Essays Archive

Less than an hour cycling out of central Manchester along the Bridgewater Canal takes you into a green and blue landscape. It only becomes clear that this is a post-industrial area when the infrastructure of a coalfield pithead rises up behind the trees. Further along the canal you encounter attractive...

When I started my career in land and water conservation almost 25 years ago, cities and nature were usually seen as two separate things. Many strategic conservation planning efforts focused on finding the best places to protect nature from people. But as we have learned from The Nature of Cities and...

People have lived in and around the Una Hydrographic Basin for as long as the city of Belém itself. Belém is the largest urban center in the Amazon River Delta, with a population that exceeds 2 million people in its metropolitan region. Beginning at Guajará Bay, the Una Basin comprises...

With an area of just 316 Km2and a population of more than 475,000, Malta is the smallest member country of the European Union (EU). This island state has been moulded through human action since the first recorded human settlement more than 7000 years ago. Today, more than 30 percent of...

It has been raining all afternoon in Megali Sterna, a village in the north of Greece, and, from the empty and closed café we have been sitting in for  hours, it looks like the rain will continue into the evening. We scan the neighborhood for a dry place to pitch...

(This is a recasting of an essay of the same title recently published in the limited circulation Ecocity World newsletter) “You say you want a revolution Well, you know We all want to change the world You tell me that it’s evolution Well, you know We all want to change...

From early on as a family, we considered ourselves to be fairly knowledgeable about environmental issues, such as plastic pollution, deforestation, and global warming from all we’d learnt through the media. We recycled. We bought fair-trade items like chocolate and bananas. We also participated in environmental initiatives like a national...

When we consider planning for green infrastructure, we typically think forward to what kind of city we might imagine for the future. Far less frequently do we consider the history of the city and how past generations have shaped the green spaces and the activities and meanings related to them....

Cities that plan for biodiversity recognize the potential of healthy ecosystems to mitigate urban problems and enhance quality of life but, due to limited capacity, can struggle with developing and managing their biodiversity strategies. Our team at the Urban Biodiversity Hub (UBHub) has compiled thousands of examples of biodiversity work...

Urban trees and tree planting is like a contemporary urban planner’s holy grail—more trees means a better city, and better city assumedly means a better quality of life for city residents. But why is this the case? I’ve set out here to reflect on this.  Why the focus on urban...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

 Jerusalem has been described as “golden” by many poets and writers, inspired not only by the golden domes of holy buildings in the city, but also by the special quality of illumination created when the evening sun is reflected from the famous Jerusalem stone which characterizes most buildings in the...

As I am writing this piece, the entire state of Kerala in India stands devastated due to floods. It is estimated that more than 300 people have died, 10,000km of roads damaged and property worth millions of rupees lost (yet to be estimated). As per the Times of India report,...

Sustainable cities can be viewed from multiple perspectives. Each perspective can highlight or mute certain aspects, leading us to take different positions on complex issues. Take for example the recent floods in Kerala, the southernmost state of India. Unprecedented rainfall led to intense floods across the state. Over 400 people...

On 14 June 2018, Isabelle Anguelovski participated in the panel Designing, Planning and Paying for Resilience at Rice University Kinder Institute for Urban Research, where she and other leading experts discussed flood mitigation strategies such as low impact design, green infrastructure and urban-scale greenspace preservation, and how they interact with a community’s broader planning efforts....