urban green space
Green Cities: From Piazzas to Pocket Parks
It is no secret that successful cities are also green cities. This includes tree-lined boulevards, large regional or central parks, and smaller, neighborhood-scale pocket parks.[read more]
Shaping the City with Horticulture: Parks and Plazas
At Civic Horticulture in Philadelphia, three panels of leading landscape architects discussed the organizational, aesthetic, and productive potential of horticulture. They explained how it is shaping contemporary civic spaces.[read more]
Wilderness South of Chicago: Beauty Amid Industry
An alliance of nearly 270 organizations, which have banded together under the name Chicago Wilderness, are working towards improving green infrastructure and creating access to nature for children, among other things.[read more]
Mechanisms of Resilience & Other "Re-Words" in Urban Greening
These words are interesting because of what so many of them represent—they are ‘do-over’ words, words that indicate another opportunity, a second chance. They suggest alternate endings and outcomes.[read more]
Improving Public Health Through Public Green Spaces
Studies show that gardens soothe medical patients. It isn’t much of a leap to see that gardens with walkways, benches and the gentle hum of falling water would have similar effects in other public facilities.[read more]
Lack of Green Spaces? Pocket Parks Are the Solution
When one thinks of a park, one usually imagines a large plot full of trees in the centre of the city. But what happens in cities where green spaces are vital, but there is no free for such uses?[read more]
The Invisible Urban Nature All Around Us: Embedded Green In Our Built Infrastructure
It is interesting that we think of nature in cities only as fauna and flora. Mineral nature—the rocks and inert resources—is the stage on which living nature is set. In cities, this means that the embedded nature all around us, that has been extracted from the Earth like the processed aggregate that we use to make concrete,...[read more]
Food Trucks Bring New Patrons to City Parks
Visitors line up for food truck fare at the Prospect Park Food Truck Rally.Credit: Elissa H. IzmailyanThe second season of the Prospect Park Food Truck Rally launched this Sunday in balmy spring weather. On the third Sunday of each month from April through October, sixteen gourmet food trucks will greet crowds of eager...[read more]
Building a Greener Capital
Can you 'green' a city like Beijing? Even if you wanted to, there's a lot of challenges.[read more]
New wetlands park made possible by environmental justice lawsuit
A densely packed, distressed neighborhood in South Los Angeles has a new, nine-acre park that will include a 4.5-acre wetland, filtering stormwater while bringing much-needed green space into a community historically plagued by nearby industrial facilities. Even better, the park replaces a former brownfield, a paved bus and...[read more]
The Price of Public Green Space
A New Orleans public housing development on the verge of demolition. Source: The Bag Is it possible to assign a monetary value to public green space in cities? Alex Lo recently published an assessment of methods based on choice modeling and cost-benefit analysis. He focuses on the contingent value method (...[read more]
How Greenways Create Healthy Communities
This post explores using greenways as the connector to parks, neighborhoods, schools and mixed-use centers, allowing for urban and rural ideas to merge and produce a superior hybrid community form.[read more]
Sustainable Cities Collective

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“Spot on! I believe that incorporating concepts in anthropology (or biology, and so on) is absolutely necessary for our health in cities. It only makes sense that the environment we evolved in would impact our physiology today. How we can utilize this knowledge and research it further is crucial...”
“Great article, Kaid.Rethinking the future of what will hopefully be the inevitable demise of the suburban strip mall is an important exercise. Whether or not the next generation of strip mall tenants are big business or small scale artisans, does it really help to defuse the underlying flaws in the use patterns of the development type? The choice may change the feel of the suburbs, but isn't ...”