Many practitioners and scholars have emphasized the importance of strengthening urban system resilience. However, a less explored area of work is the resilience that affects urban areas but in adverse ways. Weak governance, conflicts and lack of resources and capacity in many cities have detrimental environmental and human outcomes that have existed for long periods and are reinforced by the...

I sit at a picnic table in a sliver of a park running alongside Istanbul Caddesi (street), not far from the Küçükçekmece Gölü, a natural lagoon on the Marmara Sea. It’s about noon on a Wednesday and, except for two ladies chatting on a bench a few meters away, I have the rest of the park to myself. Across the...

Recently Buenos Aires, the capital city of Argentina, has begun a transformation to reduce the urban processes that have negative effects on biodiversity. The city has an area of 202 square kilometers and a population of...

Cities, like nature, are all about the details. Granular. Fine-grained. Cellular. Each of these describes what we see in cities as unique, what defines them as places: small details that differentiate them from anywhere else and add up to a web of connections we call the city. I am writing this from Paris, a city marked by its idiosyncrasies. Small...

A review of “Shelter,” an exhibition on view at the Architecture and Design Museum Los Angeles until Nov. 6, 2015. Although recent efforts to mitigate the characteristic poor air quality and largely suburban character of Los Angeles have been the focus of much debate and action, the city still faces a rash of issues today, including an increasingly severe drought...

When there is a storm, trees can cause damage to homes, cars, and people—ultimately, the tree itself is a casualty of a storm. At these moments, generally, the public perceives arborists as the heroes of storms—arborists remove the “problem” from their properties. But at most other times during the year, when people see an arborist pruning or removing a tree,...