Topic: Infrastructure

As Wars Rage, Cities Face a Dark New Era of Urban Destruction

By Anthony Flint, January 29, 2025

This article is reprinted with permission from Bloomberg CityLab, where it originally appeared.

Not far from the pyramids of Giza, symbols of the endurance of civilization, a global group of urban planners and scholars recently gathered to confront the myriad threats afflicting the physical city.

Calamity associated with climate change continued to be top of mind at UN-Habitat’s World Urban Forum 12, a summit to promote equitable and sustainable global cities held in Cairo in November. But another driver of urban devastation loomed especially large: intensifying military conflict.

In Gaza and Ukraine, entire neighborhoods have been reduced to rubble, following on the vast destruction seen in Syria, Iraq, and the former Yugoslavia in the last nearly half-century. While attacking human settlement is hardly new—from the sacking of Rome to the London blitz to Hiroshima and Nagasaki—the razing of cities has grown in intensity and scope, researchers say, thanks to shifts in military strategy and advances in missile, bomb, and drone technology.

Accordingly, conflict-driven destruction—and the vastly complicated associated questions of humanitarian triage, refugees, and ultimately, rebuilding—played a prominent role in policy discussions at WUF12. With urban ruination occurring in real time not far away, one of the forum’s six major “dialogues” confronted the issue directly: In a session called “The Loss of Home,” delegates addressed “displacement caused by global crises, with a focus on rebuilding resilient communities and strengthening urban responses to protect the idea of home.”

The forum’s concluding resolution acknowledged the toll, citing “the need for resilient urban systems that can adapt and respond to the needs of all residents, fostering social cohesion and the reconstruction of homes” and noting that “local governments play a key role in driving solutions and integrating the forcibly displaced into urban development strategies.”

“Those of us brought up as architects or urban planners, we know that the home is not just about the provision of shelter,” but is inextricably bound up with family, community, culture and identity, said Sultan Barakat, professor of public policy at Qatar Foundation’s Hamad Bin Khalifa University and one of the speakers at the dialogue.

Any plans for accommodating displaced peoples, or in the longer term, reconstruction—a politically fraught exercise that will depend on who is doing the rebuilding, and paying for it—must acknowledge these powerful associations, Barakat said.

While there is no single metric, researchers and international aid organizations agree that urban destruction driven by conflict has intensified in the first quarter of the 21st century. Since 2002, approximately 432,000 civilians have been killed, and 38 million forcibly displaced, according to the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University. Most were city dwellers, partly a reflection of continuing global rural-to-urban migration.

Over the last several decades, the battlefield has shifted to dense urban areas, military scholars say, often because insurgent or paramilitary forces have embedded themselves into the civilian population. In other cases, armies are simply seeking to make territorial gains city by city—an established military tactic that is today playing out in an excruciatingly drawn-out process.

“Evacuation and exile appear to be the main objective: depopulation lowers the human capital of countries and depresses their economies,” writes University of Glasgow professor Josef Konvitz in his 2023 article “People Are the Target: Urban Destruction in the 21st Century.” “Moreover, the increased number of refugees can be turned into an instrument to exert leverage on other countries, destabilizing regions far removed from the war zone.”

Advances in weaponry also play a role. While modern weapons systems can hit with great accuracy—and in some cases civilians are forewarned of an attack—the sheer volume and intensity of today’s urban bombardments has brought shocking devastation. By some measures, the campaign on Gaza has outpaced Allied bombings of Germany during World War II. Human rights groups have decried the use of weapons like ground-penetrating bunker buster ordnance, air-launched glide bombs and “barrel bombs”—oil barrels filled with explosives—on the populations of cities like Kharkiv in Ukraine and Aleppo in Syria. This carnage has brought into the discourse the concept of urbicide, referring to the deliberate destruction of cities, their iconic architecture, and their identity.

The end result, as listed by United Nations Under-Secretary Anacláudia Rossbach, executive director of UN-Habitat, which organizes the World Urban Forum: 1.4 million homes damaged or destroyed and 3.7 million people displaced in Ukraine; 227,000 homes destroyed and 2 million forced to flee in Gaza; and 6,700 residential buildings destroyed and 1.2 million people displaced in Lebanon.

“The situation is huge and urgent. The sense of emergency—we need to bring that to the table,” she said before a hushed audience at the event, offering to work with other parts of the UN, especially with regard to building safe housing. “My view on that is that we can support in looking at the long term. While all the agencies are very well equipped to provide immediate humanitarian support, we can help look beyond the humanitarian crisis. We can work with communities, with local governments, with local stakeholders, with the civil society, because we do have these entry points naturally throughout our work.”

 

Anaclaudia Rossbach, executive director of UN-Habitat, speaks at a podium at the World Urban Forum in 2024.
Conflict-related destruction of cities is a “huge and urgent” situation, said Anacláudia Rossbach, executive director of UN-Habitat and former director of the Lincoln Institute’s Latin America and the Caribbean program, at the World Urban Forum in 2024. Credit: UN-Habitat.

 

Beyond near-term measures geared toward humanitarian relief and accepting refugees—an estimated 9 million are expected in Egypt alone—the broader discussion of reconstruction from these current conflicts is so politically fraught that it’s hard to envision a way back from all the destruction. The rebuilding of Europe under the Marshall Plan appears straightforward by comparison. As the journal article author Konvitz wrote: “Cities destroyed in world wars were rebuilt; cities destroyed in today’s urban battles, often in fragile, unstable states, may be left in ruins for years.”

Nevertheless, there are tools and methodologies available to facilitate rebuilding, these experts said in Cairo, from post-disaster land readjustment strategies to geospatial mapping, which can instantly assess the damage and define the land use parameters of reconstruction.

At WUF12, those with experience with the devastation of warfare on cities talked about the importance of neighborhood-scale planning. Mona Fawaz, professor in urban studies and planning at the American University of Beirut, warned against a focus on rebuilding individual buildings, which can engender competition. Instead, she envisioned building a “collective” that would have “custody over the neighborhood and the space of negotiation with public authorities. Once we don’t focus on the collective and we don’t put the public at the center of our attention, what happens is that people don’t come back.”

Another challenge, she said, is the regulatory framework. Consider that cities and villages in southern Lebanon, for example, were built before modern building codes: “So the framework allows only for reconstruction not as it used to be before, which destroys heritage and the sense of identity in these collectives, or then to build illegally.”

Ammar Azzouz, a research fellow at the School of Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford, agreed that if cities can ever recover from the horrors of conflict over recent years, rebuilding will need to be informed by more basic elements of urbanism. There is too much emphasis on the destruction of “cultural heritage and monuments and the ancient and the classical antiquity sites, but less often there is a focus on the everyday, on the mundane, on the bakery shops on the streets, the neighborhood, the schools,” he said.

Azzouz, the author of Domicide: Architecture, War, and the Destruction of Home in Syria, left his hometown of Homs, Syria, in 2011, and has not been able to return.

“These power dynamics are so important, and I feel like we have to to move from our obsession in academia and journalism and international organizations of focusing on one mosque or one church or a bridge, to celebrate the success of reconstruction,” Azzouz said, asserting that master plans formulated by aggressors do not constitute genuine rebuilding at all. “We need to think about the wider question of what reconstruction means for the local people, and how can we listen to their voices.”

