Synthesis of Household Yard Area Dynamics in the City of San Juan Using Multi-Scalar Social-Ecological Perspectives

Abstract

Urban sustainability discourse promotes the increased use of green infrastructure (GI) because of its contribution of important ecosystem services to city dwellers. Under this vision, all urban green spaces, including those at the household scale, are valued for their potential contributions to a city's social-ecological functioning and associated benefits for human well-being. Understanding how urban residential green spaces have evolved can help improve sustainable urban planning and design, but it requires examining urban processes occurring at multiple scales. The interaction between social structures and ecological structures within the subtropical city of San Juan, the capital and the largest city of Puerto Rico, has been an important focus of study of the San Juan ULTRA (Urban Long-Term Research Area) network, advancing understanding of the city's vulnerabilities and potential adaptive capacity. Here we provide a synthesis of several social-ecological processes driving residential yard dynamics in the city of San Juan, Puerto Rico, through the evaluation of empirical findings related to yard management decisions, yard area, and yard services. We emphasize the role of factors occurring at the household scale. Results are discussed within the context of shrinking cities using an integrated, multi-scalar, social-ecological systems framework, and consider the implications of household green infrastructure for advancing urban sustainability theory.

Attitudes toward Residential Trees and Awareness of Tree Services and Disservices in a Tropical City

“…We collected data through household and yard surveys via a convenient-based recruitment at six permanent monitoring locations within the Río Piedras Watershed (RPWS) based on the San Juan Urban Long-Term Research Area (ULTRA) Collaborative Network stratified sampling scheme [31,34,86,98]. The six sites have been studied to address a variety of social-ecological questions at residential scales since 2011 [26,30,31,82,86,98,99] and lie across a rural-urban and elevation gradient of grey coverage (Table 1). At each site a circular buffer zone of 1 km radius was overlaid on aerial photos of San Juan and a street vector file of access roads using ArcGIS v. 9.3 software [100].…”

“…Within the Río Piedras Watershed (RPWS), residential yards vary in the amount of green and tree cover [86], found to be partly associated with variation in yard size, with some differences moderately explained by housing tenure, age, and geographic location [34]. Considering these factors have not been able to explain all the variation in yard vegetation cover, one hypothesis is that these associations are also partly driven by differential attitudes toward residential vegetation and their services across social groups and sites within the watershed [31,85]. At least two studies conducted in the San Juan Metropolitan Area (SJMA) of Puerto Rico have shown that while urban dwellers are able to identify many of the ecosystem services provided by urban green infrastructure, green spaces may also generate disservices [81,82].…”

“…In addition, private yards can improve human health and well-being by providing physical and psychological benefits, facilitating connections with other people and with nature [16], and by providing services that go beyond their utilitarian value (e.g., emotional, physiological, spiritual) [24][25][26][27]. Private yards are managed green spaces, and as such, their condition and dynamics will be greatly influenced by both social and ecological drivers, warranting an integrated multi-scalar, social-ecological approach to develop understanding of these systems [17,[28][29][30][31][32]. In that regard, many studies emphasize that anthropogenic factors could dominate over non-anthropogenic ones in determining the characteristics of green infrastructure elements at the residential scale [17,29,33,34].…”

The impact of extreme weather events on community risk planning and management: the case of San Juan, Puerto Rico after hurricane Maria

“…In some cases, such as with Playas Pa'l Pueblo, researchers needed to make physical contact with participants in order to request and interview. The interview question guide was prepared incorporating questions from a previous study conducted by the US National Science Foundation funded project San Juan ULTRA-Ex (Urban Long Term Research Area, Exploratory) and other sources (Muñoz-Erickson, 2014b;Muñoz-Erickson et al, 2016;Meléndez-Ackerman et al, 2016). The question guide contains five main sections: background questions on the individual being interviewed and the organization she represents, access to information on community environmental risks, their attitudes toward current livability in San Juan, the perceived capacity for community innovation and change, and a closing section that provides participants the opportunity to add anything to the interview that was not previously covered.…”

Sustainability for Shrinking Cities

“…Meléndez-Ackerman et al [49] examines residential yard management choices in San Juan, which is starting to exhibit shrinking in some neighborhoods. The differences in how residential landscapes are managed in occupied lots across regions may indicate a potential for differences in how vacant land is managed as well.…”