urban green space

wilderness 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]

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]

public gardens

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]

pocket parks

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]

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]

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]

Can you 'green' a city like Beijing? Even if you wanted to, there's a lot of challenges.[read more]

  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]

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]

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]

Luzinterruptus, a Spanish guerrilla-style art collective based in Madrid who’s work I adore, is at it again but this time they’ve set their aim at the vegetated and the vertical. Their humorous criticism here is two-fold. One, the lack of green in urban spaces and two, the vertical gardens that are becoming so popular in many...[read more]