought
to myself.
On this day he was fishing sablefish (also known as black cod) on a long
line. He returned in the afternoon having reached his quota.
There is little doubt that support for local fishermen like Deyerly would
lead to more sustainable fisheries. There is a connection and accountability
here, and even the chance for urbanites to learn about the ocean from
these interactions. The emerging CSF mechanism is an important one, but
still remains small in size. There are perhaps a couple of dozen CSFs scat-
tered around the USA.
This is perhaps not surprising given that our national policies and sys-
tems of subsidies tend to work against these kinds of small scale fishermen.
Without subsidies the deep sea trawling that we see today would not be
economical, Pauly tells me.
50 T. BEATLEY

Indeed the larger trends suggest ever greater support for the industrial
forms of fishing that are so ecologically destructive and human–ocean dis-
connecting. A recent analysis of the financial subsidies for fishing finds
(not surprisingly) that the lion’s share goes to larger, industrial fishing
operations. Writing in Marine Policy, Schuhbauer and co-workers con-
clude that of an estimated $35 billion in national financial subsidies given
to support fishing (in 2009), only about 16 % went to the “small-scale
fishing sector.”5 The parallels to land-based agriculture are evident. As a
matter of fairness this ought to concern us, but more important is the
resource-exhausting, unsustainable industrial scale fishing supported by
these subsidies.
One interesting development is the growing awareness of the emo-
tional complexity of fish, adding an important and relatively new dimen-
sion to the debate about seafood harvesting. Could there be another
moral reason to shift entirely away from fish, built less on scarcity and
unsustainability and more on sentience and the need to avoid pain and
suffering?
New research is adding to our appreciation of the emotional and psy-
chological complexity of fish and a sense of concern about how we are
treating these creatures literally swept up in the industrial fishing system.
In many ways the emerging concerns parallel the concerns we feel about
the plight of animals in land-based factory farms, and while considerable
progress has been made in improving animal living conditions and intro-
ducing a measure of humaneness, no similar efforts can be seen (yet) when
it comes to fish.
Much of our early awareness of the plight of animals and the need to
take their pain and suffering into account can be traced to Australian phi-
losopher Peter Singer, and to his groundbreaking book Animal Liberation.6
I spoke recently to Singer about progress made since the book was pub-
lished in 1975. He is largely optimistic and points to progress in improv-
ing conditions for farm animals, especially in the European Union, but
points to the marine realm as an area where little has been done so far.
There is now good research showing the psychological and emotional
complexity of fish, something not heretofore given much attention. This
research shows, Singer believes, that “fish are individuals…some are quite
intelligent, good at problem-solving…they have emotions and feelings,
and relate to others as individuals.”7
By Singer’s estimate the annual global fish kill exceeds a trillion: “It is
an enormous number of sentient beings being killed…And of course many
 AN UNSUSTAINABLE BOUNTY FROM THE BLUE: CITIES TO THE RESCUE? 51

of these deaths are very painful and drawn out. So I think it is time that
people become aware of the slaughter, of the suffering involved,” as well
as the unsustainable and damaging nature of modern fishing methods.
This is a lot to consider and an issue not widely thought of when ordering
a salmon or grouper for dinner.
There are other reasons why we have been slow to care about the pain
and suffering of fish. “They can’t vocalize, or we can’t hear them,” in the
same way that we might hear a pig or a bellowing cow. “Fish are silent to
our ears,” Singer says.
I must admit to my own visceral emotional reaction to the landing of
fish (albeit small) in Moss Landing the day we shadowed CSF fisherman
Calder Deyerly. This fisherman spoke eloquently and passionately about
the craft of fishing, proudly passed down from one generation to the next,
and the care he clearly had for his home coast and the marine ecosystems
on which his livelihood depended. These are the kinds of fisherman we
need and want, engaging in a form of sustainable fishing on a reasonable
scale. Nevertheless, when I saw firsthand the writhing fish, it ignited a
sickening feeling—these were clearly sentient, feeling creatures that were
dying, or had died.
As with most food purchased in a modern grocery store there are few
opportunities for (and little interest in) experiencing firsthand the difficult
(and painful) lives of farm animals. Even fewer opportunities exist to see
the harvesting of wild caught fish. In ways similar to factory farming,
much or most of this happens hidden or masked from the consumers who
ultimately buy and eat these fish.
The level of “bycatch,” or the unintentional killing or harming associ-
ated with fishing is yet another reason for ethical concern. By some esti-
mates the extent of global bycatch may reach 10.3 million tonnes per year.8
In early 2017, hundreds of common dolphins began washing ashore in
the UK, France and Ireland, the likely result of offshore fishing trawlers.
The number of dolphins killed has been estimated at more than 3000, a
dramatic demonstration of the harm industrial fishing especially inflicts on
marine mammals. This is just one episode that illustrates the huge prob-
lem of secondary death and suffering that happens in the regular course of
commercial fishing. And while progress has been made to reduce bycatch—
for instance the installation of turtle excluder devices—the problem and
impact remain large and mostly unmitigated.
In contrast to a system based on harvesting fish, filter-feeding species
such as mussels and oysters can be cultivated without this immense
52 T. BEATLEY

s­ uffering. Singer believes the sentience line is somewhere between an oys-

ter and a lobster or a shrimp, a speculation contained in Animal Liberation,
and now being validated, Singer believes, by science. Their production
and harvesting do not entail the same degree of environmental damage
and, indeed, are actually ecologically restorative (e.g. filtering and cleans-
ing water).
“So yes, if you want to eat animal products, oysters, clams and mus-
sels…scallops are the best possible, most sustainable and least suffering
animal products you can eat,” Singer says.
There was a time when shellfish fed many Americans. Today, major
shellfish ecosystems contain and produce only a fraction of what they did
at their peak (Gulf of Mexico 10 % of peak, Chesapeake Bay only 1 %).9
That could change and it is not inconceivable that oyster fisheries could be
rebuilt, but it will require a major effort. There is little doubt that there is
major growth potential for farm shellfish—oyster, clams, mussels—and a
considerable amount of this might happen near cities. Efforts to engage
urban residents directly in the raising of oysters—for instance through the
Billion Oyster Project in New York, described in a later chapter—will fur-
ther raise the visibility of the benefits of bivalves, even though water qual-
ity remains too poor to allow their human consumption. Bivalve production
can be expanded in many parts of the country (and world) with positive
environmental benefits (in contrast to the negatives associated with the
raising of carnivores, that Pauly so well critiques). And we might envision
a time when water quality is so improved in city harbors that oyster and
shellfish could be raised for urban consumption (Fig. 3.6).
Cultivating seaweed is another promising option, and one that would
meet Singer’s sentience test. Like oysters and other shellfish, seaweed con-
tributes positively to the marine environment and does not require input.
A recent story in the Washington Post sings its praises:

It needs no fertilizing, no weeding, no watering, and it has very few enemies

in the form of pests or disease. It gets all its needs from the environment
around it and, under optimal conditions, can grow almost six inches a day.
It’s healthful for people, and it actually leaves the environment better than
it finds it.10

There are now a number of seaweed or kelp farms in operation, in the

USA and around the world.11
Seaweed is not without its challenges. While nutritious, its high iodine
content raises concerns about the potential health impact of eating too
Fig 3.6 Oyster aquaculture is one promising and more sustainable option for producing food from the sea. In New York
Harbor, the Billion Oyster Project is attempting to use oysters to educate residents on and connect residents to the harbor
ecosystem, and is directly engaging high school students in this program. Image credit: New York Harbor School
AN UNSUSTAINABLE BOUNTY FROM THE BLUE: CITIES TO THE RESCUE?
53
54 T. BEATLEY

much seaweed. And then for some there is the issue of taste (or lack thereof),
and the important step of cultivating demand for this less-than-­savory food
product. But there is considerable promise in cultivating the sea in these
ways, and through kelp and sea vegetables, and oyster and shellfish aquacul-
ture, satisfying global protein needs in more sustainable and humane ways.

Some Concluding Remarks

As many global fisheries crash and as our current largely industrial approach
to seafood harvesting is proving unsustainable, Blue Biophilic Cities have
the chance to lead the way to explore new ideas and avenues. There are few
areas where the connection between urban consumption and marine health
is clearer or more ripe for re-thinking. The issues are complex but some of
the more promising avenues have been identified here. These include:
greater support (financial and otherwise) for more community-­based, small
scale fishing (such as CSFs), and support for an emerging “slow fish” move-
ment that parallels slow food and local food movements; utilizing the fish
we harvest more efficiently and, as much as we can, eating further down
the food chain; support for stronger fisheries management regimes, and the
need to dramatically expand the extent of protected marine areas; and find-
ing ways to shift consumption from wild-caught fish through more sustain-
able and humane forms of aquaculture. Blue biophilic cities give priority to
ensuring healthy oceans but recognize that in many parts of the world
wild-caught fish will remain an important source of protein. I have intro-
duced the controversial topic of pain and suffering of marine organisms
and, while the question remains open for discussion, the ethical underpin-
nings of Blue biophilic cities lend support to humane modes of aquaculture
(i.e. oysters, clams, seaweed and other sea vegetables). Blue biophilic cities,
moreover, support expanding protected marine areas, with special atten-
tion to those near to cities where urbanites can explore and learn about the
marine world, but also cultivate an ethic of wonder and caring that can (it
is hoped) extend to marine conservation in far-away locales.

Notes
1. These include so-called TURFS or Territorial Use Rights for Fishing
(TURF) Programs, see: http://fisherysolutionscenter.edf.org/catch-
share-basics/turfs
2. Oregon State University, “International Science Team: Marine Reserves
Can Help Mitigate Climate Change,” June 5, 2017.
 AN UNSUSTAINABLE BOUNTY FROM THE BLUE: CITIES TO THE RESCUE? 55

3. There are many ways that protected marine areas can enhance ocean resil-
ience, for instance helping to address the increasing ocean water acidity:
“coastal wetlands—including mangroves, seagrasses and salt marshes—
have demonstrated a capacity for reducing local carbon dioxide concentra-
tions because many contain plants with high rates of photosynthesis.”
Oregon State University, 2017, p. 2.
4. For more information see http://www.seafoodwatch.org/; there is also a
discussion in Beatley, Blue Urbanism, Island Press, 2014a.
5. The authors also estimate that some 90 % of the “capacity enhancing sub-
sidies” go to large scale fishing, supporting overfishing and marine degra-
dation, “Conclusions indicate that taxpayer’s money should be used to
support sustainable fishing practices and in turn ocean conservation, and
not to foster the degradation of marine ecosystems, often a result of capac-
ity-enhancing subsidies. Reducing capacity-enhancing subsidies will have
minimal negative effects on SSF [small-scale fisheries] communities since
they receive very little of these subsidies to begin with. Instead, it will help
to correct the existing inequality, enhance SSF economic viability, and pro-
mote global fisheries sustainability.” Schuhbauer, Chuenpagdee, Cheung,
Greer, and Sumalia, “How Subsidies Affect the Economic Viability of
Small-Scale Fisheries,” Marine Policy, 82, 114, August 2017.
6. Peter Singer, Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of
Animals, HarperCollins, 1975.
7. Interview with Peter Singer, April 4, 2017.
8. “How is Seafood Caught? A Look at Fishing Gear Types in Canada,”
found at: http://www.oceana.ca/en/blog/how-seafood-caught-look-
fishing-gear-types-canada
9. Monica Jain, “Oysters Built the East Coast. Entrepreneurs are Rebuilding
the Oysters,” found at: http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2017/04/11/
oysters/
10. Tamar Haspel, “Seaweed is Easy to Grow, Sustainable and Nutritious. But
it will never be Kale,” The Washington Post, October 27, 2015.
11. One such company is Ocean Approved, located on the Maine coast. They
advertise “Fresh, Frozen Kelp from Maine,” with products that include
kelp cubes and seaweed salad. See: http://www.oceanapproved.com/
 CHAPTER 4

Making the Marine World Visible: Fostering

Emotional Connections to the Sea

Abstract The marine world is, to many, remote and exotic. For city resi-
dents to fully embrace the wonder and beauty of the ocean world, and to
actively work on its behalf, it will require emotional connection and car-
ing. There are many different ways to do this and several of the more
compelling and creative are described here: using social media to foster a
sense of fascination and concern for the great white shark; taking children
into the water and challenging them to find, look, touch and learn about
the nature there; sending real-time video images from underwater divers
to the surface; developing new long term institutions, such as a New York
Harbor School and the Billion Oyster Project, to educate and engage resi-
dents of all ages. There are now compelling models that other cities can
follow to foster this deep sense of emotional connection and caring for the
marine realm.

Part of the difficulty of connecting urbanites with the marine world is that
even though it may be nearby, it is often visually and emotionally distant.
Our terrestrial world and lives make it hard to see and appreciate what lies
beneath waves and water. Scuba diving and snorkeling offer a chance to
see those worlds, but it seems unlikely that many residents will be able to
do that.

© The Author(s) 2018 57

T. Beatley, Blue Biophilic Cities, Cities and the Global Politics of the
Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67955-6_4
58 T. BEATLEY

There is as sense now that we must take full advantage of all the many
ways, some conventional, some newer and more innovative, to reach and
teach urban populations.
Visiting an aquarium might represent one opportunity for learning and
for emotional connections, and we are now seeing a change in the ways in
which these facilities are understanding their roles on the blue planet (for
instance the new design for expansion of the National Aquarium in
Baltimore). In San Francisco, we visited and filmed the Aquarium of the
Bay. As aquaria go, it is a small operation, but it plays a big educational
role in the region and it sits in the heart of the city, adjacent to Pier 39.
Unlike many other aquaria, this one has only marine organisms that are
native to and found in the ecosystems of San Francisco Bay. One of the
aquarium’s campaigns is cleverly titled “The Sharks of Alcatraz.” It’s
meant to highlight the fact that there are indeed many species of sharks
that can be found in the bay. The Alcatraz reference pertains to the story
told that inmates of this island prison don’t attempt to escape because if
you do you will be eaten by sharks. Not really true, it was a convenient fear
to stoke, and a story that provides a chance to educate about the remark-
able shark life found close by.
Organizations such as the Georgia Strait Alliance in Vancouver has
worked in several creative ways to build new appreciation for the ways that
oceans might be under threat, and specifically addressing how urban life-
styles and recreational choices can have an impact. It has developed a series
of online pledges aimed at both educating and building commitments to
reducing pesticide and herbicide use on one’s lawn, for example, and
greener, more sustainable boating practices.
One of the most effective efforts at connecting urban residents to
nearby water has been the use of “drift cards” as a way to simulate the
potential impacts of oil spills. A joint initiative with the more science-­
based organization Raincoast, the cards are designed to float and are made
of natural materials (plywood and nontoxic paint), intended to simulate an
oil spill. The cards are tossed into the water from chosen locations, usually
from a boat (often as part of an event organized with a local school), with
the intent of understanding how far and fast the cards would travel. Each
card carries a unique number and once citizens find them they are encour-
aged to go online to register where they found them, providing some
highly useful information about how far and how quickly oil might move
in the case of a real spill. It is an eye-opening exercise and the findings so
far suggest that an oil spill would likely have a much wider geographical
impact than previously thought, and the impact would be fast (Fig. 4.1).
Fig. 4.1 The release of “drift cards” shown here, is a way to engage the public in studying how quickly and extensively
potential oil spills from tankers might travel through the Strait of Georgia, near Vancouver, British Columbia. Image
MAKING THE MARINE WORLD VISIBLE: FOSTERING EMOTIONAL…

credit: Andrea Reimer, Georgia Strait Alliance

59
60 T. BEATLEY

This is not an academic exercise. The Georgia Strait Alliance and other
ocean conservation organizations are actively opposing a new proposed oil
pipeline that would bring oil from the tar sands of Alberta province to be
put on tankers in Barnaby (near Vancouver), which then travel through
the Straits of Georgia.
The use of drift cards helps to educate about the oil threat and to foster
a sense of caring about the ocean. According to Christianne Wilhelmson,
the drift card program “has been incredibly powerful as a [public out-
reach] tool.” Impacts that are abstract—a future oil spill—are made tan-
gible and real in this way.

