Welcome to Urban Ecology
Urban Ecology is dedicated to developing harmony with urban planning and nature.
This site highlights all that Urban Ecology has accomplished over the years. We hope these archives inspire you to continue the pursuit of harmony between urban planning and the natural world around us.
Urban Ecology is published to provide information and encourage dialogue on issues related to the urban environment, city and regional planning, and metropolitan affairs.
Urban Ecology gives voice to an ecological urbanism. It encourages readers engaged in urban design, governance, and activism to incorporate ecological sensitivity into their work and to understand the links between the built and natural environments and the many-layered concerns and needs of the people who live in urban settings around the world.
Success Stories!
Below are just a few of our success stories. You can find more details of some of these success stories under our Community Design Consulting section.
Active and Healthy Parks and Schoolyards
Oakland, California Challenge Residents of Oakland’s Eastlake, Lower San Antonio, and Fruitvale neighborhoods suffer disproportionately from illnesses such as heart disease, hypertension, and asthma. A range of factors contribute to the prevalence of these illnesses...
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Visitacion Valley
San Francisco, California Challenge Visitacion Valley in San Francisco, California, has been changing steadily as immigrants from Asia have added to the community’s diversity, and as mounting real estate prices in other parts of San Francisco have driven...
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Urban Promise Academy Campus Improvement Plan
Manzanita Community / SEED Schoolyard Redesign
Nevin Park Re-Design Project
Richmond, CA Background Nevin Park sits at the center of Richmond’s Iron Triangle, an inner city neighborhood that is an historic hub of the City’s African-American community. The Nevin Community Center and the Richmond Museum of History, housed in a landmarked...
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Green Business Certification
Summary The San Francisco Green Business Team includes Urban Ecology, the San Francisco Department of Public Health (SF.DPH), San Francisco Department of the Environment (SFE), and the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SF.PUC). This team provides free...
read moreCommunity Design Consulting Services
Some of our past projects.
Visitacion Valley Community Vision
Telegraph-Northgate Neighborhood Plan
Just north of downtown Oakland, the Telegraph-Northgate neighborhood displays familiar signs of disinvestment: the major retail corridors are lined with vacant storefronts; the older houses are crumbling; and the parks are filled with graffiti and shards of glass. But...
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Visitacion Valley Neighborhood Center Plan
24 th Street BART Plazas Community Design Plan
The Clinton Park Plan
Introduction to our Community Design Consulting Program
Urban Ecology's Community Design Program is a cutting-edge example of how a sustainable vision embraces both social justice and environmental health in our cities. In collaboration with grassroots groups in low-income neighborhoods, Urban Ecology creates plans that...
read morePast Articles from Our Journal
You can visit our contact page to submit your own article! Find all our past journal articles here.
Tunnels for Munich?
by Ron Widenhoeft In Munich, one of Germany’s most attractive cities, political controversy rages over whether the Middle Ring Road needs three new tunnels. By putting heavily burdened segments of the highway underground, advocates promise to enhance safety on the...
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Green Building Materials
by Darrel Deboer Through the 1980’s, if one claimed to be an "environmentally-oriented" designer, people’s first reaction was to look up on the roof for the solar panels. The environmental impacts, toxicity, and origin of building materials were rarely questioned....
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Regional Polarization and Tax Sharing
by Myron Orfield The forces of polarization — the push of concentrated poverty and the pull of concentrated resources — operate throughout metropolitan regions. Because the dynamics are regional, only a regional approach can change them. There is little that...
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Bangkok’s Motorcycle Taxis
Sustainable Development Around the World
Waterfront Park in Venice A 1,400-acre urban park is taking shape on the site of a landfill on the lagoon facing Venice, Italy. Parco San Guiliano will contain 13 activity centers featuring boating clubs, marinas, museums, an aquarium, a marine biology research...
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Malawi Graduates Turn Street People
Divided We Stand: A Biography of New York’s World Trade Center
Common Place: Toward Neighborhood and Regional Design
by Douglas Kelbaugh reviewed by Stephen Wheeler One the most important challenges facing urban ecologists currently is to develop a language of urban design that integrates different scales -- the building, site, neighborhood, city and region -- in ways that further...
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Creating the Blueprint: A Participatory Process
by Wood Turner Urban Ecology's Blueprint for a Sustainable Bay Area spells out the organization's vision of how the San Francisco Bay Area can become a better place to live for all its residents. It is the result of a thoughtful and tireless process intended to...
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City Front Shorts
Addressing Inequity at Barrio Logan
by Michael Rios The public spaces of Barrio Logan, a low-income Latino neighborhood in San Diego, proclaim a unique Mexican and Chicano culture. The neighborhood faces the San Diego Bay towards Coronado Island and is thirteen miles from the Tijuana border. Physically...
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A Letter from the President
I thought I'd take this opportunity to report to you from the front lines of sustainable development. Since September 1996 I've been working with Van der Ryn Architects and the Ecological Design Institute, where we get many opportunities to plan and design using the...
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