LATEST...
ESSAY
CROSSTALK
Is Cali the City with the Most Birds in the World?
The city of Cali in southwestern Colombia boasts a staggering number of 562 species of birds, and it probably has the longest bird list for any city in the world. But can we find out for sure? Birds are the link between the urban and the wild. A bird-friendly city can harbor an important sample of species found in the surrounding natural...
ESSAY
CROSSTALK
Putting Nature First: Driving Actions for Nature in Cities
The COVID-19 pandemic revealed how important urban nature is for our physical and mental health. As urban strategists embark on ideas and think of pathways for recovery and “building back better” our societies and especially cities, it is paramount that the green recovery include nature in the mix of options that cities consider. Nature (varying from remnant ecosystems, novel ecosystems...
TNOC FESTIVAL
OUTPUTS
About the Festival
TNOC Festival pushed boundaries to radically imagine our cities for the future. A virtual festival that covered 5 days with programming across all regional time zones and provided in multiple languages: 22-26 February 2021, 2200 participants from 72 countries. Outputs and new emerging projects will appear in this space soon. Learn More About the Festival
RECENT ESSAYS...
Vegetation is the Future of Architecture
Most of the inhabitable regions of the Earth were originally covered by forests, grasslands, and wetlands. These carbon-grabbing, biodiverse, spongy landscapes have been largely replaced by agriculture and urban development, which is drier, belches carbon, is erosive of soils, and which has lost most of its wildlife. Indeed, biodiversity declines continue apace. Cities and buildings, in particular, are designed and...
Knowledge Systems for Urban Renewal
“Science is meaningless because it gives no answer to our question, the only question important for us: ‘What shall we do and how shall we live?’ ” — Leo Tolstoy We know that our cities need to look and function differently. There is a wealth of scientific evidence showing that urbanisation has been, and continues to be, a global driver of...
Including Diverse Voices in Adaptation Planning
This contribution is the result of a thought-collecting Seed Session during the TNOC Summit in Paris, held on June 5, 2019. Pitches, group breakouts, and a facilitated discussion addressed the question: Including diverse voices in adaptation planning, how do we make it happen? Two illustrators, Frida Larios and Marion Lacourt, enriched the session by creating on the spot artwork to...
Making Spaces for Edible Gardens in Compact Cities: the Taipei Case
Edible urban gardens have gained increasing popularity in the Global North within the narrative of nature-based solutions for cities and as parts of urban green infrastructure, which reintroduce greenspaces and associated functions into built environments, with the aspiration of leading to a socially and ecologically more sustainable city. Amid the coronavirus outbreak, edible gardens have seemed to become an even...
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SCIENCE &
TOOLS
Highlights from The Nature of Cities in 2015
Today’s post is offered as a celebration of some of the content from 2015—a taste…a combination of TNOC writing from around the world that is a combination of diverse, widely read, a novel point of view, or...
PEOPLE &
COMMUNITITES
Orchards from the Forest: A Local Solution to Extinction
The destruction of Cerrado (Brazilian Savannah), the second largest biome in Brazil after Amazonia, has become the main concern of urban collectives focused on reintroducing elements of this important ecosystem in city landscapes and in the imaginations of city dwellers. In this essay, we look at urban farming for Cerradoregeneration from the perspective of cultural historical activity theory (CHAT) (Engeström, 2001,...
PLACE &
DESIGN
Mosaic Management: The Missing Ingredient for Biodiversity Innovation in Urban Greenspace Design
With a new stream of studies adding to evidence revealing disturbing declines in global populations of insects (Hallmann et al. 2018, Lister & Garcia 2018, Sánchez-Bayo and Wyckhuys 2019) and reports of an ecological catastrophe on the scale of a sixth mass extinction, there is an urgent need to do more to conserve these species that underpin our ecosystems. Urban areas...
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,...