Erika Svendsen

Title: Research Social Scientist
Unit: People and Their Environments: Social Science Supporting Natural Resource Management and Policy
Previous Unit: Integrating Social and Biophysical Sciences for Natural Resource Management
Address: Northern Research Station
290 Broadway, 26th Floor
New York, NY 10007
Phone: 212-637-3598
E-mail: Contact Erika Svendsen

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Education

• PhD Candidate, Columbia University, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation
• M.E.S, Yale University, School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, 1993.
• B.A. Allegheny College, 1990

Civic & Professional Affiliations

• Advisory Board, Meristem: Restorative Environments for Health Care and Well-Being www.meristem.org
• Advisory Board, Groundwork USA, www.groundworkusa.org
• Advisory Board, Brooklyn-Queens Land Trust (BQLT)

Current Research

My current research focuses on how, when, where and why different urban actors use open space and greening as a way to gain legitimacy and socio-political power in both their local communities and the larger urban arena.  My current work suggests that some urban stewardship groups are hybrids where members of the private sector, civil society and the state are informally drawn together by a common interest, disturbance or risk – and over time unite to create new institutional and physical forms.   In some cases these new urban forms may give rise to urban stewardship regimes where an informal yet stable group emerges with access to institutional resources and is able to bridge the divide between popular control of government and private control of economic resources. 

 

Much of what I do right now is informed by my recent collaborative research with Lindsay K. Campbell of the Northern Research Station on the Living Memorials Project.  This project inspired me to better understand the critical need for open space for societal well-being.  Space to create. Space to teach. Space to restore.   I am currently working with fellow Forest Service social scientists, and spatial analysis experts at the University of Vermont and Prof. Dana R. Fisher of Columbia University to develop STEW-MAP (the Stewardship Mapping and Assessment Project) for New York City. This citywide assessment will analyze the spatial locations and network relationships of over 5,000 stewardship groups and create on-line stewardship maps and a database. Other active areas of research include the Urban Tree Mortality project where we are working together with NYC Parks Forestry to understand the relationship between tree mortality, social indicators and the built form and the Harlem Healthshed Sustainability Project where we are working with the NYC Dept. of Health and the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University to develop a framework for implementing and monitoring projects focused on urban greening, public health and well-being.

Why is This Important

Specific to the goals of urban and community forestry, park and open space planning, there are currently thousands of groups engaging in some aspect of land-based urban stewardship in cities throughout the United States yet planners have no means to comprehensively understand them  This information is critical for planners as they seek to harness the capacity of new knowledge, provide innovative ways to understand and view the city, and suggest the potential for transboundary collaboration and open space policies that promote public health and well-being. 

While environmental planning was an important first step in technocratic urban planning, it tends to look at individual aspects and problems.  Situated within the dominant frame of technocratic expertise, environmental planning is ill-equipped as a sub-discipline of urban planning to implement and balance issues of social equity, economic viability and environmental quality.   My research is framed within a post-empiricist view of environmental planning where knowledge and truth emerges through ideas, actions, discourse and risk (Beck 1994; Beck 1995; Hajer 1995; Fischer 2000; Fischer 2003).  In this sense, open space projects such as urban greenways, community gardens, regional parks, etc… are opportunities for a new urban ecological planner to emerge.  An urban ecological planner must learn to embrace heterogeneity, complexity, succession, power and promote the integration of knowledge through social innovation and the built form.  This new framework is a critical step toward achieving unified social action and effective natural resource stewardship.  It is critically important in this era of sustainability that we are able to look at the intersection of social, physical and biophysical factors that make up every city and town, with an eye toward understanding them as spatial, scalar and temporal relationships between human and nonhuman urban residents.   This is will lead to sustainability as a practice rather than an abstract ideal.

Future Research

Several projects have been identified by the NYC Urban Field Station, a unique research collaborative between the NRS, non-profits and the NYC Dept. of Parks and Recreation. Of specific interest is monitoring city-wide community management of open space as neighborhoods change, management jurisdictions shift and leadership transitions to a new generation. I hope to work with colleagues at the NYC Housing Authority to develop a framework for enhancing ecosystem and social services on the grounds of public housing

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