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ESSAY
CROSSTALK
SALT: Restoration + Recreation = Water in California
It is late June and we are up to our knees floating a small tent sculpture in a containment pond filled with a thick green milkshake-like goo. A combination of duck week and blue-green algae (cyanobacteria), this overgrowth or bloom is probably caused by fertilizer run-off from the surrounding cemetery grounds. We are working on a photographic series exploring the...
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ESSAY
CROSSTALK
2046, year of our lady The Fog
This is part of the TNOC poetry series “The City We’re In”. Lea el poema en español, su idioma original. Lisez le poème en français. 2046, year of our lady The Fog Poems by Claudia Luna Fuentes Translation from Spanish by Gerardo Mendoza Garza _____________________________________________ 2046, año de Nuestra Señora la Niebla Poemas de Claudia Luna Fuentes _____________________________________________ ...
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REVIEWS
PODCAST
When a Korean Hillside Town Disappears, Who will Notice?
A review of “A Local Neighborhood Traveler,” an exhibition of painting and drawing by Korean artist Se Hee Kim at the Boroomsan Museum of Art in Gimpo, South Korea. On the outskirts of Seoul, tucked away into a traditional hillside garden is the Boroomsan Museum of Art. The museum sits on the edge of an enormous expanse of dry, dusty...
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RECENT ESSAYS...
Changing Green Cities from Myth to Reality
New town development or new cities, being rapidly built across much of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, may be founded on the principles of green cities and are yet found lacking in their attention to the environment. Numerous articles on the smart cities mission in India also note the techno-managerial approach to ecological elements of urban design, whereby monitoring...
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Civic Coproduction = Counterinstitutions + People: Make Participation Work by Focusing on the Possible
There is a common refrain in liberal democracies: local government is where participatory action is most likely to happen. Indeed, we often presume that neighbourhoods and towns and cities are privileged—perhaps even natural—spaces for the deliberative coproduction of plans, policies, strategies, and projects for sustainability and the common good. By “deliberative coproduction” I mean meaningful participation in decision-making so that...
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Ocean Cities: The Power of Documentary Filmmaking to Tell Stories About the Nature Around Us
At a recent film screening of our new documentary film Ocean Cities, about connecting cities and marine environments, the panel discussion and questions that followed demonstrated clearly the value of these kinds of films. Some of the comments reflected a sense of being inspired by what other cities were doing (“that’s a great idea, we can do that here also”),...
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Secular, Sacred, and Domestic—Living with Street Trees in Bangalore
In rapidly growing Indian cities, change seems like the only constant. Heritage buildings are torn down, roads widened, lakes and wetlands drained, and parks erased to make way for urban growth. Nature is often the first casualty in a constant drive towards development. Yet the street tree stubbornly survives across Indian cities—beleaguered by gasoline fumes, besieged by construction, but still...
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RECENT ROUNDTABLES...
An urban planner and an urban ecologist walk into a bar. They chat about how (and maybe whether) “ecology” could play a bigger role in planning…
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Smart cities are coming. Can they be as much about nature, health, and wellbeing as traffic flows, crime detection, and evermore efficient provision of utilities?
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SCIENCE &
TOOLS
Water and the City: A Dispatch From an American Frontier Town
Out in the no longer so Wild West of America, a war is brewing. At the fringes of the great southwestern deserts, in the shadows of the high Sierra Nevada mountains, lies the great Central Valley...
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PEOPLE &
COMMUNITITES
The Waste Economy as a Transformative Gendered Practice for Sustainable Resource Management in Urban Africa
Frameworks for understanding the gendered nature of urban waste management have yet to emerge and analyses on the relationship between sustainable urban resource management and waste re-use and recycling at the neigbourhood-level are few. Those that do exist are more focused on city-level industry and infrastructure. This article illustrates how gender relations differentiate the ways in which women as compared...
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PLACE &
DESIGN
Biocultural Diversity for Healthy Cities
At the heart of the concept of biocultural diversity is the idea that much of culture is based in the natural world, so a diversity of cultures and cultural phenomena arises from a natural environment with great natural or biological diversity. Human culture and productive land uses can actually promote higher biodiversity by producing many different habitats—a more diverse landscape—through...
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ART &
AWARENESS
Shaped by Urban History—Reflections on Bangkok
It takes distance to gain a sense of perspective, and so I find myself sitting in a small market town in the north of England looking halfway across the world at my time living in one of the world’s great emerging megacities, Bangkok. From this market town there is a sense of history that goes back over a thousand years,...
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