Cities and Nature

This book analyses the adaptive reuse potential of inner-city modern movement car parking structures for controlled environment agriculture systems and the contribution of such a transformation to urban development. Modern movement garages built over the last 60 years are becoming redundant due to changing mobility trends and growing environmental awareness. Adaptive reuse is one of the scenarios that can reconcile these megastructures with contemporary urban needs. The novel function proposed in this study for multi-storey garages is controlled environment agriculture, which is a food production technique that is now developing in cities as an innovative business and a secondary food source.  

This book explores how power relationships, measured through qualitative social network analysis, impact planning participation and livelihood strategies of a marginalized group of farmers cultivating the Yamuna River floodplain in Delhi, India. Through an in-depth study of 165 farming households facing land development, this book offers insights from the ground-up into how social dynamics enable and constrain agency. A novel mixed-methods approach was used to measure social networks and access to resources based on the different types of people farmers might interact with as part of their livelihoods: hired laborers, vendors, other farmers, etc. Digging deeper into social network patterns, typologies of power are illustrated as they manifest household agency through diverse pathways. More broadly, a political ecology lens is used to link together the multiple and fragmented Yamuna farmers’ stories with broader social, ecological, infrastructural, and economic contexts to suggest future directions for inquiry and policy related to localized urban food systems and sustainable development. 
This monograph will be of interest to academic faculty and graduate students in critical geography, cultural anthropology, food studies, landscape architecture/urban planning, and sociology. 

This book offers in-depth ethnographic analyses of key informants’ interviews on the ecological urbanism and ecosystem services (ES) of selected green infrastructure (GI) in Yoruba cities of Ile-Ife, Ibadan, Osogbo, Lagos, Abeokuta, Akure, Ondo, among others in Southwest Nigeria. It examines the Indigenous Knowledge System (IKS) demonstrated for wellbeing through home gardens by this largest ethno-linguistic group in Nigeria. This is in addition to the ES of Osun Grove UNESCO World Heritage Site, Osogbo; Biological Garden and Park, Akure; Lekki Conservation Centre, Lagos; Adekunle Fajuyi Park, Ado-Ekiti; Muri Okunola Park, Lagos; and some institutional GI including University of Ibadan Botanical Gardens, Ibadan; Federal University of Agriculture Abeokuta Botanical Garden, Abeokuta; and University of Lagos Lagoon Front Resort, Lagos, Nigeria. The study draws on theoretical praxis of Western biophilic ideologies, spirit ontologies of the Global South, and largely, Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005) to examine eco-cultural green spaces, home gardens, and English-types of parks and gardens as archetypes of GI in Yoruba traditional urbanism, colonial and post-colonial city planning. The book provides methods of achieving a form of modernized traditionalism as means of translating the IKS into design strategies for eco-cultural cities. The strategies are framework, model, and ethnographic design algorithms that are syntheses of the lived experiences of the key informants.