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Continuing with Archinect's weekly job highlights, we've put together a list of firms that put sustainability and ecological design/research at the forefront of their practices. If you're an architectural designer or experienced architect with a passion for environmentally driven projects... View full entry
The visionary team at Terreform ONE in New York City have unveiled designs for an eight-story Monarch Butterfly sanctuary tower that promises to enliven the facade of a forthcoming commercial building with a vertical terrarium. The diagrid structure will be made out of 3D-printed... View full entry
In the face of increasingly destructive climate collapse, the University of Pennsylvania's McHarg Center for Urban Ecology is launching Design with Nature Now, a sprawling survey of some of the most inventive ecologically-driven landscape infrastructure projects from around the... View full entry
Beijing is stepping up measures to fight against smog and pollution by building a web of ventilation corridors as one of its plans to combat climate issues, according to municipal authorities.
“Ventilation corridors can improve wind flow through a city so that wind can blow away heat and pollutants, relieving urban heat island effect and air pollution,” Wang Fei, deputy head of Beijing’s urban planning committee, told Xinhua News Agency.
— CCTV America
The planned "ventilation corridors" would range from less than 80 meters to more than 500 meters wide and – hopefully – do what their name suggests, providing a conduit for wind to blow away pollutants like particulate matter.Five major corridors are planned for the Chinese capital, running... View full entry
Fullilove increasingly came to see cities as ecosystems, with streams and channels, one flowing unseen into the next, disruptions wreaking havoc, threatening vitality everywhere. In a 1999 article in The International Journal of Mental Health, she showed federal urban renewal policies to be a fundamental cause of disease — NYT Magazine
Robert Sullivan profiles Mindy Thompson Fullilove. Trained as a psychiatrist, she studies the links between the environment and mental health and adapted the concept of "root shock" from gardening, which she applied to her studies of urban planning/policy and community psychology. View full entry
municipal infrastructure is being expanded to include living creatures. In many ways, of course, this is simply the contemporary urbanization of a practice that goes back millennia. However, the ensuing juxtapositions – of 21st-century landscapes and cities being maintained not by high-tech machines or by specialty equipment but by neo-medieval groups of trained animals – can be quite jarring. Animal labour is once more becoming an explicit component of the modern metropolis — newscientist.com
The absolute premise, and conclusion, here is that human urbanism is ineluctably woven within all animal ecologies, and that harnessing inter-species relationships within urban systems can be advantageous for every bit of the food web. A few instances from the piece are:landscaping llamas for... View full entry
the spontaneous plants, remain wild in the city, choosing to live among us. What allows these plants, the successful weeds of the city, to thrive in sidewalk cracks and rubble piles while valued native species retreat to rural landscapes? What are the characteristics of a successful invaders, colonizers and pioneers? — Medium
Ellie Irons on Nativeness, Biodiversity, and Urban Flora in the Anthropocene. View full entry
Indeed, at heart of our SUPE Platform lies a sincere wish to contribute to a broad conversation on urban political ecology that takes a broader experience of urbanization into account...We wish to participate in building a collaborative and supportive community open for conversation to all those interested in understanding the politics of urban ecologies and environments in a world of cities — Situated Ecologies
Henrik Ernstson reflects on the difference between “pluralizing” and “provincializing” urban political ecology. View full entry