Exchanging Tweets with a Great White Shark

We need to further cultivate our “blue heartstrings,” for lack of a better
way to say it. There are natural times when we can emphasize empathy and
caring for marine life and reject fear and separateness. The 1970s film Jaws
did much damage to our collective psyche about sharks, teaching us that
they are intrinsically dangerous and to be feared. That seems to be chang-
ing gradually, and it is heartening to see instances of herculean efforts on
the parts of beachgoers to save stranded great white sharks.
Similarly, our new digital technologies and lives are helping us make
connections and grow some of these much needed blue heartstrings.
The nonprofit Ocearch, for instance, has been tagging sharks and pro-
viding real-time information online about their whereabouts. These
tagged sharks include a great white shark named Mary Lee, who has a
Twitter account with more than 100,000 followers. Mary Lee tweets (in
fact it was recently discovered that the real author of her tweets is a reporter
for the Raleigh News and Observer) and her followers tweet her back,
sending a variety of personal messages, from wishing her a happy mother’s
day, to encouraging her to return soon to their state and region. Along the
way, followers seem to be learning about the shark—there are images,
there is information about weight and distance traveled, and in the end
perhaps a sense of something familiar; a digital friendship that helps to
overcome the remoteness, the strong sense of “otherness” that a creature
like a great white shark engenders.
I spoke to Ocearch founder Chris Fischer recently who discussed the
ways in which shark tagging has helped to overcome the perhaps
 MAKING THE MARINE WORLD VISIBLE: FOSTERING EMOTIONAL… 61

­ nderstandable disconnect (or aversion) that many feel towards sharks.1

u
Fischer and his Ocearch crew have tagged some 300 sharks, including
about 80 great whites (Mary Lee is in fact named after Chris’s mom). The
trips are usually collaborations with marine scientists from Woods Hole
and the Mote Marine Laboratory. Fischer points to the value of this more
public-­inclusive mode of science and notes the many biological insights
the trips and the tagging have generated.
Fischer argues that most of the fear of sharks stems from a fear of the
unknown. “The only time we heard about a shark was when something
bad happened and now we’re talking about could Mary Lee be pregnant?
Where is she giving birth? Where is the mating site?” Facts and curiosity
and wonder replace fear. The secret seems to be to find ways to engage the
public, to get their attention, to interest them in caring about these
creatures.
“And we’re having thousands of ongoing conversations throughout
every day of the year,” says Fischer. “Instead of just the odd shark attack
story really driving how people feel… and so we’re replacing kind of this
fear of the unknown with really kind of the first facts and information that
people can see and be a part of and that’s allowed us to engage them in
not only solving the problem of where they’re mating, giving birth and
migrating, but also to help them then understand why sharks are
important.”
This more inclusive model of science gives the public different ave-
nues for contact and connection, “by allowing people to find their way
into the project whether it’s communicating with the shark on Twitter
or tracking a shark on the tracker and then Tweeting or Facebooking a
scientist with a question and connecting all these dots for people in
real time, in the now.” The Ocearch Facebook page now has more than
440,000 likes, so it’s content and photos are clearly being seen
(Fig. 4.2).
These modern digital tools are also proving to be helpful in the class-
room, where elementary school students are following sharks in real time,
learning about their biology, writing in journals about this, and generally
replacing fear with fascination. Fischer tells me they have been working
with a dozen schools to integrate a K-12 educational curriculum around
the sharks, and to use this information in teaching other subjects from
math to physics.
 62
T. BEATLEY

Fig. 4.2 The nonprofit Ocearch has been tagging and tracking great white sharks and, through social media, helping to
educate about and build new emotional connections to these majestic marine animals. Image credit: Ocearch
 MAKING THE MARINE WORLD VISIBLE: FOSTERING EMOTIONAL… 63

There is the impressive example of the first-grade class of Highlands

Elementary School in New Jersey who have been keeping track of Mary
Lee, and have even made a 16-foot paper replica of her that adorns the
front wall of their classroom.2
These students are quite fond of Mary Lee, according to their teacher,
Colleen Acerra, capturing their thoughts in a journal. “They love her,”
said Acerra, who was quoted in the Asbury Park Press. “They love tracking
her. They love learning all about her and they’re wondering if she’s preg-
nant…Some people think she’s pregnant and some people think she’s just
following the tuna run up and down the coast.”
Fischer sees real change happening in the way sharks are being per-
ceived and points to a recent episode where Cape Cod beach goers worked
frantically to save a 14-foot great white shark. It was a remarkable example
of collective compassion on Wellfleet Beach in Cape Cod, where a group
of 100 human would-be rescuers carried buckets of water and dug a chan-
nel in an attempt to pull the fish back to open water.
Local reporter Alison Pohle reported on the scene:

After people dug a trench around the shark, someone tied a rope to its tail.
Another person then swam to a boat offshore with the other end of the
rope. As the boat traveled away from the shore, the crowd dragged the shark
back to the water, but it was too late.3

While unable in the end to save the shark, the effort was itself remark-
able. The tide seems to be turning in our view of sharks. The image of
people digging in the sand, passing buckets of water, pulling together on
a rope in an effort to get a shark back to open water—what turned out to
be a futile effort—is impressive to see.4 And while it may not be the direct
result of Mary Lee tweets, these social media connections are undoubtedly
helpful.
Such efforts can lead to real and significant scientific insights, to be
sure, and can result in more effective management and protection. Tagging
and tracking of marine organisms, including sharks, has also happened
through the Global Tagging of Pelagic Predators. Barbara Block of
Stanford has been a leading force behind this tagging effort of sharks, but
also bluefin tuna, elephant seals and California sea lions, among other spe-
cies. Some species such as Pacific bluefin tuna are doing quite poorly, with
64 T. BEATLEY

populations estimated at 5 % of what they had been before extensive com-

mercial fishing. How to protect and manage this species is a real challenge
(as Block and her colleagues well know) and is the impetus for organizing
a recent Bluefin Futures Symposium held at the Monterey Bay Aquarium.
Tracking tuna has led to an understanding of where essential feeding
grounds lie, including the area off the northwest coast of the USA where
nutrient uplifting happens every spring—what Block has called our “blue
Serengeti” (a compelling illustration of the power of language to help us
connect with and understand the importance of this essential piece of
seascape).
Can tracking this species ignite a level of engagement and concern
around tuna and perhaps create the political space and cover for the tough
management and conservation decisions necessary to ensure that Pacific
bluefin tuna doesn’t, as Block says, “go the way of the cod”? It is hard to
know, but the new ways that technology may allow us to “wire the ocean”
(through a network of wi-fi buoys and wave gliders—the latter being
surfboard-­like autonomous floating structures capable of collecting a vari-
ety of kinds of data from oceans).
Of course, there are many other creative ways that our modern digital
technologies can foster nature connections. Our iPhones and tablets pro-
vide an almost unlimited opportunity to record the natural world around
us and to effortlessly share these images, observations and experiences
with friends and family. We are able prod, induce and incite with our
Twitter posts, and Twitter and other social-media campaigns have proven
to be effective methods of encouraging more natureful lives.

Cultivating a Marine Ethos Through Experience

and Adventure

How else do we develop a sense of connection and empathy? Another way

to make this magic visceral and real is through direct experiences in or near
the water. In blue cities we have filmed these kinds of experiences.
One such remarkable effort can be seen in the work of the Marjory
Stoneman Douglas Biscayne Nature Center, a part of Crandon Park. With
the Miami Beach Skyline seen in the distance, the center puts on a variety
of impressive programs to educate in a very hands-on fashion about marine
biology and marine conservation. At the center we filmed a visit hosted by
Theodora Long, the center’s long-serving director.
 MAKING THE MARINE WORLD VISIBLE: FOSTERING EMOTIONAL… 65

We watched as the center hosted a visit for some 100 fifth-graders from
the inland community of Homestead, a community hard-hit by hurricane
Andrew. The students initially sat and listened to one naturalist explain
what they intended to do and what they might see and learn. Then we
made our way out to the water for a “Seagrass Adventure.”
The namesake of center, Marjory Stoneman Douglas, was an inspira-
tion: a conservation hero in Florida history. Surviving until the age of
108, she was an active conservation advocate until the very end of her
life. According to Long, she was intimately involved in the establish-
ment of the center. She is most famous for her book on the Everglades,
River of Grass, published in 1947.5 It was the result of a writing con-
tract—a request to contribute to a book series about rivers. The editor
of this series first proposed that Douglas write about the Miami River,
what Douglas thought to be a relatively small and unimportant river
(and thus writing task). The Everglades, she thought, would be a much
more appropriate subject, though before her book it was not generally
viewed as a “river,” but indeed it was on a grand scale. The book helped
to change this understanding as well as to foster greater appreciation
for a kind of natural environment that perhaps did not fit the more clas-
sical view of a picturesque landscape worthy of conservation (Figs. 4.3
and 4.4).
The center is a nonprofit organization in partnership with two other
entities: the Miami Dade County Public Schools, and the Dade County
Parks and Recreation Department.
On this beautiful Florida January day, with the skyline of Miami Beach
in the distance, an energetic, excited group of fifth graders set off for a
marine adventure. The almost 100 students from Homestead, an inland
city to the west, were equipped with life vests and large nets for scooping
the sandy bottom of the sea. They set off into thigh-high water in groups
of around eight or ten. Each of the six or seven groups was accompanied
by a naturalist from the center. There were also a few parents, but they
seemed more hesitant about entering the water, one of them asking me
sheepishly about whether there were any Portuguese man ’o wars around
(there were, something the children had been briefed on but not too
worried about). Once in the water the children, working in pairs, went to
work and in no time there were screams of delight about what they were
finding—a variety of small fish (e.g. trunkfish, toadfish), shrimp and
sponges.
66 T. BEATLEY

Figs. 4.3 and 4.4 One of the most effective ways to engage children in the marine
realm is to take them into the ocean. Shown here are images from the so-­called
Seagrass Adventure, where fifth-graders are lead into the water to see what kinds of
marine life they can find. This is one of the most popular programs of the Marjory
Stoneman Douglas Biscayne Nature Center, Miami. Image credit: Tim Beatley
 MAKING THE MARINE WORLD VISIBLE: FOSTERING EMOTIONAL… 67

The children would bring their nets to the naturalist who would, with
a smaller aquarium style net transfer the contents to a couple of plastic
buckets floating (cleverly) in the center of two round life preservers.
For me, one of the most dramatic early finds was what at first looked
like a spiky tennis ball. I thought it was a species of sea urchin, until it was
placed in water in the bucket, where it proceeded to miraculously trans-
form back into a balloonfish. There were other dramatic finds—a queen
conch, with its beautiful pink shell, a Filefish and blue crabs, sea hares and
a spectacular bristleworm.
After more than an hour in the water the children came back to the
shore to look more closely at and further discuss what they had found.
The naturalists were terrific at simultaneously stoking the imaginations of
these children, providing lots of additional information and natural his-
tory about the marine life, and managing their youthful impulses and exu-
berances (speaking all at once or moving around in distracting ways).
There was a lot of learning that happened on that day, reinforced by the
visceral, hands-on aspect of the experience. The pupils learned that a tiny
pea-sized fish would likely grow into a trunkfish, and that a mantis shrimp
is in fact the fastest animal in the world (move over peregrine falcons)
because of the rapid strikes of its claw. But I think the larger messages,
more implicit, and more powerful were that a remarkable diversity of life
lives just beyond our sight; that we can barely imagine what we might see
in that net when it comes to the surface; that the sea is so magical and so
different from anything else we know in our more land-based lives. The
balloonfish certainly showed me that on that special day on Key Biscayne.
Filming this was fun and a privilege. We went from group to group,
asking the pupils what they had found, and peering into the buckets to see
for ourselves what had been collected (and to try to capture some of that
on film).
There was also an indoor classroom element to this visit for the stu-
dents. There are several classrooms at the center but one especially intrigu-
ing room, organized into a series of marine science “stations,” each with a
large aquarium in front of it. The children worked through a series of
learning modules, answering questions by looking in the tanks or by
accessing the other hands-on materials around them. A whistle blew peri-
odically and the pupils shifted from one station to the next, gradually mak-
ing their way around the room.
There are three full-time Miami-Dade County teachers who are assigned
here permanently, employees of the school system (one of the main part-
ners of the center, along with the Parks and Recreation Department).
68 T. BEATLEY

Interviewing the center’s director, Theodora Long, and program coor-

dinator Sandra St. Hilaire, further helped to put this educational effort
into a wider context. We heard the history of the center, going back to a
time when they ran educational programs out of the back of a hotdog
stand. Since 1969, Long tells me, they have reached more than a million
people. This is not bad in a metropolitan area of 2.6 million.
Standing at Crandon Park, not far from the center, the skyline of the
south end of Miami Beach can be seen in the distance. The prognosis
for this city is not great, considering the rise in sea levels it will likely
experience by the end of the century. But the city is bullish and resistant
to the idea that it is ever going away or going to beaten by sea level rise,
as we saw in the previous chapter. Proximity to this wondrous marine
world is certainly one reason that helps to explain the deep draw of this
coastal setting, though likely even well embedded adults have not had
the full immersion marine experience provided by Long and her pas-
sionate staff.

Piering into the Night

We will need to look for more creative ideas to stimulate the imaginations
of urban residents about what lies around and below. Luckily we have the
technology to do this today. One innovative effort in the USA’s northwest
is called “Pier Into The Night.” Organized by the nonprofit Harbor
WildWatch, the idea is relatively simple—with the help of volunteer divers,
underwater video is streamed in real time to a screen on a public pier. The
divers carry a relatively inexpensive camera mounted with lights. They
swim underwater looking for and pointing out marine life. On the pier
there is a HarborWatch naturalist providing commentary to the on-screen
images.
It is yet another creative way of making the undersea marine world vis-
ible. We visited (and filmed) one of these Pier Into the Night events in
January—they happen on the first Saturday of every month from October
through to March, a time of the year when the waters of Puget Sound are
less murky and it is easier to see marine life (Fig. 4.5).
We spoke with Lindsey Stover, executive director of Harbor WildWatch,
before the event began. HarborWatch has been organizing these events
since 2009, and Stover tells me that this is not the first or only place where
they are doing some version of underwater video. There was a palpable
Fig. 4.5 Pier Into the Night, is an event in Gig Harbor, Washington, where divers send images in real time to a screen
on a public pier. Here families are mesmerized by what the divers are finding. Image credit: Tim Beatley
MAKING THE MARINE WORLD VISIBLE: FOSTERING EMOTIONAL…
69
70 T. BEATLEY

feeling of anticipation, of what might be discovered that evening. Stover

describes the evening as an enticement to residents to experience “the
mystery of what’s below the surface.”
It is “incredibly exciting” she says. “The kids love it. The big kids, all of
us, the adults love it as well.”6 There are touch tanks, also, stocked with
marine life discovered earlier in the day by the divers.
Everyone I tell about the Gig Harbor programs seems to think it is a
great idea and I wonder why more places haven’t tried this. As a reservoir
of fascination and wonder, the marine environment has no equal. There is
still so much to learn about the biology of marine organisms and these seem
to live and behave in ways so completely foreign to what we see on land.
On the night we were filming there were about 90 residents huddled
around the screen. It was relatively chilly, in the low 30s (Fahrenheit).
Children and families mostly, I was impressed that there were not many
sounds of complaining youngsters, anxious to leave for the warmth of car
and home. The children seemed mesmerized by the images appearing on
the screen. A naturalist from Harbor WildWatch, Stena Troyer, equipped
with a hands-free microphone provided a steady stream of commentary
about what the divers were finding and pointing to. There was a lot to see
that evening, including sea cucumbers, decorator crabs and sea stars. The
gloved finger or hand of a diver would occasionally appear on the screen
directing attention to some piece of marine life.
The messages that evening were clear enough: there is remarkable and
fascinating life just below the surface. “Anywhere there’s space there is going
to be stuff living,” Stena told the audience. There was also trash and human
debris to see, its own message. At one point a household iron appeared,
allowing for a brief discussion of the need for beach and marine cleanups and
the need to be more careful about what we throw into the water.
There were also fascinating stories about the biology of some of the
marine organisms we were seeing. Troyer spoke with wonder in her voice
about the remarkable things a sea cucumber can do, including its ability to
spit out it intestines at a predator, if need be. “A pretty cool trick,” Stena
told us.
Stena had just the right personality for this event and managed to con-
vey well a genuine sense of mystery and surprise at what was appearing on
the screen. “The cool thing is that we never know what we’re going to see.
So, it is a different experience every time.”
The assembled group got to see some remarkable forms of life, mostly
hidden from view day to day. It was at least a glimpse into the hidden
 MAKING THE MARINE WORLD VISIBLE: FOSTERING EMOTIONAL… 71

world of the marine realm and perhaps stirred further interest in children
and adults alike. But the elusive giant Pacific octopus (or “GPO” as the
divers referred to them affectionately) did not make an appearance. One
had in fact been seen earlier in the day and so there was some hope for an
appearance for a bigger audience later in the day. But no matter, the group
was happy with what it had been able to see.
The Pier Into the Night is largely a volunteer effort. We spoke briefly
with the two volunteer divers, Anthony and Allen, as they came out of
the water at the end of the event. They were tired but excited to share
their love of the underwater world with others. Much can be done it
appears with a few volunteers and a few bits of relatively inexpensive
technology.