 


 

Anthony Flint is a senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, host of the Land Matterspodcast, and a contributing editor of Land Lines.

Lead image: A residential building in Odesa, Ukraine, damaged by a Russian drone strike in 2024. Credit: Office of the President of Ukraine via Flickr/CC0 1.0 Universal.

A hand-painted stop sign on a street corner in New Orleans.
City Tech

Of Potshots and Potholes: Social Media and Urban Infrastructure

By Rob Walker, January 24, 2025

For years, a certain resident of New Orleans, someone who drives a lot for work, would turn one corner or another and encounter an all-too-familiar sight: a road pocked with potholes and broken pavement. “Look at this freakin’ street,” he would say to himself. Actually, he said something a little more salty than “freakin’,” and eventually converted his repeated utterance into the handle of an Instagram account devoted to documenting, and venting about, the many flaws of the Crescent City’s infrastructure.

Today the account (we’ll just call it LATFS) has more than 125,000 followers—including employees of city and water utility agencies whose accounts it tagged in some snide posts. “I figured I’d just get blocked,” says the account’s creator, who has chosen to remain anonymous. Instead, those agencies started to pay attention to the account—and, in some cases, problems flagged (and mocked) on LATFS promptly got fixed. Today the account’s creator mostly curates submissions from others, and while the account quite clearly is not an official part of New Orleans’ infrastructure maintenance system, it’s hard to deny that it’s part of the conversation. And there may be lessons in that for cities looking to harness citizen input to manage infrastructure maintenance.

The use of technology to strengthen government-citizen communication is of course a long-established practice. The Federal Communications Commission designated 311 for non-emergency government service in 1996. Baltimore was the first city to implement a 311 system that year, and other cities followed, offering an easy way for citizens to report potholes, graffiti, malfunctioning stoplights, and so on. This early version of crowdsourcing soon moved online, evolving into web- or app-based systems that can (depending on the municipality) respond to texts, accept photo or video submissions, and incorporate back-end software that can collect and consolidate service data.

Along the way, private-sector services emerged to develop and provide cities with more efficient and consumer-friendly citizen-connection platforms. SeeClickFix, a pioneer in that category, was created by New Haven entrepreneur Ben Berkowitz and partners in 2007, and acquired in 2019 by CivicPlus, a public sector tech firm with over 10,000 municipal clients. CivicPlus offers a variety of software and services from local government software to websites to an emergency alert system. One of its clients’ top priorities across categories is making these systems work together as seamlessly as possible, says Cari Tate, solutions director at CivicPlus.

For 311-style products, that means getting user concerns to the right part of city government smoothly, and making sure people feel heard. “Residents ultimately want to see their communities improved,” says Tate, a SeeClickFix veteran who came to CivicPlus with the acquisition. “And want to partner with their local governments to do so. But they often don’t know how, or they feel like their comments go into the void.”

Partly that’s a matter of improving functionality. The publication Government Technology surveyed app-store reviews for 75 city and county 311 apps and identified Improve Detroit as one of the most praised. The app, which uses SeeClickFix software, is regularly updated with relevant new features—for example, after flooding in 2021, the city added a tool to file water damage claims.

A series of screenshots from the Improve Detroit app, which allows residents to report infrastructure issues to the city.
A national survey of reviews of municipal 311 apps ranked Improve Detroit among the most praised. Credit: City of Detroit.

 

But partly the effectiveness of a citizen-to-government tech connection may also be a matter of meeting residents where they are, which is increasingly on social media. Over the years, some municipalities have publicized hashtags—like #502pothole for Louisville residents, as an example—that citizens could use to flag problems via popular social platforms like Twitter (now X) and Instagram.

Not surprisingly, users of such platforms don’t need an invitation to sound off about the flaws or blemishes of their local infrastructure. And sounding off in public digital spaces often feels more satisfying than going through official channels. New Orleans, for example, has a 311 service, but it can feel like a “black box” compared to the buzzy camaraderie of Instagram, the creator of LATFS points out. When the latter actually gets results, that fact just heightens the attention. A recent example: A series of images of a fallen stop sign and its citizen-painted replacement caught the attention of a city council member who leaned on city services to make a real fix—and credited LATFS to local media. (A spokesperson for the city’s sewer and water utility says as an entity it does not “actively follow” LATFS in a formal way, but is aware of the account; often the utility is aware of issues before they show up on social media, the spokesperson added, pointing to the official “robust” customer contact phone number as the best way to report an issue.)

One challenge with making practical use of social media accounts is that reactions to fleeting problems may lack context. For actual infrastructure planning, social data is “actually really muddy, not specific,” says Julia Kumari Drapkin, CEO and founder of ISeeChange, a climate risk data and community engagement platform that works with New Orleans, Miami, and other municipalities and utilities. Its approach takes in social media data and uses AI to help craft bigger-picture solutions. As it happens, it has worked with LATFS, asking it to direct followers to the ISeeChange app during flood events, enabling residents to upload real-time reports and photos.

ISeeChange’s software can take in that information and combine it with data from its municipal and utility clients to deliver insights with tangible impacts, Drapkin says. In one recent project with engineering and design firm Stantec, ISeeChange collected firsthand, citizen-provided flood data that helped improve a flood infrastructure project in New Orleans. This resulted in the reallocation of $4.8 million in federal funding, more than doubling stormwater capacity in one low-income neighborhood. On the ground residents, she maintains, can provide the best data.

Social media’s role in reporting infrastructure issues may be somewhat messy, but its sheer popularity makes it hard to ignore. Last year, Tulane University sociology PhD candidate Alex Turvy published an article in the journal Social Media + Society closely analyzing LATFS posts and comments provided to him by the account’s founder, and concluding that it is “an effective and powerful participatory platform for exposing a broad range of systemic problems and their causes.” Boiling user strategies down into categories (shaming, mocking, and exposing), he contends that the account allows residents, through humor, connection, and “in-group knowledge,” to “take back the narrative of their city’s infrastructure challenges” and who is responsible for them. And while there is plenty of anger and snark, resident users also swap explanations and practical information.

Turvy acknowledges both the utility of 311-style systems and the challenge an actual city government would face in trying to corral the disgruntled and profane discourse of something like LATFS. And while similar citizen-driven accounts have popped up elsewhere—Pittsburgh’s PWSA Sinkholes on Instagram is a notable example—many fizzle out if they fail to attract submissions and followers. But even if LATFS is an outlier, cities might still learn from it, Turvy argues.

“The core lesson is that cities need to move beyond treating citizen reports as individual service requests and instead view them as part of a collective narrative on infrastructure issues,” he says. While traditional systems feel transactional, LATFS feels like a shared story. Its success, he continues, “highlights the power of storytelling over service processing.” To encourage that “organic, citizen-driven” feel, cities could work with community groups, communicate more proactively, and clearly demonstrate how citizen feedback is being put to work.

Some of this may seem a bit utopian, but it also overlaps with trends and aspirations for 311-style systems. Cities are looking “to provide a way for residents to actually hear back and to see all of the other things that they’re doing,” says Tate of CivicPlus. Too often, “you see all of the problems, but we don’t see what the city is actually doing.” Cities are increasingly looking for systems with strong data analytics that also “provide visibility, and actually shift that mindset and build trust.”

