Landscape+Urbanism

Category: environmental

  • Ecologists on Urban Ecology

    A great roundtable going on right now from The Nature of Cites asking ecologists “What is one thing every ecologist should know about urban ecology?”  Consisting of a range of voices from all over the globe, the conversation discusses the larger contributions of ecology, as well as some of the challenges, as mentioned by David Maddox in…

  • Living Shorelines

    Amidst the political crazy we like to call our United States government, and specifically what seems like a daily dismantling of environmental policies, there’s at least some folks at work on alternatives.  Per a recent ASLA Advocacy brief: “On December 1, 2017, Congressman Frank Pallone Jr. (NJ) introduced H.R. 4525, the Living Shorelines Act of 2017.…

  • The Peregrine

    While not specifically urban, some reading worth your time is JA Baker‘s slim volume, The Peregrine. Written in 1967, it was one    The cover of the 2004 edition I own features an introduction by Robert Macfarlane  (who I learned about the book from via his readings).  Seemingly simple in format, a short blurb from Amazon gives…

  • Landscape Observatory: The Work of Terence Harkness

    I was really excited to learn about the publication of this book Landscape Observatory: The Work of Terence Harkness (2017, Applied Research & Design).  Having earned my undergraduate degree in Landscape Architecture at North Dakota State University, our design milieu often focused on the sprawling plains, with design exercises that took us into the realms…

  • Smart Trees

    Way back in undergraduate studies, I developed a project for a pedestrian street mall in Vancouver, British Columbia.  The conceptual framework of car-free zones in cities was a contentious one at the time with some notable failures but the idea of removing cars from urban zones was a key driver of my design.  This has…

  • Walden, the game

    I’m a bit tardy in posting about the 200th Anniversary of Thoreau’s birthday, which generated some great reading about the man, his adventures, the pond, and his legacy.   I’m one of the camp that was highly influenced by early and often readings of Thoreau, and accept both the critical view of his life, while also…

  • Urban Ecology Reading List 2: Landscape Ecology

    URBAN ECOLOGY READING LIST – 2 Beyond some of the specific books focusing  on the science of Urban Ecology, there are subsets of literature that support this study.  This is the first of three posts to expand the reading list that investigate these other, related disciplinary alignments, including landscape ecology, the hybrid books on planning…

  • International Urban Wildlife Conference

    In early June I was in San Diego for the 2017 International Urban Wildlife Conference.   This was my first time at this particular conference, and it was fascinating to experience the breadth of ideas, and the urban focus on wildlife.  It’s something that we as designers care about, but struggle with implementation that truly…

  • Introducing Hidden Hydrology

    Regular readers of the blog know of my long-time passions of both Vegitecture and Hidden Hydrology, which both dovetail nicely into the larger themes of Landscape+Urbanism.  While the L+U blog has been relatively intermittent, I’ve been hard at work developing a new website and blog for the Hidden Hydrology project. The goal is to culminate…

  • Map Landscapes by Matthew Rangel

    These are some amazing illustrations from Artist Matthew Rangel, that remind me both of old school map/diagrams from the 1800s, and the Taking Measures  James Corner’s Map Landscapes.  While much of the graphic conventions seem to hover around exploded axonometrics and collage photoshop, the ability of these sketchy images to depict landscapes in map and…