Published:
Really excited to share that our recent analysis of the distribution of urban gardens in Detroit was featured by WDET last week. This was my first radio interview for a publication, and Pat was great to chat with. I’m really pleased with how this turned out and hopeful that the attention this paper is garnering will influence decision makers to more equitable gardening in Detroit.
Published:
Cities love to talk about urban agriculture. It’s a green infrastructure, it’s food justice, it’s community space. But where exactly is it? Honestly, most cities don’t know. And when so many of the benefits that cities love to talk about are localized to the neighborhoods near the gardens, not knowing who lives nearby is a problem.
Published:
Few topics have grabbed the attention of urban scholars and policymakers like “gentrification,” a process first described in Ruth Glass’ 1960s work about displacement of working-class residents in London. Today, most folks define gentrification as the process by which lower-income communities are displaced by higher-income communities — this manifests as a combination of shifting business landscapes, higher taxes and rents, and increased state investment (including police presence). In the early 2000s, geographers began to point to policies and planning strategies that were rapidly accelerating gentrification while cities pointed to it as an important part of urban revitalization. Meanwhile, activists and low-income communities the world over have pointed to gentrification as perhaps the single greatest threat to the cultural and historical roots of those communities in cities.
Published:
A few years back, colleagues and I set out on the FEW-meter project — a multi-country effort to systematically measure what actually goes into and comes out of urban farms and gardens. Since wrapping up that data collection, the team has produced a steady stream of papers, and I’ve written about several of them here. This latest piece, led by Agnès Fargue-Lelièvre and co-authored with Benjamin Goldstein, Lidia Poniży, and Erica Dorr, is something of a synthesis: what does the full body of research — ours and others’ — actually tell us about urban agriculture’s impact on people, places, and the planet?
Published:
One of the questions I get asked most often — at conferences, after talks, from journalists — is whether urban agriculture is actually good for the climate. The intuition is appealing. Local food, shorter supply chains, no trucks crossing the country. But sustainability research has a long track record of complicating appealing intuitions, and this one is no exception.
Published:
One of the most important contributions of the FEW-meter project is the large-scale tracking of inputs and outputs for urban agriculture. We recently published the results of this work in Agronomy for Sustainable Development, an effort led by Erica Dorr. One of the most interesting challenges of this work, which I think is worth thinking about here, is the diversity of urban ag sites we see around the world today. Our work focused on work in industrialized nations, specifically the US and Europe, and we were tasked with figuring out how to meaningfully bin those farms and gardens into categories that were both useful and insightful.
Published:
The central project of my dissertation, the FEW-meter project, is drawing to a close, and we’re working to synthesize some of our findings so far into policy recommendations for the future of urban ag. This month, we released a roadmap to resource-efficient urban agriculture. While we argue that urban ag is likely to expand in the future and that this is likely to come with many social benefits, we also acknowledge that resource-efficient and environmentally-friendly urban ag is not a guarantee. Food production has a huge environmental footprint, and if urban ag is to help reduce this instead of expanding it, we’ll need policy and planning optimized to make that happen. To explore these policies, we conducted interviews with urban ag stakeholders across several countries and followed these interviews with an internal scenario-building process, during which we used back-casting to explore possible urban ag futures and their relationships to urban sustainability. We identify seven key factors and develop key recommendations for how each factor can be leveraged to support more sustainable cities.
Published:
The international FEW-meter project is slowly drawing to a close — but there’s a whole lot of work still to do with the fabulous dataset that the project generated. Three years after I arrived at Michigan, the FEW-meter dataset has become the center of my dissertation — and the folks I’ve worked with on that project have taught me so much about research and life. So on the occasion of the final report going public, it seems like a good time to revisit — what is the FEW-meter project and why does it matter for my work?
Published:
People on the coasts of Michigan are facing a housing crisis. This isn’t new, but my question is — are we only seeing the beginnings of it? A recent article from Crain’s Detroit pointed out that seasonal workers can no longer afford to live in the small tourist towns they power, and it’s not news that Airbnb sites and second homes have driven up prices all along the Michigan shoreline. But what if this is only the beginning?
Published:
The 15-minute city has become one of the most talked-about ideas in urban planning. The premise is simple: everything you need for daily life — work, groceries, green space, community — should be accessible within a 15-minute walk or bike ride. Paris has made it the organizing framework for its urban development strategy. Cities across the world are using it as a lens for thinking about what equitable urban infrastructure looks like. But when we say “everything,” what exactly do we mean?
Published:
Sustainable Development Goal 6 is “Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all.” This follows on the heels of Millennium Development Goal 7.C, which aimed to cut in half the number of folks without access to safe drinking water and sanitation. Remarkably, the UN reports that that goal was met five years ahead of schedule, and that 2.6 billion people gained access to improved drinking water sources between 1990 and 2015.
Published:
New semester, new paper! Our article studying farmer vulnerability to irrigation water loss is in print. An exciting output from my MS work with Dr. Zhao Ma and co-authors Dr. Morey Burnham, Dr. Meg du Bray, Dr. Vicken Hillis, and Dr. Trina Running. Link.
