Author Archives: Sanaz

Resilience and complexity: A bibliometric review and prospects for Industrial Ecology

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Meerow, S & J.P. Newell. 2015.

Journal of Industrial Ecology, DOI: 10.1111/jiec.12252

Abstract: Resilience is an increasingly popular concept in academic research and public discourse and is closely connected to complex systems theory. This article reviews research on resilience and complexity in industrial ecology and the broader academy by conducting a bibliometric analysis of the academic literature over a 40-year period (1973–2014). The review revealed a large body of scholarship composed of five clearly identifiable intellectual communities, with resilience theory from ecology especially influential. Based on the study of ecosystems, these scholars conceptualize resilience as a dynamic and adaptive property of systems with multiple stable states that evolve over time. In comparison, resilience research in industrial ecology is limited and underdeveloped. Bibliometric analysis of this literature yielded just 37 publications and a scholarly network with no well-formulated research communities. This contrasts with industrial ecology scholarship on sustainability; a similar search yielded 1,581 publications. Given the emerging importance of the resilience concept and its relevance for sustainability issues, industrial ecology should expand research efforts in this area. The growing body of industrial ecology scholarship on complex systems provides a foundation to do so, as does the field’s long-standing practice of using ecological principles to inform the study and design of industrial ecosystems. The article concludes by discussing how industrial ecology would benefit from incorporating principles of dynamic resilience and, conversely, how industrial ecology approaches could advance broader resilience scholarship.

Keywords: bibliometricscomplex systemscomplexityindustrial ecologyresiliencesustainability

Newell gives talk at Architectural League of New York

Newell gives an invited talk at the Architectural League of New York and the Cooper Union Institute for Sustainable Design’s Five Thousand Pound Life Water Symposium in New York City.

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Research Group Master’s Student Named 2015 Dow Sustainability Fellow

Dana Wall received the 2015 Dow Sustainability Fellowship, and will conduct a year-long project to explore sustainability issues with other interdisciplinary fellows.

View Dana’s Profile

Newell Featured in Next City

Josh Newell comments on the under utilization of alleys in this article for Next City.

“The residents of South Los Angeles were initially a bit skeptical about the idea of green alleys. “When we first started talking to community members, they were like, ‘No way,’” says Tori Kjer, a program director of the Trust for Public Land. After all, alleys are often seen as forbidding places in cities. “They’re traditionally very much overlooked spaces for people to put out that couch they don’t want or for weeds to grow,” says Kjer. It was hard for people to imagine them as inviting or useful.”

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Newell Receives National Institute of Food and Agriculture Grant

Josh Newell was awarded a grant of $55,000 for his current research on urban forest ecosystems as equitable green infrastructure for the Detroit region.

Wolch Featured in Co.Design

Jennifer Wolch comments on what is “just green enough”, and the concept of “eco-gentrification” in this article for Fast Company.

“On the three Es of sustainability—ecology, economy, and equity—the High Line in New York passes the first two with flying colors. The elevated-railroad-turned-park has brought a fresh mix of plants, flowers, birds, and insects to the once-drab West Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. It has also attracted billions in financial investments, with area property values increasing 103 % between 2003 and 2011, Great Recession be damned.”

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Xu and Newell Receive National Science Foundation Grant

Ming Xu and Josh Newell was awarded a grant of $319,000 to develop an integrated tool to evaluate water scarcity risks for industries with global supply chains.

Wolch, Byrne, and Newell Featured on Next City

The article “Urban green space, public health and environmental justice: The challenge of making cities ‘just green enough’” by Jennifer Wolch, Jason Byrne, and Joshua Newell was highlighted inn Next City’s Science of Cities column. Click here to read the column.

From green roofs in Chicago to the High Line in Manhattan, U.S. cities have been making high-profile investments in green space — to widespread celebration. But could there be a downside to urban greening? A growing body of academic literature examines a paradox: Low-income communities tend to suffer from various kinds of environmental injustice, including shortage of green space. But when these concerns are addressed — the power plant closes, a park opens — the neighborhood becomes more desirable, often kickstarting a process of so-called “environmental gentrification.”View More

Newell Featured in The University Record

The University Record ran a weeklong “Victors for Michigan” feature highlighting Joshua Newell’s work on underutilized urban spaces in a week long “Victors for Michigan.”

Back alleys, vacant lots and underutilized urban spaces hold great potential for fostering more sustainable cities, if they can be reimagined and transformed into multidimensional green infrastructure that simultaneously delivers environmental, social and economic benefits, says Joshua Newell, assistant professor at the School of Natural Resources and Environment.

“Traditionally, city planning around green urban redevelopment has been driven by one agency with a single agenda, so there’s been little focus on trying to achieve multiple objectives,” he says. “We can be more strategic in these redevelopment efforts. There’s much greater potential to achieve simultaneous benefits by repurposing neglected urban spaces with more than just one pillar of sustainability in mind.”

Much of Newell’s urban sustainability research focuses on developing new models for what he describes as coupling multiple ecosystem services within a single redeveloped urban space. For example, an empty lot in a park-poor neighborhood can be repurposed as green parkland that serves as open space for residents, a playground for children and a means for abating stormwater runoff.View More

Urban Permaculture

With Sepp Holzer visiting Southeast Michigan this week, I thought it an appropriate time to reflect on the applications of permaculture principles to urban areas.

The word “permaculture” is the invention of Bill Mollison and David Holmgren. Originally it was intended to be a derivative of “permanent agriculture,” (1978) but it has since come to embody the notion of “permanent culture” (Gundersen and O’Day, 2009). Permaculture is an approach to design and engineering of systems that aims to emulate nature’s processes. The focus is on creating closed loop, zero waste systems. More often permaculture is thought of in landscape applications, but its doctrines are relevant to virtually any system. In the center of the diagram below are the three ethical principles of permaculture surrounded by the twelve design principles as described by Holmgren (2002).

Source: Tumblr

Potential urban applications include city planning, organizational structuring, and energy and mobility systems. In fact, Holmgren identified the built environment as a “key domain” for permaculture, in addition to finance, economics, education, culture, well-being, land tenure and community governance (2002). Permaculture systems design embraces adaptability and small experiments that utilize local knowledge, two important considerations for cities grappling with climate change adaptation strategies.

The University of Massachusetts Amherst serves as a living laboratory that demonstrates how permaculture gardening techniques can be integrated into a city’s infrastructure. Otherwise underutilized space, namely lawns, on campus have been converted to edible landscapes that provide fresh produce to the University’s dining halls. Pictured below is one of these spaces, the Franklin Permaculture Garden.

Source: UMass Amherst

Hungry for more? Resilience.org offers an urban permaculture reading list.

Resources:

Holmgren, D. 2002. Ethical principles of permaculture. In Permaculture: principles and pathways beyond sustainability, 1–12. Hepburn, Australia: Holmgren Design Services.

Gundersen, D. and T. O’Day. 2009. Permaculture, a natural systems design approach for teaching sustainability in higher education: Pacific University’s B-Street permaculture project. In Addressing Global Environmental Security Through Innovative Educational Curricula. ed. S. Allen Gil et al. Springer Science + Business Media BV.

Mollison, B., and D. Holmgren. 1978. Permaculture one: A perennial agriculture for human settlements. Melbourne, Australia: Transworld Publishers.