Category: Urban Green

  • Beautiful Dragonflies of the Not-so-Beautiful City

    Beautiful Dragonflies of the Not-so-Beautiful City

    This article investigates dragonflies in the city. While they are specialists in flight, very little is known about their pre-metamorphosis aquatic life. Since urban areas create niches where multi-habitat creatures like dragonflies can flourish, should cities be chastised as unwise, unsustainable endeavours or can they be reimagined as housing nature in changed forms?

    Read more

  • Gatekeeping “Access”: Exploring Caveats to Public Greenspace Use for the Urban Poor

    Gatekeeping “Access”: Exploring Caveats to Public Greenspace Use for the Urban Poor

    Planning processes institutionalise the will of the politically powerful, shaping cities where equal access to urban public greenspace is several steps too far for the urban poor, quite literally and quietly figuratively. Environmental justice scholarship needs to integrate quantitative and qualitative measurements of access to understand what influences greenspace use along socio-economic indicators.

    Read more

  • Bats: The Night Workers

    Bats: The Night Workers

    Shiwani As the sun goes down, the nightwalker, or rather, I would say, night fliers come out, one can see colonies of bats flying in the sky and sometimes wandering near a tree or plant. On one such night, as I stood on the balcony, sipping a cup of tea, I observed some bats visiting…

    Read more

  • A Brief on Control and Management  of Invasive Phragmites for Wetland Restoration

    A Brief on Control and Management of Invasive Phragmites for Wetland Restoration

    Shiwani One of the important steps in wetland restoration is managing the invasive or weed species (SER Report, 2019).  A common invasive plant that is a threat to the ecological health of wetland ecosystems is a family of grasses called phragmites (Phragmites karka). These are dominant wetland plants and are found all around the world,…

    Read more

  • Living Legacies

    Living Legacies

    Fizala Tayebulla Heritage is a legacy of important tangible and intangible assets passed down through the generations. An individual, a family, a community, or even a city or country could inherit a heritage property. There are three forms of heritage recognised by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO): Cultural, Natural and Mixed.…

    Read more

  • On the Aesthetics of Urban Nature

    On the Aesthetics of Urban Nature

    Vijaylakshmi Suman The vision of a world-class city comes with socially produced aesthetic criteria. It draws a distinction between the beautiful and the ugly, the visible and the invisible, the legal and the illegal as a process for the making of world-class urban improvements. According to such an aesthetic mode of governance, development projects in…

    Read more

  • Urban Wetland and its Importance

    Urban Wetland and its Importance

    Vijaylakshmi Suman World Wetlands Day is celebrated every year on 2 February to raise global awareness about the importance of wetlands for the environment and the people. This day also marks the date of the adoption of the Convention on Wetland in 1971, in the Iranian city of Ramsar on the shores of the Caspian…

    Read more

  • Defining ‘Urban Greenspace’

    Defining ‘Urban Greenspace’

    Vijaylakshmi Suman One of the aspects which I am planning to analyze for my doctoral study is how urban greenspaces are defined and understood by not just the people living around it, but also by planners and researchers. As part of the research process, I have been looking at several studies to find common definitions…

    Read more

  • Analyzing Vegetation Cover Change in Dheerpur Wetland  Restoration Site

    Analyzing Vegetation Cover Change in Dheerpur Wetland Restoration Site

    Shiwani The success of an ecological restoration project is based on several key attributes such as the progress/recovery of ecosystem function and structure. A timely assessment/evaluation of the progress of the restoration activities is an important step in measuring the progress. It further helps in monitoring the changes and emergent patterns that could be of…

    Read more

  • What’s in the Name?

    What’s in the Name?

    Vijaylakshmi Suman How often do we as humans see the same thing in so many different ways. This difference in perceptions is generally labelled as subjectivity. My recent read of the book “Postmodern Wetlands: culture, history, ecology” by Rod Giblett (1996) provides a similar situation of how a wetland can be associated with diverse imagination…

    Read more