The New York Harbor School and the Power

of Oysters

One of the interesting programs under way in Baltimore, mentioned ear-

lier in Chap. 2, was an initiative to engage the public in raising oysters. A
collaboration between the Healthy Harbor Initiative and the Chesapeake
Bay Foundation, some 150,000 young oysters (or spat as they’re called)
are being raised by schools and by corporate sponsors. These sponsors take
on the task of helping to raise these spat until they are large enough to be
transferred to oyster beds in Chesapeake Bay.
One innovation is that they are raised in hanging cages, not far away,
but right there in the inner harbor. There are about ten sites where the
hanging cages are found around the inner harbor. These so-called “oyster
gardens” are at points accessible from the harbor’s promenade, where
schools and corporate volunteers can easily reach the cages to inspect them
and clean them. Cleaning the cages must happen every month, Adam
Lindquist tells me (Lindquist runs the program for the Healthy Harbor
Initiative). When the cages are pulled to the surface, it attracts quite a bit
of attention from passers-by. This Lindquist tells, is much of the point and
provides an unusual chance to educate the wider public about the state of
water quality and marine habitat. “All of my volunteers,” Lindquist tells
me, “are ambassadors for cleaning up the harbor, because they love to talk
to the public.” This is indeed a clever way to foster emotional connections
with, and caring for, the aquatic realm of this city. I have been an
­enthusiastic admirer of the Baltimore effort and mentioned the thousands
of oysters being raised there. When following one event, a resident of
72 T. BEATLEY

New York City proudly declared, “Well, we are growing a billion oysters.”
In the months to follow I would learn much more about the impressive
efforts to connect New Yorkers to their harbor through the growing of
oysters, and the power of the oyster as both an educational tool and mode
for connecting us to the marine world.
During our filming in New York City it was frequently mentioned that
the city’s historical motto had been the “City of Water.” Though highly
appropriate—it is a city with some 700 miles of shoreline—there has been
an odd denial or disconnect with this profound watery context. That has
been changing, as already noted, and New York Harbor is now commonly
referred to as the city’s sixth borough, and articles in outlets like the
Smithsonian are declaring that New York is rediscovering its maritime
spirit. These are all positive trends, but these shifts are not occurring by
accident. The importance of doing many different things in that city is
evident, from exploring new ideas for flood mitigation and sea level rise
adaptation, to the new generation of waterfront parks like the Brooklyn
Bridge Park, and these things are definitely transforming relationships
with, and perceptions of, the harbor.
One of the most inspirational stories can be found in the New York
Harbor School (I will return shortly to the Billion Oysters Project). We
had the chance to interview Murray Fisher, founder of the school, on
Governors Island where this unique New York high school is located. It is
a spectacular setting, with views of the lower Manhattan skyline and con-
siderable boat and ferry traffic in all directions.
Fisher told us the story of when he came up with the idea of a public
high school centered on the harbor. He was working for the River Keepers
organization, having moved to the big city from rural Virginia and with a
background in farming. He began to realize that there few or no experi-
ences for young people to learn about the harbor, or gather the kind of
deep knowledge he had about the place in his position as river keeper. He
had an epiphany. “This should be a school. This should be how we teach
and learn. We should place young people directly in the ecosystems where
they live.” The light bulb went off, he told us.
The school he co-founded with several others is like no other. Part of
the New York school system, it is considered a “career and technical edu-
cation school,” and students are able to graduate with technical creden-
tials in one of six subjects taught: aquaculture; marine biology science;
marine systems technology (including building and maintaining vessels);
ocean engineering (including the operation of underwater ROVs, remotely
 MAKING THE MARINE WORLD VISIBLE: FOSTERING EMOTIONAL… 73

operated vehicles); professional scuba diving; and vessel operations (that is

driving and operating boats). Some 475 students travel to the high school
from all five boroughs. Fisher explains that while one goal is for students
to develop a skill set in one of these areas, another goal is to be accepted
at the end to a four-year college or university. The high school reflects the
philosophy that students should have maximum choice about their futures.
The array of skills and subjects taught is impressive indeed. We spent
some time with two students who showed us around the aquaculture lab
where they were working and learning. They walked us around and
explained the tanks and magical looking vertical green-tinted cylinders
(tanks of algae to feed the young oysters).
This high school is something to be proud of, and Fisher clearly is. It
saw its first graduating class in 2007 and has just celebrated ten years of
graduating enthusiastic, harbor-skilled students. Murray says he sees grad-
uates working all over New York Harbor. “We feel the harbor school is
helping to change the complexion of the industries that are so related to
the marine environment.” African–American students make up a high per-
centage of the high school’s student body and historically few marine jobs
and careers have been open to them.
“The basic big thesis behind the harbor school is that if you can create
curriculum and job training skills and workforce development skills in
high school that are directly related to restoring that ecosystem, then
maybe we will have an opportunity to engage millions of youth in restor-
ing the planet.” It is a clever way to impart marketable skills but also a
connection and care for the marine world (Fig. 4.6).
One of the higher visibility initiatives of the school has been the Billion
Oyster Project (BOP), which has an audacious goal of planting and grow-
ing a billion oysters in the harbor. Fisher saw it as a way to bring together
all of the students of the high school around a single big project. It was
also a way to spread the message and curriculum to many other parts of
the city beyond the high school. The project works with hundreds of stu-
dents in a number of other schools, who learn about oysters and marine
ecology and who help to plant and raise the oysters. The BOP curriculum
is used in some 75 middle schools in New York. And now there are five
“feeder” middle schools that have been designated, where students learn
even more, and are more prepared to enter the Harbor School. So far
some 20 million oysters have been planted.
Peter Malinowski, co-director of the BOP, spoke with us about how the
BOP works in practice. All of the propagation and planting of the oysters
 74
T. BEATLEY

Fig. 4.6 Billion Oyster Project engages high school students from the New York Harbor School in the raising, monitor-
ing and studying of oysters placed in New York Harbor. Image credit: New York Harbor School
 MAKING THE MARINE WORLD VISIBLE: FOSTERING EMOTIONAL… 75

happens by the students at New York Harbor School. Those learning

aquaculture raise the spat, those with a focus on marine biology monitor
the health of the reefs, and so on. The BOP trains teachers at the middle
schools and provides curricula. Students there learn math and science,
Malinowski explained, “through the lens of oyster restoration.” “Whatever
you’re learning in science class can be related back to the harbor. So rather
than learning about prairie dogs and snakes, students learn about oyster
toadfish and oysters, sea robins and sea horses, and all the animals that
actually live here.”7
Another key part of the project is the engagement of restaurants and
their clientele. Some 60 New York City restaurants are participating in a
program that collects and sends to the New York Harbor School their
discarded oyster shells. After they are cured, they are used as oyster media
and assembled into blocks that become the basis for new oyster beds. This
is an important educational and community engagement function of the
BOP. About a half million pounds of oyster shells were collected from
these restaurants over the last year or so, but still more will be needed.
The planting of a billion oysters is a big goal and I wanted to know how
much progress toward that goal had occurred thus far. Malinowski says
that they have placed about 20 million new oysters into the harbor. Not
close to the billion goal, but pretty impressive nonetheless. That is, until
Malinowski suggests that there were likely trillions and trillions of oysters
originally. By some estimates there were as many as 200,000 acres of oys-
ter beds (a billion oysters would require, by comparison, about 200 acres).
The goal is not to plant anything near this original number, but rather
to reach a point where the oysters are self-sustaining and where, as
Malinowski says, they are able to reproduce on their own.
In the meantime, these new oysters, when placed, almost immediately
enhance and improve marine habitat. But there is a larger goal, Fisher
believes, and it is to build up a harbor-literate populous. “We’ve got to get
the idea of nature and ecosystems back into New Yorker’s minds,” Fisher
tells me. The BOP is a way to do that, a way “to grab people’s
attention.”
Public education and ocean literacy must be at the core of Blue Biophilic
Cities. Here we must circle back around again and mention the impor-
tance of the Waterfront Alliance and the 950 different organizations that
make up this alliance that are actively engaged in marine education.
Summer programs are another opportunity. One especially good idea is
the Harbor Camp, organized by several different groups, including the
76 T. BEATLEY

Waterfront Alliance and the New York Harbor School. This program takes
kids from disadvantaged neighborhoods in the city out on the water, expos-
ing them to a side of the city they have not seen. Since its start, the program
has reached some 20,000 kids, (and another 4000 are expected to partici-
pate in the summer of 2017). They learn about the harbor and its ecology,
and they actually participate in a hands-on way with the sailing of vessels.

Some Concluding Thoughts

Fisher describes New Yorkers as “shockingly disconnected” from that
city’s harbor and from its marine roots and history. There is a parallel story
in almost every other coastal city. But there are many wonderful, creative
ways to introduce urban populations to the marine nature all around
them. This chapter has sampled and described several of the most compel-
ling ideas, including sending video images of underwater marine life in
real time to a waiting pier-bound audience; taking kids into the water to
explore and see what they can find and identify; and engaging kids and the
public in marine restoration efforts such as the Billion Oyster Project.
There are things that can be done that will have a lasting impact, that will
change, educate, entertain, deepen a sense of beyond one’s narrow self,
build larger communities and foster ultimately a sense of the wonder and
majesty of the natural world. Maya Lin in her presentation at the
Smithsonian’s 2017 Earth Optimism Summit commented on the power
of efforts such as the Billion Oyster Project to change the world: “If we
can plant a billion oysters in New York Harbor we can save the planet.”8
A few weeks after we filmed the wonderful Pier Into the Night event in
Gig Harbor, we became aware of (indeed the nation heard about) the
likely death of the matriarch of the southern resident orca population of
the Salish Sea. Often referred to as J-2, she was also affectionately known
as “Granny” for her longevity. Her death was a major blow on many levels
and was felt acutely and deeply by the many human admirers that Granny
had. In February of 2017 the Whale Museum in Friday Harbor,
Washington, even hosted a potluck dinner to share stories about Granny.9
How we acknowledge and celebrate these marine lives, these creatures
that have touched us, speaks volumes about our culture and also send
signals to children and adults alike about the importance and inherent
worth of the other living beings with whom we share the planet. It is
hoped that some of the tools and techniques described herein will help to
further strengthen these emotional human–marine bonds.
 MAKING THE MARINE WORLD VISIBLE: FOSTERING EMOTIONAL… 77

Notes
1. Phone interview with Chris Fischer, March, 2015.
2. See http://www.app.com/story/news/local/land-environment/enviroguy/
2015/06/09/mary-lee-great-white-shark/28749931/
3. Alison Pohle, “Great White Shark Dies on Cape Cod Beach Despite Valiant
Rescue Attempt,” www.boston.com, September 7, 2015.
4. Watch the video here: https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2015/09/06/
foot-great-white-washes-cape-cod-beach/tCZvIPuyPKsGAU2q4HBAKM/
story.html
5. Marjory Stone Douglas, The Everglades: River of Grass, Rinehart and
Company, 1947.
6. Personal interview and on-camera filming, Lindsey Stover, Gig Harbor,
Washington, January, 2017.
7. Personal interview and on-site filming, Peter Malinowski, Governor’s
Harbor, New York City, May 9, 2017.
8. This quote was related to me by Murray Fisher, in an interview on Governors
Island, May 8, 2017.
9. More about Granny and the Whale Museum’s efforts here: https://whale-
museum.org/products/j-2-granny
 CHAPTER 5

Rethinking the Blue–Urban Edge

Abstract Blue cities around the world are re-thinking their edges, as they
must. New design and planning ideas include ensuring that the blue–
urban residents have abundant physical and visual access to marine envi-
ronments. New parks and shorelines are being designed to be more
dynamic and multifunctional—projects such as the Dryline in New York
City will at once enhance water connectivity, add public park space and
urban nature, and provide for flood mitigation and resilience. There are
new efforts, such as the Living Breakwaters project under way in Staten
Island, to enhance ecology and connect residents to the water, while also
enhancing the marine environment’s resilience. New initiatives seek to
integrate marine biodiversity into the design of new shoreline structures in
cities such as Singapore and Seattle.

It is an ambitious plan to re-connect the city to the water, with new park
space, a continuous promenade, re-built piers, places to launch kayaks and
new street level connections to surrounding neighborhoods. Progress has
already included completion of a first phase of a re-built Elliott Bay
Seawall, designed to provide a new habitat for salmon (habitat benches
and light-penetrating sidewalk panels), a set of unique textured surfaces
that create spaces for marine invertebrates.

© The Author(s) 2018 79

T. Beatley, Blue Biophilic Cities, Cities and the Global Politics of the
Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67955-6_5
80 T. BEATLEY

In the larger framework of biophilic cities, we often advocate a “whole of

city” approach, which recognizes the need for contact with nature at many
levels and scales, and indeed at every scale. That is, it is important to bring
nature inside of homes and offices (recognizing that we spend more than 90
% of our time inside), and we can do that in many creative ways (e.g. interior
green walls, hanging plant systems, a variety of biophilic interior design
ideas). But we also want to work to overcome the indoor/outdoor barriers
by bringing the outside world in (e.g. by creative movable windows and
doors, through greening terraces and balconies) and by imagining living
building systems that add to the nature of the site and neighborhood (e.g.
through exterior living walls). Every scale from “room to region”, or “roof-
top to region” (or bioregion), is a place where nature can be inserted, and we
must protect and grow nature in all the urban spaces and places in between.
In coastal and marine cities this approach manifests in buildings and
structures designed with natural features and elements throughout but
which in turn flow through to and connect with the larger natural systems
in which they are embedded, including rivers, harbors and waterfronts.
Given that we continue to spend the bulk of our day inside, their
remains a need to bring nature into these working and living spaces. They
should be designed to be as natureful as possible—with abundant living
nature, natural light, water, and other biophilic features and, helping to
overcome the indoor/outdoor barriers and thus making it easier to con-
nect to outside nature.
There are an emerging set of good examples of waterfront or coastal
buildings that achieve this. One is the 1 Hotel Brooklyn Bridge. A ten-­
storey, 194-room hotel, it emphasizes sustainability and connections with
nature, and it displays the work of local artists.
A recent story on website Curbed critiques this hotel but notes the
many ways its design incorporates the surrounding nature and its harbor
setting:

‘We had this running joke that it had to feel like it washed up on the shore,’
says Drew Stuart, a partner at INC. Nothing here feels too precious; raw
concrete pillars are visible throughout the hotel, and pallet-like wooden
slabs are used as decor elements. Reclaimed wood from the Domino Sugar
Factory is also used throughout.1

The lobby is bathed in natural light, and the wood and stone through-
out make for a more biophilic feeling and design. There are a number of
 RETHINKING THE BLUE–URBAN EDGE 81

plants and other bits of living nature found here as well. Most dramatically
is a living wall which is the focal point of the lobby and adjoining lounge.
Designed by local landscape architecture firm Harrison Green, it snakes up
and across the main interior wall, and is made of a series of soft-potted
plants, connecting to a large wire grid mounted on the concrete. The
effect is lovely (Figs. 5.1 and 5.2).
There are other biophilic and sustainability features in this hotel.2 All
the power needed for the building comes from wind energy, importantly,
and of course there was a great effort to re-use building materials in its
construction. There are also some clever smaller references to sustainabil-
ity. I like the fact that all showers are equipped with five-minute hourglass
timers. Even the room keys are sustainable—they contain flower seeds and
are “plantable.”
An example of a different kind of biophilic structure, providing similar
biophilic connections and transitions between indoor and outdoor, is the
Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital in Boston. Completed in 2013, it was
specifically sited on the harbor to take advantage of the therapeutic and
healing power that water, and access to water, can provide. The site access,
for instance, is Boston’s Harborwalk, described as “a near-continuous,
43-mile linear park along Boston’s shoreline” which “connects Boston’s
waterfront neighborhoods to Boston Harbor and each other.”3 The hos-
pital has many biophilic and sustainable features. Described in a recent
Urban Land Institute publication as a “resilient hospital,” the first habit-
able floor is elevated 30 inches above the level of the 500-year flood and
all mechanical systems have been placed on the roof.4 Its system of backup
generators will provide power for a number of days after a power outage,
and operable windows (i.e. windows that can be opened) allow natural
ventilation and allow occupants and patients to remain in the building.
Most interesting perhaps is the sense that the hospital is a healing build-
ing because of its proximity to the water. The windows in patient rooms
are large and extend almost to the floor to allow patients in wheelchairs to
enjoy the views. Visual access is important but so also is physical access to
the water, and the possibility of launching a kayak or canoe from the site.
Its flood- and wave-protecting landscaping, in the form of berms and
swales, has also become part of the therapeutic program. Overall, the hos-
pital demonstrates how it is possible to blend the resilient, sustainable and
biophilic together, and effectively bridge the scales of building, site, neigh-
borhood and city.
82 T. BEATLEY