While LATFS remains a highly irreverent forum focused more on complaints and jokes than on civics or the complexities of infrastructure planning, the city’s engagement with the account has probably softened its original oppositional feel. “We try not to post things that are in the middle of repair, which I get a lot of,” says its founder. “We can’t shame the city for repairing things.” That said, he is also quick to point out that he’s a citizen, not a stealth urban planner or city activist. As he put it: “I’m just a guy posting on Instagram.” But sometimes, that’s exactly the person the city needs to hear from—and wants to engage.

A black and white bumper sticker reads, "I'd rather be trolling city officials about their mismanagement of public funds on new orleans' infrastructure projects."
Yes, there is merch. Credit: LATFS.

 


Rob Walker is a journalist covering design, technology, and other subjects. He is the author of City Tech: 20 Apps, Ideas, and Innovators Changing the Urban Landscape. His newsletter is at robwalker.substack.com.

Lead image: This photo of a hand-painted New Orleans stop sign held up with plastic wrap gained notoriety—and inspired the city to install a proper replacement—after it appeared on a citizen-led Instagram account dedicated to flagging necessary infrastructure repairs. Credit: LATFS.

Tercera edición del Premio Lincoln anual reconoce la presentación de informes sobre políticas de suelo en América Latina

Por Jon Gorey, November 19, 2024

En la ciudad ecuatoriana de Durán, más del 70 por ciento de los 325.000 residentes estimados no tienen servicio de agua potable ni alcantarillado. Deben comprar agua transportada por camiones cisterna, una situación precaria y aparentemente insostenible que ha persistido durante casi 40 años. Cuando un equipo de periodistas se dispuso a investigar las razones de la inadecuada infraestructura de agua de Durán —y descubrió parte del encubrimiento del gobierno y la corrupción del sector privado detrás de esta—, comenzó a recibir amenazas de violencia.

Sin embargo, el equipo perseveró y publicó una serie de investigaciones multimedia, en la que se describe con gran detalle cómo la colusión entre los actores gubernamentales y el sector privado ha restringido el acceso al servicio básico de agua potable para la mayoría de la población de Durán. En octubre de este año, el Instituto Lincoln de Políticas de Suelo reconoció el trabajo de dos periodistas involucrados en el proyecto —Leonardo Gómez Ponce y otra persona cuyo nombre no se revela debido a amenazas continuas— con el Premio Lincoln 2024 (Premio Lincoln) al Periodismo sobre políticas urbanas, desarrollo sostenible y cambio climático. Ambos beneficiarios forman parte de la Unidad de Investigación Tierra de Nadie. El premio, ahora en su tercer año, se presentó como parte de la prestigiosa Conferencia Latinoamericana de Periodismo de Investigación 2024 (COLPIN) y reconoce al mejor periodismo de política de suelo en América Latina y el Caribe.

Ponce y otros ganadores del Premio Lincoln se unieron a una mesa redonda, moderada por Laura Mullahy, Senior Program Manager del Instituto Lincoln, el día 3 de la conferencia anual COLPIN, celebrada este año en Madrid. El organizador del evento de cuatro días fue el Instituto Prensa y Sociedad (IPYS), con sede en Lima, Perú.

El comité de selección del Premio Lincoln y los galardonados en la Conferencia Latinoamericana de Periodismo de Investigación 2024. Laura Mullahy, del Instituto Lincoln, es la cuarta desde la izquierda. Crédito: Instituto Lincoln.

Los periodistas enviaron 265 obras para el Premio Lincoln este año, dice Mullahy, más del doble del número recibido en cada uno de los primeros dos años. Dichas obras se extendían por todo el mapa, tanto literalmente (representando 63 ciudades en 22 países) como en relación con los temas tratados. La escasez de agua, el cambio climático y la vivienda fueron temas predominantes, al igual que las investigaciones sobre conflictos de suelo, migración climática, asentamientos informales y uso ilegal o injusto de la tierra.

Mullahy dice que la profundidad y la tenacidad de los informes fueron inspiradoras. Algunos de los periodistas ganadores dedicaron varios años a la investigación y escritura de sus reportajes. Dice: “Me emocionan un poco estos premios porque son personas tan dedicadas”. Mullahy también se enorgullece de que dos de los ganadores hayan participado en cursos del Instituto Lincoln para periodistas latinoamericanos en el pasado, que se diseñaron para presentarles los conceptos básicos de la política de suelo.

A continuación, encontrará los ganadores del Premio Lincoln 2024 al Periodismo sobre políticas urbanas, desarrollo sostenible y cambio climático, junto con enlaces a su trabajo (vea los ganadores de 2023 aquí).

Ganadores del Premio Lincoln 2024

Primer premio: Leonardo Gómez Ponce y colega por la serie Durán, los hijos del tren y las mafias del agua, una investigación de años publicada por la revista ecuatoriana Tierra de Nadie.

La plataforma en línea para esta serie de investigación de varias partes y muy informativa se abre con un conteo en tiempo real de los más de 38 años (cada mes, día, hora y segundo) que el 70 por ciento de los residentes de la ciudad de Durán, Ecuador, han pasado sin agua potable ni sistemas de alcantarillado en funcionamiento.

“Este es un ejemplo de cómo las empresas sin escrúpulos pueden limitar la planificación y el desarrollo de la infraestructura de una ciudad”, dice Mullahy. “El comité de selección valoró la calidad de la investigación, la contribución de datos y documentación de respaldo, y la clara demostración de que, sin infraestructura de servicios básicos, las poblaciones permanecen en la pobreza y no es posible progresar”.

Segundo premio: Alexánder Marín Correa, Juan Camilo Parra, Miguel Ángel Vivas, Camilo Tovar Puentes, María Angélica García Puerto y Juan Camilo Beltrán, por “Escasez de agua en Bogotá: ¿Cómo llegamos a este punto? ”, publicado por El Espectador en Colombia.

Producido por un grupo de periodistas del periódico colombiano El Espectador, en este artículo se narra cómo una combinación de factores históricos, ambientales y de gestión condujo a una catástrofe sanitaria en Bogotá.

En el artículo se relata cómo la capital de Colombia ha experimentado un rápido crecimiento y una mayor demanda de agua, mientras que la deforestación y el cambio climático han disminuido las fuentes de agua. La situación se ve agravada por la contaminación de los ríos y la falta de infraestructura adecuada. En el artículo se muestra claramente que la gestión del agua ha sido ineficiente, lo que ha provocado problemas de distribución y acceso inequitativo. Este contexto plantea un desafío urgente para garantizar el suministro sostenible de agua a la población de Bogotá.

Tercer premio: Aramís Castro, por “Boom inmobiliario en la Amazonía del Perú agudiza la pérdida de bosques”, publicado por OjoPúblico en Perú.

En el artículo de Castro se analiza cómo la especulación inmobiliaria está contribuyendo a la deforestación en la Amazonía peruana, lo que demuestra cómo la venta de tierras rurales está transformando regiones como San Martín y Ucayali, donde ya se han perdido miles de hectáreas de bosques.

Castro analizó cientos de anuncios en las redes sociales y descubrió que las empresas inmobiliarias privadas estaban promoviendo representaciones de edificios modernos en entornos arbolados y naturales y atrayendo a los compradores con lemas como “El nuevo Miami en la selva peruana”. Sin embargo, muchos de los lotes rústicos carecen incluso de servicios básicos de agua o alcantarillado y, a menudo, contribuyen a la degradación del ecosistema. La investigación muestra cómo la falta de regulación y control en la venta de tierras agrava la deforestación, la pérdida de biodiversidad y otros problemas ambientales.

