4 September 2024
![A wall with several house martin nests made up underneath the roofline](https://www.thenatureofcities.com/TNOC/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/martin-1837709_1280-604x270.jpg)
Did you know that baby housemartins speak in their sleep? I did not ― until some nights ago in early July. I was walking down the deserted main road outside Varese Ligure, an old-fashioned Italian mountain town. It was the evening of the day I had arrived. Following the dimly...
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22 August 2024
![A picture of a root bridge over a river](https://www.thenatureofcities.com/TNOC/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Pierson5-604x270.png)
I recently attended The Nature of Cities Festival (TNOC Festival) in Berlin, Germany, where I hosted a session with colleagues on the Global Roadmap for the Nature-based solutions for Urban Resilience in the Anthropocene (NATURA), a National Science Foundation research initiative co-led by the Urban Systems Lab. TNOC Festival uniquely...
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6 August 2024
![Left: A tan rock apartment building. Right: A brick house with a hedge.](https://www.thenatureofcities.com/TNOC/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/McDonald1-1-604x270.jpg)
India is roasting, with some cities like Delhi pushing to almost 50 degrees C (122 degrees F). In India’s recent election, at least 33 poll workers died while doing mostly compulsory work to administer the election in sweltering polling places. All told, there have probably been thousands or tens of...
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30 July 2024
![A group of old tombstones in a cemetery](https://www.thenatureofcities.com/TNOC/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Some-of-the-oldest-graves-in-the-cemetery-min-604x270.jpg)
The word “cemetery” is derived from the Greek word ‘koimeterion’ meaning ‘dormitory’ or “resting place”. But cemeteries in cities can be more than resting sites for the deceased, or for their loved ones to visit and mourn. They are spaces that harbour a rich biodiversity including trees and plants of...
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15 July 2024
![](https://www.thenatureofcities.com/TNOC/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Imagen3-left-604x270.jpg)
Human reconnection with Nature is one of the greatest challenges of architecture in the attempt to generate more livable cities in built environments. Among architects and designers, there were visionaries who sought to reflect an indivisible relationship between art, life, and nature in their compositions. One of them was Hundertwasser...
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9 July 2024
![A person crouched down on the ground looking at green vegetables at a market](https://www.thenatureofcities.com/TNOC/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Picture2-604x270.jpg)
In the dynamic landscape of Africa, a fascinating interplay unfolds between urban informality and the transformative promise of primate cities. Mark Jefferson defined a primate city in 1939 as the largest in its country, province, state, or region, and disproportionately larger than any others in the urban hierarchy: at least...
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30 June 2024
![A body of water with hills and land](https://www.thenatureofcities.com/TNOC/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/fig-15-mio-604x270.jpg)
Kansai is both an international airport built on an artificial island in Osaka Bay and an urban megaregion sprawling across Japan’s largest and most populous Honshu Island. But Kansai also affords countless walks in which to understand landform heritage and ecology. The Osaka Sea is embraced by two mountainous areas,...
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27 May 2024
![A child drawing on a large piece of canvas smattered with drawings and colorful squiggles](https://www.thenatureofcities.com/TNOC/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Wiesner4-604x270.jpg)
Lee esto en español. Over the course of a year, we embarked on an emotional and conceptual journey of exploration and reflection on water with two groups of young people and children living on the border between urban and rural areas in the hills of Bogotá. This experience led us...
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12 May 2024
![A billboard in pink script reading "Imagine a city without billboards" with a person in activewear running by it](https://www.thenatureofcities.com/TNOC/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/161050379_4036581156386376_6301222984507373836_n-604x270.jpg)
The imperative to mitigate global warming to within 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels necessitates substantial systemic changes in the Global North. While much attention has been directed towards clean energy transition and infrastructure investments, addressing unsustainable consumption habits has not received the priority it deserves. The growing challenges in...
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27 April 2024
![](https://www.thenatureofcities.com/TNOC/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Forbidden-Fuit-David-Maddox3.png)
Lindsay: I am co-principal Investigator on a USDA Forest Service (USFS) research project called “Fueling Adaptation” which is looking at wildfire communications, governance, and adaptation as part of the Wildfire Crisis Strategy. This is work I co-lead with Miranda Mockrin (USFS) and Cody Evers (Portland State University). Our team of...
