Mary Miss has reshaped the boundaries between sculpture, architecture, landscape design, and installation art by articulating a vision of the public sphere where it is possible for an artist to address the issues of our time. She has developed the ”City as Living Lab”, a framework for making issues of sustainability tangible through collaboration and the arts. Trained as a sculptor, her work creates situations emphasizing a site’s history, its ecology, or aspects of the environment that have gone unnoticed. Mary Miss has collaborated closely with architects, planners, engineers, ecologists, and public administrators on projects as diverse as creating a temporary memorial around the perimeter of Ground Zero, marking the predicted flood level of Boulder, Colorado, revealing the history of the Union Square Subway station in New York City or turning a sewage treatment plant into a public space. Recent projects include an installation focused on water resources in China for the Olympic Park in Beijing and a temporary installation at a seventeenth-century park in Delhi, India as part of the exhibition 49°: Public Art and Ecology. A proposal for a permanent project at the North Carolina Museum of Art explores the presence and movement of water through the site by recovering and revitalizing elements of the watershed to reveal the wetland processes in the region. A recipient of multiple awards, Mary Miss has been the subject of exhibitions at the Harvard University Art Museum, Brown University Gallery, The Institute of Contemporary Art in London, the Architectural Association in London, Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, and the Des Moines Art Center. Among others, her work has been included in the exhibitions: Decoys, Complexes and Triggers at the Sculpture Center in New York, Weather Report: Art and Climate Change curated by Lucy Lippard, co-presented by the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art and EcoArts Connections, More Than Minimal: Feminism and Abstraction in the 70’s, Brandeis Museum’s Rose Art Museum, and Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis at the Tate Modern.
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The Landscape Lab, on the campus of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, is a stormwater management landscape designed that serves as stormwater infrastructure but also as a research and demonstration facility. The steep slopes of the catchment basins represent standard institutional landscape practice: plants are planted into...
It can be easy to remain in the bubble of your own perspective, thinking that one’s relationship to place might be a universal phenomenon. When the phenomenon, in fact, is the uniqueness of each person’s relationship to place, community, home, and their perspectives, cultures, and lived experiences that shape the...
Climate action needs a new approach Ravaging fires and flooding, widespread ecological destruction, increasing dispossession and displacement: year after year, climate change action shows its tragic shortcomings because people and socio-territorial inequalities are not at the center of commitments, policies, and follow-up mechanisms. As long as global agreements and national...
It’s December 12, 2035. I woke up in my apartment, in the middle of the city and there was a mountain. Yes, a mountain with a forest, greenery everywhere. I opened the windows and I could listen to the birds singing. I could smell the moist ground, the same smell...
There is a close relationship between the three Es―economy, employment, and environment. Economic growth and jobs rely heavily on environmental resources, but a myopic focus on either of these aspects often results in environmental degradation. Green jobs have been seen as a way to buffer the adverse effects of economic...
In a world where every route is optimized, where algorithms predict our movements, and speed becomes an unassailable norm, the detour stands out as an act of resistance. It is the assertion of reclaimed freedom, a refusal of systematic efficiency that reduces our experience of the world to a digital...
Serina Fast Horse and Toby Query met as employees at the City of Portland in 2018 while working on an innovative project that centered Indigenous voices and perspectives. This project, Shwah kuk wetlands (which means frog in Chinuk Wawa, a local indigenous trade language) intertwines Indigenous (or relational) and Western...
What does the more-than-human city look like? Ferne Edwards, Barcelona Lucia Alexandra Popartan, Girona Ida Nilstad Pettersen, Trondheim Lily Fillwalk, New Brunswick Audax M. Gawler, Victoria İdil Gaziulusoy, Espoo Giulia Gualtieri, Almere Gloria Lauterbach, Espoo Saba Mirzahosseini, Turin Clare Qualmann, London Trophica Lab, Bogotá D.C. Aylin Yildirim Tschoepe, Basel
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Places, much like nature, are in a constant state of change. This is especially true for Rocinha, Brazil’s most populous favela, home to approximately 200,000 people. Perched on steep hillsides in Rio de Janeiro’s Southern Zone, Rocinha is a vibrant, multi-layered community where life unfolds within a dense network of...
Biodiversity has always been important to environmental scientists, conservationists, landscape architects, and others but only recently seems to have entered the public domain. It took a long time for Australia to accept the climate emergency. It is pleasing to see that the biodiversity crisis has been accepted more readily. There...
The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) estimates that 19 to 23 million tonnes of plastic waste end up in lakes, rivers, and seas annually[1]. This staggering number highlights the urgent need to tackle plastic pollution. The growing production of waste, inadequate disposal methods, and the slow degradation of plastics significantly...
The EU Nature Restoration Law is here. Do we have what it takes to make it work? Bettina Wilk, Bilbao John Warren Tamor, Bonn Evelyn Underwood, Brussels Laure-Lou Tremblay, Brussels Ferenc Albert Szigeti, Budapest Adeline Rochet, Brussels Martin Grisel, The Hague Federica Risi, The Hague Silvia Quarta, Murcia Christos Papachristou, Dublin Anne-Sophie Mulier, Brussels Shane McGuinness, Dublin Goksen Sahin, Brussels Philipp LaHaela-Walter, Freiburg Gitty Korsuize, Utrecht Valerie Kapos, Cambridge Chris McOwen, Cambridge John Tayleur, Cambridge Opi Outhwaite, Cambridge Niki Frantzeskaki, Utrecht João Dinis, Cascais City Marta Delas, Madrid Jordi Cortina-Segarra, Alicante Humberto Delgado Rosa, Brussels Roby Biwer, Luxembourg Marta Mansanet Cánovas, Luxembourg Heather Brooks, Brussels Carlo Calfapietra, Porano Chiara Baldacchini, Viterbo Bogdan Micu, Bucharest Liviu Bailesteanu, Bucharest
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7 January 2025
The Power of Care for Climate Justice Praneeta Mudaliar, Mississauga Lilian Dart, Mississauga Dannia Eyelli Philipp Gutierrez, Toronto Celina Mankarios, Mississauga
Commoning and climate justice The Greater Toronto Area (GTA) in Canada is bustling with youth-based climate action and advocacy. From bringing lawsuits against governments to advocating for fossil fuel divestment and spreading awareness about intersecting crises such as housing insecurity and climate impacts, young people are emerging as powerful voices...
Cities are, at their best, collaborative masterpieces, aren’t they? They emerge from the interplay of diverse professions, ways of knowing, modes of action, governments, and, most importantly, the people who call them home. They are cultural, ecological, human, and non-human. Together (ideally), these forces shape cities based on shared—and sometimes...
Love, a complex and profoundly influential emotion, has been widely explored in a variety of academic fields including sociology, psychology, anthropology, as well as human and physical geography. In geography, love is explored in several ways, including love of place and of nature (tophilia and biophilia) (see Tuan, 1974 and...
The UK’s new Labour-led government has pledged to tackle the country’s long-standing housing crisis head-on, with a bold promise to deliver 1.5 million new homes in the next five years. This plan comes in response to the mounting pressures of soaring demand, limited housing supply, and ever-increasing prices that have...
Each time our editorial team gathers to publish an issue of SPROUT, we reflect on the role of poetry to comment on the current state of the eco-urban. When we read through the submissions, we feel that our original vision and mandate for the journal is confirmed by the special...