Figs. 5.1 and 5.2 1 Hotel Brooklyn Bridge is an example of a growing number
of hotels that embrace sustainability. Most impressively, it incorporates biophilic
design principles in many different ways, including through a prominent green
wall in its lobby. Image credit: Tim Beatley
 RETHINKING THE BLUE–URBAN EDGE 83

Seeing and Experiencing Blue Cities in Spectacular

New Ways
Designing all buildings in blue cities so that they are resilient and bio-
philic—office buildings, residential structures, university buildings and
even hospitals—will be essential. But there are many other complementary
ways that such cities can foster connections and connectedness to water,
and there are some compelling examples of urban walks and coastal path-
ways that at once provide a visitor or resident to fully immerse themselves,
in a sense, in the watery realm.
Bridges can provide often quite spectacular opportunities to take in and
experience the larger marine environment in cities such as New York,
Sydney, San Francisco and Singapore. Walking across the Brooklyn Bridge
has become a major attraction and features on many tourist bucket lists for
good reason. It is a great way to experience the city, a chance to float above
water and land, and to see the wider topography of the harbor (Fig. 5.3).
Sydney Harbor provides similar opportunities to see the water and under-
stand the harbor setting from on high, in this case in the form of the city’s
iconic Harbor Bridge. Beginning in the late 1990s, visitors to Sydney have
had the opportunity to climb the bridge and reach its apex. Tethered by a
harness, climbing the bridge has become a major rite of passage in Sydney and
a popular tourist attraction. Climbs are organized by a company appropriately
called BridgeClimb, and each year it seems to add more fun elements.
Sometimes climbers are met with live music when they reach the top. There
are twilight and sunset climbs, and even a karaoke climb. The trip takes about
3.5 hours and is 1.75 kilometers in distance, and it requires traversing catwalks
and climbing ladders. Some 3 million people have made the climb so far.5 One
of the FAQ’s on the company’s website is “Can I propose to my partner at the
summit?”, to which the answer is a decided yes. The visual vantage point
offered on the beautiful harbor is said to be like no other (Fig. 5.4).
The Sydney Metropolitan area offers unparalleled access, visual and
physical, to marine environments. Exemplary are the investments made by
local councils and the state of New South Wales in coastal walkways that
open up the marine edge to public visits. One dramatic example of this is
the coastal walk from Coogee Beach to Bondi Beach (Figs. 5.5 and 5.6).
It follows the rocky edge of this Hawkesbury Sandstone coastline, with
spectacular views of the ocean along the way. The rugged coast appears in
layers, with cliff-adapted flora and fauna, and birdlife throughout—willie
wagtails, boisterous rainbow lorikeets, smaller more subtle birds though
no less visually striking, such as the superb fairy wren. Wooden walking
 84
T. BEATLEY

Fig. 5.3 The water views walking across the Brooklyn Bridge in New York City are spectacular. Image credit: Tim
Beatley
Fig. 5.4 The Sydney Harbor Bridge is a prominent landmark in the city, and it is now possible to climb to its top. Image
RETHINKING THE BLUE–URBAN EDGE

credit: Tim Beatley

85
86 T. BEATLEY

Figs. 5.5 and 5.6 One of the most spectacular and beautiful coastal walks is
from Bondi Beach to Coogee Beach, in Sydney, Australia. It is popular with both
residents and tourists. Image credit: Tim Beatley
 RETHINKING THE BLUE–URBAN EDGE 87

structures hug the cliff, with stairs and switchbacks, and occasional oppor-
tunities to hike down to reach sheltered beaches and bays below. There are
places to sit and rest along the way, with breathtaking perspectives. Many
residents jog or walk the route daily, and there are occasional doorways
providing direct access for coastal homeowners.
Another impressive stretch of this Eastern Beaches Coastal Walkway
can be found south of Coogee Beach, a boardwalk through the Trenerry
Reserve built in the 1990s. One especially memorable portion crosses one
of the few remaining clifftop or rockshelf wetlands, with the sounds of
frogs, such as the common eastern froglet, being audible. As the water
runs over the rocky cliffs there are numerous mini-waterfalls, adding to
the natural soundscape of this coastal hike.
Along the sea edges of the eastern beaches a series of small but biologi-
cally significant marine reserves have been established. These are spots that
harbor remarkable marine biodiversity but are also important for their
accessibility to urban residents, and their ability to offer snorkelers and
divers a nearby view of the marine nature around them. One example is
Gordon’s Bay, a small marine protected area along the Coogee to Bondi
walk. One innovation here is the Gordon’s Bay Underwater Nature Trail,
a 620 meter trail for divers and, on clear water days, snorkelers. The trail
is maintained by the local scuba diving club and is easily accessible from a
paved footpath. “The Trail can be compared to a bush walking track in the
wilderness,” declares a sign on the site, “only it is underwater” (Fig. 5.7).
To the north, near Manley Beach, can be found another example in the
form of the Cabbage Tree Bay Aquatic Reserve. Not especially large, its
value again derives in large part from its accessibility (Figs. 5.5 and 5.6).
Wellington, New Zealand, a partner city in the Biophilic Cities Network,
offers a similar story of access to protected marine areas. In this case there
is a marine life education center and a snorkel trail. The city has been re-­
thinking its marine edges more comprehensively, working to develop
“blue belts” that will complement its green belts.6
There are a variety of other ways urban residents can enjoy the watery
edges and spaces, if cities make that possible. Extending our notion of
greenspace to bluespace sends the signal that these are not empty and
unimportant but worthy of visiting and enjoying. This can happen in
many ways, including through boating and sailing, snorkeling and scuba
diving, and increasingly swimming. Another positive outcome of improv-
ing water quality in ports and harbors in a number of cities, such as
Copenhagen, is the establishment of public swimming areas, where previ-
ously it would have been unsafe and unimaginable.
 88
T. BEATLEY

Fig. 5.7 Gordon’s Bay Underwater Nature Trail, near Sydney, Australia, is very close to the shoreline and easily acces-
sible by visitors and residents. Image credit: Tim Beatley
 RETHINKING THE BLUE–URBAN EDGE 89

Swimming along the edges of cities has happened in some remarkable

ways. The long history in Australia of establishing rockpools, or ocean
pools, is one that exemplifies the possibilities of swimming in ways that
connect to the larger ocean world.7 In the Sydney suburb of Coogee
(actually in the city of Randwick Council to be precise) there are some old
examples of this impressive idea. North and south of Coogee Beach there
are four rockpools open to the public, including one that dates back to the
1880s. These are essentially concrete pools crafted from the edges of the
rugged cliff-lined coasts of eastern Australia.
They are bounded on the ocean side by a wall or two, depending on the
shape of the pool, which allow ocean water and waves to enter, especially
during high tides. Swimming in these ocean pools is a delight for many
because it provides an experience of swimming in, or remarkably near, a
wild ocean while being sheltered from its force.
The rockpools around Coogee are quite full of marine life. Fish swim-
ming beside swimmers, and we are told that several octopi visit one. In the
case of one another rockpool, I was told the story of the blue groper who
arrived with the tide and stayed in the pool for around a month. A visit to
the pool exposes one to one of the many signs erected by Randwick
Council displaying the marine life likely to be encountered. Another beau-
tiful and old rockpool can be found along the Manley Scenic Walkway,
which connects Manley Beach to the small and sheltered Shelly Beach.
Along another beautiful coastal walk, the ocean pool incorporates some
beautiful sculptures with a marine theme (Fig. 5.8).
Along with the positive connection to marine life there are also be some
small dangers associated with swimming in a rockpool. Entering Wylies
pool, established in 1907, visitors are warned about stepping on sea
urchins, which can be quite painful.
Re-discovering these shoreline and interstitial edge spaces around cities
as places for swimming is something of a trend. Copenhagen has famously
established a series of public swimming areas in the harbor, a result of
major improvement in water quality. Paris recently instituted something
similar along the Seine, and there are plans for the installation of “floating
pools” in New York Harbor.8
Blue cities work hard to break through the barrier to water, to open up
vistas and sightlines, and also to provide new opportunities for direct physical
contact, whether by walking to the water’s edge and touching the water,
strolling along a beach, or providing opportunities for canoeing or kayaking.
New waterfront parks can provide this kind of access. A hallmark of
New York’s efforts at re-connecting to water can be seen in innovative
 90
T. BEATLEY

Fig. 5.8 Australian rookpools provide an unusual opportunity for a more natureful swimming experience—one that
blends the experience of a municipal pool with that of swimming in a more open ocean environment. Image credit: Tim
Beatley
 RETHINKING THE BLUE–URBAN EDGE 91

parks such the Hudson River Park and the Brooklyn Bridge Park. The
Waterfront Alliance has been joining with a number of other organizations
to expand physical access for boaters and kayakers. Especially along the
shorelines of Queens, Brooklyn, Manhattan and the inner boroughs, it
remains difficult to find spots to reach the water. Specifically, the Waterfront
Alliance has joined forces with DockNYC and with the City of New York
to expand the network of community eco docks in the region. These are
floating docks that have been designed to better withstand the forces of a
Hurricane Sandy type of event. The docks generally have two floating
levels (lower level to accommodate kayaks and canoes), move up and
down with the tide, and can serve as outdoor classrooms. They are even
habitats themselves: “Fuzzy rope and oyster baskets hung from the sides
and below will attract aquatic life and bring opportunities to study the
marine life of New York’s waterfront and harbor.”9

Resilience in Blue–Urban Design

The experience of Hurricane Sandy has convinced many people of the need
to design buildings that will be much more resilient and livable in the face of
future storms. Sometimes referred to as “passive survivability” is the idea that
structures should be habitable in the face of damaged power grids and other
public infrastructure. Hurricane Katrina, which struck New Orleans in 2004,
was a wake-up call and for many a realization that a quick national response
and rescue from such events could not be guaranteed. In recent years, we
have seen considerable attention being paid to designing new structures
along or near the water limit the damage to them and ensure that they will
remain livable in the days (and possibly weeks) following a storm event.
New high rise buildings in New York now include sufficient backup
generators, powered by natural gas, to ensure continuation of some level
of power and service. Generally there is a push to ensure that mechanical
systems are elevated and placed at or above those floors likely to be
impacted by floodwaters. The New York Times recently profiled one such
new project, the American Copper Buildings. These are twin, connected
towers (there is a skybridge joining the two), right on the East River, with
distinctive architecture. The design includes five backup generators
(located on the 48th floor) producing sufficient power to run elevators, a
refrigerator and one outlet per apartment.10 The walls of the building’s
lobby, which could likely see some floodwater in the future, are made from
stone rather than wood. While flood resilience doesn’t make it onto the
developer’s list of “top ten reasons why everyone wants to make an
92 T. BEATLEY

American Copper home,” number six is “waterfront property,” and num-

ber three is “insane views” (they are spectacular water views).11 The apart-
ments have floor to ceiling windows and window walls on display on the
project’s sales website, and the water views are indeed remarkable.
In Baltimore we visited the site of the newly renovated Pier Hotel. A
project of Kevin Plank, it has been elevated to the 500-year flood levels
with a number of design features intended to respond to sea level rise.
Kristen Baja, the city’s chief resilience officer, described the structure’s
shift in window design—floor to ceiling windows were forbidden because
of the chance that they might be subject to sea and wave action, and
instead a flood-proof window system was required.
Organizations such as the Waterfront Alliance have also been actively
encouraging different, more resilient designs for new waterfront projects.
In particular, they have spearheaded the development of a new set of
Waterfront Edge Design Guidelines (or WEDG), it represents a form of
green building/site certification for waterfront development projects.
Even though they are voluntary, the guidelines are already having an
impact and can be seen in the more resilient designs for re-developing the
former Domino Sugar factory site, along the Brooklyn waterfront. Now
under construction, the project’s master plan (developed by the firm Field
Operation) devotes space in front of the buildings to public waterfront
park and public access, and the structures themselves are meant to be
porous, “featuring large openings that allow light and air to penetrate
through the site and into the neighborhood beyond.”12 The buildings have
been set back, allowing the creation of a new quarter-mile waterfront park.
Rather than blocking off the public from the water, the development seeks
to actively connect to the surrounding neighborhood of Williamsburg.13
The Brooklyn Park Bridge, mentioned earlier, is the first waterfront
park to gain WEDG certification. It is designed to better withstand future
storms and flooding. As Roland Lewis described it during our interview
there, resilience is a main goal, and this park proved its design during
Hurricane Sandy: “The water came in, the salt edges did their job, let the
water in where it could, and let the water back out after it receded, with
minimal damage to the park infrastructure.”
There are many things that cities can do to retain stormwater, and to
address increases in flooding resulting from climate change. Cities such as
Rotterdam have developed comprehensive strategies to better handle
water, including design of urban fabric that helps it better retain water and
in a sense act like an urban sponge. It has famously installed so-called
“water plazas’ designed to be community spaces most of the time but to
 RETHINKING THE BLUE–URBAN EDGE 93

collect and retain water when it rains. The first of these, Benthemplein,
was completed in 2013. Designed by the firm De Urbaniste, the position-
ing of the different layers of spaces in the plaza is described in this way:14

When its dry, the square is a feast for active youth to sport, play and linger. The
first undeep basin is fit for everybody on wheels and whoever wants to watch
them doing their thing. The second undeep basin will contain an island with a
smooth “so you think you can dance” floor. The deep (third) basin is a true
sports pit fit for football, volleyball and basketball, and is set up like a grand
theatre to sit, see and be seen. On each entrance we create more intimate
places to sit and linger. The planting plan emphasizes the beautiful existing
trees. We plant high grasses and wild flowers surrounding the trees framed by
a concrete border at seating height to offer many informal places to relax here.

A different version of this idea can be seen in the Western Australian

capital of Perth. Completed in 2010, the Perth Urban Wetlands demon-
strates that it is possible to convert a standard sterile urban water feature
(energy intensive, heavily chlorinated) into something that can support
native flora and fauna in the heart of the city. The re-design is the work Josh
Byrne and his firm. Byrne is well known as a presenter for the national tele-
vision show Gardening Australia and is the author of The Green Gardener.
He speaks about the wetlands in a recent documentary film.15 “The
idea really was to provide an opportunity for reintroducing the types of
plants and animals that were once common through this part of Perth
before it was drained and became the city.” From a biodiversity point of
view the wetland has been quite successful, with flora and fauna thriving
on the site. It is located in the heart of the city’s cultural center, and the
wetland sits on top of a museum storage facility. A lot of care went into
plant and faunal selection. There are pygmy perch chosen to control mos-
quitos. Plants are thriving here, with varieties chosen in part to ensure they
don’t obscure views of the stage.
The project addresses several goals at once. The wetland is in the center
of an amphitheater, with a stage in the background, so it helps to soften
and draw people to these public spaces. There are now a variety of events
that take place at the wetlands, including concerts, and sometimes a light
show is projected onto the adjacent museum wall. The wetlands add an
unusual dimension to the area, and Josh describes the setting of these
performances as “quite magical.”
It also adds a wonderful, cooling, biophilic element to the city’s down-
town area. There are stepping platforms that allow kids to walk into the
wetland. It also has an important stormwater management function,
94 T. BEATLEY

c­ ollecting and filtering stormwater from surrounding buildings before it

makes its way into the Swan River. “It’s a great example of where a bit of
inner urban biophilia and civic space can go hand in hand.”16

The Vision of a Dynamic Shoreline

New York has been experimenting with other new ideas for re-imagining
the shoreline as a more dynamic edge. The Big-U, more commonly now
called the Dryline, is one important example of this new thinking. More
formally called the East Side Coastal Resiliency Project, and with post-­
Sandy Federal Emergency Management Agency funding, this project envi-
sions a 12 kilometer long “protective ribbon” encircling Lower Manhattan.
Designed by the Danish architectural firm Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), it
is an important project in terms of how it re-imagines the shoreline and
also how it integrates urban design and resiliency goals—it is planned as a
series of berms, floodable park spaces and flood-resistant vegetation. It
will be a place that residents will want to visit in fair weather, and a cityscape
that will provide resilience in the face of a hurricane or coastal storm.
Kai-Uwe Bergmann, a partner at BIG, and the lead designer of the
Dryline, spoke at the University of Virginia (UVA) about the inspiration
for, and intentions behind, the innovative project. New York’s Highline is
a reference point not only in name but in its design program according to
Bergmann, noting how the Highline uniquely re-imagines an infrastruc-
ture and imbues it with new social functions and purpose. Similarly we
need a new kind of coastal infrastructure, a new approach to both protect-
ing and contributing to the larger beauty and vitality of the city. He con-
trasts the Dryline with the sterile, single-function investments in floodwalls
in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. “We wanted not to build a
concrete wall but to build a flood protection system that adds to the qual-
ity of the city,” Bergmann told the UVA audience:17

It’s a piece of urban furniture that also protects. It’s a park that is there for
everyone to enjoy 99.9% of the time, but then is also there to protect you
against future storm events.18

Other cities are experimenting with similar ideas. Rotterdam has

embraced the concept of tidal parks, which are designed to allow periodic
flooding. The Brooklyn Bridge Park is designed in this way, as are other
parks in floodplains or along rivers. The South Waterfront Park along the
Monongahela River in Pittsburgh is yet another example (Fig. 5.9).
Fig. 5.9 The “floating wetlands” have been placed in Baltimore’s inner harbor. Adam Lindquist, shown here, runs the
RETHINKING THE BLUE–URBAN EDGE

Healthy Harbor program, which is responsible for these floating wetlands. Image credit: Tim Beatley
95
96 T. BEATLEY

Incorporating soft edges and healthy natural ecosystems along shore-

lines will remain a preferred strategy where that is possible. There is now
considerable research into the flood mitigation benefits of mangroves, for
instance, and these, if they exist in or near city shorelines, need protect-
ing.19 Where possible, blue cities should pursue and use planning strate-
gies and project designs that allow coastal wetlands and tidal marshes to
move and migrate landward in response to sea level rise. Very often, how-
ever, given the population density and extent of development present, that
will be difficult. However, in many harbors, from Seattle to Sydney, there
are a variety of coastal structures, from bulkheads to piers, where some
degree of marine nature can exist.

