I am writing this editorial from a neighbourhood in the UK’s second largest city, Birmingham, where bird song and car engines intermittently can be heard competing for attention. While my preference is for ‘living in the sticks’, rather than a city, I nevertheless like Birmingham for its generally down to earth, friendly people, and its multicultural, innovative, collaborative spirit. Still, I struggle with the urban car obsession, and polluted air. Towns and cities in the English West Midlands are largely known for their manufacturing past, their factories and warehouses, road and canal networks. Birmingham has the infamous ‘original spaghetti junction’, an intertwined road interchange in the Gravelly Hill area that connects the M6 motorway with various main and local roads. Between 2002 and 2015, Birmingham had the second fastest growing UK city centre population and more growth is forecast for the city over the coming years. Like all cities there is a schizophrenic range of policies and actions trying to achieve economic prosperity – constantly seeking investment and economic growth that adds concrete, bricks and tarmac – while claiming to be ‘green’. It has struggled to ‘green’ new developments, maintain communal spaces and provide active transport infrastructure across the city such as traffic-free cycle networks and footpaths. Since 2015 it has been marketing itself as a ‘biophilic’ city1 and declaring its intent to be the UK’s first ‘natural capital city’. These different ‘traits’ could also be expressed as a dichotomy between development and nature or, more generally, between humans and nature. Economic development is largely driven and funded by those who see nature and environmental benefits as separate from, or an add-on to, their primary objectives. They do not see environmental concerns as a fundamental and intimately connected way of thinking about place-making and relating to nature. A few months ago, a colleague from Birmingham City University, Professor Kathryn Moore, added an interesting proposal to the regional development discourse: a West Midlands National Park encompassing Birmingham and the Black Country. Here the attention shifts from a landscape dominated by industrial heritage and manufacturing to the West Midland plateau’s waterways, parks and open landscapes. This vision has been created and impressively captured by Moore in her colour-markings of maps. Instead of highlighting roads, trainlines and built-up areas, the lines of natural features such as rivers and areas of heathland and forests are accentuated and elevated viewpoints marked and envisioned as nature observatories. In her own words:

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关注关系问题克服二元性

我是在英国第二大城市伯明翰的一个社区写这篇社论的，在那里可以断断续续地听到鸟鸣和汽车引擎争夺注意力。虽然我更喜欢“生活在木棍中”，而不是城市，但我还是喜欢伯明翰，因为它普遍脚踏实地、友好的人民以及多元文化、创新和协作精神。尽管如此，我仍然在与城市汽车的痴迷和污染的空气作斗争。英国西米德兰兹郡的城镇以其制造业历史、工厂和仓库、道路和运河网络而闻名。伯明翰拥有臭名昭著的“原始意大利面交汇点”，这是 Gravelly Hill 地区的一个相互交织的道路交汇处，将 M6 高速公路与各种主要和地方道路连接起来。2002 年至 2015 年间，伯明翰是英国市中心人口增长第二快的城市，预计未来几年该市还会有更多增长。像所有城市一样，有一系列精神分裂的政策和行动试图实现经济繁荣——不断寻求投资和经济增长，以增加混凝土、砖块和柏油碎石——同时声称自己是“绿色”的。它一直在努力“绿化”新开发项目、维护公共空间并在整个城市提供活跃的交通基础设施，例如无交通的自行车网络和人行道。自 2015 年以来，它一直将自己宣传为“亲生物”城市1，并宣布其有意成为英国第一个“自然首都”。这些不同的“特征”也可以表达为发展与自然之间的二分法，或者更一般地说，人类与自然之间的二分法。经济发展主要是由那些将自然和环境效益与其主要目标分开或附加于其主要目标的人推动和资助的。他们不认为环境问题是思考场所营造和与自然相关的基本且密切相关的方式。几个月前，伯明翰城市大学的同事凯瑟琳·摩尔教授在区域发展讨论中添加了一个有趣的建议：一个包含伯明翰和黑人国家的西米德兰兹国家公园。在这里，注意力从以工业遗产和制造业为主的景观转移到西米德兰高原的水道、公园和开放景观。这一愿景是由摩尔在她的地图颜色标记中创造并令人印象深刻地捕捉到的。而不是突出道路，火车线和建成区，河流、荒地和森林等自然特征的线条被突出和提升，被标记和设想为自然观察站。用她自己的话来说：