Published:
In 1798, Thomas Malthus wrote one of the most influential essays in the history of environmental thinking. In 134 short pages (can you imagine a 134-page article today?), Malthus explained that food production grew linearly with increased acreage, while population grew exponentially, and that this disconnect would inevitably lead to widespread famine. Malthus was, of course, wrong — modern agricultural innovations have meant that more calories are produced per person today than at any time in history, even though the population is 8 times higher than in Malthus’ day. Despite that, Malthusian thinking — or the framing that population is fundamentally the driver behind many of our environmental problems — has persisted. Today, popular thinkers like Paul Ehrlich point to population as the key variable that is driving habitat loss, climate change, and other environmental challenges. So far, he too has made something of a career out of being routinely wrong — though famines have occurred since 1970, his prediction of a global, catastrophic famine by 1985 did not materialize, and some of his more objectionable proposals like the end of food aid have been widely derided by governments and scientists globally.
Published:
One of the questions I get asked most often — at conferences, after talks, from journalists — is whether urban agriculture is actually good for the climate. The intuition is appealing. Local food, shorter supply chains, no trucks crossing the country. But sustainability research has a long track record of complicating appealing intuitions, and this one is no exception.
Published:
Circular economy has achieved near-universal approval as an idea while remaining frustratingly difficult to define. Everyone — industries, cities, policymakers, NGOs — is for circularity. The concept has become so elastic that it risks meaning everything and nothing at once. In a paper just published in Resources, Conservation and Recycling, Benjamin Goldstein, Danielle Levy, Brandon Marc Finn, and I try to get more precise about what circularity actually looks like in an urban context — and why the distinction matters.
Published:
After many years of trying to figure out where I fit (discipline-wise), I’ve settled into a comfortable middle ground, somewhere between engineering and geography. So I always get excited when I see my engineering colleagues start talking about social justice and the need for collaborative research with social scientists to unlock more equitable solutions. This week Dr. Joe Bozeman and a number of folks from around the world published a perspective piece in the Journal of Industrial Ecology arguing for just that. In fact, they outlined three key research priorities for a more just and sustainable urban future: equity, circularity, and digital twins.
Published:
People on the coasts of Michigan are facing a housing crisis. This isn’t new, but my question is — are we only seeing the beginnings of it? A recent article from Crain’s Detroit pointed out that seasonal workers can no longer afford to live in the small tourist towns they power, and it’s not news that Airbnb sites and second homes have driven up prices all along the Michigan shoreline. But what if this is only the beginning?
Published:
New semester, new paper! Our article studying farmer vulnerability to irrigation water loss is in print. An exciting output from my MS work with Dr. Zhao Ma and co-authors Dr. Morey Burnham, Dr. Meg du Bray, Dr. Vicken Hillis, and Dr. Trina Running. Link.
Published:
One of the questions I get asked most often — at conferences, after talks, from journalists — is whether urban agriculture is actually good for the climate. The intuition is appealing. Local food, shorter supply chains, no trucks crossing the country. But sustainability research has a long track record of complicating appealing intuitions, and this one is no exception.
Published:
Decarbonization is the fundamental challenge of our time. For more than two centuries, fossil fuels have fired the global economy. With that unprecedented power came unprecedented global impacts, and climate scientists estimate that we have 7 years to cut global carbon emissions in half if we hope to see less than catastrophic global warming. People have proposed endless solutions to reach that goal — from electric cars to replanting the Amazon to shutting down oil extraction. There is really only one consensus — this is going to take all hands on deck, not just one approach.
Published:
Twitter is a really interesting platform. These days, the algorithms are confused, the ads are plentiful, and the hate speech is growing. Despite all that, it remains a central pillar of academic social networking — probably because we’re all slow to adapt to new platforms as much as anything else. Most of the time, the different sections of my Twitter are talking about their own things — Dr. David Shiffman is talking about sharks and Dr. Katharine Hayhoe is tweeting about climate change — and, of course, Andy Naylor is reporting on Brighton and Hove Albion Football Club, since that’s the other half of my Twitter presence.
Published:
In 1798, Thomas Malthus wrote one of the most influential essays in the history of environmental thinking. In 134 short pages (can you imagine a 134-page article today?), Malthus explained that food production grew linearly with increased acreage, while population grew exponentially, and that this disconnect would inevitably lead to widespread famine. Malthus was, of course, wrong — modern agricultural innovations have meant that more calories are produced per person today than at any time in history, even though the population is 8 times higher than in Malthus’ day. Despite that, Malthusian thinking — or the framing that population is fundamentally the driver behind many of our environmental problems — has persisted. Today, popular thinkers like Paul Ehrlich point to population as the key variable that is driving habitat loss, climate change, and other environmental challenges. So far, he too has made something of a career out of being routinely wrong — though famines have occurred since 1970, his prediction of a global, catastrophic famine by 1985 did not materialize, and some of his more objectionable proposals like the end of food aid have been widely derided by governments and scientists globally.
