Indicators of Cultural Ecosystem Services for urban planning: A review

Highlights

• Indicators for Cultural Ecosystem Services (CES) in urban planning are reviewed.

• No CES indicator was found to be of high relevance to urban contexts.

• High dependence of indicators from data quality and availability.

• Need for explicit considerations of urban context by CES indicators is identified.

Abstract

The concept of Ecosystem Services has gained traction on the scientific agenda and has found its way into research on urban environments. Cities and towns, like any other ecosystem, provide specific services to their inhabitants and communities and they are benefited by surrounding ecosystems as well. Among the different categories, typical Ecosystem Services categories such as food production and erosion control usually have a lesser importance within urban contexts. However, the very diverse range of land uses and ecosystems in urban contexts provide specific Cultural Ecosystem Services including recreational, cultural and educational values.

However, to date only limited attention has been given to the provision of Cultural Ecosystem Services (CES), especially considering the relevant benefits that communities and urban planning processes can derive from them. In this document we review existing approaches for the assessment of CES in urban contexts and provide a critical overview of how indicators are used to assess and measure CES. We first conduct a literature review on the indicators used for CES in urban contexts then the paper addresses some specific issues with reference to both operability and benefits of the use of CES indicators for urban planning and management.

Our results show that existing CES indicators have limited usability for urban planning and management. Moreover a lack of appropriate data use is a significant obstacle for proper CES assessment. This impacts the potential for sustainable decision-making concerning CES in urban contexts. These issues, together with fact that most identified indicators are proxy ones, identify an urgent need to develop proper assessment indicators for CES.

Introduction

The concept of Ecosystem Services (ES) has gained traction on the scientific agenda and has found its way into research on urban environments. Cities and towns, like any other complex ecosystem, provide specific services to their inhabitants and communities (Bolund and Hunhammar, 1999, Gómez-baggethun and Barton, 2013, Haase et al., 2014) and they are benefited by surrounding ecosystems as well. In urban contexts, a diverse range of land uses and ecosystems provide different services including air filtration (gas regulation), micro-climate regulation, noise reduction (disturbance regulation), rainwater drainage (water regulation), sewage treatment (waste treatment), and recreational, cultural and educational values. Other services such as food production and erosion control usually have a lesser importance within urban boundaries, but may become relevant when looking at more extended contexts (i.e. metropolitan or regional areas), especially under the eventual pressures that climate change might exert on urbanised areas.

To date limited attention has been given to Cultural Ecosystem Service (CES) among different categories of ES, especially considering the relevant benefits that communities and urban planning processes can derive from them (Hernández-Morcillo et al., 2013, Tengberg et al., 2012). Widely accepted and used definitions of CES are provided by MEA (2005) or TEEB (2011) and define CES as non-material and/or socio-ecological benefits people obtain from a contact with ecosystems through spiritual enrichment, cognitive development, reflection, recreation, and aesthetic experiences. CES are directly experienced and appreciated by people through ecosystems, thus, unlike other services, CES cannot be replaced if degraded (MEA, 2005, Plieninger et al., 2013).

In a recent review, Milcu et al. (2013) highlighted five clusters of research regarding CES, dealing with general conceptualisations, case studies coming from different disciplines, social and participatory approaches, descriptive reviews and economic assessments. Even if CES can act to bridge gaps between different research areas (Milcu et al., 2013, Hernández-Morcillo et al., 2013) studies on CES still do not have an effect on decision-making processes and especially on planning (Gómez-baggethun and Barton, 2013, Steiner, 2014).

Assessing the benefits of cultural services is a complex and sometimes even controversial issue, as CES need multidisciplinary outcomes from several disciplines such as ecology, economics and social sciences (Milcu et al., 2013). The diversity of approaches to CES can indicate a wide interest on the topic and dynamism in the applied research but, at the same time, might also be related to a lack of solid common terminology and understanding.

There are several features of CES that make their assessment different to assessment of other ES. Firstly, the general dependence of CES to an individual's value systems makes their assessments less quantitative than other services (i.e. provisioning services) that can be quantified independently from the presence of humans (Nahuelhual et al., 2014). Another important issue is the difficult use of spatial geographical units for CES assessment (Abson and Termansen, 2011, Burkhard et al., 2012). The use of spatial units is often absent, is rather general (Norton et al., 2012, Klain and Chan, 2012) or is characterised by continental/country mapping exercises (Maes et al., 2012, Paracchini et al., 2014). Furthermore, when it comes to measurements and operationalisation of CES through specific indicators, there is also lack of conceptual clarity. An explicitly spatial-based assessment of CES thus presents many challenges and studies have mainly focused on mapping benefits rather than on CES provision itself (Milcu et al., 2013). All these issues can be a good starting point to improve current assessments of CES towards their inclusion in urban planning.

