Category Archives:
Essay

A review of The Future of the Suburban City: Lessons from Sustaining Phoenix, by Grady Gammage, Jr. 2016. ISBN 1610916239. Island Press, Washington, D.C. 208 pages. Buy the book. When taken together, recent books, lectures, and exhibitions on design paint a picture that Architecture and Landscape Architecture are two disciplines moving in...

Beijing, China’s capital, has been experiencing serious air pollution in recent years. Greenhouse gas emissions from industry, coal heating, and vehicles are believed to be three major causes of the city’s air pollution. Beginning over a decade ago, Beijing Municipal Government began to take targeted actions to control air pollution....

On Sunday, 22 May 2011, a multiple-vortex tornado touched down shortly after 5:00pm and began to rip a path nearly a mile wide across Joplin, Missouri, through the town of Duquesne, and into the rural areas of Jasper County. The Storm was on the ground for 38 minutes and traveled...

We tend to think that what we see is what we get, and also what we’ll get in the future. Nature will always be there—it can just grow back. But it depends on what we want to grow back. In fact, urban ecological communities may be accumulating a large amount...

Greek green roofs—Oikosteges, or OS for short—were born when I discovered that the existing conventional Northern and Central European green roofing systems could not be applied to our situation because they had been designed for the climate and building situations in those countries. Greece has many differences. Greece is in...

A review of Large Parks, edited by Julia Czerniak and George Hargreaves. 2007. ISBN 1-56898-624-6. Princeton Architectural Press, New York. 255 pages. Buy the book. “Large parks are priceless, and those cities that do not have an effectively designed one will always be the poorer.” –James Corner As a Regional Park...

In September last year, the IUCN World Conservation Congress—Planet at the Crossroads—brought together in Hawai’i more than 10,000 participants from 180 countries, including top scientists and academics, world leaders and decision makers from governments, civil society, indigenous peoples, and business. It presented a unique opportunity to discuss the unprecedented challenges...

Street vendors. Market peddlers. Musicians walking through subway cars. Parking spot guards and car watchers. Van drivers with handmade signs competing for passengers. Hawkers who sell stuff out of the trunks of their cars, out of baby carriages, and from bicycle carts. Hagglers looking to pocket some cash along the...

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...

The first five people we spoke to in the San Anton neighborhood of the Mexican city of Cuernavaca didn’t know the location of the Salto Chico (small waterfall). The neighborhood’s larger waterfall, referred to as the Salto Grande or Salto San Anton, is known as a place to buy ceramic...

A review of Wild by Design: Strategies for Creating Life-Enhancing Landscapes, by Margie Ruddick. 2016. ISBN: 9781610915991. Island Press, Washington, DC. 264 pages. Buy the book. This book, Wild by Design, is written from the perspective of a landscape architect, Margie Ruddick, who designs cityscapes and individual lots in such a...

I have an affection for cities in transition. I like when I visit a city for the first time and get an immediate sense that things are changing, that there is a blurring between what’s old and what’s new. Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan was one of those cities. When I first arrived...

In the science of natural resource management and planning, we often think about land from a “bird’s-eye” view: parcels on a map that delineate parks, residential properties, and the city streets—for example. Understanding these sites from a “worm’s-eye” view presents a different, more grounded experience of space and place. In...

When I see titles like this, I always wince. Half-baked, hastily-gleaned, Internet-trolled info-news parading as something useful; it’s everywhere, and it’s only ever there as time-wasting click-bait. It all lives in the land of hyphenated-nowhere that delivers most of what we now think we know about the world. But I...

I was looking at an infographic on Twitter recently. It was in the form of a wheel of words, listing dozens of objectives and issues relating to urban design. Hoping that soil, water, vegetation, habitat, or biodiversity would be featured, I looked for some mention of these terms. I did...

A review of The Ecopoetry Anthology, edited by Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street. 2013. Trinity University Press, San Antonio, TX. 628 pages. Buy the book. Are cities beyond the help of poetry? Donald Trump and his administration seem to think so, and their recent actions give the question urgency for...

“Yet these you may eat among all the winged insects which walk on all fours: those which have above their feet jointed legs with which to jump on the earth.” —Leviticus 11:21 Masaka On a recent trip to the town of Masaka, Uganda, I met a number of women who...

If you have been following the global, regional, and local-level conversations about the Sustainable Development Goals (or SDGs) and their implementation—for example, UN’s Habitat III meeting, held in Quito, Ecuador—you have probably heard of or participated in providing clarity on the role of the private sector in achieving SDG 11,...

We found ourselves scrambling along the slippery, vine-entangled slope, ducking under branches and contorting ourselves around fallen trees. The air was hot and thick with humidity, causing us to sweat after just a few minutes on the trail. As we walked, the noise of the busy highway slowly subsided and...