Architecture & Urban Planning

Few weeks ago, Jessica Hall, a Los Angeles landscape architect who also co-authors the excellent L.A. Creek Freak blog, showed me around some of the little-known wetlands of the old Dominguez Slough, hidden in the South Bay cities of Torrance, Gardena, and Carson.

Editor's Note: The Robert and Patricia Switzer Foundation helped fund Sarah's early work on Conservation Development with the Wildlife Conservation Society through a Leadership Grant.

Bike paths, bike lanes, bike racks, and cycle tracks. Bike this and bike that. Cities and towns across Greater Boston are peddling cycling construction projects this summer like never before: If it isn’t a Newton city committee proposing 30 new miles of bike lanes, it’s Malden and Everett converting downtown railroad beds into a multiuse path, or Charlestown and Jamaica Plain residents lobbying for bike improvements once antiquated highway overpasses are torn down. Read the full story

This research will explore the motivations for and outcomes associated with the stewardship of sustainable yard practices and design, with "sustainable yards" being those that more closely mimic natural processes and vegetation composition and configuration. The research will be guided by a conceptual framework that focuses on the poorly understood linkages between the motivation for urban stewardship of sustainable yards, and the ecological outcomes from yard management.

Five years ago, Women in Green: Voices of Sustainable Design was published after Lance Hosey and I spent 18 months interviewing hundreds of people and trying to understand why it seemed like there was a preponderance of women doing “green” in many fields. Individual stories poured out and we assembled a suggestive but hardly conclusive collective story. We had the privilege of dipping in and were the beneficiaries of the generosity of an amazing community of creative people—but it’s clear that there is much more to discuss on the topic.

While shrubs may shield bad behavior, mature, well-tended trees do just the opposite, said J. Morgan Grove, a social ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service and one of the study's three authors. That could be important for a city like Baltimore, where trees cover just 27 percent of its landscape and some neighborhoods are practically barren. Read the full story

"It's an evolution, not a revolution," said Stuart Cohen, head of TransForm, a transportation and land-use coalition that supports the plan. "What's stronger than ever is how we're spending our (transportation) money, and where growth is happening."