Essays Archive

Art, Science, Action: Green Cities Re-imagined
March, 2017

1 March 2017

The Nature of Green
Gary Grant, London

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...

February, 2017

26 February 2017

Six-legged Superfood for Chirpier Cities
Russell Galt, Edinburgh

“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...

22 February 2017

How Do We Get the Private Sector to “Walk the Walk” on the SDG for Cities?
Buyana Kareem, Kampala

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,...

19 February 2017

Southeast Asia’s Urban Future: A Snapshot of Kuala Lumpur
Chris Ives, Nottingham Alex Lechner, Kuala Lumpur

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...

15 February 2017

Take a Walk on the Wild Side: Evolution in the Streets
Marthe Derkzen, Arnhem/Nijmegen

I read this article by Menno Schilthuizen, a Dutch evolutionary biologist and ecologist, about the evolution of animal and plant species taking place in cities. In cities, evolution is propelled by two forces: the known laws of ecology AND the social dynamics of human society. The article concludes that we...

12 February 2017

Of Wilderness, Wild-ness, and Wild Things
Nina-Marie Lister, Toronto

And I think in this empty world there was room for me and a mountain lion. And I think in the world beyond, how easily we might spare a million or two humans And never miss them. Yet what a gap in the world, the missing white-frost face of that...

8 February 2017

Environmental Education Generates Urban Sustainability
Alex Russ, Ithaca Marianne Krasny, Ithaca

Can environmental education in cities foster urban sustainability? Yes—according to 90 scholars from six continents who contributed to a forthcoming book called Urban Environmental Education Review (Russ and Krasny, eds, 2017). Three themes—participation of urban residents in planning and environmental stewardship, exploring and reconstructing urban places, and forming partnerships among...

5 February 2017

Five Reasons to Conserve Nature in Kampala
Shuaib Lwasa, Kampala

Many cities still have green areas in various forms, despite the fragmentation of their ecosystems. The call for integration of built form with nature is now more explicit and can be discerned from the Sustainable Development Goals of 2015 as well as the New Urban Agenda of 2016. There is...

1 February 2017

How to Make Urban Green Verdant and Sustainable: Designing “Wild” Swedish Lawns
Maria E Ignatieva, Perth

Sweden, especially its capital, Stockholm, is a very famous “green” city. Indeed, Stockholm’s green infrastructure wedges system is one of the most recognized and cited around the world because of the significant ecosystem services that it provides and because it acts as a source of natural biodiversity for an urban...

January, 2017

29 January 2017

Enforcing Good Corporate Governance in Disaster Risk Management is a Must
Fadi Hamdan, Athens

In a recent essay on TNOC regarding urban inequality, I spoke about the need to address inequality in exposure and vulnerability of urban populations to risk as a necessary condition to reducing urban inequality in general, including inequality in the access to basic services. I would like to expand on...

25 January 2017

Beyond the City
Naomi Tsur, Jerusalem

This concept paper was inspired by a series of round table discussions that were hosted by the Israel Urban Forum, together with the Bezalel Academy of Urban Design in Jerusalem. The participants at my round table, where the topic of discussion was “The City and its Surrounding Region”, are all...

22 January 2017

Future Cities Live Underground—And That’s Not a Pile of Schist
Francois Mancebo, Paris

Winter is here in the north—not the slightest allusion here to any famous TV series or any recent election, of course. And in the wintertime, life goes underground in a literal sense: tubers and roots reign while most of the aboveground parts of plants are dormant; animals hibernate or at...

18 January 2017

Linear Parks: The Importance of a Balanced, Cross-Disciplinary Design
Ana Faggi, Buenos Aires Claudia Zuleyka Vidal, Cali Florencia Gustelar, Buenos Aires Romina Lopez, Buenos Aires

In a previous contribution to The Nature of Cities (Faggi & Vidal 2016), we wrote about linear parks (LPs) as an interesting green space typology and discussed some strengths and threats of these multifunctional areas in Latin America. Other contributions (Tsur 2014, Das 2015, Maddox 2016) explained that LPs are...

15 January 2017

Celebrating the First Ecology Parks in London
David Goode, Bath

In November 2016 there was a celebration in London: it had been 40 years since the idea of creating an Ecology Park in central London was first suggested. The event provided opportunities to share memories of those early days and to see how the concept has taken root and proliferated....

11 January 2017

Building for Birds: An Online Tool to Evaluate How Different Development Designs Impact Forest Bird Habitat
Mark Hostetler, Gainesville Jan-Michael Archer, Gainesville

Often, city forest fragments and tree canopies are overlooked by city planners and developers as important bird habitat. More often than not, people only regard large patches as beneficial. The message from conservationists is that we want to avoid fragmentation and to conserve large forested areas. While this goal is...

8 January 2017

The Real Dirt on Urban Compost
Sven Eberlein, San Francisco

“Why isn’t every city doing this?” Dave Vella asks as he intently massages a handful of succulent compost from the towering pile freshly deposited onto his vineyard’s gravel thoroughfare. Dressed in jeans and denim shirt, the veteran Grape Manager of Chateau Montelena is about as casual as can be for...

5 January 2017

How a Little Endangered Fox Found Sanctuary in a California Oil Town
Madhusudan Katti, Raleigh

If I were to ask you where I could find a healthy population of the endangered San Joaquin Kit Fox, you might be forgiven for not immediately saying, “Why, Bakersfield, of course!” Bakersfield? The Oil Capital of California? Yes, the very same! Unlikely as it seems, this oil-town-turned-city sprawling at the...

2 January 2017

Resolving to Act After the 2016 U.S. Election and the United Nations Climate Conference
Franco Montalto, Philadelphia and Venice Hugh Johnson, Philadelphia

We attended the 22nd session of the United Nations Climate Conference (also called COP22) as “Observers” in the immediate aftermath of the U.S. 2016 presidential election. Since 1995, the COP has served as the annual UN climate conference, providing an opportunity to assess progress, negotiate agreements, and disseminate information regarding...

December, 2016

28 December 2016

Highlights from The Nature of Cities in 2016
David Maddox, New York

Today’s post celebrates highlights from TNOC writing in 2016. These contributions, originating around the world, were widely read, offer novel points of view, are somehow disruptive in a useful way, or combine these characteristics. Certainly, all 550+ TNOC essays and roundtables are great and worthwhile reads, but what follows will give you a...

22 December 2016

We Need to Think Trashy Thoughts
Valerie Gwinner, Nairobi

Out of sight, out of mind. That is how most of us want to think about the trash we generate. But as our cities become increasingly overwhelmed with the burden of refuse collection and disposal, we must refocus the way we view our discards and devote greater attention to the...

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