Essays Archive

Cities start, grow, expand, and usually—mainly in developing countries—exceed their limits, overflowing into rural and wild lands. This city growth applies not only to the imposition of manmade facets on geographical extensions, but to increases in the city’s complexity and dynamics. Urban phenomena start and keep mistreating nature beyond the...

In this post, we report on a recent design workshop at National Cheng Kung University, or NCKU, in Tainan, Taiwan, a continuation a series of of intensive practicums held at undergraduate schools of architecture in successive locations internationally since 2008. The work presented here extends from our last essay, posted...

I normally write in The Nature of Cities about biocultural diversity, particularly related to the developing world, but in light of recent events, I would like to ask the reader’s indulgence in my writing about a slightly different topic, and maybe even getting on my soapbox a little. You see,...

The historic gardens of Western civilization typically include segments that were municipal areas, hunting grounds, or, on occasion, fragments of the region’s original forest. Many of the Italian, French, and English gardens that establish the history of landscape gardening were interventions added within or onto lands that, originally, were uncultivated...

For city planners and those interested in addressing sustainability of the city as its interrelates with nature, we are very familiar with the pervasive discourse of climate change and the idea of adaptation to, as well as mitigation of, climate change effects and causes. As with any such terms, there...

Through their educational and experimental roles in society, universities can play a unique and vital role in cities’ transitions to sustainability. Although life itself is a learning process and education can happen anywhere, from the streets to virtual places, the temples of educations in our minds were—and still are—schools and...

Within a 10-minute walk from just about any home in Watts, Los Angeles, you’ll find freeways, liquor stores, train tracks, and paved or weedy vacant lots. You’ll also find houses—lots of them, in this dense community of bright concrete streets and sidewalks. What you’re much less likely to find are...

As paradoxical as it may seem, the Amazon region is considered not only an “urban forest”, but also a region with one of the most rapid rates of urban population growth in Brazil. Within the region, the Amazon Delta and Estuary (or ADE), where the urban population has increased about...

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...

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...

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...

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...