An Array of Utopian Flowers
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The Literary Labyrinth of Stephen T. Vessels
Posted on November 27, 2022 | No Comments - Indigenous Voices from the Northeast: Past, Present and Future
Posted on November 26, 2022 | 1 Comment - Microplastics Are Everywhere: What’s The Risk?
Posted on November 22, 2022 | No Comments - Solving the Climate Crisis Through Global Soil Health with Didi Pershouse
Posted on November 20, 2022 | No Comments - Visionary Art of Lakota Sundance Chief Marvin Swallow
Posted on November 14, 2022 | 2 Comments
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WilderUtopia in 102 Languages
‘Medicine Walk’ Featured in SBLitJo
Santa Barbara Literary Journal released ‘Bellatrix: Volume 3’ in June 2019, which among adventurous fiction, poetry, essays, and lyrics, features an excerpt of Jack Eidt’s psychic-animism fiction, Medicine Walk. Buy the book!
Urban Planning Archive
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Public Art and the Psyche: Olafur Eliasson on Cities
Posted on July 15, 2015 | 1 Comment"City planning has been way too pragmatic for a long time." So says Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson, who creates artistic environments that break down the industrial expanse of cities with faux-natural elements, hot sun, waterfalls, rivers, and take over the senses of their spectators. -
Sprawl vs. Open Space: “Rio Santiago” Again Threatens Orange
Posted on May 13, 2014 | 1 CommentJack Eidt writes on the dangers of proposing mixed use development far from urban amenities and alternative transportation. The real estate industry in Orange County, California and beyond, has consistently violated engineering and planning wisdom by building in floodplains, paving over precious open space land and losing opportunities to preserve wildlife habitat and recreation opportunities amid the suburban sprawl at the edge of the wilderness. -
French-Designed Flower Towers Planned for Casablanca
Posted on March 21, 2014 | No CommentsFrench architect and urban planner Edouard François' latest following the vertical garden trend: A quartet of flower towers in Morocco that will be planted with bougainvillea and jasmine. -
LA River: An Urban Ecosystem Makeover in Transition
Posted on September 16, 2013 | 1 CommentAfter seven years of study, federal officials have recommended a $453-million plan that would restore an 11-mile stretch of the Los Angeles River but leave much of its banks steep and hard to reach. Advocates will continue to press for a more ambitious alternative that would bring more people to the river, improving parks and recreation as well as ecosystems. -
Detroit Future: Landscape Urbanism, Antidote to Industrial Blight
Posted on August 17, 2013 | 4 CommentsFor the last 40 years, Detroiters have fled the once-majestic downtown core for the bucolic image of sprawling suburbia. Now an urban revival in the name of "Detroit Future City," complete with forests, parks, farms and waterways, is planned to overcome the financial mismanagement and industrial blight that have plagued the city for far too long. -
Win:Win Journal – Re-Imagining Los Angeles
Posted on May 31, 2013 | 2 CommentsWIN:WIN “The Future, a Sustainable Los Angeles” - How does Los Angeles - its people, buildings and infrastructure establish a restorative, long-term relationship with the environment that hosts it and the financial systems that supports it? Read Jack Eidt's Essay on Poly-Human Los Angeles -
Urban Ecology: Promoting Life in the Concrete Jungle
Posted on November 30, 2012 | 2 CommentsIn the growing field of urban ecology, scientists study cities as if they were ecosystems. With cities launching efforts to slash carbon emissions, reduce water use and improve habitats, scientists are beginning to evaluate how such policies affect the overall health of the urban environment. -
A Los Angeles Rail~Volution: A City in Sustainable Transition
Posted on October 23, 2012 | 1 CommentThe Rail~Volution Conference rolled into Los Angeles to illustrate how transit projects energize neighborhoods, meeting a significant demand for multi-density housing walkable to restaurants, offices, and shops. They can transform the landscape and mindset, in this case, of auto-addicted Southern California. One stop at a time. -
Electric Streetcars: Back to the Urban Future
