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Issue 2: Urban Marine Parks
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The Upwell: Notes from the Editor is a semiregular special edition to our newsletter that brings you analysis of emerging issues impacting coastlines around the world.
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Earlier this year, I received an email: “Jude, @TimBray and I are keen to talk to you about our vision of creating the first national urban marine park in False Creek. It’s been done in the UK—(Plymouth Sound National Marine Park) and it can be done here.”
That was from Mark Schneider, a retired journalist in Vancouver, British Columbia. Tim Bray is a celebrated software developer, mostly known for his work for, and defection from, Amazon. Schneider and Bray are neighbors; they each have boats in False Creek, which is not a creek but a short and narrow saltwater inlet separating parts of downtown Vancouver from the rest of the city. The surrounding shoreline is a well-used public and private space with a market, arts facilities, museums, parks, pedestrian walkways and cycling lanes, restaurants, and a marina.
But it’s not the green space surrounding False Creek that Schneider and Bray want designated as a park.
Via Zoom, we talk a bit about the challenges in False Creek. They’re the same problems facing any other city waterway, and all boil down to a lack of respect for the water itself.
So what is an urban marine park? It depends.
Park status is really just a badge that reads: “This is a special place where we do [insert activities] and all users should treat it with respect.” Vandalizing a kids’ play park is universally acknowledged as bad behavior, so is cutting fresh blossoms from a city park’s rose garden or a tree for firewood. Calling an urban waterway a park is a signal that the water is a public space, welcome to all and deserving of respect as a common resource.
But after talking with the marine ecologist who came up with the concept, with the academic who coined the term green urbanism, with a City of Vancouver employee, and with a city councilor from Plymouth, England—each of whom spent time chewing over the idea with me—it became clear that the more important question is, What is the goal of an urban marine park?
As Schneider puts it, for him and Bray, the goal is “for False Creek to become a watery place of reverence and wonder.”
Simon Pittman, a research associate at the University of Oxford’s Seascape Ecology Lab in England, was the first to describe his vision for a “city marine park” in a 2019 paper. In his view, the goal of an urban marine park is to deepen the local community’s appreciation and connection to the ocean. Green urbanism guru, Timothy Beatley, says the goal is to “expand and fully shift our mental maps to encompass the marine environment.” And to Angela Danyluk, a biologist and senior sustainability specialist at the City of Vancouver, an urban marine park is a place that “honors and recognizes our marine space in an urban setting.”
These are slippery things. You can’t legislate or mandate or create a bylaw for respect. And a city park usually emerges because the public wants it: locals already feel a connection and a respect for a particular space. (I know, I know, some people jump into an ocean wherever they are, or fish from a pier, but they’re not the majority.)
How did industrialized cities get to a place where so many urbanites lost their connection to the water?
My favorite parts of the 1990s hit film Shakespeare in Love are when Shakespeare, always in a hurry and constantly running, has to keep getting in a rowboat—a 17th-century water taxi—to cross the Thames. Bridges are convenient, but they were among the first technological changes to sever a community’s regular interaction with its waterway. In many industrialized cities, the complete divorce between water and residents happened early in the 20th century. Waterfronts became fairly nasty places with industrial warehouses, mills, power plants, factories, and shipping ports transforming the environment and limiting public access. Industrialization eroded the public connection with the urban ocean. Standing on the shoreline, or gazing at a view from a window is a different experience from wading into the intertidal, paddling a boat, or swimming.
Other technological changes (read: shipping containers), during the latter half of the 20th century pushed ports downstream of urban centers toward deeper water for bigger ships. Mechanization—cranes for unloading—reduced the number of people who worked at a port. Manufacturers moved to cheaper digs in the suburbs or overseas (repeating the same problem in other countries). As industry abandoned city waterfronts, it left behind piers, pollution, and derelict buildings.
Any sense of respect and connection from the public was long abandoned, too. “You can be physically close, and yet mentally so far away,” Beatley says.
Cities are trying to foster connections. Beatley points to Gig Harbor near Seattle, Washington, where the nonprofit education society Harbor WildWatch hosts Pier Into the Night, during which divers with GoPros send images back to the pier for the public to view on a large screen (online now due to the COVID-19 pandemic). Danyluk notes that Copenhagen, Denmark, built harbor baths for public swimming in an area that was once packed with factories and polluted from coal shipping. And while False Creek is not clean enough for regular sea bathing—polluted storm-water runoff is still a problem—remediation that began in the 1980s has improved the water quality enough for spawning herring and anchovies to return.
Many efforts at revitalization, however, focus on the shoreline. City planners tend to stop short when maps reach the water, Beatley says. Is an urban marine park the way to encourage a healthier relationship with an urban waterway, and in some cases, repair a broken one? Can cities invite more people into and onto the water and establish deeper connections?
Pittman thinks so. He spent many years working for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the United States, primarily on marine spatial planning and marine protected areas (MPAs). In his work, he noticed that as useful as MPAs can be—in terms of conservation—they’re often a top-down approach to solving a marine problem, often overfishing, and do little to engage the public. MPAs tend to be well away from urban shorelines, so are not likely on the minds of average coastal residents—a fair number of people, considering that 50 percent of the industrialized world lives within 50 kilometers of a coast. After his contract with NOAA ended, Pittman resettled in the United Kingdom, worked at the University of Plymouth as a research associate, and began beating the city marine park drum. Pittman explains what a city marine park is not: it’s not statutory, it’s not a management tool for the protection or conservation of nature, it’s not the same from city to city. And most emphatically, he says a city marine park is not an MPA. “We are very specific about this,” says Pittman. MPAs, with their top-down rules and regulations, can create anxiety and conflict, he adds.
