An Array of Utopian Flowers
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Wildlife Crossings: Animals Survive with Bridges and Tunnels
Posted on May 19, 2013 | 1 Comment -
Henry Miller’s Free Association into the Surreal
Posted on May 19, 2013 | No Comments -
La Loba: Wild Woman, Luminous Wolf
Posted on May 15, 2013 | 1 Comment -
Vandana Shiva: Maintaining Biodiversity and the Seeds of Freedom
Posted on May 11, 2013 | No Comments -
African Garden Cities: Urbanization Without Planning for People
Posted on May 7, 2013 | No Comments
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WilderUtopia in 64 Languages
Chasing Ice: The New “Inconvenient Truth”
Arctic Melting Before Our Eyes - In his new film on the disappearance of Arctic glaciers, “Chasing Ice,” author, award-winning photographer and reformed climate-change denier James Balog used time-lapse photography to capture global warming in progress.
Read MoreEcological Urbanism
A City Green Re-Imagination - We must demand an ecological retrofitting of our urban environments to live together more efficiently, giving credence to community, allowing space for the open wild.
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Urban and Regional Development Archive
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Los Angeles River Revitalization: A City Rediscovers its Flow
Posted on April 9, 2013 | 1 CommentThe LA River, an over-engineered concrete "water-freeway," is undergoing a long-term greening and revitalization. A 32-mile greenbelt, developed through numerous projects, promises to improve the health of the ecosystem and the value of the river as a regional public amenity, while managing flows and protecting properties. -
BioMilano: Italian Eco-Vision Grows 26-Storey Vertical Forest
Posted on January 15, 2013 | No CommentsNow under construction is the Bosco Verticale or Vertical Forest, the first phase of BioMilano, a re-envisioning of Milan, Italy, with an eye toward ecological urbanism, integrating tree and skyscraper, city and wild. -
Affordable and Green: Net-Zero House in Washington DC
Posted on December 27, 2012 | No CommentsEMPOWERHOUSE is a community-based approach to sustainable urban development showcasing the design of two affordable, energy-efficient solar powered homes and a neighborhood learning garden for inner-city Washington DC and beyond. -
China’s Urbanizing Utopia: Ghost Cities and Propaganda Theme Parks
Posted on December 19, 2012 | 2 CommentsChina has been building ghost towns for years, and like a never-ending vaudeville show, the bizarre overbuilding never stops. Here are four of 2012's most eyebrow-raising developments. -
US EPA: 2012 Awards for Smart Growth Sustainability-Minded Projects
Posted on December 3, 2012 | No CommentsThe U.S. EPA recognized seven communities with its 2012 National Award for Smart Growth Achievement. Specific initiatives include improving transportation choices, developing green, energy-efficient buildings and communities, and providing community members with access to job training, health and wellness education, and other services. -
Urban Ecology: Promoting Life in the Concrete Jungle
Posted on November 30, 2012 | No CommentsIn the growing field of urban ecology, scientists study cities as if they were ecosystems. With cities launching efforts to slash carbon emissions, reduce water use and improve habitats, scientists are beginning to evaluate how such policies affect the overall health of the urban environment. -
A Los Angeles Rail~Volution: A City in Sustainable Transition – By Jack Eidt
Posted on October 23, 2012 | No CommentsThe Rail~Volution Conference rolled into Los Angeles to illustrate how transit projects energize neighborhoods, meeting a significant demand for multi-density housing walkable to restaurants, offices, and shops. They can transform the landscape and mindset, in this case, of auto-addicted Southern California. One stop at a time. -
Urban Neighborhoods Revitalized with Certified Greening
Posted on October 3, 2012 | 1 CommentThree LEED-ND pilot participants—the Brewery in Milwaukee, Wisconsin; the SALT District in Syracuse, New York; and Tassafaronga Village in Oakland, California—show promise as neighborhood-scale revitalized green adaptive reuse in a difficult economy. -
Beasts of the Southern Wild: Bayou Culture Sinking into the Gulf – By Jack Eidt
Posted on August 28, 2012 | No Comments"Beasts," a hard-knock ecological fairy tale about the disappearing Louisiana bayou coastline, highlights the fragility of the region's hurricane defenses and the resulting devastation of communities and cultures living on the flooding margins. -
Detroit Works: Urban Farming and Reforestation as Neighborhood Preservation
Posted on August 9, 2012 | 2 CommentsDetroit Works, the long-term planning vision for the long-rusting Motor City, embraces the urban farming, permaculture, and ecological urbanism movements seen in cities across the United States, to chart the way to more a prosperous and sustainable future. -
Singapore: Gardens By The Bay Sprout Supertrees and Horticultural Conservatories
