Recalling Urban Nature-linking city people to ecosystem services
Publication review
This thesis investigates how social-ecological features behind practices of actor groups shape the generation of ecosystem services (ES). The empirical basis is case studies in the urban landscape of Stocholm, and the methodological approach is interdisciplinary.
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Paper I shows that the urban landscape owes it current flow of ES to co-evolutionary processes and that governance with the aim of sustaining ES must take into account historical property rights and the involvement of a diversity of actor groups, as well as ecological processes of the larger landscape.
Paper II studies allotment gardens, cemeteries and city parks in relation to the generation of pollination, seed dispersal and pest regulation.
Paper III shows how practice, linked to ES generation, is retained and stored among allotment gardeners, and modified and transmitted through time, by means of social-ecological memory (SE-memory).
Paper IV explores how spatial scale mismatches between ecological processes and processes of management can be bridged by a spatially explicit and flexible social network structure of governance.
Sustaining ES in urban landscapes is not about conservation with people, but shaped by and dependent on management practice by people. Practice that links to generation of ES are facilitated by SE-memory of local actors that hold long term management rights.
Consequently, local communities of ecosystem practice, which contribute to the production of ES should explicitly be taken into account in urban green governance.