Aramís Castro analiza su investigación sobre la especulación inmobiliaria y la degradación ambiental en la Amazonía peruana en una mesa redonda organizada por el Instituto Lincoln. Crédito: Instituto Lincoln.

 

Mención de honor 1: Lucía Viridiana Vergara García, Darío Ramírez, Isabel Mateos, Rodrigo Flores Esquinca, Alonso Esquinca Díaz, Erick Retana, Eduardo Mota y Eduardo Buendía, por “Aquí no cabe un tren” y “La Sedena arrasó la selva para construir 6 hoteles del Tren Maya”, producido por Mexicanos contra la Corrupción y la Impunidad en México.

En este artículo y el pódcast que lo acompaña, se analiza cómo la construcción del Tren Maya en México y los nuevos hoteles vinculados a este megaproyecto podrían causar daños irreversibles al medio ambiente, lo que contradice los argumentos a favor del desarrollo de las regiones por las que pasará el tren. El trabajo explora de manera clara y creativa el tema con ricos testimonios y plantea una serie de problemas con el proyecto: desde la tala de árboles y la falta de estudios técnicos y científicos de sus impactos ambientales hasta los efectos de la construcción en áreas arqueológicas protegidas y una biosfera declarada Patrimonio de la Humanidad por la Unesco en 2002.

Mención de honor 2: Daniel Fonseca por “¿Dónde vamos a vivir? Datos, proyectos e intentos de solución al problema de vivienda en América Latina”, publicado por Distintas Latitudes, Honduras.

En esta investigación periodística, realizada para Distintas Latitudes por la séptima generación de la Red LATAM de Jóvenes Periodistas, se explora la crisis de la vivienda en América Latina desde diferentes ángulos. Se destacan problemas, como el acceso a la vivienda, el aumento de la desigualdad y la falta de políticas inclusivas para grupos vulnerables como los jóvenes, las mujeres y la comunidad LGBTI.

En la serie, se examinan la dinámica del crecimiento urbano no planificado y cómo los gobiernos no han abordado adecuadamente la demanda de vivienda digna, y se busca arrojar luz sobre las condiciones actuales y proponer soluciones para garantizar el derecho a una vivienda adecuada en la región.

Mención de honor 3: Aitor Sáez por “Aguas revueltas: sequía y saqueo en México”, publicado por​ Pie de Página, México.

En esta serie de investigación, se describe la crisis del agua en 12 regiones de México. En el informe, se reflejan los diferentes conflictos relacionados con la falta de agua, que resultan tanto de la crisis climática como de la intervención humana directa, especialmente a través de la coerción del crimen organizado.

Mención de honor 4: Miguel Ángel Dobrich y Gabriel Farías, por “De la sequía a la inundación: el impacto sobre el trabajo en la zona costera de Uruguay, de Este a Oeste”, publicado por Amenaza Roboto en Uruguay.

En este artículo, se explora el impacto del cambio climático en las condiciones de trabajo en diferentes áreas de Uruguay, desde Valizas hasta Ciudad del Plata, y se describe cómo el clima extremo afecta a los pescadores artesanales, los trabajadores domésticos y otras personas que dependen de ecosistemas vulnerables. También se aborda la desigualdad y el riesgo de inundaciones en las comunidades costeras. La investigación combina datos geoespaciales y visualización avanzada para mostrar el impacto de estos cambios.

Mención de honor 5: Vinicius Sassine y Lalo de Almeida por “Cerco às aldeias” (“Asedio de aldeas”), publicado por Folha de São Paulo en Brasil.

En esta obra, se describe cómo las empresas mineras, o garimpos, roban la tierra, el agua y la salud de los grupos indígenas mundurukú, kayapó, nambikwara y yanomami de la Amazonía brasileña. En las áreas donde operan estas empresas mineras, los habitantes sufren enfermedades debido al contacto con el mercurio, que es el metal pesado tóxico utilizado para separar el oro del suelo. Se diagnostica a los niños con retrasos cognitivos y a los adultos con enfermedades físicas. Sin embargo, el Gobierno brasileño no tiene planes de poner fin a la minería ilegal.

 


Imagen principal: Un camión lleva agua a Durán (Ecuador), donde casi el 70 % de los residentes ha vivido sin agua potable durante décadas. Hace poco, un proyecto plurianual que investiga esta crisis ganó un premio de periodismo del Instituto Lincoln. Crédito: Unidad de Investigación Tierra de Nadie.

Mayor’s Desk

Laying a Foundation for Growth in St. Louis 

By Anthony Flint, November 25, 2024

Tishaura Jones was sworn in as the 47th mayor of St. Louis—and the first Black female mayor in the city’s history—on April 20, 2021. Described as a history maker on a mission, Jones served two terms in the Missouri House of Representatives, was selected as the first African American woman in Missouri history to hold the position of assistant minority floor leader, and was also the first African American woman to serve as treasurer of St. Louis. She holds a bachelor’s degree in finance from Hampton University and a master’s degree in health administration from the St. Louis University School of Public Health. Jones is also a graduate of the Executives in State and Local Government program at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. She spoke with senior fellow Anthony Flint earlier this year for the Land Matters podcast. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Anthony Flint: For those rooting for a rebound for legacy cities, St. Louis has been a bit of a roller coaster, from the renaissance of Washington Avenue to the post-COVID downtown doom loop and continuing population loss. What’s your assessment of the city’s strengths and weaknesses at this point?

Tishaura Jones: I would say that in the past three years, we have been laser focused on doing the nonsexy work to lay the foundation for future growth. And that is, the work within City Hall to make City Hall easier to navigate, easier to participate in, and easier to understand. And then adding different pieces that are looking to the future. We just opened an Office of New Americans because we realized that part of population growth is going to come from our refugees and other international citizens who choose St. Louis as a home who may be fleeing violent situations. We’ve accepted refugees from Afghanistan, from Ukraine, and back in the ’90s, we accepted refugees from Bosnia. So we have the largest Bosnian population outside of Europe. Knowing those things and knowing those pieces of the puzzle, also looking at our severe population loss of African Americans, we are laying the groundwork to make sure that St. Louis is equitable and a city that everybody can participate in; we’re focused on rebuilding areas and investing in areas that haven’t seen investment in decades.

AF: Speaking of investment, we’ve been looking at the Inflation Reduction Act and how it is pumping billions for clean energy manufacturing into economically distressed areas, including St. Louis. Do you consider the region part of a potential new “battery belt,” and can this clean energy transition be a savior?

TJ: I would say partly. We haven’t seen a lot of companies investing and exploring that technology. We only have one company that has taken advantage of the money from the Inflation Reduction Act to expand its business. Where we see the most growth is in defense and geospatial, as well as advanced manufacturing. Those are the areas and industries that we have focused our attention on.

AF: Tell us more about the investments that are going on. With the backdrop of federal funding, you also have the $250 million NFL settlement from the loss of the Rams. There seems to be an unprecedented amount of funding and an approaching deadline for spending it. How are you managing that?

