The
Importance of Being Engaged: The Role of Community Participation
in Urban Creek Stewardship |
| The 20th century witnessed a change in how the stewardship of urban nature is practiced: from a top-down, distant, centralized, professionals-leading regime to a local, participatory, grassroots movement. Focusing on urban creeks in the San Francisco Bay Area, this paper proposes to further this movement by combining volunteerism with spontaneous use. Through examining research on these two modes of engaging people, we hypothesize that volunteerism and spontaneous use together create a participatory culture of urban nature stewardship. |