Environment

Sociologist Colin Jerolmack explains how the inescapable pigeon can help us understand the broader systems — natural, physical, and cultural — that build our experience of the urban environment.

Restoring paved-over waterways is rightly celebrated for its environmental benefits. Zach Youngerman explores the practice in terms of post-industrial urban revitalization strategies.

Maria Aiolova of Terreform ONE discusses the design group's ONE Prize, an annual design and science award that this year focused on how cities can adapt to future challenges of extreme weather, yielding winning proposals that address coastal conditions from Staten Island to Tokyo to Sumatra.

The Architectural League announces an ambitious initiative to raise our collective discussion of living sustainably to a higher register, imagining the systemic change needed to live well, and to live well within the carrying capacity of the planet.

Chris Reed shares work from a Harvard GSD landscape architecture studio that considers how productive ecologies drive the development of urban form and uses Jamaica Bay as a case study for exploring the opportunities of richly fluid territories.

In the latest installment of their Crisis Fronts degree project, Michael Chen and Jason Lee ask students to use the specific urban challenges of the Bronx to investigate the intersection between public policy and speculative design.

In our third of a series of profiles of Naturally Occurring Cultural Districts around the five boroughs, Joey de Jesus takes us on a tour of Hunts Point, Bronx, to explore how artists, activists, and educators have turned social and environmental challenges into opportunities.

Malaika Kim, one of two runners-up of the Fuzzy Math writing competition, traces how the intangibles of her life — the passage of time, acquired knowledge, and changes in lifestyle and family — have shifted her perception and experience of the physical environment in very measurable ways.

Juliet Helmke traces the origins and prospects of a genre of art that aims to educate and more effectively influence consumer behavior through the reinterpretation of ecological data.

Urban ecologist Alexander Felson proposes a new kind of ecological practice, one that moves from analyzing nature to shaping it and embeds scientific experiments into the design process.