Schneider and Bray envision a False Creek marine park that combines elements of the past with the present reality. At one time, the Squamish people had a seasonal village, called Sen̓áḵw, at the entrance to the inlet, where they fished and tended clam gardens and oyster beds. They also gathered there with other Coast Salish tribes. (Today, the Squamish Nation has a development plan for a portion of the area—about the size of eight sport fields—that it gained back from the government in a court case in 2002.)
“If the water was clean enough, I could see clam beds there again,” Bray says. “We already have wildlife venturing back in at the western edge. I can imagine putting up a permanent raft with recreational facilities, for music—there are a lot of things you could do if you had some organization.”
But it’s harder to designate a piece of the ocean a park than it is to designate terrestrial parkland. A city park generally lies within one jurisdiction; the ocean does not. There are no fewer than 16 entities that have jurisdiction over False Creek. That kind of bureaucratic tangle is found in other cities around the world, including Plymouth, the first city to begin the process of designating its marine space, Plymouth Sound, as a park. It will be a national marine park, the first of a proposed blue belt of national parks in UK waters.
Plymouth is an enormous presence in English history: it’s been a fishing port and hub of maritime trade since the 11th century. Located on England’s southwest shore, Plymouth Sound is a natural deepwater harbor. It’s where Francis Drake launched his mission to circumnavigate the globe in 1577, where the Pilgrims left to escape religious persecution in 1620, and where Charles Darwin boarded the HMS Beagle for the Galapagos Islands and beyond in 1831. The city is also home to the National Marine Aquarium and has hosted the Royal Navy since 1670. One of Plymouth’s members of parliament included the marine park initiative in his first election campaign in 2017. He was re-elected in 2019, which is good, because if the city’s waterway is to work as a marine park, there are myriad government entities that must be involved, from the Marine Management Organisation to the Department for Environment, Food, & Rural Affairs, to the Ministry of Defence, among others.
Pam Buchan, a marine scientist and a Plymouth city councilor, says the city declared its intention to support the Sound as a marine park a couple of years ago. “Because it’s a lovely thing,” says Buchan from her home, her Zoom background an image of snakelocks anemone. The vote was unanimous. The details defining the park have yet to be fleshed out, with basic details, such as the governance model, still undecided. “It’s still ongoing; it’s challenging work,” Buchan says. The pandemic came on the heels of the first board meeting in January 2020 and has made the process more challenging—because central to the urban marine park vision is public participation.
Schneider, Bray, Beatley, Danyluk, Pittman, and Buchan all agree that there is no park without public buy-in. Aside from the fact that public gatherings have been discouraged or forbidden for over a year, advocates in Plymouth—and Bray and Schneider—have a chicken-egg situation on their hands. If you call it a park and pass bylaws, will the public treat a waterway with the kind of respect usually reserved for a terrestrial park? Or, do you have to create a connection with the ocean before a marine park truly becomes a park?
Buchan has some thoughts. “[An urban marine park] fits in really well with marine citizenship,” she says. Buchan is set to defend her doctoral dissertation on the concept in June. Marine citizenship is part of the same thought family as ocean literacy—an idea that Canada has done a lot of work around. In fact, the Canadian Ocean Literacy Coalition officially launched its national strategy last month. The goal is to strengthen Canadians’ relationships with the ocean through community-based initiatives. Again, public participation.
Buchan’s view is that the purpose of increasing ocean literacy is to foster marine citizenship. Ocean literacy equips citizens with knowledge and awareness, but marine citizenship implies commitment, or obligation. But to feel that sense of obligation, connection is essential. So how do you create a marine citizen? Buchan deconstructed the lives of people she identified as marine citizens but who didn’t necessarily make a living from the ocean: people engaged with the sea in a positive way, through citizen science projects, beach cleaning, or other kinds of community group activities. “It’s not a population sample. I wanted to find people who take care of the sea and investigate why they started and why they keep doing it,” she says.
What she found was the obvious: people who love the sea care about it, and they love it because at some point, often in their childhoods, that connection was developed and nurtured. A city marine park—or a national marine park within a city—can foster that connection.
So how can Schneider and Bray get Vancouverites to accept False Creek as a watery park, where people play on and in the water, where they socialize and give people hell for throwing cigarette butts into the water the same way they may admonish people who leave dog poop uncollected at a terrestrial park?
Just declaring a waterway a park doesn’t make it so.
“I can’t say the city will say yes or no to a marine park, because I don’t know yet,” Danyluk says about the False Creek initiative. There hasn’t been a proposal made officially to the city, nor is she part of the decision-making process. But, “in these cases, I do know that the process is as important as where we end up.”
Danyluk has spent the past year talking with people who live and work on False Creek, including Schneider and Bray, for the city’s False Creek Coastal Adaptation Plan. Overall, the message she’s hearing is that the public desires an inclusive, safe space that honors the Indigenous history, that’s economically and culturally vibrant, and that invites people to interact with the environment, including the water itself. It’s a start.
Jude Isabella
Editor in chief
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Illustrations by Sarah Gilman
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