Towards Living Edges

These coastal edge designs and edge investments must also be seen as oppor-
tunities to foster new life, to support the biodiversity of these places. As with
the larger vision of biophilic cities, these too are spaces where we as humans
can co-occupy and co-exist with many other forms of life, large and small.
Here there is also new thinking. I return to the work in Seattle around
re-connecting that city with its shoreline. One of the elements is a highly
unusual design for the new seawall. Part of a larger $410 million infra-
structural investment, the seawall is intentionally designed to accommo-
date human foot traffic on top, and through a series of light tiles, which
allow light to penetrate to the wall below, the creation of what is essen-
tially an “underwater corridor” habitat for salmon as they emerge from
nearby rivers and make their way to the ocean. Much thinking has gone
into the unusual design for the surfaces of the wall below. There are many
different spaces and crevices, intended to support different kinds of marine
organism, including “micro-algae.”20
Heidi Hughes spoke of the unique ecological design elements of this
seawall as we walked along and on top of the light-emitting glass tiles. The
natural light making its way through is considerable, Hughes says, as is the
marine life already taking hold below. The seawall panels are “designed
with a variety of textures to encourage sea life. By raising the seabed with
rock matrices, and putting this new seawall in, and the cantilevered light
penetrating surface, we’re creating a salmon migration corridor.”
Hughes has a mockup of the seawall panels in the Waterfront Space, a
kind of information center with a full scale model of the waterfront plan.
“The whole design of the waterfront was made with the nearshore
 RETHINKING THE BLUE–URBAN EDGE 97

e­ cosystem in mind.” Another interesting feature of the design, there are

tidal markings which will let kayakers see where they are in the tidal cycle.
Public art will also attempt to do some this connecting of visitors to the
ebbs and flows of the water cycle.
Other cities, including Singapore and Sydney, have also been experi-
menting with new materials and designs for seawalls, revetments and other
harbor structures so that they might also serve as habitats for marine
organisms. In Sydney, efforts to “ecologize” these structures has led to the
installation of “flowerpots” on seawalls, such as along the heritage wall at
Sydney Royal Botanic Gardens. Designs have also included artificial rock-
pools and sediment-trapping elements that add marine habitat value.21
Singapore has also been experimenting with and testing different sea-
wall surfaces. NParks researchers Nguyen, Tun and Chan describe an
ongoing monitoring effort to test different forms of surface complexity
and the extent to which marine organisms colonize them over time.
Different surface configurations are being explored to see which combina-
tions of pits, grooves and steps might attract the most marine biodiversity.
While monitoring continues and conclusions have yet to be reached, the
results so far are encouraging:

Faunal diversity and abundance increased over time and, after several weeks,
we recorded periwinkle and nerite snails, crabs, tube and fire worms, feather
stars, and bead anemones. The performance of each tidal pool design and its
complexity elements are also being monitored. The outcomes of this study
are expected to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the combi-
nation of complexity treatments on species recruitment and biodiversity.22

The researchers see hope that such seawall structures will be designed
to respond both to sea level rise and to the need to support marine
biodiversity.
The re-design of urban aquaria offers the chance to soften edges and to
re-introduce natural systems. One notable example is the ongoing re-­
design of the National Aquarium in Baltimore. Architect Jeanne Gang,
and the Gang Studio, has spearheaded this effort, producing a Strategic
Master Plan in 2015. Among other things, the plan imagines a new
emphasis on educating about the Chesapeake Bay ecosystem, and gener-
ally shifting to a “new and more conservation-oriented visitor experi-
ence.”23 Most impressive is a new 37,000 square foot urban wetland that
will serve as the centerpiece of the aquarium’s outdoor space. Work has
98 T. BEATLEY

also begun to design a dolphin sanctuary, a place to humanely re-locate

the aquarium’s eight resident bottlenose dolphins.24
Currently the aquarium has installed and is monitoring several floating
wetlands. The design and installation of floating wetlands has actually
been a major project of the Healthy Harbor Initiative with considerable
success. With design help from the firm BioHabitats, these floating wet-
lands have been assembled and installed with volunteer help. They utilize
recycled plastic bottles for floatation. They have now been installed on 54
sites, covering some 2000 square feet of the inner harbor. They add much
visually and contribute to a sense of a nature in an otherwise largely grey
and builtup harbor environment, and the evidence is that they actually
work to cleanse the water and add to the habitat. A number of harbor
animals have been sighted using them, including blue heron and river
otters, and a 2011 study concludes that they have been quickly colonized
by marine organisms (and an estimated 0.5 million dark false mussels per
platform). Adam Lindquist, who runs the Healthy Harbor Initiative, tells
me that the floating wetlands have been popular: “Not only do people
love the soft green vibe that they bring to an otherwise hard urban area,
they also actually help to remove pollution as they grow, so the plants
actually suck up the excess nutrients in the harbor.”
Landscape architect Kate Orff and her firm SCAPE have been experi-
menting with a variety of living shoreline/harbor design ideas. Most
famously is her idea of Oyster-Tecture, suggesting that we ought to design
and install oyster beds in New York Harbor as both works of ecological
restoration and as flood mitigation strategies. She developed this idea pre-­
Hurricane Sandy as part of the exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of
Art in New York, and it has received a widespread embrace.
The Living Breakwaters project extends this earlier work and scales it
up. It involves installing two miles of breakwater structures along the
south coast of Staten Island, seeded with oysters (planted through the
Billion Oyster Project), in combination with onshore dunes. There is a
heavy community engagement dimension as Orff is working with Staten
Island schools to plant the oysters and monitor the marine life taking hold
there. Part of what is unique about the scheme, Orff tells me, is the mul-
tifunctional aspect: “The project is aiming not just to solve one problem,
but aiming to foster water-based culture again in Staten Island.”25 The
breakwaters will engage kids, schools and adults, will provide protection
and reduce risks from future flooding, and will help to regenerate harbor
ecosystems ecologically.
 RETHINKING THE BLUE–URBAN EDGE 99

For Orff, much of her design work is about overcoming the traditional
Olmstedian dichotomies of passive versus non-passive landscapes. She sees
the need to understand landscapes, and especially New York Harbor, as a
living productive landscape, and one that humans can and must be actively
engaged with.
The harbor, Orff argues, “can’t just be a backdrop anymore.” And she
sees the need for a new kind of landscape architecture that sees water in a
profoundly different way. “It’s not just water as backdrop, as empty, as a
space that is not land, [but] literally understanding that water as full of life.”

Some Concluding Thoughts

These are exciting times in blue biophilic cities as there are now many new
ideas for re-thinking the shoreline edge in ways that will enhance habitat
and human connection while also responding to flooding and sea level
rise. The idea of a less fixed, profoundly dynamic edge seems better suited
to the current world and to a more integrative land–sea vision of blue
biophilic cities. The design toolbox is now much more expansive: it
includes floodable parks and floating wetlands, habitat seawalls and rock-
pools, and the use of multisurfaced and creviced facades that make room
for the marine in cities. There are even more ambitious designs to be
imagined in the future, and blue biophilic cities will be in a position to
push the design and planning envelopes yet further in the years ahead.

Notes
1. Amy Plitt, “Tour 1 Hotels’ New Sustainable NYC Hotel in Brooklyn
Bridge Park,” Curbed, found at: https://ny.curbed.com/2017/3/24/
14902856/nyc-hotels-brooklyn-bridge-park-design, March 24, 2017.
2. E.g. see Zachary Weiss, “This New Brooklyn Hotel Runs Entirely on Wind
Power,” found at: http://observer.com/2017/02/1-hotel-brooklyn-
bridge-review/, February 23, 2017.
3. “About the HarborWalk,” found at: http://www.bostonharbornow.org/
what-we-do/explore/harborwalk/
4. See Urban Land Institute, “Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital,” found at:
http://returnsonresilience.uli.org/case/spaulding-rehabilitation-hospi-
tal/
5. For more information, see Sydney BridgeClimb: www.bridgeclimb.com
100 T. BEATLEY

6. For more background on Wellington’s efforts around blue belts, see

Beatley, Blue Urbanism: Connecting Cities and Oceans, Washington, DC:
Island Press, 2014.
7. The precise number of rockpools along the New South Wales coast is
unclear but is likely between 50 and 100; e.g. “In Search of the South
Coast’s Best Ocean Pool,” http://www.canberratimes.com.au/act-news/
canber ra-life/in-sear ch-of-the-south-coasts-best-ocean-pool-
20150303-13ttn0.html
8. Matt Hansen, “Swim in New York’s East River? A Floating Pool Plan
Envisions a Safe Way,” LA Times, March 15, 2015, found at: http://www.
latimes.com/nation/la-na-floating-pools-20150315-story.html
9. “First-of-its-kind $1.1 Million Eco Dock Opens On The South Brooklyn
Waterfront,” found at: https://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/american-
veterans-memorial-pier/pressrelease/21190
10. David W. Dunlap, “Building to the Sky, With a Plan for High Waters,”
New York Times, January 26, 2017.
11. http://americancopper.nyc/
12. “Domino Sugar Refinery Master Plan,” found at: www.shoparc.com/proj-
ects/domino-sugar-refinery/
13. E.g. see Jules Gianakos, “Domino Sugar Factory Master Plan Development,”
Arch Daily, March 5, 2013.
14. Water Square Benthemplein, found at: http://www.urbanisten.nl/
wp/?portfolio=waterplein-benthemplein
15. Interview and site visit with Josh Byrne, July 5, 2017, See the film
here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGJhcMdQyY8.
16. see Perth Urban Wetland film, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
LGJhcMdQyY8.
17. Kai-Uwe Bergmann, lecture, April 3, 2017, University of Virginia,
Charlottesville, VA.
18. Ibid.
19. E.g. see “Mangroves for Coastal Defence,” found at: https://docs.google.
com/document/d/1q__FT92WS-Bplh5Wwplao2e88Aou2BXpNz3A3KX_
GCo/edit
20. E.g. see Ken Christensen, “Seattle’s New Seawall: Holding Back the Tide,
Protecting Salmon,” crosscut.com, May 18, 2017.
21. E.g. see K.A. Dafforn et al., Guiding Principles for Marine Foreshore
Developments: Report Prepared for Urban Growth NSW, Sydney: UNSW,
2016, found at: http://thebayssydney.nsw.gov.au/assets/Document-
Library/Precinct-Wide-Technical-Studies-Underway-2015-/2016-
Guiding-Principles-for-Marine-Foreshore-Developments.pdf
22. Nguyen, Tun and Chan, “If You Build It, They Will Come: Modifying
Coastal Structures for Habitat Enhancement,” The Nature of Cities Blog,
 RETHINKING THE BLUE–URBAN EDGE 101

October 5, 2016, found at: https://www.thenatureofcities.com/2016/10/

05/if-you-build-it-they-will-come-modifying-coastal-structures-for-habitat-
enhancement/
23. Gang Studio, National Aquarium Strategic Master Plan, found at: http://
studiogang.com/project/national-aquarium-blueprint
24. Edward Gunts, “National Aquarium in Baltimore to Build North America’s
First Sanctuary for “Retired” Dolphins,” Architects Newspaper, June 14,
2016, found at: https://archpaper.com/2016/06/national-aquarium-
dolphin-sanctuary-studio-gang/
25. Interview with and filming of Kate Orff, Battery Park, New York City,
May 9, 2017.
 CHAPTER 6

Just Blue (and Biophilic) Cities

Abstract Social justice is a key goal in a blue biophilic city. Often there are
significant social inequalities in terms of access to nature, including blue
nature, and efforts such as the Blue Greenway in San Francisco and the
new Waterfront Park in Newark seek to more fairly distribute these blue
benefits. This chapter introduces the concept of equigenic blue: that
investments in access to blue nature can help to overcome other forms of
social and health disparity. There are other important aspects of social
justice explored here, including the extent of ethical obligations to future
generations and to other non-human forms of life.

Our blue cities of the future must also place social justice at the fore, and
understand how both the benefits and the burdens of the blue realm are
distributed across a city. Physical and visual access to blue medicine is often
correlated with higher income, white neighborhoods, with lower income
and ethnic minorities being less able to access and enjoy these marine
urban values.
It is a common goal of biophilic cities to provide easy access to parks
and nature for all, not just those with income and privilege. This is fre-
quently expressed in terms of the percentage of residents within a 5–10
minute walk of a park or other green area. Experience shows that while

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104 T. BEATLEY

many cities have made great strides towards achieving equal access to
nature, profound inequalities remain in many cities.
Access, physical and visual, to water, and to oceanfront and waterfront
locations, in blue cities represents a tremendous opportunity to address
these inequalities. More economically distressed neighborhoods may lack
conventional parks or greenery, but likely are not far away from a shore-
line. In blue biophilic cities there is an emphasis on utilizing the marine
and aquatic realm as a restorative asset to enhance the quality of life in
these places.
More generally there is the goal that in our ambitious waterfront re-­
development visions, and in creating new public spaces to enjoy water,
that we work hard to make these spaces attractive and accessible to all resi-
dents of the city. Efforts such as Seattle’s New Waterfront have explicitly
framed the vision as a “Waterfront for All,” an encouraging sentiment and
goal. In that city, creative experimentation through its Hot Spot pilot
project has been looking for ways to entice residents to the waterfront,
and to convey the message to all residents that there are things to experi-
ence and enjoy there. Through a variety of means including music, dance
and even pop-up soccer, the work of groups like Friends of Waterfront
Seattle aim to ensure that all residents feel welcome.

