Category: urban ecology
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Living Nature
I seem to be attracted to compelling pavilion installations this month, as this interesting proposal (via Archinect)for a project ‘Living Nature’ by Carlo Ratti Associati definitely caught my eye with it’s interesting take on climate and seasons. A short description from the CRA site: “International design and innovation office CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati has unveiled “Living Nature. La Natura…
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Got Moss?
A cool vegitectural proposal from Sam Biroscak in collaboration with Gina Dyches, Stephanie Borchers, Annick Lang, and Anneli Rice is “Mossgrove is a proposal for an architectural pavilion to be built in Times Square during NYCxDESIGN from May 12-20, 2018. It highlights the possibilities of two under-appreciated urban elements: scaffolding and moss. Individually, scaffolding and moss…
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Irish Hunger Memorial
I remember seeing images of the Irish Hunger Memorial in Battery Park City a few years back, and was amazed by the hovering cantilevered structure holding a metaphorical ‘slice’ of Irish landscape. The Memorial, designed by internationally renowned sculptor and public artist Brian Tolle, originally opened in 2002. It is a contemplative space devoted to…
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Connecting Green
Although not a new idea, the concept of connected green roofs that emerge from the ground on to structure is a persist, compelling idea, essentially blending building and site and maximizing green space, habitat, and square footage through layering of uses. A trio of projects show the variations on that theme. First, via Designboom, the…
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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…
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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…
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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.…
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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…
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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…
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Urban Ecology Reading List – Updated
Note: This was originally published in late June, with a plan to include specific books that discussed the science of urban ecology. I’ve added a few titles in this realm to the original post on 7/7 and organized them alphabetically with a summary at the beginning. The literature of the somewhat youthful discipline of urban…