TJ: We received almost $500 million in ARPA funding, which is really large for a city our size. We’ve made intentional decisions to put that money out in communities that haven’t seen investment in decades. For St. Louis, that’s North St. Louis, which is 99 percent African American, and a part of Southeast St. Louis, which is about 60 to 65 percent African American. Both of those areas have high levels of poverty, high levels of vacancy, and also high levels of crime. So we are making intentional investments in those areas, bringing back business and industry, building new homes. There are places where a mortgage hasn’t been generated in a neighborhood for 10 or 15 years . . . we’re trying to rebuild a market in order to build  more new market-rate and affordable homes.

“Where there is no vision, there is no hope,” reads a newly painted mural of George Washington Carver in North St. Louis. The mural is part of a major investment of federal funds in the area that will include affordable housing, infrastructure improvements, and other projects. Local advocates urged that Carver be depicted facing north: “That’s where development needs to happen.” Credit: City of St. Louis via Instagram.

 

The Monarch at MLK was an old electrical plant that sat vacant for decades. We are turning that into a world-class workforce development hub, co-located with companies that will be producing their products on site. Our Office of Violence Prevention will go there, and our Workforce Development Agency . . . our Economic Empowerment Center will also go there, which is going to help entrepreneurs either start or grow their businesses, as well as our Land Reutilization Authority, our land bank. They have a lot of equipment that they use to maintain our vacant lots; we have about 7,000 vacant lots that we are currently maintaining.

We’re co-locating essential services in the community so people don’t always have to come downtown to City Hall. We hope that this facility is going to be a hub of activity, and we also own 15 acres around it, so we’re going to build up around it as well, with a daycare center and housing and other amenities.

AF: For all the physical planning and placemaking that is part of the mayor’s job, what are the key elements of addressing violent crime, which understandably is on the minds of so many residents?

TJ: The year before I came into office, which was a pandemic year, we had 263 homicides. As of the end of 2023, that number is down to 158. That’s a 40 percent decrease. Crime is also decreasing in other categories. . . . It’s because of several things that we put in place. It’s not just one thing. We started by opening a new Office of Violence Prevention, where we work with community organizations because people who are closest to the problem are closest to the solution.

We provide grants and technical assistance to community organizations on the ground who are doing this violence prevention work, employing trusted messengers, taking care of mental health, substance abuse. We also started a cops-and-clinicians program where we pair an officer with a mental health professional to be deployed to certain calls. We’re trying to deploy the right professional to the right call. That program alone has saved us thousands of man hours and millions of dollars because we’ve diverted people from emergency rooms, we’ve diverted people from jail and entering the criminal justice system. . . . Also for the first time in our city’s history, I hired a police chief from outside of the city. He’s been in several cities, Wilmington, Delaware, Chicago, and started his career in New York. He applies business practices to policing . . . and deploys our resources—which are finite—based on what the data is telling us. In his first full year being police chief, homicides were reduced 20 percent. We’re not quite where we want to be, but we’re definitely moving in the right direction with all of these pieces working together.

AF: I want to turn to infrastructure, which plays a role in the overall vibe of the city. Have you seen any difference in the results of the infrastructure plan from two years ago, which included some small but important things like sidewalk repair, lighting, and trimming weeds?

TJ: Yes. I sit as the chair of our local metropolitan planning organization, the East-West Gateway [Council] of Governments. Most of our infrastructure dollars flow through there for our various transportation projects. But we also, as a city, set aside almost $50 million to repave our major thoroughfares. And we currently have about $300 million in projects going on, whether it’s repaving our major thoroughfares or our side streets. Great Rivers Greenway is building the Brickline Greenway—think of Atlanta or Denver, where they have those greenways that are bike and ped paths. We will be expanding ours to connect our major parks. So in about five years, you’ll be able to ride your bike from the Arch all the way to Forest Park, and then to a park on the south side called Tower Grove Park, to a park on the north side called Fairground Park. It’ll all be connected through a series of bike and ped pathways.

The Brickline Greenway, currently under construction in St. Louis, will connect 14 of the city’s neighborhoods with more than 10 miles of bicycle and pedestrian paths. Credit: Great Rivers Greenway.

 

We’re hoping to also start construction on expanding transit, taking advantage of the money that’s available through the Department of Transportation, expanding our light rail. Then we’re also going to apply for funding to redo our airport. So in about five to seven years, St. Louis is going to have a new airport, a new transit line, new bike and ped pathways, and a whole host of infrastructure projects will be almost finished or at completion.

AF: How can a city like St. Louis contribute to the effort to combat climate change while at the same time, needing to build resilience to manage extreme heat, for example?

TJ: Today, as we are recording this interview, it’s about 100 degrees outside, which is normal for August in St. Louis, but it’s not normal for those who have respiratory problems. We also received a multimillion-dollar grant from the federal government to plant more trees to make sure certain neighborhoods are not heat islands. Just with the disinvestment that happened in certain portions of our community, there weren’t trees replanted. We’re going to be planting more trees, hopefully cooling down the city as we do that. We’re also part of the Bloomberg Sustainable Cities Initiative, where we will be employing about three to four people for the next three to four years to identify other sustainability projects and how those intersect with economic justice.

AF: A lot of the mayors that we’ve interviewed have talked a little bit about the stress and heavy weight of the job. I’d like to ask you, on a personal level, how do you manage all of these challenges day to day?

TJ: The answer I usually give is that I rely on three things: Jesus, my Peloton, and bourbon, and not always in that order. But I think I have a fourth weight that’s on my shoulders, which is I’m a single mom of the most adorable and probably the tallest 17-year-old you’ll ever see. He is about 6′ 8″, and he’s a junior in high school. So I also have to juggle that in addition to being mayor. I would say I do it all by the grace of God. I feel like this is the work that God called me to do, and because of that, it doesn’t feel like work. I really enjoy and love what I do. I love being able to see in real time the changes that we’re making—either brick and mortar or the lives that we’re changing. So that is the job satisfaction that helps me rest every night.

 


Anthony Flint is a senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, host of the Land Matters podcast, and a contributing editor of Land Lines.

Lead image: St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones takes a selfie at City Hall with local middle school and high school students. Credit: St. Louis Mayor’s Office via Facebook.

Third Annual Lincoln Award Recognizes Land Policy Reporting in Latin America

By Jon Gorey, November 19, 2024

In the Ecuadorian city of Durán, more than 70 percent of the estimated 325,000 residents have no drinking water or sewage service. They must purchase water trucked in by tanker companies—a precarious, seemingly untenable situation that has persisted for almost 40 years. When a team of journalists set out to investigate the reasons for Durán’s inadequate water infrastructure—and uncovered some of the government obscuration and private-sector corruption behind it—they began to receive threats of violence.

The team persevered, however, and published a multimedia investigative series that describes in vivid detail how collusion between government actors and the private sector has restricted access to the basic service of drinking water for most of Durán’s population. This fall, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy recognized the work of two journalists involved with the project—Leonardo Gómez Ponce and another whose name is being withheld due to ongoing threats—with the 2024 Lincoln Award (Premio Lincoln) for Urban Policy, Sustainable Development, and Climate Change Journalism. Both recipients are part of the Unidad de Investigación Tierra de Nadie (No Man’s Land Research Unit). The award, now in its third year, was presented as part of the prestigious 2024 Latin American Conference of Investigative Journalism (COLPIN), and recognizes the best land policy journalism in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Ponce and other Premio Lincoln winners joined a roundtable discussion, moderated by Lincoln Institute Senior Program Manager Laura Mullahy, on Day 3 of the annual COLPIN conference, held this year in Madrid. The four-day event was organized by the Lima, Peru–based Instituto Prensa y Sociedad (Press and Society Institute), or IPYS.

