Discussions on the contemporary city often focus on the challenges faced by large metropolitan areas. The conflicts that emerge between the need to sustain economic growth and at the same time maintain ecological health and resilience are increasingly difficult to resolve; the economy often wins over ecology. Nevertheless, cities may be more environmentally efficient than sprawling suburbs and may be better suited for dealing with the problems of environmental degradation and mitigating the effects of climate change. Much research has also been done studying large urbanized areas from the point of view of their environmental systems and new fields of specialization, such as urban ecology, have emerged in the last few decades.

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In this seminar, we considered, instead, cities of less than 100,000 inhabitants. These are numerous throughout the world (fig.1), often distributed in and around metropolitan centers. Although they are usually tied to the same economic, energy, transportation, water, and food networks of the metropolis, they present opportunities for increasing biodiversity, water and soil remediation, agriculture, and redistributing building density in ways that compactly built environments cannot do. Our case study was the city of Curridabat in Costa Rica, an autonomous municipality that is part of the metropolitan area of the capital San José. With an area of 15 square kilometers and a population of about 75,000, Curridabat is nestled in a system of gently rolling hills, traversed by five rivers and many creeks. From any point in the city, one can see large mountain ranges and volcanoes, which are the source of Costa Rica’s biodiversity.

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Costa Rica is known for its biodiversity of flora and fauna, its numerous ecosystems most notably its rain forests, and its many volcanoes. Approximately one-fourth of its territory is protected from development, which indicates a strong conservation policy. The second characteristic of this Central American country is that it has enjoyed a stable democratic system. These two conditions account for a robust economy based on its eco-tourism industry. However, while these conditions point to a strong environmental policy at the federal level, at the municipal level the situation is different. Costa Rica’s lush eco-friendly image is contradicted by the reality of its urban environments. Cities, clustered in the Central Valley, do not have enough green or recreational spaces per inhabitant, nor systems of resilient landscape structures. Municipal governance generally lacks the tools to translate national policy to the local scale, or the know-how to understand the landscape as an essential tool in the planning and designing of cities.

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As has often been noted, maps both describe and construct a geographical reality. In our case, we sought to understand what was the geographical basis of Costa Rica’s biodiversity, and how Curridabat, with its profusion of water and hilly topography at the foothills of the Irazú volcano, fit into the larger understanding of the Central American isthmus, often said to function ecologically as both filter and connector. The second part of the Atlas is comprised of ten multiple criteria maps. Each map combines information explicitly to highlight conditions that are specific to Curridabat. These maps are diagnostic; they seek to explain “why” rather than “what,” and support a new environmental agenda for the city by exposing discontinuities, conflicts, and fragmentation. The maps are made from information gathered from many types of sources, including the single criteria maps, observations made in the field, GIS data, and historical research on the evolution of the cultural landscape of Curridabat, to name a few. The maps in this section reveal conditions such as the invisibility of the rivers, the lack of accessibility to their edges, the fragmentation of the landscape, land-use conflicts, conflicts between political boundaries and natural structures, and the ad-hoc organization of streets, among others.
 

Multiple criteria maps are the methodological stepping-stone for the last part of the atlas: the potential scenarios for re-tooling the city for greater environmental impact across scales (inventionis). The seven scenarios included in this study support two premises. First, by improving the environmental performance of small cities, the effects across scales add up and counter the environmental harms that originate in denser and/or industrial parts of metropolitan areas. Second, that by de-emphasizing political boundaries in favor of emphasizing geographical systems, it is possible to create a vision of how to reconfigure the institutions that protect the integrity of the environment and develop a regional-scale conservation policy organized independently from the federally-based and tourism-focused national policy.