Participatory Urban Planning

This chapter examines how integrated, participatory design and urban environmental education can enhance learning, ownership, agency, and long-term sustainability of place. Drawing on recent efforts to articulate a global urban sustainability agenda, it considers the ways that urban environmental education can help integrate the participation of underrepresented groups—such as children, youth, and low-income and minority residents—in urban planning while also improving urban planning outcomes. The chapter presents a case study that illustrates outcomes of engaging young people in urban planning: the Child Friendly Bolivia project in La Paz, Bolivia. It shows that engaging youth and underrepresented groups in urban planning offers a unique opportunity to address concerns about equity and to engage multiple innovative perspectives. It suggests that the tools of participatory urban planning and environmental education may help create more sustainable cities for all.

Urban Agriculture

This chapter considers school gardens in North America and urban agriculture in South Africa as sites for urban environmental education. Urban agriculture encompasses rooftop and community gardens, greenhouses, hydroponic systems, plant nurseries, small livestock husbandry, and vertical farms, located indoors, on vacant lots, on roofs, and on postindustrial landscapes, among other sites. Urban environmental education taking place in urban agriculture sites can integrate intergenerational and multicultural learning and contribute to environmental and science knowledge, positive youth development, job skills, and improved diets. It can also enhance social capital, environmental quality, and economic development. The chapter looks at examples of recent policies and practices strengthening urban agriculture and environmental education.

Sustainable Campuses

This chapter examines sustainable urban campuses and their impact on their students and local communities. It also considers elements of green infrastructure, learning, and community through the lens of urban environmental education trends, namely: City as Classroom, Problem Solving, and Environmental Stewardship. After providing an overview of aspects of sustainable university campuses, the chapter discusses the ways that such campuses address urban sustainability related to infrastructure, teaching and learning, as well as connections to the community. It shows that the built environment and lifestyles are important for urban campuses, given their location in areas of highly concentrated buildings and dense human population. It argues that environmental education in cities can benefit from harnessing the power that lies within a university campus's academic, infrastructural, and community-related resources.

Nonformal Educational Settings

This chapter examines the pedagogy of nonformal environmental education for urban audiences, focusing on different types of urban nonformal educational opportunities and situating them in the lives of urbanites using the concept of “learningscapes.” Urban nonformal environmental education involves relating environmental content to the everyday lives of urban learners, ensuring learner autonomy, and integrating the institutions of environmental education providers within the broader array of social institutions in the urban environment. Nonformal urban environmental education programs according to participant choice and goals and provider goals include school field trips or related programs, casual visit to a community institution (for example, nature center), and recreational programs. The chapter suggests that urban environmental education providers have unique opportunities for connecting beyond traditional audiences due to the dense and diverse networks of programs within urban environments, from youth sports leagues to literacy clubs and neighborhood watches.

Sense of Place

This chapter considers the concept of sense of place, focusing on how urban environmental education can help residents to strengthen their attachment to urban communities or entire cities and to view urban places as ecologically valuable. Sense of place—the way we perceive places such as streets, communities, cities, or ecoregions—influences our well-being, how we describe and interact with a place, what we value in a place, our respect for ecosystems and other species, how we perceive the affordances of a place, our desire to build more sustainable and just urban communities, and how we choose to improve cities. Our sense of place also reflects our historical and experiential knowledge of a place and helps us imagine its more sustainable future. The chapter offers examples of activities to help readers construct field explorations that evoke, leverage, or influence sense of place, including social construction of place meanings and developing an ecological identity.

Cities as Opportunities

This chapter discusses the notion of “cities as opportunities,” drawing on urban experiences lived in the broader geopolitical context of the Global South. It shows that different countries and cities present different conditions and opportunities to address multidimensional social and environmental problems. In the Global South, cities integrate into environmental narratives aspects of their colonial histories and decolonizing viewpoints, which are reflected in educational practices. Environmental education in these cities reflects the ways that people construct perspectives and narratives to frame and address social and environmental issues, while also providing models for other countries seeking to simultaneously address environmental and social justice. The chapter looks at examples of urban environmental education from three countries: South Africa, Brazil, and India. It demonstrates how the intensity of colonial legacies and environmental problems in cities in the Global South makes them “cities as opportunities” for environmental education and urban sustainability.

Afterword

This book has discussed academic debates and practices in urban environmental education. It has highlighted challenges and opportunities facing the field of environmental education in general and educators working in urban areas in particular. It has examined how the unique features of cities—as places facing major environmental and justice issues yet also as hubs of innovation—influence environmental education goals and implementation. Urban planning, social justice, climate change, and social-ecological systems resilience are areas environmental education has addressed in the past, but which are becoming increasingly salient for environmental education in cities. This afterword urges environmental educators to: First, challenge the urban/rural binary by recognizing and critiquing processes such as urban decay, suburban sprawl, migration, and gentrification. Second, spend time in the field—or, more accurately, in the streets— in order to understand urban settings in a deeper, more embodied way.

Green Infrastructure

This chapter examines opportunities for using green infrastructure in classroom and after-school activities and strengthening student contact with and attachment to their local environment. Education about green infrastructure refers to the learning opportunities provided by infrastructure projects in cities, where ecosystem services are intertwined with human development and can teach fundamental lessons about systems thinking, sustainability, and resilience. In addition, education for green infrastructure emphasizes the need for increased public education regarding the benefits of green infrastructure, which could increase public support, management, and stewardship of present and future green infrastructure projects. The chapter considers the ways that urban environmental education in, about, and for green infrastructure can improve human–nature connections in the city.

Adventure Education

This chapter examines the benefits of adventure education and of pairing adventure and environmental education in urban environments. By participating in outdoor activities, people learn about their surroundings and places they might not otherwise visit. These group experiences enhance social ties and may promote pro-environmental behaviors, which contribute to ecosystem health and human well-being as well as urban sustainability. Benefits of adventure education include positive relationships with self, other people, places, and the natural world. After explaining what adventure education is, the chapter considers adventure education in urban areas such as metropolitan Hong Kong, Minneapolis (Minnesota), and Japan. It shows that adventure education can be used by educators as a catalyst for urban environmental education.

Adult Education

This chapter examines opportunities for developing urban environmental education experiences for adults. It first considers the core ideas of three influential adult education scholars—Paulo Freire, Malcolm Knowles, and Jane Vella—before describing two cases of adult environmental education in cities, one in New York City and one in London. It then reviews theory and practice through the binary categories of “emancipatory” versus “instrumental” environmental education, both of which have conceptual roots in the work of Freire, Knowles, and Vella, among others. It also explains how, through the use of andragogic methods such as relationship building, engagement in action, and a focus on the needs of the learner, adult urban environmental education initiatives can help promote environmental literacy and action.