The Premio Lincoln selection committee and recipients at the 2024 Latin American Conference of Investigative Journalism. The Lincoln Institute’s Laura Mullahy is fourth from left. Credit: Lincoln Institute.

Journalists submitted 265 entries for the Premio Lincoln this year, Mullahy says—more than double the number received in each of the first two years—and the entries were all over the map, both literally (representing 63 cities in 22 countries) and topically. Water shortages, climate change, and housing were prevalent subjects, as were investigations on land conflicts, climate migration, informal settlements, and illegal or unjust land use.

Mullahy says the depth and tenacity of the reporting was inspiring. Some of the winning journalists had been pursuing stories for several years. “I get sort of emotional about these awards,” she says, “because these are such dedicated people.” Mullahy was also proud that two of the winners had participated in Lincoln Institute courses for Latin American journalists in the past, which were designed to introduce them to core concepts of land policy.

Below, find the winners of the 2024 Lincoln Award for Journalism on Urban Policy, Sustainable Development, and Climate Change, along with links to their work. (See the 2023 winners here.)

2024 Premio Lincoln Winners

First Prize: Leonardo Gómez Ponce and colleague for the series, “Durán, los hijos del tren y las mafias del agua” (“Durán: The Children of the Train and the Water Mafias”), a years-long investigation published by Ecuador’s Tierra de Nadie.

The online platform for this multi-part, data-rich investigative series opens with a real-time counter tallying the more than 38 years—every month, day, hour, second—that 70 percent of residents in the city of Durán, Ecuador, have gone without drinking water or functioning sewer systems.

“This is an example of how unscrupulous businesses can limit the planning and development of a city’s infrastructure,” Mullahy says. “The selection committee valued the investigative quality, the contribution of data and supporting documentation, and the clear demonstration that without infrastructure of basic services, populations remain in poverty and no progress is possible.”

Second prize: Alexánder Marín Correa, Juan Camilo Parra, Miguel Ángel Vivas, Camilo Tovar Puentes, María Angélica García Puerto, and Juan Camilo Beltrán, for “Escasez de agua en Bogotá: ¿Cómo llegamos a este punto?” (“Water Shortage in Bogotá: How Did We Get to This Point?”), published by El Espectador in Colombia.

Produced by a group of journalists from Colombian newspaper El Espectador, this article chronicles how a combination of historical, environmental, and management factors led to a health catastrophe in Bogotá.

The article recounts how Colombia’s capital city has experienced rapid growth and increased demand for water, all while deforestation and climate change have diminished water sources. The situation is aggravated by river pollution and the lack of adequate infrastructure. The article clearly shows that water management has been inefficient, leading to distribution problems and inequitable access. This context poses an urgent challenge to guarantee the sustainable supply of water to the people of Bogotá.

Third prize: Aramís Castro, for “Boom inmobiliario en la Amazonía del Perú agudiza la pérdida de bosques” (“Real Estate Boom in the Peruvian Amazon Exacerbates Forest Loss”), published by OjoPúblico in Peru.

Castro’s article analyzes how real estate speculation is contributing to deforestation in the Peruvian Amazon, demonstrating how the sale of rural land is transforming regions such as San Martín and Ucayali, where thousands of hectares of forests have already been lost.

Castro analyzed hundreds of social media advertisements and found that private real estate companies were promoting renderings of modern buildings in wooded, natural settings, luring buyers with slogans like, “The new Miami in the Peruvian jungle.” But many of the rustic lots lack even basic water or sewerage services, and often contribute to the degradation of the ecosystem. The research shows how the lack of regulation and control in the sale of land aggravates deforestation, biodiversity loss, and other environmental issues.

Aramís Castro discusses his investigation into real estate speculation and environmental degradation in the Peruvian Amazon at a roundtable held by the Lincoln Institute. Credit: Lincoln Institute.

 

Honorable Mention 1: Lucía Viridiana Vergara García, Darío Ramírez, Isabel Mateos, Rodrigo Flores Esquinca, Alonso Esquinca Díaz, Erick Retana, Eduardo Mota, and Eduardo Buendía, for “Aquí no cabe un tren” (“There’s No Room for a Train Here”) and “La Sedena arrasó la selva para construir 6 hoteles del Tren Maya” (“Sedena Razed the Jungle to Build 6 Mayan Train Hotels”), produced by Mexicanos contra la Corrupción y la Impunidad in Mexico.

This article and accompanying podcast look at how the construction of the Mayan Train in Mexico—and the new hotels linked to this mega-project—could cause irreversible damage to the environment, contradicting arguments for developing the regions through which the train will pass. The work clearly and creatively explores the topic with rich testimonials, and raises a range of issues with the project, from the felling of trees and the lack of technical and scientific studies of its environmental impacts, to the effects of construction in protected archaeological areas and a biosphere declared a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2002.

Honorable Mention 2: Daniel Fonseca for “¿Dónde vamos a vivir? Datos, proyectos e intentos de solución al problema de vivienda en América Latina” (“Where Are We Going to Live? Data, Projects, and Attempted Solutions to the Housing Problem in Latin America”), published by Distintas Latitudes, Honduras.

This journalistic investigation, carried out for Distintas Latitudes by the seventh generation of the LATAM Network of Young Journalists, explores the housing crisis in Latin America from different angles. It highlights problems such as access to housing, the increase in inequality, and the lack of inclusive policies for vulnerable groups such as youth, women, and the LGBTI community.

The series examines the dynamics of unplanned urban growth and how governments have failed to adequately address the demand for decent housing—and seeks to shed light on current conditions and propose solutions to guarantee the right to adequate housing in the region.

Honorable Mention 3: Aitor Sáez for “Aguas revueltas: sequía y saqueo en México” (“Troubled Waters: Drought and Looting in Mexico”), published by ​​Pie de Página, Mexico

This investigative series describes the water crisis in 12 regions of Mexico. The report reflects the different conflicts related to the lack of water, which result from both the climate crisis and direct human intervention, especially through the coercion of organized crime.

Honorable Mention 4: Miguel Ángel Dobrich and Gabriel Farías, for “De la sequía a la inundación: el impacto sobre el trabajo en la zona costera de Uruguay, de Este a Oeste” (“From Drought to Flood: The Impact on Work in the Coastal Zone of Uruguay, from East to West”), published by Amenaza Roboto in Uruguay.

This article explores the impact of climate change on working conditions in different areas of Uruguay, from Valizas to Ciudad del Plata, describing how extreme weather affects artisanal fishermen, domestic workers, and other people who depend on vulnerable ecosystems. It also addresses inequality and flood risk in coastal communities. The research combines geospatial data and advanced visualization to show the impact of these changes.

Honorable Mention 5: Vinicius Sassine and Lalo de Almeida for “Cerco às aldeias” (“Siege of Villages”), published by Folha de São Paulo in Brazil.

This piece describes how mining companies, or garimpos, rob land, water, and health from the Mundurukus, Kayapós, Nambikwaras, and Yanomami–Indigenous groups of the Brazilian Amazon. In the areas where these mining companies operate, inhabitants suffer from illnesses due to contact with mercury, the toxic heavy metal used to separate gold from the ground. Children are diagnosed with cognitive delays, and adults with physical illnesses. However, the Brazilian government has no plans to put a stop to illegal mining.

