Urban nature equity must consider cultural nuances

Culture profoundly influences the way a person engages with nature. As cities rapidly increase in cultural diversity, achieving universal equity in access to nature and the benefits that flow from it will depend on meaningful consideration of this diversity in urban design. Current approaches to urban planning and design tend to be implicitly monocultural, which may diminish equity of access and reproduce entrenched epistemological and material conditions that contribute to power imbalances and dictate whose preferences are reflected in urban nature spaces. To move toward culturally inclusive urban nature design demands explicit efforts be made in policy and practice to embrace the contextual, dynamic and multifaceted nature of culture and resist the implicit adoption of monocultural urban nature designs. We discuss the consequences of superficial cultural inclusion attempts and propose three key recommendations for taking a culturally-conscious approach towards urban nature equity.