Posted on August 25, 2012 | 2 CommentsThe movement toward revitalization of downtown areas in the United States with streetcars brings 19th century urbanism together with 21st century sustainability, despite the usual fossil fueled detractors. -
Chinese Mega-Cities Contrasted with Calvino’s ‘Invisible Cities”
Posted on August 13, 2012 | 2 CommentsRapid industrialization in China has caused a massive migration to crowded, faceless and polluted urban mega-cities of 10 million residents or more. They should consider Italo Calvino's utopian "Invisible Cities" to rethink the role of imagination in urban planning. -
Detroit Works: Urban Farming and Reforestation as Neighborhood Preservation
Posted on August 9, 2012 | 21 CommentsDetroit Future City, the long-term planning vision for the long-rusting Motor City, embraces the urban farming, permaculture, and ecological urbanism movements seen in cities across the United States, to chart the way to more a prosperous and sustainable future. -
Singapore: Gardens By The Bay Sprout Supertrees and Horticultural Conservatories
Posted on July 25, 2012 | No CommentsGigantic steel, concrete and wire trees rise from manicured serpentine gardens, human-blessed symmetry reaching skyward. At the bay’s edge, two sustainably-designed domes invite visitors to explore world biomes and horticultural paradises. A public amusement park, ecological urbanism designed to invite the populace to rediscover the earth, a visit to Singapore’s Gardens by the Bay evokes a green wonderland, human-designed, artistically crafted, growing "wild" and sort-of-natural. -
Ecological Urbanism: A City Green Re-Imagination
Posted on April 17, 2012 | 12 CommentsWe must view the fragility of the planet, the disaster of our resource addiction, the warming of the earth's atmosphere as an immune response to our daily environmental mis-stepping, a call for a re-conceptualization of our cities. We must demand a retrofitting of our urban environments to live together more efficiently, giving credence to community, allowing space for the open wild in us and them. -
Detroit’s Sprawling Legacy: How to Overcome the Automobile?
Posted on March 18, 2012 | 7 CommentsDetroit must overcome its landscape sprawl and its prime benefactor: the automobile, to revive the economy and become an environmentally sustainable 21st Century city. -
Smart Growth: San Diego’s Approach to Sustainable Communities
Posted on March 10, 2012 | 4 CommentsWith "ambitious but achievable" transportation and land use proposals left off the table, California's first climate protection mandated Sustainable Communities Strategy aimed high but did not quite achieve setting the San Diego region on a long-term course toward sustainability. -
Manhattan’s Lower East Side: Underground Trolley Reclamation for Park
Posted on September 25, 2011 | 1 CommentMuch as The High Line transformed an old freight line into an urban greenway, the proposed conversion of the six-decades-disused trolley terminal on the Lower East Side into a park called Delancey Underground, will inevitably be known as the Low Line. -
Permaculture: Land-Based System of Human Rewilding
Posted on May 21, 2011 | 10 CommentsPermaculture is an integrative approach to re-creating sustainable cities, towns and villages, emulating ecologic relationships from wild nature. The practice encompasses architecture, horticulture, energy, waste management, and urban planning. -
Urban Humanity Revival: Walkable Neighborhoods and Mass Transit
Posted on April 25, 2011 | No CommentsThe time is now to invest in walkable neighborhoods accessed by mass transit with opportunities for cultural coming together and societal participation, instead of environmentally-destructive sprawl, cultural intolerance, societal alienation, and personal anonymity. -
Suburban Sprawl: Serpentine Sameness from the Skies
Posted on November 18, 2010 | 3 CommentsHelicopter photos by Christoph Gielen reveal the beautifully-designed patterns and shapes of our auto-dependent homes on the range, walking not preferred, neighbors as yet uncontacted, wildlife unwelcome, sustainable future in question. -
Megacities Rise from the Egyptian Desert
Posted on August 31, 2010 | No CommentsUnsustainable urban sprawl continues to spread through the world responding to massive population growth and poor planning practices, as people clamor to escape the crowded, contaminated, crime-ridden urban miasma like Cairo.
