The Five Urban Growing Guilds formulates an agroecology of urban growing guilds associated with various scales, functions, and agencies bound by context. While not all farming is conducive to urbanization, the model's agroecology absorbs the city’s advantages to deliver combined urban and ecosystem services.
Ecologists consider trees to be the most successful life forms on Earth. Could planning begin with the tree as an irreducible landscape unit to create larger urban and regional frameworks?
Big box retail is the dominant economic system of retailing and is an urbanism all its own. To address such logistical expressions of space, planning introduces a transect of edge effects and frontages to connect public right-of-ways, parking, and stores.
Streets are currently designed to maximize auto traffic flow and to transport polluted stormwater elsewhere. Designed as a park, context-sensitive streets propose a shared infrastructure, integrating pedestrian amenities, stormwater treatment gardens, and building frontage, with traffic throughways.
Since man moves more material around than atmospheric, geological, and oceanic forces combined, land use and transportation are pressing sustainability issues. Each city pattern type generates distinct planning and economic opportunities. Developing the right pattern is critical to a locality’s ongoing viability.
The first hour of urban stormwater runoff has a pollution index far greater than that of raw sewage. LID substitutes an ecological stormwater management system for costly civil engineering technologies―Parks, not Pipes!
The quality of life in a city is determined by its transportation system. Pressing beyond the monoculture of the automobile, TOD combines intermodal transit planning with community development to advance new cultures of mobility, urbanism, commerce, and environmentalism.
Healthy streams deliver 17 critical ecological services whose value can no longer remain outside human systems of development. Watershed Urbanism offers an ecologically-based development model for integrating land development and riparian systems.
