Article | Summer 2007
STEW-MAP: Mapping Civic Innovation in New York
by Dana Fisher (Sociology)
How do civic groups in New York City work to steward their local communities and in what ways are these groups connected? The Stewardship Mapping and Assessment Project (STEW-MAP)—a unique research partnership between ISERP, the USDA Forest Service Northern Research Station, and the University of Vermont Spatial Analysis Lab—is studying how environmental stewardship happens. Acknowledging that environmental challenges cannot be tackled by governments alone, stewardship is the idea that sustainability is the collective responsibility of the individuals, organizations, and businesses that make choices and take actions that affect the environment every day.
Boys planting shrubs in Queens on It's My Park! Day.
by Partnership for Parks
As part of his plan for Â"a greener, greater New YorkÂ" through PlaNYC 2030, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has recognized the importance of trees, parks, waterways, and open spaces as fundamental to a vibrant urban environment. The current plan calls for an historic increase in the budget available to plant trees and improve city parkland. Although everyday New Yorkers play a role in implementing this plan, stewardship is often unrecognized as part of sustaining this great effort. Citizens around New York serve as stewards by conserving, managing, monitoring, advocating for, and educating the public about their local environments, including water, land, air, waste, toxics, and energy issues. In contrast to other forms of civic engagement, stewardship involves action that is oriented to natural environments.
Some policymakers have begun to recognize stewardship as a leading tool by which communities contribute to the sustainability of their local environments. For example, a 2005 report by the EPA Innovation Action Council states: Â"We believe environmental stewardship offers great potential for solving some of our most challenging problems and that it can help galvanize collaborations with a broader range of stakeholders.Â" Even with this recognition, however, local efforts are not well understood, particularly with regard to how individual citizens, nonprofit organizations, businesses, and governments work together to protect their environments.
As a first step towards answering this question, this summer, STEW-MAP is surveying the thousands of civic groups that serve as stewards in New York City. These groups range in size, age, focus, and geographic scope—from small, unincorporated groups of volunteer gardening groups to large, multimillion dollar regional nonprofits. Through the survey, these stewardship organizations will provide information regarding how they connect, compete with, and complement the goals of government agencies and the private business sector in the management of the urban ecosystem.
Analyses of these data will explore the networks among stewards and the social, organizational, informational, and funding nodes that link them. Specifically, the study intends to shed light on the role of Â"nodesÂ"—citywide or borough-wide organizations whose primary role is to connect and support other, smaller civic groups. These groups include nonprofits like Citizens Committee for New York City and the Trust for Public Land, as well as hybrid programs like Partnerships for Parks, a joint public-private entity of the City Parks Foundation and the NYC Department of Parks and Recreation, and public agencies like the New York City Housing Authority Garden and Greening Program. Nodes provide financial and human resources, technical assistance, materials, information, training, and networking opportunities. Some have existed for several decades, following on the environmental consciousness-raising of the 1970s. Others are emerging in response to new technologies (e.g. EarthPledge, founded in 1992, which focuses on buildings).
In addition to exploring networks among stewards, this project aims to highlight the work of the many informal, neighborhood scale groups by quite literally Â"putting them on the map.Â" It will add a social layer of information to pre-existing biophysical and urban geographic information on Â"green infrastructureÂ" to understand the Â"who, what, where, and howÂ" of environmental stewardship in New York City. Using geo-referenced data, the project will analyze existing stewardship gaps and overlaps to strengthen organizational capacities, enhance citizen monitoring, and build effective partnerships among relevant stakeholders. By advancing the spatial and temporal understanding of civic innovation, STEW-MAP will create tangible tools for resource managers, policymakers, researchers, stewards, landscape architects, designers, and grant makers.
Findings from the survey will be distributed to civic groups, governmental agencies, and communities through a series of stewardship roundtables that will be held throughout New York City. The roundtables will provide an opportunity to correct maps, gather feedback, and observe how our findings are integrated into decisionmaking processes.
Through STEW-MAP, dynamic areas of public and private resource management will be identified for the combined purpose of improving quality of urban life and the environment and understanding civic innovation more clearly. It will also connect potentially fragmented groups and create a framework for measuring future urban environmental stewardship outcomes. By understanding the spatial and social footprint of these civic organizations, STEW-MAP will help us develop a more comprehensive understanding of stewardship and how stakeholders are working together to achieve sustainability.
See Also
- Research grant: Urban Stewardship Project