 


Lead image: A truck brings water to Durán, Ecuador, where nearly 70 percent of residents have lived without drinking water for decades. A multiyear project investigating this crisis recently won a Lincoln Institute journalism award. Credit: Unidad de Investigación Tierra de Nadie.

“Design With Nature Now” Inspires Exhibits in Taipei and Nanjing  

Jon Gorey, November 13, 2024

Two new translations of the Lincoln Institute book Design with Nature Now are hitting international bookshelves this year, and with them, a pair of interactive exhibitions—one in Nanjing, China, and a second in Taipei, Taiwan—have brought the publication’s concepts and projects to life for thousands of attendees.

Design with Nature Now was published in 2019 by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and the University of Pennsylvania, commemorating the 50th anniversary of Ian L. McHarg’s landmark volume, Design with Nature. Published in 1969, that book helped redefine landscape architecture and introduced ecological planning principles aligned with the growing environmental movement. Edited by Penn faculty, Design with Nature Now reflects on McHarg’s enduring influence over half a century later and showcases a variety of visionary environmental design projects taking place around the world. They include a protected 2,000-mile Yellowstone to Yukon wildlife corridor, a 5,000-mile Great Green Wall of trees and shrubs being planted to combat desertification in Africa, and the transformation of what was once the world’s largest landfill into a 2,200-acre urban park and wetland habitat in New York City.

Recognizing that it would be easier for people to appreciate the enormity and scale of such massive projects when the accompanying photographs and maps were measured in feet as opposed to inches, a team at Penn—including coeditor Frederick “Fritz” Steiner, professor and dean of the Weitzman School of Design, and William Whitaker, architectural archives collections manager—curated a series of visually stunning exhibitions at the Weitzman School upon the book’s initial publication in 2019. With the work now being translated into both simplified and traditional Chinese (the former used predominantly in mainland China, the latter in Taiwan), Steiner found partners with Penn connections abroad who were eager to revive and reimagine those installations for new audiences.

Visitors explore the Design with Nature Now exhibit in Taipei.
Visitors explore the Design with Nature Now exhibit in Taipei. Credit: Matt Chu.

 

The Taiwan Institute of Landscape Architects (TILA) agreed to host an exhibition in Taipei, where the mayor is a Penn Law School alumnus; Southeast University in Nanjing, China, offered to host as well. Southeast is “the oldest school of architecture in China, and it was founded by two Penn alums, so we have a very close relationship,” Steiner says.

The Nanjing exhibition opened first, running May 31 through July 31, while the Taipei installation was open from September 14 to October 12. The exhibitions drew “thousands and thousands of people,” says Steiner, who attended both openings.

“Both venues were amazing,”  Steiner says, and the settings enhanced the displays of maps and other materials related to the book: “The Nanjing exhibition was held in a kind of shopping plaza on a huge lake by the historic city wall—it’s a major subway stop and a park, a venue where a lot of people get married, so it was just swarming with people,” Steiner says. The Taipei exhibit was housed in a former tobacco factory “in the hippest cultural and arts center of the city,” he adds, at the Songshan Cultural and Creative Park.

Penn professor and Design with Nature Now coeditor Karen M’Closkey recently returned from a global landscape architecture conference that overlapped with the end of the exhibit in Taipei, and says the dynamic venue helped ensure that the exhibition was packed. “They’ve renovated all these buildings, there are small shops and bookstores,” she says. “It was busy with people the whole time, and on the pedestrian street between the buildings, there were always performances and people selling things. It was a very lively place.”

In Taipei alone, roughly 9,600 people attended the exhibition, says curator Matt Chu, deputy secretary general of the Taiwan Institute of Landscape Architects. The Taipei exhibition included guided tours, weekend lectures with Taiwanese government officials, and a two-day symposium as the installation came to a close in mid-October.

Over 600 attendees took one of the guided tours offered by TILA volunteers and adjunct professors, Chu says, each tour beginning with a deep introduction to ecological design projects and concepts in the auditorium. “Every tour was packed, and we were so thrilled by positive feedback from the audience,” Chu says.

A Taiwan Institute of Landscape Architects (TILA) member offers a guided tour of the exhibit in Taipei. Credit: Matt Chu.

Themes That Resonate

The 25 large-scale environmental design projects showcased in Design with Nature Now are organized into five major themes: Big Wilds, Rising Tides, Fresh Waters, Toxic Lands, and Urban Futures. The exhibits were likewise split into five thematic categories, but also included a section on McHarg himself, called The House We Live In, and a gallery of works by artist and landscape architect Laurel McSherry, created during her stint as a Fulbright Scholar in McHarg’s homeland of Scotland. In both Nanjing and Taipei, local government agencies augmented the exhibits by connecting the themes to their own environmental efforts around climate change and resilience.

Three of the thematic projects highlighted in Design with Nature Now are located in China—including a focus on Qianhai Water City in Shenzhen—but that’s hardly the only reason the book has found a welcome audience there.

“The importance of nature to Chinese culture is ancient, so I think there’s that historic connection,” Steiner says. “But also in a contemporary sense, it’s the biggest country in the world in terms of population, it’s become majority urban . . . so the issues of urbanization, loss of biodiversity, climate change—they’re not abstract. There’s a lot of interest politically, both in Taiwan and in the People’s Republic, in addressing these issues. I think the five big themes that we identified resonate very much.”

In addition to the larger-than-life reproductions of maps, photographs, and landscapes, the exhibits included 3D models and updated information on projects featured in the book and original exhibit.

The exhibit included a three-dimensional model of Taipei. Credit: Matt Chu.

 

In Taipei the exhibit included a three-dimensional model of the city. And one of Chu’s favorite installations in Taipei brought new clarity to a concept introduced in McHarg’s 1969 book. McHarg and his students had famously sliced up contoured landscapes, such as that of Staten Island, New York, into different layers—showing existing land uses alongside hand-drawn maps of the area’s physiography, water table, wildlife habitat, forest cover, and tidal inundation, among other ecological features—in an analog precursor to geographic information system (GIS) mapping.

“In the original exhibition in Philadelphia, they had those 18 Staten Island graphics on the wall,” Chu says. “But I kind of stacked them using transparent panels, so visitors can see all the different layers—the geology, the hydrology, the vegetation, all the layers—the way Ian McHarg explained how nature would influence culture and where development should go.”

A series of transparent panels map the ecological and geological features of Staten Island, NY. Credit: Matt Chu.

 

Five years after the Penn exhibition, Chu was also able to display updated photos from the landscape architecture firm Field Operations, which has completed early phases of two major projects featured in Design with Nature Now: Freshkills Park in New York, which was once the largest landfill in the world, and Qianhai Water City in Shenzhen. “So it’s kind of a comparison with five years ago, when they were only in the planning phase,” Chu says. “They’ve got North Park, Phase One built in Freshkills Park, and in Shenzhen they got Guiwan Park built. And you can see the process, how it’s come from the planning phase, to design, to building it, and see how designing with nature really came true.”