Equigenic Blue
Cities such as San Francisco have taken steps to expand access to the blue
realm. The Blue Greenway, for instance, seeks to expand and connect
shoreline parks in some of the traditionally poorest parts of the city. The
neighborhoods of Hunters Point and Bayview have been the site of con-
siderable industrial contamination. A former shipyard and power plant are
being cleaned up as part of this planning initiative. When this work is
completed, residents will be able to reach the water more easily, with
enhanced pedestrian and bicycle mobility as a result of the 13-mile Blue
Greenway (Fig. 6.1).
Another compelling story about the power of water in helping cities
and neighborhoods overcome disinvestment and economic and social
hardships is that of Newark’s Riverfront Park. Now with its third phase
under way, it has provided new public access to the Passaic River, a water-
way heavily contaminated by the chemical industry there. The scheme is
spearheaded by the city’s Newark Waterfront Revival Initiative, with the
“aim to connect every Newarker to their river.”1 The river is slowly being
 JUST BLUE (AND BIOPHILIC) CITIES 105

Fig. 6.1 Through an initiative of the Baltimore Parks Department, kids from
underserved neighborhoods learn all about kayaks, including how to sit in and
steer them, and then they experience being on the water often for the first time.
Image credit: Tim Beatley

cleaned, and along with it a new greenway and park along the river are
being created, providing new river access and new public spaces for a vari-
ety of activities, from music to Zumba to arts festivals. There are new
sports fields, a floating dock and a new boardwalk painted a distinctive
orange. The impacts have already been considerable.
The new park and greenway, which will ultimately cover more than 20
acres, are the result of a collaboration between the city (and its initiative
Newark Waterfront Revival) and the Trust for Public Land, with a variety
of other partners. Of course there is an economic benefit to this new park,
and also a health benefit to residents. In a city with a high concentration
of underserved, the benefits of walking trails and parks are immense. One
new health partnership can be seen in the Horizon Wellness Trail (finan-
cially supported by the Horizon Foundation), which will encourage
106 T. BEATLEY

healthy walking and is designed in a way that makes it easy to set and
exceed daily walking targets.
These efforts at opening up access to the river go back to 2008, and the
city has employed some creative ways to foster interest and community
support. The planning department has organized hundreds of tours of the
riverfront, some by boat and many on foot. “One of the things about the
park is how good people are to each other when they’re there,” said a
volunteer.2 Waterfront spaces, and contact with water generally, are a vital
urban salve, delivering some potential mental and physical health benefits,
and as with other natureful settings they have the opportunity to enhance
human connections and make us more generous, better human beings.
Likely at work here is what we might describe as “equigenic blue”.
Equigensis refers to the ways in which green spaces, access to nature and
the quality of physical environments may help to reduce health inequali-
ties. We would ideally like to see shifts in income, education and the many
other ways in which health inequalities might be corrected, but the likeli-
hood of this is low to nil, so the design and planning of environments
become even more important. Research is emerging that shows that access
to coastlines and water have the potential to be profoundly equigenic—to
reduce the inequalities in health and wellbeing.3 This is true for both San
Francisco’s Blue Greenway and Newark’s Riverfront Park.
There are efforts in a number of cities to ensure that adequate oppor-
tunities exist in minority and underserved communities to enjoy the blue
nature that may exist nearby. The City of Baltimore’s program aimed at
teaching kayaking and offering the chance to experience the inner harbor
in a kayak is one such example. Its Healthy Harbor Initiative has also
sought to engage underserved neighborhoods in other ways, including
through its Alley Makeover program. We visited and filmed one alley
where neighbors had come together to design and paint, with a remark-
able result—a painted blueway—an uplifting piece of neighborhood art
that has helped neighbors to meet each other and come together to
improve their homes and watershed (Fig. 6.2).
Yet another important dimension of the “just blue” agenda is working
hard to ensure that the many positive qualities of new waterfront parks
and greenspaces do not unfairly result in the displacement and gentrifica-
tion of the surrounding neighborhoods. An example frequently invoked is
the High Line in New York City. An elevated former commercial rail line,
running through the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, it has been a
 JUST BLUE (AND BIOPHILIC) CITIES 107

Fig. 6.2 An alleyway in an underserved neighborhood in Baltimore, Maryland,

receives an “Alley Makeover.” Image credit: photo by Adam Stab; alley art design
by Adam Stab and Leanna Wetmore

wonderful and unique addition to the parks and nature of that city. It is an
unusual green and biophilic ribbon of nature running above and through
the city, providing spectacular views and impressive green spaces in which
to relax and stroll. But these very impressive qualities have also resulted in
massive amounts of new development being attracted to the area, raising
the price of housing and displacing many residents. These unintended
side-effects of otherwise exemplary biophilic projects have been described
as a kind of “ecological gentrification.”4
108 T. BEATLEY

New parks in biophilic and blue cities must begin then to take a differ-
ent approach and plan early to minimize these kinds of unintended conse-
quences. One recent positive example can be seen in the proposed 11th
Street Bridge Park, being planned for Washington, DC. Spanning the
Anacostia River, this bridge has a strong community equity mission at its
core—seeking to bridge the literal and income gulf that exists between the
affluent west side of the river with the largely minority and lower-­income
neighborhoods east of the river. A unique design, the result of a design
competition, the structure will provide an unusual pedestrian environ-
ment, complete with new public spaces, a cafe, an environmental educa-
tion center, an urban farm, and even a large waterfall. (Fig. 6.3).
I spoke recently with Scott Kratz, who is coordinating this $45 million
project under the auspices of the non-profit Building Bridges Across the
River. From the beginning, an emphasis was given to listening to and con-
sulting with residents. Some 200 meetings with community stakeholders
were organized to determine park programming, and a later design com-
petition for the bridge structured in a way that community input was cen-
tral. Most impressively, the project is spearheading a comprehensive effort
to ensure that the underserved east side of the river will benefit from the
project and that the unintended consequences that are likely—higher-
priced housing, displacement, and gentrification—are avoided or at least
minimized. An impressive Equitable Development Plan has been pre-
pared, and many of the proposed measures, from workforce development
to forming a community land trust, are already under way.5 Kratz tells me
that ultimately he will judge the success of this piece of innovative urban
infrastructure by how well these underserved neighborhoods will benefit
economically and socially. “Who is this for?” has been a primary question
from the beginning, and a fair and important lens for judging most blue,
biophilic initiatives.
The question of fair access to the blue often raises fundamental ques-
tions about the appropriate line between public and private interest. As
many cities such as New York, Boston and Seattle re-discover their water-
fronts, the process of privatizing and monetizing these spaces leads to
ongoing debates about fairness. Should coastal developers be permitted to
profit immensely from the physical access and amenities that shorelines
now create, and the spectacular views of water that are now cherished and
rewarded in the marketplace. On one hand, we see the positive trend in
cities such as New York especially of opening up new opportunities for
waterfront access in places such as Brooklyn Bridge Park, but on the other
 JUST BLUE (AND BIOPHILIC) CITIES

Fig. 6.3 A rendering of what the 11th Street Bridge Park in Washington, DC, will look like when completed. Image
credit: Courtesy OMA + OLIN
109
110 T. BEATLEY

hand, the best locations to love and the best views will still be retained by
those able to pay for them.
Boston is a city where similar re-development trends are occurring and
a similar re-discovery and appreciation for its harbor has taken place. Some
have been critical of the city’s willingness to let private developers capture
much of this positive coastal value, especially given that it has been the
public money—investments by the public sector—in cleaning up the har-
bor that have made possible this waterfront renaissance. Organizations
such as the Conservation Law Foundation (CLF) have taken legal action
to ensure that the public’s interest is adequately safeguarded in the review
of waterfront development proposals. Peter Shelley, interim president of
the CLF, makes the case succinctly in an interview in the Boston Globe: the
public has spent billions to fix leaking sewer pipes and to clean up Boston
Harbor, “And yet when development goes forward around the harbor,
you’re [the public] getting completely excluded … That’s an outrage.”6
These discussions taking place in cities such as Boston about how peo-
ple should enjoy or benefit from public investments in harbor and water-
front cleanups also introduces some important temporal questions. Blue
cities favor the larger civic interest in accessing water, and doing so, like
the cleanup of Boston Harbor, requires long-term commitments and
thinking well beyond the narrow electoral cycle. Blue biophilic cities rec-
ognize that our moral communities—the people and things to which we
have duties—extend beyond the narrow present. Indeed, many of our
decisions, say commitments to protect cetaceans or to clean up ocean plas-
tics, are motivated in part out of a duty to future generations.
Thinking longer term is not always easy for the human species, of
course. But many of our toughest ocean challenges will require a deeper
time perspective, and will require an ethical commitment to think carefully
about and act on behalf of a healthy marine future. I recently had the
chance to sit down with Long Now Foundation executive director
Alexander Rose. The Long Now is an idea advanced by Stewart Brand,
and laid out in a thin but highly influential book The Clock of the Long
Now.7 Rose talked at length about the concept of the Long Now and the
utility and importance of longer term thinking, and where some of the
Long Now’s most iconic projects stand.
The core of the idea behind the Long Now is a need to break out of our
incessant short-term decisions and decision making. Not that we need not
make such decisions but that they should be framed and guided by a longer,
deeper sense of time. The Long Now takes 10,000 years as an important
 JUST BLUE (AND BIOPHILIC) CITIES 111

marker—it has been about that amount of time since the human species
developed agriculture. As Rose told me, “The idea behind the Long Now
is both the last 10,000 years and the next 10,000 years …. We’re placing
ourselves in the middle of the story rather than at the end of a story.”8
One of the key ideas here is that we must be ever cognizant of actions
that will limit choices in the future. It is the principle of keeping options
open, and avoiding actions that will close future society avenues. This is a
key decision premise of the Long Now: avoid irreversible steps (think extinc-
tion of a species, destruction of a complex ecosystem such as a coral reef).
“Fundamentally, if you’re making choices that limit future generations
choices, you are making the wrong choices. If you’re making choices that
increase those choices, you’re making the right choices.” Pretty clearly
much of what we are doing in the marine realm—rapidly overharvesting
fish, filling oceans with garbage and plastics, and, of course, climate
change—will have huge and lasting impacts and will limit future choices.
Simply giving futurity a voice in the debate about how we use and treat
our marine environments, near and far, would be a positive step, and many
of the ideas advanced in this volume—expanding marine protected areas,
limiting seafood harvests, re-wilding marine environments near to cities—
could all be defended by reference to keeping options open and by a more
cautious and sensible posture towards the future. And I would argue,
moreover, that our efforts to design and create blue, biophilic cities will be
option-expanding and more respectful of future generations.
There are a host of other challenging ethical issues and quandaries that
emerge in the design and planning of blue and biophilic cities. Some have
been surprises during our interviews with leaders in the marine world. In
my interview with Daniel Pauly I was somewhat startled that the subject
of slavery on the high seas figured so prominently in the conversation.
One feature of the modern fishing industry is that ships are able to spend
months, or even years, at sea, with labor that has been captured or tricked
into service. This low wage labor makes up another significant subsidy to
modern fishing and is a serious human rights concern. There is now more
awareness of these issues as the popular press has given more attention to
it, but I suspect that it is still a largely hidden dimension to which the cur-
rent industrial seafood system is unjust.
At the heart of the concept of biophilia—indeed, what its intuitive
meaning “love of nature” suggests—is a sense of caring about and concern
for other forms of life. A biophilic city, as mentioned in Chap. 1, is under-
stood as one of shared spaces, as a place where many different forms of life
112 T. BEATLEY

are found. For coastal and marine cities the challenge is to make that
nearby life manifest and visible.
And increasingly we recognize the moral if not legal rights held by at
least the larger, (perceived to be) more sentient and intelligent marine life
that live and visit near to cities—whales, dolphins, marine mammals, for
instance. Biophilia and the vision of biophilic cities broaden the moral
community to which we have duties to include all life, all living things and
all living systems. In these ways we (i.e. cities) have an ethical duty to
respect and protect this marine world and all of its living inhabitants.

Some Concluding Thoughts

In this chapter I have sought to at least begin the discussion about the
social justice and social equity obligations of a vision of blue, biophilic cit-
ies. These are complex issues to be sure and they require community dis-
cussion and debate. But at the minimum every design and planning project
or proposal should take its “justness” into account. Every effort should be
made to ensure that we provide truly public access to the profoundly
restorative and wondrous marine world, and that we employ connections
and access to water as a proactive antidote to overcoming societal inequali-
ties in health and opportunity. Finally, the blue biophilic city understands
that justice requires recognition of the inherent moral worth of all marine
life: we seek to enjoy it, to learn from it, to revel in it and to be inspired by
it, but we also have a duty to protect and care for it.

Notes
1. See Newark Riverfront Revival, found at: http://newarkriverfront.org/
2. Steve Strunsky, “Newark Breaks Ground on Riverfront Park Expansion,”
found at: http://www.nj.com/essex/index.ssf/2016/10/newark_river-
front_park_expansion_groundbreaking.html, October 5, 2016.
3. See Rich Mitchell, “What Is Equigenesis and How Might It Help Narrow
Health Inequalities?” found at: https://cresh.org.uk/2013/11/08/
what-is-equigenesis-and-how-might-it-help-narrow-health-inequalities/
Mitchell hypothesizes several different ways in which equigenisis might
work: “Equigenesis might work in two ways; levelling up or levelling down.
An equigenic environment which levels up presumably supports the health
of the less advantaged as much as, or perhaps more than, the more advan-
taged. An equigenic environment which levels down presumably limits the
health of the more advantaged to a greater extent that the less advantaged.
 JUST BLUE (AND BIOPHILIC) CITIES 113

Given our desire to improve population health overall, it would clearly be

better to level up.”
4. E.g. see Sarah Dooling, Ecological Gentrification: A Research Agenda
Exploring Justice in the City, International Journal of Urban and Regional
Research, 33, no. 3, 621–639, 2009.
5. See Equitable Development Plan, found at: http://bridgepark.org/sites/
default/files/Resources/EDP%20Final%20-%20UPDATED.pdf
6. Thomas Farragher, “It’s a Cleaner Harbor, with Fewer Spots to Enjoy It,”
Boston Globe, May 27, 2017, found at: https://www.bostonglobe.com/
m e t r o / 2 0 1 7 / 0 5 / 2 7 / c l e a n e r- h a r b o r- w i t h - f e w e r- s p o t s - e n j o y /
ZzPRAks04xRcZjP7h2h8uM/story.html
7. Stewart Brand, The Clock of The Long Now: Time and Responsibility, Basic
Books, 2000.
8. Interview with Alexander Rose, San Francisco, CA, June, 2017.
 CHAPTER 7

Conclusions and Trajectories: Future Cities

that are Blue and Biophilic

Abstract Blue biophilic cities represent a compelling new urban vision for
the future, one appropriate both for the opportunities available and for the
challenges faced by coastal cities. The marine nature all around can be the
source of immense benefit for urban residents in the form of wonder,
physical and mental health, purpose and meaning. At the same time, blue
biophilic cities can exert leadership in ocean conservation and serve as a
pioneer in shaping new and more sustainable relationships with the marine
world (e.g. by re-thinking what they harvest from and grow in the ocean).
It is hoped that the stories told, and the examples and ideas presented, in
this book are just the beginning, and that blue biophilic cities will con-
tinue to innovate and continue to imagine and explore new connections
to the marine environment.

The main message of this book is that we need blue nature in cities, and in
turn oceans need positive leadership and planning from cities. The book
builds on the basic insight of biophilia—that we are innately drawn to
nature and living systems, and contact with nature is important and essen-
tial to healthy and meaningful human lives. The vision of biophilic cities—
cities that are profoundly natureful, that seek to foster connections to
the natural world, and where residents are curious about and attentive to
the nature around them—is gaining traction in the USA and around the

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116 T. BEATLEY

world, and a new global Biophilic Cities Network has been formed to help
to advance this global movement. Our notion of biophilic cities can’t just
rely on a terrestrial view of the world, not on a blue planet: it must increas-
ingly understand them as cities connected to and embedded in a larger
marine fabric. All cities, of course, even interior land-locked cities, are
affected by and in turn affect the ocean world, but it is the coastal and port
cities where the potential to cultivate a truly blue biophilic urbanism is
most evident. And we have some good examples of cities that are doing
this.
These new models of blue and biophilic urbanism, and our new global
Biophilic Cities Network, are emerging at just the right time. Globally, we
are engaged in a collective discourse about cities and the environment,
and there is a growing recognition that current directions must change. In
2015, many countries adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable
Development, and the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (building on the
earlier Millennium Goals). As Mentioned earlier, two goals stand out in
their connection to blue biophilic cities: Goal 11 (Sustainable Cities and
Communities) and Goal 14 (Ocean Conservation). There are more spe-
cific targets identified for each of these goals, including, for instance, end-
ing overfishing by 2020 (a Goal 14 target), and, by 2020, ensuring
“universal access to safe, inclusive and accessible, green and public spaces,
in particular for women and children, older persons and persons with dis-
abilities.”1 Bluespaces and blue nature in cities will be one important ave-
nue for achieving this target, and more generally the vision of cities I am
advancing here will help to address many (most) of the Sustainable
Development Goals.

