Rescaling Natural Parks and the City
Urban Protected Areas Network: 3rd BiodiverCities International Conference
7-9 April 2014
The Old Mutual Conference and Exhibition Centre, Kirstenbosch Botanical Garden, Cape Town
This event proposes an opportunity for collective reflection on relationships between city and nature, through the showcase and exchange of experience and strategies for sustainable management of protected areas in changing urban contexts, from both Northern and Southern perspectives. In an explicitly comparative undertaking, this event brings together managers both of protected areas and of the cities they intersect, contributing to a community of urban nature researchers and practitioners.
This year’s conference will focus on issues of scale in urban park management and policies. While the natural park itself can be seen as an obvious level of management, with a clear ecological and institutional level of organisation, its position within a metropolitan area implies a more complex size and scope for park management. Different stakeholders with different goals and different uses tend to blur the “natural” boundaries of a park. Likewise, the “rational” delimitation of an urban park for specific purposes (e.g. biodiversity conservation) can be challenged by alternative views on the park’s objectives. Scale is thus an important aspect of natural parks in urban settings. Three dimensions shall be addressed:
- horizontally, the interrelationships between the national park and its urban setting, in terms of biodiversity connectivity, of urban design, as well as management authorities;
- vertically, the interrelationships between the local, regional, national and global levels: how can an urban park meet national objectives while satisfying global and local needs ?
- the differing temporal scales of biodiversity, social and economic issues as well as political imperatives.
Some of the different issues of scale around urban natural parks that frame the conference are:
- Scale mismatch and synergy between the extent and resolution of management actions, the ecological system, and political spheres.
- Temporal scale differences between ecological processes and social dynamics.
- Divergent or complementary objectives between park institutions, other nature governance bodies, and city departments.
- Potential tensions between the scales of management, of policies and of politics. – Multiscalar coordination between the park, the city, the state, and beyond (global stakes).
- Emerging issues linked to non-institutionalised stakeholders’ involvement in the park/city connections.
- Dynamics around park boundaries, urban fringes and edges, city/park connections.
- Interrelationships between policies and experiments and the role of innovative practices in creating urban park governance.
The conference aims to bring together politicians, practitioners, managers, stakeholders and researchers to discuss those issues of rescaling urban natural parks in an open and fresh way. In particular, every contributor is invited to not only present his/her own activities but engage in dialogues with other issues and other participants’ perspectives.
The aim is to discuss the synergies and contradictions all stakeholders are facing in their professional practice, emphasising whichever themes, projects, policies and/or relationships they find most pertinent.