The exhibits also included video, notes Steiner, with displays including a snippet from a late-1960s McHarg documentary; a film by McSherry that synced the waxing spring daylight hours of Glasgow with cinematic scenes in real time; and previously recorded live-cam footage of wildlife in the Yellowstone to Yukon corridor using an underpass to cross beneath a busy road. “Kids would all be huddled around watching the animals go through the underpass,” says Steiner, who notes that the curiosity went both ways, as bears, coyotes, and other animals came up to inspect the camera at close range.

The Nanjing and Taipei exhibits were such a success that other organizations are already inquiring about hosting the exhibits next year. Steiner says the Nanjing exhibit is slated to move to Shanghai next summer, while in Taiwan, Chu says, “So far we have the Taoyuan City Library and Kaohsiung National Science and Technology Museum expressing their willingness to exhibit next year,” as well as interest from Taiwan’s Forestry and Nature Conservation Agency.

Chu said the exhibition helped raise the visibility of the landscape architecture profession locally. “Even though Ian McHarg actually came to Taiwan about 40 years ago, to help Taiwan establish its National Parks system, people in Taiwan still associate the profession more with horticulture or gardening,” Chu says. “So this exhibition really opened their eyes [to the idea] that landscape architects can help with things like climate change and biodiversity loss using large-scale planning and design.”

 


Jon Gorey is a staff writer at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Lead image: Visitors explore the Design with Nature Now exhibit in Taipei. Credit: Matt Chu.

Events

Accelerating Community Investment Community of Practice Convening November 2024

November 12, 2024 - November 14, 2024

Santa Rosa, CA United States

Offered in English

The Accelerating Community Investment (ACI) initiative seeks to improve public finance by creating opportunities for public development, housing, and infrastructure finance agencies to engage with philanthropies, mission-aligned investors, and the broader capital markets. These partnerships help create new, community-led investments in underserved places and people.  

Through field research, technical assistance, and a national community of practice, ACI explores the intersection of public finance, impact capital, and community. The national community of practice (CoP) connects participants in local community investment ecosystems from 100 agencies and institutions in 18 states to each other and their peers. The group meets both virtually and in person to build partnerships, identify new investment opportunities, and share experiences and advice.  

The ACI Community of Practice Convening will be held on November 12–14 in Santa Rosa, California. Participants will have the opportunity to network, learn, and explore the Santa Rosa community. The agenda will include participant-led deal workshops, presentations from national impact investors, and a site tour that tracks the disaster recovery efforts in Sonoma County.  

This is an invitation only event.


Details

Date
November 12, 2024 - November 14, 2024
Location
Santa Rosa, CA United States
Language
English

Keywords

Economic Development, Housing, Infrastructure, Public Finance

New Publication

Lincoln Institute of Land Policy Releases New Book, City Tech

By Kristina McGeehan, August 26, 2024

CAMBRIDGE, MA—The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy has released its newest book, City Tech: 20 Apps, Ideas, and Innovators Changing the Urban Landscape, by Rob Walker.

In this thoughtful, inquisitive volume, Walker investigates technologies that have emerged over the past few years and their implications for planners, policymakers, residents, and the virtual and literal landscapes of the cities we call home. Featuring a foreword by tech journalist Kara Swisher and an afterword by urbanist and futurist Greg Lindsay, the book explores the role of technology in our rapidly urbanizing world.

Experts predict that up to 80 percent of the population will live in cities by 2050. To accommodate that growth while ensuring quality of life for all residents, cities are increasingly turning to technology, from apps that make it easier for citizens to pitch in on civic improvement projects to designs for smarter streets and neighborhoods.

“We’re on a complicated journey; our decisions can set us off in surprising directions, and opinions may differ on how to navigate the challenges ahead,” writes Walker, a Fast Company columnist and New York Times contributor, in the book’s introduction. “But based on the examples in this collection, it seems clear that collaboration, creativity, and an openness to new ideas are the keys to getting where we need to go.”

City Tech is a chronicle of the recent rise of urban technologies, featuring firsthand reflections from the founders, innovators, and researchers closest to the work and from the planners and other officials who are putting these tools into practice on the ground. It’s also a source of essential questions: What are the ethical implications of smart cities? How can cities keep up with the rapid evolution of driverless vehicles? Is building skyscrapers out of wood a viable climate solution?

“If the last decade of urban tech has been a dress rehearsal, then the curtain is now rising on the most momentous decade of change most cities have ever had to face,” writes Lindsay in the book’s afterword. “It is our turn to formulate what we demand from our technologies, versus the other way around.”

City Tech, a curated collection of newly updated columns originally published in Land Lines, the magazine of the Lincoln Institute, follows last year’s release of Mayor’s Desk by Anthony Flint, a compilation of interviews with mayors from five continents who shared their strategies for tackling global challenges at a local level. Together, the books provide tangible examples of how cities across the world have mobilized to implement innovative land-based solutions for some of society’s most critical challenges.

City Tech is available for purchase on the Lincoln Institute website. For review copies, contact Kristina McGeehan at kmcgeehan@lincolninst.edu. City Tech is distributed by Columbia University Press.

About the Author

Rob Walker is a journalist and columnist covering technology, design, business, and other subjects. A longtime contributor to the New York Times, Walker writes a column on branding for Fast Company, and has contributed to Bloomberg Businessweek, The Atlantic, Fortune, Marketplace, and many other outlets. He writes the City Tech column for Land Lines, the magazine of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. He is the coeditor of Lost Objects: 50 Stories About the Things We Miss and Why They Matter and the author of The Art of Noticing. His Art of Noticing newsletter is at robwalker.substack.com. He also serves on the faculty of the School of Visual Arts in New York City.

About the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy

The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy seeks to improve quality of life through the effective use, taxation, and stewardship of land. A nonprofit private operating foundation whose origins date to 1946, the Lincoln Institute researches and recommends creative approaches to land as a solution to economic, social, and environmental challenges. Through education, training, publications, and events, we integrate theory and practice to inform public policy decisions worldwide. We organize our work around three impact areas: land and water, land and fiscal systems, and land and communities. We work globally, with locations in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Washington, DC; Phoenix, Arizona; and Beijing, China.

 


 

Lead image: Quantum network servers managed in a partnership between Chattanooga utility EPB and Qubitekk. Credit: Courtesy of EPB.

Course

Gestión del Suelo en Grandes Proyectos Urbanos

October 14, 2024 - October 30, 2024

Online

Offered in Spanish


El curso presenta una aproximación general a las intervenciones urbanas de gran envergadura, denominadas usualmente Grandes Proyectos Urbanos (GPU), y busca generar una reflexión sobre los desafíos que representan para la gestión de suelo, especialmente en las ciudades latinoamericanas. En este sentido, el participante tendrá una introducción a los fundamentos de la formación de precios y al funcionamiento de mercados de suelo en América Latina, y se abordarán los impactos y desafíos que traen los GPU en el manejo del suelo. Se hará énfasis en el análisis de casos locales e internacionales de estos proyectos y sus instrumentos de planificación, financiación y gestión del suelo.   

Los postulantes seleccionados aparecerán en la página Listas de Seleccionados a partir del 25 de septiembre de 2024.


Details

Date
October 14, 2024 - October 30, 2024
Application Period
August 8, 2024 - September 8, 2024
Location
Online
Language
Spanish
Educational Credit Type
Lincoln Institute certificate

Keywords

Economic Development, Economics, Infrastructure, Land Market Regulation, Land Use, Land Use Planning, Municipal Fiscal Health, Public Finance