Sustainable Cities

When Cities and Wetlands Collide

When Cities and Wetlands Collide

Describes the winning entry in the recent Gowanus Lowline Competition. The winning entry, which is described encapsulates the kind of far sighted bio-mimetic and bio-symbiotic urban design our country needs. Reading this post is like reading a how to book on healing the earth; and in particular healing the brownfield urban wastelands, very often built over per-existing wetlands.

Call for Papers for Special Issue on Culture and Sustainable Communities

Call for Papers for Special Issue on Culture and Sustainable Communities

Culture and Local Governance / Culture et Gouvernance Locale is now accepting manuscript submissions for its ‘Culture and Sustainable Communities’ special issue to be published in September 2010. Papers are invited across a broad range of theory and practice of cultural sustainability planning within the municipal context. Potential themes include, but are not limited to, case studies of municipalities that incorporate culture within sustainability planning, new strategic approaches and frameworks of incorporating culture within sustainability initiatives, theoretical examinations and adaptation of cultural considerations within the sustainability paradigm, and the interplay between diversity and sustainability in municipal cultural plans. Culture and Local Governance is a peer-reviewed open access online journal publishing original work, both theoretical and empirical, on the relation between culture and local governance. This special issue takes as a foundational understanding that culture is by nature diverse and evolving, and intercultural realities and relationships must be incorporated as integral to any understanding of culture and sustainability in contemporary cities and communities. These varied, distributed efforts reflect a quickly emerging field of inquiry and practice, which this special issue hopes to reflect.

Are Zero Waste Communities A Viable Option for Achieving Sustainability in The United States?

Are Zero Waste Communities A Viable Option for Achieving Sustainability in The United States?

Imagine a world where the concept of “waste” does not exist. A world in which nothing gets discarded, every industrial product gets reassembled into something useful, each unit of energy is offset and anything and everything is a renewable resource. This is the design principle and environmental philosophy of “zero waste”.

Farming the Concrete Jungle, Feeding a Green Economy

Urban and peri-urban agriculture (UPA) is rapidly spreading around the world. The global adoption of urban farming is primarily being driven by the dire poverty of much of the world’s urban poor and is becoming an increasingly vital part of the world’s urban food supply. In rich developed cities around the world an urban farming movement is also taking root, partly because of environmental concerns and the adoption of a local food ethic, but also to help address the persistent hunger that still exists in urban areas in industrialized countries.