A research lab at ICTA-UAB
Urban environmental stewards work as volunteers or paid professionals to conserve, manage, monitor, advocate for, or educate the public about the local environment in cities. These stewards of local ecosystems are essential for efforts to create just and sustainable cities with positive environmental conditions for everyone. While stewardship is a growing movement in cities that shapes individual health, civic engagement, and governance processes, research has shown that the most engaged stewards tend to be more educated; wealthier; a higher proportion women; and less commonly people of color than the average for a given city. This aspect of stewardship creates questions about whose vision for the city is being realized through improvements to local ecological conditions. Stewardship, then, is a complex issue that simultaneously resolves and exacerbates social-ecological conflict within cities. BCNUEJ researchers have examined urban environmental stewardship in the US and European contexts and continue to explore this issue internationally.
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Urban Environmental Stewardship and Civic Engagement: How Planting Trees Strengthens the Roots of Democracy (Routledge: London, 2015)
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Mixed Methods Analysis of Urban Environmental Stewardship Networks, Handbook of Research Methods and Applications in Environmental Studies (Edward Elgar: Northampton, MA., 2015)
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Networked Governance and the Management of Ecosystem Services: The Case of Urban Environmental Stewardship in New York City (Ecosystem Services, Volume 10, 2014)
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Organizing Urban Ecosystem Services through Environmental Stewardship Governance in New York City (Landscape and Urban Planning, Volume 109, 2013)
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Stewardship of Urban Ecosystem Services: Understanding the value(s) of urban gardens in Barcelona (Forthcoming)
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Tactical developments for achieving just and sustainable neighborhoods: The role of community-based coalitions and bottom-to-bottom networks in street, technical, and funder activism (Environment and Planning C., 2015)