Category Archives:
Essay

As I walk through the William L. Hutcheson Memorial Forest in Somerset, New Jersey, on this unseasonably warm March morning, I admire the 250 year-old oaks, towering above, reaching to the sky. Although small (26 hectares), this forest is one of the only remaining old growth forests in New Jersey...

“For whom do all the flowers blossom in the spring?” —A phrase of Zen word in springtime These days, especially in summertime, we have heavy rain in Japan. Stormwater usually goes into concrete drains and flows into rivers. Most of the land in urban areas in our country is covered...

“Réinventer Paris”, or “Reinventing Paris”, the architectural program initiated by Anne Hildago (the Socialist mayor of the French capital) in autumn 2014 does not lack ambition. When I first heard about it, I was surprised and couldn’t really believe it until spring 2015, when I was convoked by two teams...

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,...

In the Third Millennium, we live in a globalized urban world, where loss of local culture and deep social segregation are happening. Climate is changing faster than predicted, hitting cities and people hard: climate-related floods, landslides, droughts, heat waves, traffic disruption, and food shortage are increasing. For instance, in Brazil,...

Out of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals, SDG 11 is a standalone goal for urban sustainability, with defined targets and indicators. SDG 11 can help urban policy and decision-makers and local people to think about and work towards urban sustainability. Most cities in developing countries, including in Africa, lack...

Step off the street in Suzhou through a small door and you leave behind the bustling cacophony of a modern Chinese city to enter a different world of tranquility and calm, where natural features create a sense of being surrounded by nature in a tiny oasis that is a scholar’s...

Long-term sustainability necessitates an inherent and essential capacity for resilience—the ability to recover from disturbance, to accommodate change, and to function in a state of health. In this sense, sustainability typically means the dynamic balance between social-cultural, economic, and ecological domains of human behavior necessary for humankind’s long-term surviving and...

A review of Projective Ecologies, edited by Chris Reed and Nina-Marie Lister. 2014. ISBN: 1940291127. ACTAR, Harvard Graduate School of Design. 314 pages. Buy the book. Several months ago, I reviewed Landscape Imagination, a collection of essays by James Corner, a professor at University of Pennsylvania and the landscape architect who...

Cities pledge to reduce emissions and fight climate change—but do these commitments measure up? The transport sector makes up nearly one-third of urban emissions, a factor influenced by distances traveled and modes of travel. Most cities focus on policies to reduce emissions from modes of travel, such as encouraging residents...

“Thailand is what you make it.” That’s what an ex-pat Westerner who relocated here a few years ago told us when we were strolling through Nakhon Sawan, a busy city in the country’s central/lower north region. This seems true in many regards, or at least from the on-the-ground impressions we...

Inequality is on the rise! Recent statistics published by Oxfam on the economy of the 1 percent show that the richest 62 billionaires own as much wealth as the poorer half of the world’s population. The report goes on to show that the wealth of the poorest half of the...

A review of Planning for Community Resilience: A Handbook for Reducing Vulnerability to Disasters, by Jamie Hicks Masterson, Walter Gillis Peacock, Shannon S. Van Zandt, Himanshu Grover, Lori Felid Schwarz, and John T. Cooper Jr. 2014. ISBN: 9781610915854. Island Press, Washington. 256 pages. Buy the book. Resilience certainly is the buzzword...

For many developers and city planners, it takes time and money to plan around trees and small forest fragments. Often, the message from conservationists is that we want to avoid fragmentation and to conserve large forested areas. While this goal is important, the message tends to negate any thoughts by...

According to the United Nations, the second biggest problem for humanity after global warming is disorganized urbanization—urbanization without planning and integration of natural environments. Since 2008, for the first time in history, the majority of people live in urban areas, and this pattern is expected to keep increasing in the...

I have written in previous articles (here and here) that Kampala’s urban landscape has been largely fragmented, just like the landscapes of many other cities. In fact, this is the common character of urban development. But it isn’t the only way. In this article, I illustrate the urban risks that...

Also available at iTunes. Story notes: Federal regulations make clean drinking something close to a guaranteed right for residents of cities in the United States, but not all urban water systems are created equal. Last year, independent scientists and grassroots activists discovered a widespread problem with lead levels in the water pouring...

Increasingly, cities are becoming risky and vulnerable places to live in because of climate change; it is vital to integrate natural defences with gray, or built, infrastructure for sustaining cities. The past decade, from 2005–2015, has shown us what happens when we ignore the vital signs of urban ecosystems, which...