Urban Galapagos

The Galapagos Islands are known to have inspired Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. It is also one of the most studied areas in the world for its natural phenomena. Recently, however, the Galapagos Islands are gaining attention due to its built environment and the impact it is making in one of the most delicate natural ecosystems in the world. A directive of the Galapagos National Park has divided the land use of the archipelago into rural, urban, and protected areas. Rural and urban areas are considered inhabitable areas and represent only 3% of the total land surface. This chapter presents the context and background against which the remaining chapters will discuss particular aspects of natural and urban systems.

Human settlements and cities, more particularly, are increasingly seen as complex adaptive systems, where collective social and economic dynamics emerge through the interactions of many individuals over structured built environments. This dynamical perspective is essential for understanding how human settlements form and grow and how their dynamics can at once be open ended and sustainable, in the sense of not degrading the natural ecosystems they interact with. The present paper presents a selection of the key features which have dominated the history of complex adaptive systems and their connections to modern approaches to cities and urbanization. Regarding issues of sustainable growth, we introduce the concept of coupled urban-natural systems, which extends and elaborates on previous conceptualizations of couplings between human activity and ecosystem dynamics. We argue that human settlements constitute not only the spatiotemporal concentrations but also the drivers, of resource flows, that create selection pressures on natural ecosystems, assuming the perspective of the needs and effects created by cities. This, we believe, is essential to addressing current issues of sustainability. We illustrate these issues in the context of the Galapagos, which are currently undergoing very rapid settlement growth, with consequences for their unique and charismatic ecosystems. We also propose a general modeling framework for characterizing coupled urban-natural systems and discuss how it can be applied to the archipelago toward creating a regional sustainability plan.

This chapter investigates the scales of socioeconomic organization relevant for transitions to sustainability and how they may be changing. This investigation then frames an analysis of the current situation and prospects of the Galapagos Islands, particularly with respect to their urbanization vis-à-vis their extraordinary ecosystems. Can the development of urban centers in the Galapagos be a driver for positive change or is it necessarily detrimental?

Our Galapagos fishers agent-based model (GF-ABM) considers strategies of household livelihood alternatives with the central proposition that fishers are being “pushed” and “pulled” into the tourism industry, but not all fishers are able to obtain alternate employment nor do all want to transition to part- or full-time employment in non-fishing activities. The processes embedded in our GF-ABM examine fishers as a social-ecological system, where livelihood transitions are modeled, and the multidimensional drivers of change are examined by integrating processes and relationships among agents, a dynamic environment, and the influence of personal and professional characteristics as well as exogenous dynamics into their employment patterns. The GF-ABM contains a demographic element that models basic demographic changes at the household level (household agents). The model also contains an employment management component in which fisher agents select jobs among three employment sectors – fisheries, tourism, and government. The tourism and government sectors each have three tiers of jobs that require increasing agent skills. Fishers make their employment decisions based on their preference to remain in fishing, the availability of jobs in the three employment sectors, and their personal and professional qualifications that facilitate their movement among the employment sectors. Households contain members that are non-fisher agents, and fishers belong to households. Income and expenses are calculated for both fishers and household agents. In this chapter, we describe the key elements of the GF-ABM and the fundamental processes that are examined within a population-environment context.

Oceanic islands have usually a unique set of organisms that gives them their distinctive character and make them laboratories for biological studies, places of employment for residents, interesting destinations for tourist, and critical importance for conservationists. The management of these natural resources generates conflicts over the use and the access to these resources. In this chapter, I look at the way in which economic and social change resulting from activities such as fisheries and tourism has developed in the Galapagos. Using these activities we explore the interaction between processes of self-organization and emergence to use the existing resources of the Galapagos and the process of regulation and control that is being generated by the government.

Biodiversity of island ecosystems has made them very attractive to develop tourism activities. Nature tourism is considered a potential sustainable economic opportunity that could encourage environmental protection while improving local livelihoods. Nevertheless, given the complexity of social and ecological multi-scale interactions, a systemic assessment of the implications of tourism on island’s sustainability deserves a holistic perspective to assure that social and ecological goals are reached given the irreversibility that some impacts have on islands habitats with high natural values. This research develops a system dynamics model-based approach to understand and assess the dynamics of tourism sustainability in island ecosystems taking as a case study the Galapagos Islands. The modeling approach provides valuable insights into the mechanisms through which tourism influences and is influenced by demographic dynamics and exerts social and ecological pressures on the Islands. The relevance of scale in the tourism activity is highlighted given that the major constraints to improve social and environmental goals were associated with tourism and population growth. This study presents a significant attempt to build a model useful to study tourism strategies taking into account the complexities to improve tourism sustainability in island’s ecosystems arising from strong reinforcing and balancing feedback. Further research may look at strengthening the model-based approach to capture the perspective of relevant stakeholders, particularly with regard to the indicators to assess tourism sustainability.

The challenge of accommodating a growing human population on these ecologically distinctive islands seems intractable. Conventional approaches to building form, urban design, and planning controls are trivial and ineffective. Recent platitudinous approaches to more sensitive settlements on the islands are demonstrably irrelevant, the results ineffectual. Thus we have sought an alternative framing of the challenge to model a response. The CAS approach, engaged by the Galapagos Science Center in its work on the ecosystem and economy of the islands, offers this alternative (Wesley F, Carpenter SR, Brock WA, Holling CS, Gunderson LH (2002) Why systems of people and nature are not just social and ecological systems. In: Gunderson LH, Holling CS (eds) Panarchy. Island Press, Washington, DC, pp 103–119). In this chapter we report the outcomes of an exercise conducted in the context of a design studio in which propositions for possible future urban development were explored informed by CAS theory. The Holling cycle of adaptive change is used as a model to examine urban interventions to describe a transition to sustainable urban form. The cycle is then embedded into a panarchy model to contextualize the urban change in the larger environment and inform it with human action through the development of local knowledge.

The aim of this chapter is to address the future of urbanization on the Galápagos Islands from a design perspective, under the assumption that human settlements and activities are part of the archipelago’s ecosystem, thus unlikely to be eradicated in order to restore the natural environment to its original condition. The research reported here takes multi-criteria optimization of competing liveability, economic, and ecological parameters as a guiding methodology and investigates the extent to which complex adaptive systems (CAS) can mitigate a tendency to trend toward at best an average outcome – characterized as “the color gray” in the chapter title. The principal motivation is the quest for “software tools” (effectively “apps”) that ultimately provide community leaders and end-users alike with the ability to investigate the likely positive and negative effects of any opportunistic change they might propose to the built environment.

Island systems present a singular opportunity for understanding processes of human development and for exploring the conditions that can make such processes sustainable. In this chapter, I attempt to summarize many of the points made throughout this book to provide a methodology for achieving sustainable development in island systems, such as the Galapagos. The methodology proposed relies on the construction of a comprehensive input-output matrix for an island, coupled to a detailed, spatiotemporally explicit model of resource use and human occupation. This matrix maps inputs to outputs such as economic activity, migration, and pollution, via internal causal processes in human settlements. At each step – inputs, outputs, and internal processes – the variables involved are observable and measurable, supporting a process of continuous improvement in data collection and modeling. Such a systems-level model can then be used to explore ways to eliminate adverse outputs while supporting human and natural development and biodiversity, in an empirically transparent and testable way. I discuss some of the challenges and trade-offs in the construction of these models as the basis for a general strategy for achieving sustainability in island systems.