Essays Archive

The nature of cities is inextricably tied to the nature of public space and this blog is about just a small part of that ‘nature’. It was inspired by what appeared to be graffiti on a public footpath that runs along the street where I live, in sunny Semaphore, South...

Next year, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), adopted by the United Nations after the Millennium Declaration, are set to expire. The next set of global development goals, which are supposed to be even more environmentally focused — the Sustainable Development Goals — are currently under discussion at the UN and...

Recently Buenos Aires, the capital city of Argentina, has begun a transformation to reduce the urban processes that have negative effects on biodiversity. The city has an area of 202 square kilometers and a population of 2.9 million. Every day up to four million people enter in the city from...

Today, we live in the ‘Urban Anthropocene’. This expression combines the global trend towards urbanization and the neologism ‘Anthropocene’, the term an ecologist would be forced to use these days to describe Homo sapiens as the key structuring species that could determine, alone, the fate of Earth’s life forms. For...

At first glance, Greenpoint seems much like many other ethnically diverse New York City neighborhood struggling with rapid gentrification. Traditional neighborhood businesses jostle for space with trendy new restaurants and shops, while developers hype luxury high-rise development proposals. But, underneath the ground, something is very different. Between the late 1800s...

0 There’s an old saying about defecating and eating and not doing both in the same place. It is usually applied to interpersonal relations but serves just as well for industrial ones. And it is particularly relevant to mining. Certainly we don’t want to mine directly upstream of water intake sites,...

Hammarby sjöstad (Hammarby Lake City) is an urban development project directly south of Stockholm’s South Island. This is no doubt the most referenced and visited spot among Scandinavian examples of implemented eco-friendly urban developments. Hammarby is included in many publications, for example in the recent Ecological Design by Nancy Rottle...

Walking in Bangkok is a messy experience. It is impossible to predict a change of grade or width of sidewalk under your feet. That is if there is a sidewalk. Similarly it is impossible to predict if the next building you walk past will be a shop house, condominium, bungalow,...

The City of Jerusalem has been subject to geopolitical and religious conflict for more than three millennia, ever since King David chose it as the site for the capital of the Kingdom of Judah. His choice has often been criticized, because of the inherent difficulty in supplying water to the...

Kim Behrens and I are driving slowly through my Turnagain neighborhood on a snowy mid-December afternoon, when a legion of songbirds prompts us to pull over to the curb, grab binoculars, and scramble out of her truck. In deepening grayness, we stand in open-mouthed amazement among yards that have been...

I recently relocated to New Delhi after more than a decade — a set of years which entailed rapid economic growth for India. Infrastructure development in cities around the country is booming and it is difficult to travel for too long without meeting the rising towers of concrete and shining...

Mention the word biodiversity to a city dweller and images of remote natural beauty will probably come to mind — not an empty car park around the corner. Wildlife, we think, should be found in wild places, or confined to sanctuaries and national parks. But research shows that cities can...

What’s a zoo to you? “Zoo” was one of the first words I learned to say, and the local zoo was my favorite place to visit as a child. I can’t be sure that it was that experience which led me to decide, at an early age, to pursue a...

The “Megurizaka pond renovation” project started in 2008 by creating a place for children to play and help restore nature to a small part of Kitakyushu City in southern Japan. The aim was to create an area for children’s play and ecological education that could also form a part of...

Ok, if you can look past my anthropomorphic statement that wildlife make decisions, the topic I would like to address deals with the adoption and use of ecological principles by the design community. Patch size, landscape connectivity, edge effects, corridor ecology, landscape ecology, and metapopulation theory are just a few...

Changes that cause major disruptions in human settlements, such as those triggered by earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanic eruptions, can give rise to new landscapes that reveal a natural cycle, which is part of the territory where cities grow and develop. These landscapes emerge particularly in cities exposed to recurrent natural...

Local governments planted millions of young trees on urban streets throughout the United States during the first decade of the 21st Century. From Los Angeles to New York, large cities made prodigious investments in urban reforestation and wrote off the expense as a relatively thrifty way of dealing with some...

A new vision of ecologically sophisticated cities has been gaining momentum. Today, in increasing numbers, scientists, designers, and practitioners create useful knowledge about the nature of cities through research and action that inspires public debate and decision makers. More citizens are becoming more engaged in the conversation about urban nature — a conversation...

Another revolution  the “ecological revolution” is required to go back and live in co-existence with nature. Recently I have been to Auroville, an experimental universal township in Tamilnadu and Puduchhery of southern India. This was founded in 1968 by Mirra Alfassa known as “The Mother”. Auroville came to be known...

By all rights a one-eyed bald eagle is a doomed bird. Imagine trying to catch a salmon or a brush rabbit with no depth perception. Oh eagles will scavenge and occasionally steal food from one another, but roadkill and kleptoparasitism will only get you so far in life…or so the...