It can be hard to see the nature of cities. High but variable human population densities, buildings and other infrastructure, and the natural resource requirements and waste outputs of urban settings modify the ecology of cities in profound ways. Yet cities are the places where people live and most innovations are generated, so making nature work in cities is important not only for the people and other species that live there, but also for enabling nature to do its work on a crowded planet. Historical ecology provides an innovative way to show people nature without the burden of industrial populations and infrastructure, and to see benchmarks for ambition of the nature of cities now and into the future.
Results/Conclusions
We have reconstructed the historical ecology of the five boroughs of New York City (Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island) at the moment immediately prior to European Contact through the Welikia Project (welikia.org). We have integrated the ecosystems, lifestyles, and climate of 1609 into an ecological democracy tool called Visionmaker for imagining the future. For any block or combination of blocks (i.e. neighborhood) in the city, users can see the environmental performance of the environment in 1609, today, and for the future, as represented by the user’s own ideas for what might make that future more desirable. Visionmaker provides tools to rapidly rework on the ecosystems of the city, change the lifestyles of the people that live there, and explore different climate scenarios, and see how those visions (future, present, past) perform in terms of metrics of the carbon cycle, water cycle, biodiversity and population. Visionmaker is free and online (Visionmaker.nyc) and has been used by architects, community groups, and schools to explore, learn, and improve the nature of New York.