We Need Nature and Wildness in Our Lives More

Than Ever and the Ocean Can Be a Major Source
We want and need connection to blue nature, and, as this book has argued
throughout, we gain much from this connection—we are happier, health-
ier, able to live more meaningful lives, and lives of (daily) wonder and awe.
Equally true, cities can and must be advocates for ocean conservation, and
for the diverse marine life that relies on healthy oceans. Cities must be
leaders in advancing a planning and design agenda that acknowledges a
deeper biophilic sensibility that recognizes the inherent value of marine
life.
 CONCLUSIONS AND TRAJECTORIES: FUTURE CITIES THAT ARE BLUE… 117

The marine world represents at least a significant part of the solution to

our current disconnect from nature. As the creative efforts reported here
show, from Pier Into the Night to efforts of ocean educators such as the
Biscayne Nature Center, to the Billion Oyster Program, we can indeed
re-­connect to nature and living systems, and in and near cities we can feed
and support our innate biophilic sensibilities. They are there waiting to
find expression and waiting to be cultivated. Much of this can and must
happen by reforming our schools so that they, in the spirit of the New
York Harbor School, acknowledge and embed learning in and through the
local marine environment. Marine nature is often all around us, and one
of the clearest forms of nearby nature and wildness that we must take
advantage of. As Fisher told me, “we’ve got to get city kids comfortable
with being around the water. That is an absolute responsibility we have”
(Fig. 7.1).
Over the course of the preceding chapters, certain key themes have
emerged. In this final chapter I summarize these and offer some specula-
tion about future directions they might move in or evolve towards.

We Need to Creatively Balance the Danger

and the Delight

Coastal cities from New York to Shanghai will experience serious challenges
in adapting to accelerating sea level rise and coastal flooding. Many cities are
now discovering new and creative ways to both adapt to climate change and
sea level rise and enhance connections to nature. The coastal edge is being
re-defined in many blue cities in some promising new ways, as reflected in
new projects such as the Dryline. In some places (perhaps many), significant
investments in more traditional shore armoring strategies will occur and
increase (seawalls, revetments, jetties, floodgates), but in many places there is
a shift to a model of a more dynamic shoreline, one that is designed to permit
or accommodate some degree of flooding. And cities such as New York
understand the need for some degree of retreat, both horizontal (floodable
edges that can be converted from roads, parking lots and hard surfaces to
wetlands and permeable spaces) and vertical (as we see in the elevation of
new structures such as the American Copper Building in New York). There
is the potential that in blue cities, as in the case of the Dryline, adapting to
sea level rise will also present opportunities to grow more urban nature and
to connect residents to the marine realm around them.
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T. BEATLEY

Fig. 7.1 Students of the New York Harbor School help to grow and monitor oysters as part of the Billion Oyster Project.
Image credit: New York Harbor School
 CONCLUSIONS AND TRAJECTORIES: FUTURE CITIES THAT ARE BLUE… 119

Also promising are the many ways in which cities are designing shore-
lines in more natureful ways, including floating wetlands, living shorelines
and breakwaters, and ecological seawalls that are designed to accommo-
date greater marine biodiversity and to mimic natural shorelines and rocky
edges. Even more creative work in these areas will likely happen in the
years ahead. Singapore’s efforts at research and development regarding
different shoreline structures and their relative effectiveness at accommo-
dating marine organisms is a good sign. The country has been a leader in
testing and applying different designs to incorporate nature into high-rise
buildings (including a green wall long-term monitoring site at the
HortPark).
I have sought more generally in this book to temper the sense of
impending doom that tends to take over in discussions about sea level rise.
We are drawn to water, and the evidence is growing that proximity to
water, physical and visual access to water, and being immersed in water
have therapeutic and healing powers. Water is one of those extremely
important (and ancient) biophilic qualities and place attributes that
humans want and need, something that blue biophilic cities understand.

We Need to Appreciate the Ocean as Medicine

In these ways we might begin to better appreciate the ocean medicine that
surrounds coastal cities and to design and plan accordingly. Blue biophilic
cities recognize the marine context as an incredible asset to take advantage
of in enhancing physical and mental health. Cities such as New York are
re-discovering the power of water and returning to earlier mottos of “city
of water” as a way of self-describing or self-defining.
In cities such as Seattle there are new and bold efforts to re-design the
urban fabric to provide new physical connections to water. The Seattle
Waterfront Plan is an ambitious scheme to re-connect the city to the water,
with new park space, a continuous promenade, re-built piers, places to
launch kayaks, and new street level connections to surrounding neighbor-
hoods. There are new human–water connections and also new investment
for marine nature, including the re-design of a main seawall to provide a
habitat for salmon, habitat benches and light-penetrating sidewalk panels,
and a set of unique textured surfaces that create spaces for marine inverte-
brates (Fig. 7.2).
It is interesting to realize that as a species we are just in the early stages
of developing an ethics and ethos of appreciating the complexity, beauty
 120
T. BEATLEY

Fig. 7.2 New York City has opened up many new parks along its waterfront in recent years, including this one along the
Hudson River, adjacent to one of the city’s most popular bike routes. Image credit: Tim Beatley
 CONCLUSIONS AND TRAJECTORIES: FUTURE CITIES THAT ARE BLUE… 121

and wonder of the marine world, and caring for its condition. I am
reminded of the remarkable work of early naturalists such as Philip Henry
Gosse, who coined the word “aquarium” and helped to design and perfect
the first versions of them, including the first public aquarium at Regent’s
Park in London, opening in 1853.2 His 1854 book Aquarium helped to
ignite the early Victorian craze for aquariums, and his later book Oceans,
and other prolific writings and work, did much to ignite a popular interest
in ocean life.3 Referred to now as the David Attenborough of his time, he
was an especially eloquent voice for the majesty of the natural world.
Before underwater photography, his wonderful watercolors of marine
organisms conveyed their beauty and otherworldliness. An early marine
scientist, he also found many ways to share his love of ocean life, including
low-tide nature walks along the Devon coast, in a way presaging some of
the ways that today we educate about and connect with oceans.
Gosse’s work was just 160 years ago, we should remember, so we have
not long had the view of oceans as places to be fascinated by, and to pro-
tect and conserve. Our usual approach to oceans was more as a repository
for demons and dragons and as intrinsically dangerous, sinister places.
Squarely in the urban age today, cities must extend and expand this view
of the wonder below. A terrific biography of Gosse by Ann Thwaite is aptly
titled Glimpses of the Wonderful, a famous Gosse quote, but also a positive
goal and measure of the success of every blue biophilic city.4

We Must Continue to Re-wild Our Blue Cities

Increasingly we are understanding our cities as places of nature, as we see
coyotes, foxes and other mammals that sometimes present co-existence
challenges, but that infuse elements of beauty and wildness into contem-
porary cities. Initiatives such as Wildlife Watch in Chicago seek to better
understand the extent of animal life living in and adapting to urban envi-
ronments. In that example some 120 camera traps are deployed along
transects through the city in one of the first attempts to comprehensively
study urban wildlife. Similar efforts might be taken to better understand
and study the marine life near cities which is even more invisible. Camera
traps are yielding important insights into urban wildlife adaptation but just
as importantly they are helping to educate about the animals that
Chicagoans share their city with. It is an interesting question how similar
efforts might be focused on aquatic and marine environments near cities
(deploying underwater cameras and hydrophones perhaps?).
122 T. BEATLEY

Arguably the marine habitats near to cities represent a level of wildness

unmatched by anything on land. Here we have habitats that while nega-
tively impacted by pollution, for example, have not been occupied by
humans in the same way as terrestrial lands, and still retain a remarkable
level of biodiversity. These marine environments serve as home to a
remarkable array of organisms. The extent of the wildness becomes appar-
ent when cities such as Singapore attempt to study it. One of the few cities
to have conducted a Comprehensive Marine Biodiversity Survey (every
blue biophilic city should do this), this five-year study collected some
30,000 specimens, utilizing scientists and volunteers, and uncovered some
14 marine species that were entirely new to science, including a “lipstick”
sea anemone, and an orange-clawed mangrove crab.
Our sense of wonder about the marine world is enhanced immeasurably
by how much we don’t know and what we are still learning. Only since
1968 have Katy and Roger Payne discovered the humpback whale songs,
it might be remembered, with new insights unfolding about how these
cetaceans modify and re-mix these songs over time.5 It was only half a
century ago, yet the discovery of these songs changed our view of whales
and the songs themselves have become iconic. We are also learning more,
almost daily it seems, about the extent of the unusual sea life at greater
depths. An ongoing Australian expedition using low-tech collection meth-
ods is finding a variety of unbelievable and fascinating animals, including
coffinfish, sea spiders and an abundance of echinoderms on the seafloor
affectionately known as “sea pigs.”6 Again, it would be hard to invent
these creatures for a sci-fi Hollywood film. Even marine species we think
we know well are proving to be powerfully different. Philosopher Peter
Godfrey-Smith’s book Other Minds explores and seeks to explain the evo-
lution of the brains of cephalopods, so distant from the evolutionary lin-
eage of the human brain. As he provocatively declares, an octopus “is the
closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien”.7
Murray Fisher spoke passionately in our interview about the promise of
re-wilding New York Harbor. As a practical matter, this could happen in
many different ways. Coastal cities can and should find ways to support
the establishment of marine parks and protected areas. A biophilic city is
one that seeks to grow and expand the nature in and around cities, but
also understands a broader duty to care for and support (indeed assume
leadership for) larger global conservation efforts. With respect to oceans,
this means significant expansion of protected marine areas. As discussed
earlier, the goal of setting aside 30 % of the planet’s ocean surface in
 CONCLUSIONS AND TRAJECTORIES: FUTURE CITIES THAT ARE BLUE… 123

­ rotected marine areas is a good one, though 50 % would be bolder and

p
more ambitious.8 Support for a connected network of such areas by blue
biophilic cities is essential. There is a special role to be played by nearby
marine parks, even quite small ones. A number of examples can be found
in the coastal suburbs around Sydney (e.g. Gordon’s Bay Aquatic Reserve).
The Taputeranga Marine Reserve in Wellington and the Island Bay Marine
Education Centre are also positive examples. These close-by marine parks
are the places where urban residents can cut their teeth on marine biology,
can be enticed to dip their biophilic toes, to experience something of the
wonder of the marine world without traveling a great distance by sea or
plane (Fig. 7.3).

Cities Must Become a Potent Force on Behalf

of the Oceans

In July, 2017, the Australian federal government announced significant

new reductions in the no-take zones of its network of protected marine
areas. Its ambitious system for marine protection gained deserved acclaim
when it was unveiled in 2012, but from the start there were pressures to
weaken it.9 The Australian story highlights the pitfalls of failure to fully
mobilize a constituency that would object to such proposals. Cities, and
urban populations, can and should serve in this capacity, and especially so
given their proximity to where these marine conservation zones are
located.
The main point here is that we need to find ways to cultivate and acti-
vate urban populations and cities on behalf of ocean conservation. This
means both local and global action, but suggests the value of local efforts
at blue re-wilding as a point of connection and an entree into re-wilding
that needs to occur beyond harbors and sounds and near-to-shore waters.

We Need to Secure Our Daily Doses of Blue Nature

A challenge is to find ways to cultivate daily experiences of marine nature
in blue cities. We are often articulating the experience of nature in bio-
philic cities in terms of an urban nature diet, and posing the question of
what constitutes a healthy urban nature diet. We find it helpful to visualize
this in terms of a pyramid—the nature pyramid (a parallel to the food pyra-
mid intended to inform healthy food choices). At the top of the pyramid
are more immersive experiences of nature obtained by visiting a faraway
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T. BEATLEY

Fig. 7.3 Beach combing and shell collecting are some of the many ways in which urban residents can enjoy nearby
marine environments. One of my family’s favorite pastimes is collecting and creatively displaying colorful coquina clam
shells. Image credit: photo by Tim Beatley; credit for the idea of displaying coquina’s in this way, and by creatively framing
them, goes to Anneke Bastiaan
 CONCLUSIONS AND TRAJECTORIES: FUTURE CITIES THAT ARE BLUE… 125

park or natural landscape. Building a nature diet around these types of

experience is impractical and costly (and costly from the perspective of the
carbon footprint associated with visiting such places). On the other hand,
we must move down the pyramid and look for ways to experience every-
day nature near to where we live and work—these should make up the
bulk of our urban nature diet. To date, we have mostly envisioned this
pyramid in terms of terrestrial habitats and settings—trees, birds, urban
parks and gardens, and a host of biophilic design strategies such as living
walls and eco-roofs. But the pyramid for a blue biophilic city should con-
tain and reflect marine opportunities, whether that might be an hourly
scan of a harborscape or seascape, a daily swim or coastal walk, a weekend
scuba dive or snorkel, or (moving up the pyramid) a more distant marine-­
oriented holiday. Figure 7.4 presents at least one possible version of the
blue nature pyramid, and every blue biophilic city should work to include
in its nature diet a healthy dose of the blue.
Blue biophilic cities must continue to explore the idea of integrated
land–sea parks. The recent examples of the Hudson River and Brooklyn
Bridge Parks in New York City, which place contact with and connection to
water at their core, are also exemplars in the direction of this positive trend.
Part of the agenda of re-wilding is about continuing the investments
made in many cities in cleaner water. Improving water quality in cities such
as New York and Boston pays dividends in many ways, including in the
biodiversity and marine life supported by the ecosystems. The return of
humpback whales, and of the menhaden fish they follow, to New York
Harbor shows the fruits of these investments.

We Must Work to Make Blue Nature More Visible

As argued at several points in this book, the invisibility and emotional
remoteness of the sea make it difficult to imagine and care for the oceans
in cities. Much of the marine environment is physically remote and far
away, to be sure, but much of it is remarkably proximate.
We have reviewed a number of innovative strategies for making blue
nature and blue wildness visible. What can be done with a simple low cost
video camera, a few underwater lights and a couple of volunteer divers can
be seen in the story of the Pier Into the Night events in Gig Harbor,
Washington. Efforts to guide school-age kids into the water, and to invite
them to find and explore the marine nature under their very feet, with the
help of skilled naturalists, is another approach.
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T. BEATLEY

Fig. 7.4 The blue urban nature pyramid provides a way to begin to understand and visualize the minimum amounts of
daily marine nature we need and might have available in a blue biophilic city. Image credit: original concept by Tanya
Denckla-Cobb; image by Tim Beatley
 CONCLUSIONS AND TRAJECTORIES: FUTURE CITIES THAT ARE BLUE… 127

And there are effective ways we can continue to make even the faraway
marine world visible and present. The wonderful underwater photography
of people such as Brian Skerry and Anne Doubilet has a power to move
and connect.
Finding ways to take full advantage of those “glimpses of the wonder-
ful” that occur at certain times in many cities—low tide being one of
them—is another strategy, and schemes such as the Seattle Aquarium
Beach Naturalist program is one such example. Here, trained volunteers
help strolling visitors to several of the city’s shoreline parks understand
and appreciate the marine organisms they see there.
Equally true, we must design the next generation of urban waterfront
and harborfront buildings and neighborhoods in ways that offer physical
connections to the water, and ideally opportunities to see and understand
the marine life nearby.
As Jane Lubchenco has said,

Most of us live in cities and because of that it will really be incumbent on us

to take the lead in being better stewards of our planet, stewards of the land,
and stewards of the ocean. Even though most of the ocean is far away from
where any of us live, we can still play a very active role in championing, pro-
tecting important places, protecting healthy ocean ecosystems, protecting
iconic species. And as individuals we can work together with like-minded
people.

As the examples in this book show, there are now wonderful programs
that engage the public directly in the restoration of marine environments.
The BOP is one that gets kids and schools involved in restoring New York
Harbor.
And while we bemoan the time kids and adults alike spend online and on
social media, we are increasingly finding new and creative ways to uses this
technology to connect people to marine environments and organisms.
Through apps such as Shark Tracker, which follows in real time the move-
ments of great whites such as Mary Lee, fear may give way to familiarity and
kinship. Such technology moreover may help make more traditional ways of
connecting with marine life—such as whale watching—easier. An Australian
app, Wild About Whales, for instance, helps residents of Sydney track sight-
ings of whales in real time, helping to watch for and see these animals.10
A biophilic marine or ocean city finds other ways to foster a sense of
connection. In biophilic design, much attention is paid also to the shapes
128 T. BEATLEY

and forms of nature, and to images of nature, not just living nature. The
Australia Port City of Fremantle, for instance, has invested in a variety of
different forms of public art, but much of it takes local nature as its subject,
and many of the nods to nature are marine. Entering the city on one of the
main roads from Perth, one is confronted by a large mural of octopus, for
instance, and there are many other places in the city where art is embedded
in sidewalks and in murals. Biophilic art can find expression and support in
many ways, and in Fremantle the city implements a One Percent For Art
requirement—1 % of the budget of all development projects, private as
well as public, must be set aside to support public art. These investments
enhance quality of life and our connections to the ­natural world, though
the evidence of the therapeutic and healing power natural images is much
less definitive than for exposure to living nature (Fig. 7.5).

