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CROSSTALK
Sewage Eating Floating Islands: Operationalizing “Urban Ecosystem Justice”
While the urban sustainability movement has had many successes over the past decades, the benefits have been disproportionately befitted affluent residents. This is partly on account of the fact that sustainability discourse over recent years has placed a stronger emphasis on the “environmental” and “economic” aspects of sustainability, largely ignoring or underemphasizing sustainability’s social dimension. Albany, NY, Summer 2018. The...
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ESSAY
CROSSTALK
Walls that Talk: Green Fences in Kampala City
Walls that talk are not found in haunted houses or buildings but rather symbolic to the phenomenon of greening residential fences using organic plant species, in ways that non-verbally speak to the broader goal of re-naturing cities. This is happening in Kampala city, where vertical structures with walls that have elements of green cover are being erected around residential dwellings...
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GLOBAL
ROUNDTABLE
As a landscape architect, how do you interpret the word “biodiversity”? How does this meaning find expression in your design?
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REVIEWS
REACTIONS
Discovering New Life in the Aging Form of Suburbia
A review of the book Suburban Remix: Creating the Next Generation of Urban Places, Edited by Jason Beske and David Dixon. 2018. 330 pages. ISBN: 9781610918626. Island Press. Buy the book. In the course of solving a design problem, landscape architects and designers will often encounter an unexpected issue that suddenly becomes the real problem to solve and driver of the...
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Earthworms Can Awaken Us to Ecological Change
The soil is alive and there is a whole ecosystem waiting to be explored, right below our feet. Anywhere in the city, where there are leaves and some cracks in the sidewalk, there is life underneath us! The soil is a living complex of roots, bacteria, fungi, substrate (rocks, sand and clay particles), and animals. Many soil animals are microscopic...
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How Do City Resilience and Climate Change Adaptation Plans Compare?
Record-breaking disaster losses, unprecedented storms and heat waves, and stark warnings in the most recent IPCC report all point to an urgent need for local governments around the world to prepare for climate change impacts. Consequently, many cities have developed climate change adaptation plans that outline projected climate change impacts and response actions (Woodruff & Stults, 2016). In the last...
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The Green Soul of the Concrete Jungle
As readers of the Nature of Cities are no doubt aware, we are living in what could rightly be called the urban century, with 2.4 billion more people forecast to live in cities by 2050. In a recent essay in Sustainable Earth, my coauthors, Tim Beatley, Thomas Elmqvist and I reviewed three different academic disciplines—urban economics, environmental health, and ecology—to...
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New Zealand’s Ecological Identity: Should We All Kill Exotic Species to Protect our Natural Heritage?
The image of a child triumphantly brandishing a dead rat on national TV news in New Zealand, trapped in her backyard as part of a community’s bid to try to bring native birds and lizards back into her neighbourhood, reminded me of the extent to which local people in New Zealand’s urban areas have committed to protecting and enhancing urban...
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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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SCIENCE &
TOOLS
Urban Wildlife—Celebrating the Commonplace
A review of Field Guide to Urban Wildlife: Common Animals of Cities & Suburbs How They Adapt & Thrive by Julie Feinstein. 2011. Stackpole Books. ISBN978-0-8117-0585-1. 453 pages. Buy the book. While it may have set a...
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PEOPLE &
COMMUNITITES
Exploring Questions of Architecture and Identity from “The Battle for Home: The Vision of a Young Architect in Syria”
Marwa al-Sabouni’s recent book on her experience as a young architect in Syria provides fascinating insights into the past, as well as current and future life in war-torn Syria. Although I have not been to Syria, the brave questions and reflections al-Sabouni poses resonate with me as they have resonated with others, both as a city planner and a concerned...
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PLACE &
DESIGN
Seeing and Seeding the Potential of Urban Life
Land really is the best art. I think having land and not ruining it is the most beautiful art that anybody could ever want. —Andy Warhol The new year is a good time to look back before looking forward: this blog offers opportunity to take stock of 2014, which was indeed a seminal year for Landlife. Landlife started out as...
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ART &
AWARENESS
September 11, 2015: An Event Ethnography of Living Memorials
A reading of names. A procession. Placing flowers on memorials. Music. Moments of silence. Tolling of bells. Certain abiding symbols and gestures give structure to our memorial remembrances. In particular, we have come to expect a ritual formality and consistency at the World Trade Center site for remembering September 11, 2001. But how do we mark the day at the...
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