Named one of the American Society of Landscape Architects’ Best Books of 2016, Nature and Cities asserts that ecologically based urban designs and plans are essential as the world urbanizes and the effects of climate change grow more severe. In this collection of essays, leading international landscape architects, architects, city planners, and urban designers explore the economic, environmental, and public health benefits of integrating nature more fully into cities and of linking ecological information to actions across many scales, communities, and regions. The book builds upon the premise of Ecological Design and Planning, also edited by George F. Thompson and Frederick R. Steiner (Wiley, 1997).

What gives you the hope that a sustainable future is possible? Designed for the Future collects 80 diverse answers to this question from some of today’s most innovative thinkers. Leaders in architecture, urban planning, landscape architecture, journalism, and environment contribute their imaginative solutions to a sustainable future. For example, “a sustainable future is one in which we have the capacity to adapt to ever-changing dynamic conditions. This means that humans, together with our environment, have transformative capacity.” Designing for the future requires an open dialogue about the nuanced forms of sustainability and how we can realistically achieve these goals.

A selection of the world’s leading experts on urbanism reflect on the changing role that water plays in cities. They investigate the possible consequences of global warming on urban water supplies, including new problems with drought and flooding, as well as the new pressures of dealing with storm waters and basin management. This book is organized in three sections, each of which explores urban water use through a particular theme: Contemporary Positions, Re-visiting/Re-editing Urban Water Projects and Explorations & Speculations. This richly illustrated book offers a wide-ranging account of the myriad roles water plays in our modern city centers.

“Ecology and landscape architecture, joined by a mutual preoccupation with living, constantly changing systems, are opening uncharted horizons of study with powerful technical capability trained on rapidly emerging environmental concerns.  This collection, edited by Chris Reed, ASLA, and Nina-Marie Lister, surveys the current and coming direction of ecological investigation in landscape architecture among a number of theorists, scientists, and design practitioners.”

“Policies promoting Toronto as a global city and provincial economic engine have been seen as beneficial to the development of all of Ontario, yet much of the province has borne significant environmental, social, economic, and political costs as a result of one city’s growth. Contributors to this volume call for a radical re-imagining of public policy at local, provincial, and federal levels, that accounts for Ontario’s overlooked regions.

In a series of regional studies, contributors describe each area’s distinctive qualities and challenges and offer recommendations about what is needed to move them forward in a more equitable and sustainable way.”

In this chapter, Nina-Marie Lister explores the often forgotten social and cultural importance and application of spatial analysis and map making.  Maps are a critical element of human history can play a critical role in storytelling and placemaking, as well as building social capital and urban sustainability.  In light of this, Lister recounts and reflects on The Explorer’s Map of the Toronto Bay project, a joint classroom and community learning effort in the context of sustainability that included identifying, exploring and mapping special places within the urban landscape.

“While climate change, sustainable architecture, and green technologies have become increasingly topical, issues surrounding the sustainability of the city are much less developed. The premise of the book is that an ecological approach is urgently needed both as a remedial device for the contemporary city and an organizing principle for new cities. The book brings together design practitioners and theorists, economists, engineers, artists, policy makers, environmental scientists, and public health specialists, with the goal of reaching a more robust understanding of ecological urbanism and what it might be in the future.”

“Water is the chemical matrix required for life, the molecular chain that connects all organisms on the planet. But in the twenty-first century, water may replace oil as the most prized of resources. Just as gas-guzzling SUVs use more than their share of fuel, water-guzzling regions threaten the water supply for the rest of the world. In Water, writers, scientists, architects, and artists consider the many aspects of water, at levels from the microscopic to the global, touching on subjects that range from new water infrastructures to ancient bathing rituals.” Water includes accounts from a variety of perspectives, with three examples being a description of how Toronto, New York, Hamburg, and Seoul have redesigned and rethought their waterfront areas, two architects’ rethinking of how to collect, divert, and transport water from water-rich to water-poor regions, and photographs of a disturbingly beautiful flooded landscape.

“Advancing a methodology that is rooted in good theory and practice, this book features case studies conducted in the Arctic and Africa, in Canada and Kathmandu, and in the Peruvian Amazon, Chesapeake Bay, and Chennai, India. Applying a systems approach to concrete environmental issues, this volume is geared toward scientists, engineers, and sustainable development scholars and practitioners who are attuned to the ideas of the Resilience Alliance-an international group of scientists who take a more holistic view of ecology and environmental problem-solving. Chapters cover the origins and rebirth of the ecosystem approach in ecology; the bridging of science and values; the challenge of governance in complex systems; systemic and participatory approaches to management; and the place for cultural diversity in the quest for global sustainability.”

“Most critical studies in landscape architecture tend to approach it from a historical or contemporary perspective organized around criteria such as built versus unbuilt, urban versus peripheral, or competition-sponsored versus commission-based. Very few analyses have been undertaken from the seemingly obvious jumping-off point of size. In Large Parks, Julia Czerniak and George Hargreaves present eight essays by leading scholars and practitioners that engage large urban parks in depth as complex cultural spaces, where key issues of landscape discourse, ecological challenges, social history, urban relations, and place-making are writ large.

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“Food is essential to our sense of place and our sense of self, but today—as fast food nation meets the slow food movement and eating locally collides with on-demand arugula—our food habits are shifting. Food examines and imagines these changes, with projects by writers and artists that explore the cultural and emotional resonance of food…Projects include a map of the free food from fruit trees on public land in a Los Angeles neighborhood, a visionary plan for farms in skyscrapers, and a surprising report on food security. The essays, artwork, and stories in Food offer readers a full menu of intellectual nourishment and aesthetic delight.”

“It might, at first glance, seem to many that industry and ecology make strange bedfellows. For proponents of sustainable development, however, such a union is crucial. How else are we to make the industries that are so central to modern societies consistent with our visions of a sustainable future?

Linking Industry and Ecology explores the origins, promise, and relevance of the emerging field of industrial ecology. It situates industrial ecology within the broader range of environmental management strategies and concepts, from the practices of pollution prevention through life cycle management, to the more fundamental shift toward dematerialization and ecological design. The book makes a compelling argument for the need to think ecologically to develop innovative and competitive industrial policy.”

“Trash: the emptied out, the used up, the broken, the outgrown, the obsolete; the dispossessed, the lost, the left behind. In Trash, writers, artists, and filmmakers look at how we are defined by what we waste and discover that we are what we throw away. Trash surveys a terrain that ranges from micro (a typology of dust bunnies) to macro (studies of landfill design and the trashed space of urban brownfield sites). It investigates the logic of trash as it is applied to humans and looks at lives intimately dependent on trash, taking us from the abducted girls of Juarez to the recycling communities of China.”

“Clearcut forests, endangered species, national parks, loss of crop varieties: in the last decade the common element of these varied concerns has become widely recognized. These are all biodiversity issues: they relate to the variety of life on Earth and our relationship with it. This relationship is now capturing the attention of activists, scientists, policymakers, and the public, from negotiations at the United Nations to concerns about the neighborhood park.

Biodiversity issues raise many questions. How many species are there, and what do they need to survive? How have we learned what we know about biodiversity? What is its value? What policies are needed to protect it? Who participates in protecting biodiversity: governments, industry, activists?

This book explores answers to these questions and, in doing so, shows how biodiversity, like other complex environmental issues, can only be understood through the insights provided by many perspectives. The authors contributing to this volume include scientists, historians, anthropologists, lawyers, political scientists, economists, and planners. Together, they provide an interdisciplinary perspective on biodiversity in Canada, especially useful for undergraduate courses in environmental and natural resource studies, geography, and political science.”