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3 April 2024
![A tree on the side of a road](https://www.thenatureofcities.com/TNOC/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Suzan-saved-this-tree-1-604x270.jpg)
A biking lane should measure 4.20 meters at minimum in the city of Utrecht. Sidewalks need to be 1.20 meters wide to make sure pedestrians and a person in a wheelchair can pass each other. For each house we build we add 0.78 parking spaces in the public domain. In...
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27 March 2024
![A diagram of a sustainable development](https://www.thenatureofcities.com/TNOC/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/ESG-Graphic-508x270.png)
Background to the Sustainable Financing Gap Globally, challenges in making our cities resilient are multi-dimensional and are on the rise. According to the 2023 Sustainable Development Goals Report, over half of the global population currently resides in urban areas, a rate projected to reach 70% by 2050. Approximately 1.1 billion...
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18 March 2024
![A group of people on bikes and motor scooters driving down a flooded street](https://www.thenatureofcities.com/TNOC/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Motorists-manoeuvre-through-the-flooded-roads-in-Kampala-city-following-a-heavy-down-pour-604x270.jpg)
The United Nations Disaster Risk Agency holds that “displacement means situations where people are forced or obliged to leave their homes or places of habitual residence because of a disaster or to avoid the impact of an immediate and foreseeable natural hazard. Such displacement results from the fact that affected...
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11 March 2024
![A harbor with a boat at a dock](https://www.thenatureofcities.com/TNOC/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/South-Battery-Park-City-Resiliency-Project.-Credit-_Rob-Pirani-604x270.jpg)
Looking out from my office in lower Manhattan, preparations for rising seas and coastal storms are becoming real. As I type these words, construction crews are cutting scores of mature trees that once graced the local parks to make room for a system of about five-meter-high berms, flood walls, and...
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26 February 2024
![A picture of many people sitting in the grass inside painted circles, all six feet apart](https://www.thenatureofcities.com/TNOC/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Social-distancing-in-parks-604x270.webp)
Social infrastructure and so-called “third spaces” (the non-work, non-home gathering spaces ― either public or private ― like parks, libraries, houses of worship, and coffee shops where people spend time) are a crucial part of the lifeblood of civic life, particularly in cities. These are spaces where people come together,...
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25 February 2024
![A picture of a young girl drinking water from her cupped hands](https://www.thenatureofcities.com/TNOC/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Wallee1-604x270.jpg)
Cities should be collaborative creations, no? Various professions, ways of knowing, modes of action, governments, and the people that live there, work together (we hope) to build their city from their shared and often contested values. And we need to find greener routes to built cities for them to be...
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7 February 2024
![A group of trees with no leaves against a blue sky](https://www.thenatureofcities.com/TNOC/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/1-Photo--604x270.jpeg)
Rightly, people recently have been valuing Indigenous cultures and writing about them. Not wishing to mimic or appropriate, but as an attempt to learn from such ways of thinking, this essay uses a form of circular storying[1] that becomes nonlinear. I stumbled upon ‘storying’ (the making and telling of stories)...
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15 January 2024
![A Google Earth image of an open pit](https://www.thenatureofcities.com/TNOC/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/IMG_6117-604x270.jpg)
Every human activity generates environmental impacts, such as in the case of urban settlements. Conventionally, the urban environmental impacts that are more worrisome are those that are the result of the city itself, such as urban solid wastes and water contamination. These wastes are the remains of urban metabolism, and...
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8 January 2024
![A woman standing in front of a brightly colored mural of a woman's head](https://www.thenatureofcities.com/TNOC/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/1_Avoyagefronbrutalismtobiophilia_OpeningPicture-604x270.jpg)
Nestled within the lively and restless Leith neighbourhood stands the iconic curved structure of Cables Wynd House, immortalised in Irvine Welsh’s novel “Trainspotting” and referred to by locals as the Banana Flats. Constructed in the 1960s, Cables Wynd is considered one of Britain’s greatest post-war buildings designed in the Brutalist...
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20 December 2023
![A muddy work site with a city in the background](https://www.thenatureofcities.com/TNOC/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Don-River-604x270.jpg)
Historically, North American urban environmental and natural resource management was operationalized in a top-down, command-and-control fashion. In general, governments prepared plans and made decisions with some limited input from other stakeholders. Over time, this shifted to a more bottom-up, collaborative approach ― an ecosystem approach. The ecosystem approach is not...
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