Posted on July 25, 2012 | No CommentsGigantic steel, concrete and wire trees rise from manicured serpentine gardens, human-blessed symmetry reaching skyward. At the bay’s edge, two sustainably-designed domes invite visitors to explore world biomes and horticultural paradises. A public amusement park, ecological urbanism designed to invite the populace to rediscover the earth, a visit to Singapore’s Gardens by the Bay evokes a green wonderland, human-designed, artistically crafted, growing "wild" and sort-of-natural. -
Toll Lanes as Congestion Management: Mobility for the Wealthy Few
Posted on July 4, 2012 | No CommentsConverting freeway lanes to tollways in the name of congestion management, without viable transit alternatives, will only reduce mobility for the majority in exchange for wealthy drivers getting to work on time. -
Hello Urbanism: Southern California Sprawl Grows Up
Posted on April 18, 2012 | 2 CommentsSouthern California's new Sustainable Communities Strategy plan posits that as a region, we have to grow up, not out. That doesn't mean Hong Kong skyscrapers, but more apartments near light-rail stations and vibrant mixed-use areas like the ones in downtown Pasadena. -
Ecological Urbanism: A City Green Re-Imagination – By Jack Eidt
Posted on April 17, 2012 | 4 CommentsWe must view the fragility of the planet, the disaster of our resource addiction, the warming of the earth's atmosphere as an immune response to our daily environmental mis-stepping, a call for a re-conceptualization of our cities. We must demand a retrofitting of our urban environments to live together more efficiently, giving credence to community, allowing space for the open wild in us and them. -
Detroit’s Sprawling Legacy: How to Overcome the Automobile? – By Jack Eidt
Posted on March 18, 2012 | 2 CommentsDetroit must overcome its sprawling landscape and its prime benefactor: the automobile, to revive the economy and become an environmentally sustainable 21st Century city. -
Smart Growth: San Diego’s Approach to Sustainable Communities
Posted on March 10, 2012 | 4 CommentsWith "ambitious but achievable" transportation and land use proposals left off the table, California's first climate protection mandated Sustainable Communities Strategy aimed high but did not quite achieve setting the San Diego region on a long-term course toward sustainability. -
How to Build a Greener City – By Michael Totty
Posted on February 21, 2012 | No CommentsWe must re-create cities greener and more sustainable from the ground up. The goal: compact living environments requiring less resources that maximize utilization of land, water and energy. Here are some suggestions. -
Reclaiming Houston: Greening of the Bayou
Posted on February 10, 2012 | 2 CommentsEven Houston, the fossil-fuel-driven, no-zoning-free-market-build-here-there-everywhere-city has found its sustainable voice with the water-park-wildlife-habitat reclamation of Buffalo Bayou. -
San Diego: Sprawling Under Sunshine and the City of Villages – By Jack Eidt
Posted on February 9, 2012 | 1 CommentSan Diego, a militarized metropolis with a deeply stratified economy, began as a series of villages amid canyons served by public transit, transformed into freeway-close suburban sprawl, but slowly reimagines the sustainable village model. -
Philadelphia Green Building: Net-Zero Mixed-Use River Redevelopment
Posted on January 25, 2012 | No CommentsA pioneering green developer in Philadelphia plans the largest "Passive House" mixed-use energy-net-zero redevelopment along the banks of the Schuylkill River. -
Manhattan’s Lower East Side: Underground Trolley Reclamation for Park
Posted on September 25, 2011 | 1 CommentMuch as The High Line transformed an old freight line into an urban greenway, the proposed conversion of the six-decades-disused trolley terminal on the Lower East Side into a park called Delancey Underground, will inevitably be known as the Low Line. -
Newhall Ranch: Feds OK Massive Flood Plain Development
Posted on August 10, 2011 | No CommentsThe US Environmental Protection Agency and Army Corps of Engineers resolved their differences and advanced one of the largest sprawling developments ever contemplated in California on 12,000 acres along the Santa Clara River in northwest Los Angeles County. Newhall Ranch would create a city for 60,000 on a six-mile stretch of the wild, open, agricultural, free-flowing river flood plain. -
Urban Humanity Revival: Walkable Neighborhoods and Mass Transit
Posted on April 25, 2011 | No CommentsThe time is now to invest in walkable neighborhoods accessed by mass transit with opportunities for cultural coming together and societal participation, instead of environmentally-destructive sprawl, cultural intolerance, societal alienation, and personal anonymity. -
China’s Utopian-Growth Overdose: Cities for Nobody
Posted on April 5, 2011 | 2 CommentsChina's planned mega-city for 42 million people has created vacant rows of overpriced high rise apartments and office buildings, sprawling malls without tenants or shoppers, freeways and transit lines constructed for no one. -
Anaheim Platinum Triangle: Visionary Urban Village or Missed Opportunity? By Jack Eidt
Posted on January 12, 2011 | 2 CommentsAnaheim's conflicted planning is ruining the opportunity to create a dense urban village, high-speed-rail-friendly for tourists, sports fans, and 25,000 new residents.
