Landscape+Urbanism

Category: habitat

  • Daily Drawdown 13: Urban Forests

    This is the thirteenth in an ongoing series illustrating the relationship of Drawdown strategies to landscape architecture. For context, read the initial post here. My presentation for Grey to Green is right around the corner, so if you’re at the conference come check it out (Thursday, April 5th in Toronto), so this will be the…

  • Daily Drawdown 11: Materials

    This is the eleventh in an ongoing series illustrating the relationship of Drawdown strategies to landscape architecture. For context, read the initial post here. The decisions about materials we use on projects have implications in a number of areas, including loss of biodiversity, the pollution produced during manufacturing, and the overall greenhouse gas emissions that…

  • Daily Drawdown 6: Coastal Wetlands

    This is the sixth in an ongoing series illustrating the relationship of Drawdown strategies to landscape architecture. For context, read the initial post here. There are a number of solutions mentioned in Drawdown that interface with the natural environment, and in doing so have a direct interface to landscape architecture. Coastal Wetlands are an important…

  • Daily Drawdown 3: Green Roofs

    This is the third in an ongoing series illustrating the relationship of Drawdown strategies to landscape architecture. For context, read the initial post here. In the last post, I focused on a Drawdown topic, Refrigerant Management, that seemed out to be well outside of the scope of landscape architecture, to point out that we have…

  • The Shape of Water

    An amazing resource posted on ASLA’s The Dirt (here) focuses on Design Guidelines for Urban Wetlands, specifically what shapes are optimal for performance. Using simulations and physical testing to investigate hydraulic performance the team from the Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism (LCAU) at MIT.  Led by Heidi Nepf, Alan Berger and Celina Balderas Guzman along with a team…

  • Resilience Matters

    Fans of Island Press (myself included) know of that, beyond their publication of a great diversity of books, the non-profit has a mission, to “provide the best ideas and information to those seeking to understand and protect the environment and create solutions to its complex problems”.  In this regard, beyond publication around these themes, they have…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…