Knowing Nature in the City: Reporting infrastructures and the politics of urban human–nature relationships

Cities increasingly know nature through citizen‐generated data—municipal complaint hotlines, contributory biodiversity platforms and other reporting systems. These data are not neutral records of urban nature but social products, shaped by who reports, through what channels and why. Drawing on our research in two Israeli cities, we re‐frame municipal reporting systems as knowledge infrastructures that determine which encounters between urban residents and the non‐human world become governance‐relevant evidence, and we develop a dual‐model diagnostic framework that helps distinguish what reporting registers from what biophysical conditions alone would predict. The framework points to two distinct mechanisms by which knowledge infrastructures may distort urban human–nature relationships: under‐reporting by marginalized communities, which renders some encounters invisible to governance, and over‐reporting by powerful actors, whether affluent communities or dominant institutions, which concentrates institutional attention on the encounters of the few. Building on a growing literature on social‐ecological biases in contributory data, we argue that the measurement systems used to capture urban nature can themselves become vectors of environmental injustice—relocating the locus of injustice from the distribution of environmental harms to the distribution of institutional visibility and power. The ecological and social dimensions of urban nature are too deeply entangled to be studied or governed as separate domains. We call on human–nature relationships researchers and managers to adopt integrated socio‐ecological approaches to knowledge production about urban nature, and to treat the gap between what is environmentally present and what is socially reported not as noise to be filtered out, but as a diagnostic signal about the governance system itself. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.