Welcome to my first blog post. My purpose today is to explain what this blog is about, and why I have decided to create it.

As an urban planner and an urban designer, I have become increasingly aware of the negative effects of cities on the natural environment. I’m not just talking about climate change (or anthropogenic global warming, as it is more technically called), but the whole range of harmful impacts that urban spaces produce. These impacts include threats to animal habitats and corresponding losses of biodiversity; pollution in water, air and soil; consumption and exhaustion of finite resources; and alterations to local microclimates, such as urban heat islands (UHI).

So, is this another site bemoaning the excesses of the modern world, and calling for greater environmental justice? No. Or, at least, not entirely. This blog is intended to serve as my scrapbook and ideas laboratory. You see, I have a particular idea that I want to develop. It is an idea which I think may enable cities to mitigate or potentially even reverse the effects they are having on the environment. But, like any idea, it isn’t going to work if it is never shared, tested, or allowed to evolve. In these posts I will be doing just that: sharing my ideas, testing and questioning them openly, and adapting them as new information and ideas form. And ideas do not grow in a vacuum, so I may also occasionally share material that is not my own creation, but that is relevant or useful to the core message of this blog.

As I develop this blog, I hope you will join me in exploring some of these ideas and concepts. The first step to addressing these issues is to talk about them, and that is what I am trying to do here.