The economic concept of cultural capital has recently taken shape for assessing cultural services (Throsby, 2001, Cheng, 2006, Bucci and Segre, 2011). This is an effort to recognise the distinctive features of certain cultural goods as capital assets and thus to capture the ways in which cultural assets contribute to the production of further cultural goods and services, job creation and wellbeing of local communities (Licciardi and Amirtahmasebi, 2012). This economic assessment of CES has found robust theoretical development in urban economics, where the use of hedonic models has developed strongly during recent decades, with a tremendous number of applications and calculations, many of them suitable in principle for their use in the assessment of CES (e.g. Colombo et al., 2014, Sander and Haight, 2012).

However, due to the problems inherent in monetary evaluations and to avoid reductionism, many authors have adopted non-economic approaches such as the relationship between a specific cultural service and its user, including personal culture, experiences and preferences (Klain and Chan, 2012, Gee and Burkhard, 2010, Kumar and Kumar, 2008). Examples of these approaches include mapping of personal preferences (Klain and Chan, 2012, Sherrouse et al., 2014, Sherrouse and Semmens, 2014), photo-based (Sherren et al., 2010) or survey based methods (Plieninger et al., 2013, Bieling and Plieninger, 2013, Bieling et al., 2014).

As noted by Bossel (1999) “indicators represent valuable information” and are also an expression of different values. Even if some ambiguity and plural meanings are still present in the term “indicators” (Heink and Kowarik, 2010), their use in ES research has recently increased (Müller and Burkhard, 2012, Hernández-Morcillo et al., 2013). As suggested by Heink and Kowarik (2010), an all-encompassing definition of indicators in environmental science can be: “An indicator in ecology and environmental planning is a component or a measure of environmentally relevant phenomena used to depict or evaluate environmental conditions or changes or to set environmental goals” as put forward by the OECD (2003).

For CES, a recent study by Feld et al. (2009) showed that even taking into consideration all indicators used for other ES assessments, only 6% referred to CES categories. Similar results can be obtained from the Ecosystem Service Indicators Database, created by the World Resource Institute, where no indicators are reported both for the “cultural” ecosystem service type and “urban” ecosystems (ESID, 2012).

In urban systems, research about CES is even more poorly developed and its real applicability in planning is still a promise (Haase et al., 2014). This is due to two main reasons. First, mismatches between areas providing services and areas benefiting from services should be highlighted in the context of urbanised territories. ES flow from production sites to sites where they are consumed (Costanza, 2008) and this makes CES assessments and evaluation difficult (Maes et al., 2012). Moreover, in urban systems the concentration of beneficiaries of ES is usually high and might result in frequent and difficult to interpret overlaps between the spatial extent of research and the spatial scale of its applications.

However the situation changes when we refer to particular CES, such as those provided by monuments, architecture and other cultural items that are naturally concentrated in cities, and thus currently addressed in standard urban planning. Thus, the second of our reasons is that urban ecosystems are characterised by high complexity, requiring careful selection of research methods, approaches and indicators. Complexity in urban systems is indicated by many different aspects, such as the large number of different land-cover types and their high degree of spatial mixing. This makes CES assessment based on land-use information particularly challenging and it requires data with an appropriately high resolution that is not always available.

Finding a proper way to assess and measure CES can provide essential insights for urban planning, especially for specific urban contexts where culture, history, location and other related features play a central role for social identity, local heritage and cohesion.

In this document we review existing indicators for the assessment of Cultural Ecosystem Services in urban contexts and provide a critical overview of how indicators can be used for urban planning purposes. We first conduct a literature review on the indicators used for CES in urban contexts and then address some specific issues with reference to both operability and benefits of the use of CES indicators for urban planning and management. The central research questions read as follows:

• What kind of indicators are currently used for CES in urban contexts?

• Which particular issues aspects are discussed in current research concerning CES?

• What are the conceptual shortcomings concerning current CES assessments?

• Which are the most suitable measurement methods and calculation units for CES indicators in urban areas?

• How and at which extent the results of CES indicators can inform urban planning and management of urban systems?

• Are there some indicators more relevant and effective for urban planning?

The paper is structured as follow. In Section 2 we present results of the queries made in academic databases about the ongoing research on CES topics. Section 3 shows the results of the queries, highlighting some key issues about the use of CES in urban systems. In Section 4 we discuss the main findings of the review, addressing the above listed research questions and especially focusing on the use of CES for planning in urban contexts. Section 5 summarises the main conclusions of the work.