We Must Adjust Our Mental Maps of Cities

A big part of the agenda of blue biophilic cities is the cultivation of a new
imagination about cities, one that sees them encompassing and extending
to include the marine world around them. It is in large part a matter of re-
drawing our mental maps of cities, which until now have tended only to see
empty or blank spaces beyond the shore’s edge. And too often we literally
draw our maps—sometimes plan diagrams, or official land use planning and
policy maps—as though there is nothing there. There are certainly limits to
the jurisdictional planning and control that cities can exert, but even when
there is no clear power to plan beyond mean high tide there is a broader
purpose served—to extend our consideration of and care for this marine
world, to reinforce visually that these are natureful, biodiverse, wondrous
places that need to be protected and conserved. I have frequently com-
mented on the official planning maps of cities such as San Francisco, that
show well the parks and greenspaces on land but seem to indicate just an
empty void (or a profound lack of interest in) beyond the terrestrial edge.
Ideally blue biophilic cities are able to extend even further their spatial
sense of connection. Along the East Coast of the USA, for instance, lies a
network of deep canyons, many specifically named after the nearest land-­
based city. There is a Norfolk Canyon, named after the Virginia city, for
example. Through a blue biophilic frame, these are wonderful areas of the
sea that cities (like Norfolk) could adopt or embrace in some way and be
proud of. Recent underwater expeditions have shown a remarkable marine
life there, and although few Norfolk citizens are likely to visit this underwater
Fig. 7.5 Octopus mural, Fremantle, Western Australia. Image credit: Paul Weaver
CONCLUSIONS AND TRAJECTORIES: FUTURE CITIES THAT ARE BLUE…
129
130 T. BEATLEY

marine habitat, their lives may be enriched by knowing about it. And the life
of that underwater canyon can certainly use the conservation friend. One
idea that extends our spatial frame, and that was proposed in an earlier book,
is that of an ocean sister city, and perhaps the Norfolk Canyon could be so
adopted by the City of Norfolk. It should also contribute to a city’s pride of
place.11

We Must Continue to Develop the Vision

and Practice of Blue and Biophilic Cities

We are at a unique juncture in the history of the blue planet, one in which
population growth and levels of consumption have soared, and more and
more of us are living in cities. We have also reached a point where many,
perhaps most of us, living in cities have become profoundly disconnected
from nature and natural systems. The concept of biophilia argues that we
are drawn to nature and living systems, that there is an innate pull that
nature exerts on us. The emerging research in psychology, medicine and
public health confirms the many physical and mental health benefits deliv-
ered by nature, and I have argued that these connections can provide
meaning, purpose and a deeper dimension to life. The vision of biophilic
cities, cities that put nature at the core of their design and planning, that
are natureful and seek to foster deep connections with the natural world,
is taking hold. The blue dimension to this agenda has been slower to
materialize and harder to envision. But that can and must change, and
indeed is changing, as the case studies described here demonstrate. We will
need to continue to expand these efforts, to further flesh out what it
means to be a blue biophilic city, and to build a set of programs and initia-
tives, coastal projects and urban designs, and many other exemplars that
show how cities can connect with blue nature. This will be the task of
many—city planners, architects and engineers, marine conservationists
and, of course, the residents of the cities where the urban blue can do so
much to frame and enhance future urban life.

Notes
1. See “Goal 11 Targets,” found at: http://www.un.org/sustainabledevelop-
ment/cities/
2. For an excellent review of that history, see Tim Wijgerde, “Victorian
Pioneers of the Marine Aquarium,” found at: http://www.advancedaquar-
ist.com/2016/2/aafeature2
 CONCLUSIONS AND TRAJECTORIES: FUTURE CITIES THAT ARE BLUE… 131

3. Philip Henry Goss, The Aquarium: An Unveiling of the Wonders of the Deep
Sea, London: J. Van Voorst, 1856.
4. Ann Thwaite, Glimpses of the Wonderful: The Life of Philip Henry Goss,
Faber and Faber, 2002.
5. Ed Yong, “Humpback Whales Remix Their Old Songs.”
6. “Australia’s Most Bizarre Creatures Uncovered in Deep Sea Expedition,”
found at: https://particle.scitech.org.au/earth/australias-bizarre-creatures-
uncovered-deep-sea-expedition/
7. Peter Godfrey-Smith, Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep
Origins of Consciousness, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016.
8. E.O. Wilson, Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life, Norton, 2017.
9. Michael Slezak, “Australia’s Marine Parks Face Cuts to Protected Areas,”
The Guardian, July 21, 2017, found at: https://www.theguardian.com/
environment/2017/jul/21/turnbull-government-plans-further-cuts-to-
fishing-protection-zones?CMP=share_btn_tw
10. https://www.wildaboutwhales.com.au/app
11. See the discussion of the idea of ocean sister cities in Beatley, Blue
Urbanism, Island Press, 2014, pp. 152–153.
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 Index1

NUMBERS AND SYMBOLS B

2030 Agenda for Sustainable Baja, Kristen, 92
Development, 116 Balloonfish, 67
Baltimore, x, 25–28, 71, 92, 97, 106
Baltimore National Aquarium, 26
A Baltimore Parks Department, 105
Acerra, Colleen, 63 Bayview, 104
Agenda for Sustainable Development, Beach combing, 124
16 Beatley, Timothy, 55n4, 100n6,
Alley Makeover, 106, 107 131n11
Amazing Surf Adventures (ASA), 12 Benthemplein, 93
American Copper Buildings, 91 Bergmann, Kai-Uwe, 94
Anacostia River, 108 BID, see Business improvement district
Animal Liberation (Singer), 50, 52 BIG, see Bjarke Ingels Group
Antarctica, 7 Big-U, see Dryline
Aquarium (Gosse), 121 Billion Oyster Project, 13, 28, 52, 53,
Aquarium of the Bay, 58 73–76, 98, 117, 118
ASA, see Amazing Surf Adventures BioHabitats, 98
Australia, 15, 89 Biophilic Cities Network, 3, 17n5, 87,
Australia Port City of Fremantle, 116
128 Biscayne Nature Center, 117

Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2018 137

T. Beatley, Blue Biophilic Cities, Cities and the Global Politics of the
Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67955-6
138 INDEX

Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), 94 Chan, Lena, 97

Block, Barbara, 63, 64 Chen, Carrie, 45
Blue biophilic cities, 1–17 Chesapeake Bay, 97
medicine and wildness and, 12–16 Chesapeake Bay Foundation, 71
urbanist need to care for oceans and, Cheung, William W.L., 55n5
10–12 Chuenpagdee, Ratana, 55n5
See also Specific entries City of Water Day, 22
Blue crabs, 67 CLF, see Conservation Law
Blue Greenway, 104, 106 Foundation
Blue medicine, 12, 103 Clock of the Long Now, The (Brand), 110
Blue mind, 10, 23 Coastal edge designs, 96–99
Blue Mind (Nichols), 10 Coastal walkways, 83–87
“Blue Serengeti”, 64 Collective compassion, 63
Blue Urbanism, v, vi Community Supported Agriculture
Blue urban nature pyramid, 123–126 (CSA), 47
Blue wildness, 3, 11, 125 Community Supported Fisheries
Bluefin Futures Symposium, 64 (CSF), 47–49
Bluefin tuna, 63 Comprehensive Marine Biodiversity
Blue–urban design, 79–99 Survey, 122
coastal edges and, 96 Conservation Law Foundation (CLF),
dynamic shoreline and, 94–96 110
resilience in, 91–94 Copenhagen, 87, 89
Bondi Beach, 86 Coral Gables, 33–34
Boston, 13, 108, 110, 125 Corner, James, 23
Boston Globe, 110 CSA, see Community Supported
Boston Harbor, 110 Agriculture
Brand, Stewart, 110 CSF, see Community Supported
BridgeClimb, 83 Fisheries
Bridges, 14, 20, 34, 37, 72, 80, 83, 91 Curbed website, 80
Bristleworm, 67
Brooklyn Bridge, 83, 84
Brooklyn Bridge Park, 37, 72, 91, 92, D
94, 108, 125 DakPark (Rotterdam), 36
Business improvement district (BID), 26 Davis, Chuck, v
Bycatch, 51 De Blasio, Bill, 20
Byrne, Josh, 93 De Urbaniste, 93
Deyerly, Calder, 48, 49, 51
DockNYC, 91
C Doubilet, Anne, 127
Carnivore farming, 47 Douglas, Marjory Stoneman, 65
Carson, Rachel, 2, 3 Drift cards, 58–60
Cason, Jim, 33, 34 Dryline, 28, 36, 94, 117
“Catch shares” system, 41 Dynamic shoreline, vision of, 94
 INDEX
   139

E Gig Harbor, 69
Earle, Sylvia, 6 Glimpses of the Wonderful (Thwaite),
Eastern Beaches Coastal Walkway, 87 121
East Side Coastal Resiliency Project, Global Tagging of Pelagic Predators,
94 63
Ecological gentrification, 107 Godfrey-Smith, Peter, 122
Economist, The, 1, 2 Gordon’s Bay, 87
Elephant seals, 63 Underwater Nature Trail, 87, 88
Environmental Protection Agency Gosse, Philip Henry, 121
(EPA), 22 The Green Gardener (Byrne), 93
EPA, see Environmental Protection Greer, Krista, 55n5
Agency
Equigenic blue, 104–112
Equigenisis, 112n3 H
Equitable Development Plan, 108 Harbor Camp, 75
Harbor WildWatch, 68
Harborwalk, 13, 81
F Harrison Green, 81
FAO, see Food and Agriculture Hawkesbury Sandstone coastline, 83
Organization Healthy Harbor Initiative, vi, 9, 25,
Filefish, 67 26, 71, 95, 98, 106
Fischer, Chris, 60, 61, 63 Highline, 94
Fisher, Murray, 9, 13, 72, 73, 75, 76, Homestead, 65
77n8, 117, 122 Horizon Wellness Trail, 105
“Fishing industrial complex”, 40 Hotel Brooklyn Bridge, 82
Floating communities, 36 Hudson River, 120, 125
Floating wetlands, 95, 98 Hudson River Park, 91
Fog Harbor Fish House Restaurant, Hughes, Heidi, 23, 25, 96
43, 45, 46 Humpback whales, 13, 14
Food and Agriculture Organization Hunters Point, 104
(FAO), 40 Hurricane Sandy, 92
France, 51
Friends of the Seattle Waterfront, 23
Friends of Waterfront Seattle, 23, 104 I
Future cities, 1–17, 115–130 Ireland, 51
ocean as medicine and, 119 Island Bay Marine Education Centre,
123

G
Gang, Jeanne, 26, 97 J
Gang Studio, 97 Jaws (film), 60
Georgia Strait Alliance, 9, 13, 58, 60 “Just blue” agenda, 103–112
140 INDEX

K N
Keene, Kellen, 13 National Aquarium, 97–98
Kratz, Scott, 108 Nature, 7
Nature of Cities, The (documentary), v
New Jersey, 22
L New Waterfront, 104
Lane, Bobby, 12, 13 New York, 20
Lee, Mary, 60, 61, 63, 127 New York City, 13, 20–24, 28, 72, 83,
Levine, Philip, 28, 30, 33 91, 94, 106, 108, 117, 119, 120,
Lewis, Roland, 20, 22 125
Lin, Maya, 76 New York Harbor, 89, 122, 125, 127
Lindquist, Adam, 26, 71, 95, 98 New York Harbor School, 117, 118
Living Breakwaters, 28, 98 and power of oysters, 71–76
Long, Theodora, 64, 65, 68 New York Times, 91
Long Now, concept of, 110–111 Newark, 104, 106
Louv, Richard, 6 Newark Waterfront Revival Initiative,
Lovewell, Alan, 48 104, 105
Lubchenco, Jane, 6, 7, 40, 41, 43, Nguyen, Nhung, 97
127 Nichols, Wallace J., 10, 12
Norfolk Canyon, 128, 130
NYC Ferry, 20
M
Malinowski, Peter, 73, 75
Manley Scenic Walkway, 89 O
Mantis shrimp, 67 Obama, Barack, 41
Marine edge, 3 Ocean, as medicine, 119–121
Marine ethos cultivation, through Ocean Approved, 55n11
experience and adventure, Ocean blindness, 9
64–68 Ocean pools, 89
Marine Policy, 50 Ocean resilience, 55n3
Marine Stewardship Council, 43 Oceans (Gosse), 121
Marjory Stoneman Douglas Biscayne Ocearch, vi, 60–62
Nature Center, 32, 64, 66 Octopus mural, 129
Medicine and wildness, 12 One Percent For Art requirement, 128
Miami Beach, 29–33, 68 Operation Surf, 12
Miami New Times, 33 Orff, Kate, 28, 98, 99
Mitchell, Rich, 112n3 Other Minds (Godfrey-Smith), 122
Molenaar, Arnoud, 34 Oyster aquaculture, 53
Moral communities, 110, 112 “Oyster gardens”, 71
Mowry, Bruce, 29–33 Oysters, growing, 26–28
Municipal Arts Society, 20 Oyster-tecture, 28, 98
 INDEX
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P S
Pacific bluefin tuna, 63, 64 St. Hilaire, Sandra, 68
Pacific octopus, 71 San Francisco, 11, 14, 43, 58, 83,
Paris, 89 104, 106, 128
Partrite, Bob, 43–45 San Francisco Bay Area, 43
Passaic River, 104 Schuhbauer, Anna, 55n5
Pauly, Daniel, 40, 41, 45–47, 52, 111 The Sea Around Us (Carson), 3
Payne, Katy, 122 Seafood Watch app., 43
Payne, Roger, 122 Seafood Watch program,
Perth, 93, 128 Monterrey Bay Aquarium,
Perth Urban Wetlands, 93 43
Pier Hotel, 92 Seagrass Adventure, 66
“Pier Into The Night”, 68–71 Sea hares, 67
Pikes Place Fish Market, 42 Sea lions, 11, 14, 63
Pittsburgh, 94 Seattle, 13, 23–25, 43, 96, 104, 108,
Planning Magazine, vi, xi 119
Planning, for danger and delight Seattle Aquarium, 25
balance, 19–37 Seattle Aquarium Beach Naturalist
Pohle, Alison, 63 program, 127
Seawall, design of, 96–97
Seaweed cultivation, 52–54
Q Shanghai, 117
Queen conch, 67 Shark Tracker app., 127
Shell collecting, 124
Shelley, Peter, 110
R Singapore, 4, 83, 97, 119, 122
Raincoast, 58 Singer, Peter, 50–52
“Rainy day flooding”, 29 Skerry, Brian, 127
Randwick Council, 44, 89 “Slow fish”, 47
Real Good Fish CSF, 48 South Florida, 29
Red mind, 10 South Waterfront Park, 94
Resilience, v, 16, 19, 28, 36, 41, 55n3, Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital, 13,
81, 83, 91–94 81
Re-wilding, 13, 111, 122, 123, 125 Stover, Lindsey, 68, 70
River Keepers, 72 Sumalia, Rashid, 55n5
River of Grass (Douglas), 65 Sustainable Development Goals, 16,
Riverfront Park, 104, 106 116
Rockpools, 89, 97, 100n7 Sydney, 83, 89, 96, 97
Australian, 90 Sydney Harbor Bridge, 83, 85
Rose, Alexander, 110, 111 Sydney Metropolitan area, 83
Rotterdam, 34–36, 92, 94 Sydney Royal Botanic Gardens,
Rouse, James, 25 97
142 INDEX

T Washington Post, 52
Taputeranga Marine Reserve, 123 Water, significance of, 10–12
Thwaite, Ann, 121 Water Edge Design Guidelines, 22
Tidal parks, 94 Waterfront Alliance, 9, 20, 22, 75, 76,
“Mr Trash Wheel”, 26, 27 91, 92
Troyer, Stena, 70 Waterfront Plan, 119
Trust for Public Land, 105 Waterfront Space, 96
Tun, Karenne, 97 Waterfronts Partnership, 25
Water plazas, 92
Wellington, 87, 100n6
U “Whole of city” approach, 80
United Kingdom (UK), 51 WiIhelmson, Christianne, 60
Urbanists, need to care for oceans, 10 Wild About Whales app., 127
Wildlife Watch, 121
Wilhelmsen, Christianne, 7, 13
W Wilson, E.O., 3, 14
Wanless, Harold, 29 Wylies pool, 89