Bird man

Bird Man, the artwork of Senegalese artist Soly Cissé, looms over the Banco National Park in Abidjan, Ivory Coast.

Introducing the Urban Ecosystems Collection

PLOS ONE announces their Urban Ecosystems Collection "We felt it was particularly important to reflect the interdisciplinary nature of contemporary research in urban contexts and highlight some of the innovative approaches being used to explore important issues in these dynamic, complex environments."

see their collections of articles at https://collections.plos.org/s/urban-ecosystems

Urban nature, green cities, still life

Sherman Aronson is a visual artist, working with drawing, watercolor and digital tools, who earned his BA at Penn in the College in 1971 and his masters in architecture from Penn  in 1973. He is a practicing architect in Philadelphia and an adjunct professor of architecture at Drexel University.

Mr. Aronson has always made drawings, sketches and designs, from high school art classes through college and architecture school. It is part of how he looks at the world, thinks about his work and dreams. As an architect, he works in historic preservation and adaptive reuse, transportation renovations, green design and sustainable building. He has been an advocate for energy conservation and building preservation since the 1980s, working with professional associations and through his teaching. His art is an extension of that interest and passion.

“Enhancing our perception and conscious awareness of our urban parks and streetscape plantings can support our subconscious behavior and appreciation of climate change and human responses. Finding delight in the landscape around us, at home, while traveling and in many settings is a way to express our deep connection to the living world we love,” he said.

Courtesy of https://almanac.upenn.edu/articles/urban-nature-green-cities-still-life-at-the-burrison-gallery

Finding nature in your city

WildArk.org does a great job of describing where the wild places are in various cities around the globe. Their main mission is to preserve species and ecosystems through education and research. Check out their website at https://wildark.org

Transitional ecologies and tactical urban artists

“We are optimistic that the combination of creativity, ingenuity and low-budget, DIY mindsets that are hallmarks of both ecologists and public artists will help collaborators transform abandoned space into exciting and informative destinations.”

From Transitional Ecology: embedding ecological

experiments into temporary urban public art

Adam D. Kay,1,* Elizabeth Scherber,1 Hunter Gaitan,1 and Amanda Lovelee2

1Department of Biology, University of St. Thomas, 2115 Summit Avenue, St. Paul, MN 55105, USA and 2Public Art St. Paul, 381 Wabasha St N, St. Paul, MN 55102, USA

Journal of Urban Ecology, 2019, 1–7

Clean, green cities poised to take shape

China is building high-rise forest towers. Courtesy of China Daily news:

"For example, in Nanjing, capital of Jiangsu province, two residential high-rises designed by Italian architect Stefano Boeri are being built.

When completed, the buildings will house 1,100 trees from 23 local species and 2,500 cascading plants and shrubs, which according to the architects, will absorb 25 metric tons of carbon dioxide each year and produce about 60 kilograms of oxygen a day.

To put that in perspective, removing 25 tons of carbon dioxide would be equivalent to taking five cars off the road for a year. Chinese cities have some of the most polluted air in the world."

read more from this article at: https://www.chinadailyhk.com/articles/29/48/153/1573015446133.html?newsId=111714

Toward an Urban Ecology: SCAPE

Kate Orff, 2017 MacArthur Fellow, has an optimistic and transformative message about our world: we can bring together social and ecological systems to sustainably remake our cities and landscapes. Part monograph, part manual, part manife­sto, Toward an Urban Ecology reconceives urban landscape design as a form of activism, demonstrating how to move beyond familiar and increasingly outmoded ways of thinking about environmental, urban, and social issues as separate domains; and advocating for the synthesis of practice to create a truly urban ecology. 

In purely practical terms, SCAPE has already generated numerous tools and techniques that designers, policy makers, and communities can use to address some of the most pressing issues of our time, including the loss of biodiversity, the loss of social cohesion, and ecological degradation. Toward an Urban Ecology features numerous projects and select research from SCAPE, and conveys a range of strategies to engender a more resilient and inclusive built environment.