Published:
People on the coasts of Michigan are facing a housing crisis. This isn’t new, but my question is — are we only seeing the beginnings of it? A recent article from Crain’s Detroit pointed out that seasonal workers can no longer afford to live in the small tourist towns they power, and it’s not news that Airbnb sites and second homes have driven up prices all along the Michigan shoreline. But what if this is only the beginning?
Published:
There’s often nothing better than learning by doing. Yet, opportunities are limited for early career sustainability professionals to practice key tools of the trade like co-production of knowledge. In a recent paper published by Urban Transformations, Matt Feagan led a team of collaborators (including me) to figure out how we might address this.
Published:
How do you design international service-learning projects to foster the best outcomes in partner communities? That’s the question we tackle in our new open-access paper in the International Journal of Research on Service-Learning and Community Engagement — https://doi.org/10.37333/001c.31383.
Published:
Last week I attended the 2022 Industrial Ecology Gordon Research Conference — and it was a whirlwind introduction to the industrial ecology community. For anyone reading this debating on whether or not to go to a Gordon Research Conference, I can only say that I highly recommend! Between the Gordon Research Seminar and Conference, it was about a week of getting to hear from and talk with some of the brightest minds in the field. Since it was my first conference in the subject, it was all a breakneck introduction to the people, ideas, and places that have shaped this relatively young field.
Published:
Decarbonization is the fundamental challenge of our time. For more than two centuries, fossil fuels have fired the global economy. With that unprecedented power came unprecedented global impacts, and climate scientists estimate that we have 7 years to cut global carbon emissions in half if we hope to see less than catastrophic global warming. People have proposed endless solutions to reach that goal — from electric cars to replanting the Amazon to shutting down oil extraction. There is really only one consensus — this is going to take all hands on deck, not just one approach.
Published:
After many years of trying to figure out where I fit (discipline-wise), I’ve settled into a comfortable middle ground, somewhere between engineering and geography. So I always get excited when I see my engineering colleagues start talking about social justice and the need for collaborative research with social scientists to unlock more equitable solutions. This week Dr. Joe Bozeman and a number of folks from around the world published a perspective piece in the Journal of Industrial Ecology arguing for just that. In fact, they outlined three key research priorities for a more just and sustainable urban future: equity, circularity, and digital twins.
Published:
The international FEW-meter project is slowly drawing to a close — but there’s a whole lot of work still to do with the fabulous dataset that the project generated. Three years after I arrived at Michigan, the FEW-meter dataset has become the center of my dissertation — and the folks I’ve worked with on that project have taught me so much about research and life. So on the occasion of the final report going public, it seems like a good time to revisit — what is the FEW-meter project and why does it matter for my work?
Published:
Decarbonization is the fundamental challenge of our time. For more than two centuries, fossil fuels have fired the global economy. With that unprecedented power came unprecedented global impacts, and climate scientists estimate that we have 7 years to cut global carbon emissions in half if we hope to see less than catastrophic global warming. People have proposed endless solutions to reach that goal — from electric cars to replanting the Amazon to shutting down oil extraction. There is really only one consensus — this is going to take all hands on deck, not just one approach.
Published:
As part of rolling out this website, I’m going to revisit some old projects. From 2019 to 2020, I got the chance to work with a great group of folks (led by Dr. David Yu at Purdue) across institutions and countries to ask: How do we assess resilience in designed systems like infrastructure? What happens when those systems contain social, ecological, and technological components? We published our findings in Risk Analysis — “Toward General Principles for Resilience Engineering”.
Published:
Sustainable Development Goal 6 is “Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all.” This follows on the heels of Millennium Development Goal 7.C, which aimed to cut in half the number of folks without access to safe drinking water and sanitation. Remarkably, the UN reports that that goal was met five years ahead of schedule, and that 2.6 billion people gained access to improved drinking water sources between 1990 and 2015.
Published:
In 1798, Thomas Malthus wrote one of the most influential essays in the history of environmental thinking. In 134 short pages (can you imagine a 134-page article today?), Malthus explained that food production grew linearly with increased acreage, while population grew exponentially, and that this disconnect would inevitably lead to widespread famine. Malthus was, of course, wrong — modern agricultural innovations have meant that more calories are produced per person today than at any time in history, even though the population is 8 times higher than in Malthus’ day. Despite that, Malthusian thinking — or the framing that population is fundamentally the driver behind many of our environmental problems — has persisted. Today, popular thinkers like Paul Ehrlich point to population as the key variable that is driving habitat loss, climate change, and other environmental challenges. So far, he too has made something of a career out of being routinely wrong — though famines have occurred since 1970, his prediction of a global, catastrophic famine by 1985 did not materialize, and some of his more objectionable proposals like the end of food aid have been widely derided by governments and scientists globally.
Published:
Cities love to talk about urban agriculture. It’s a green infrastructure, it’s food justice, it’s community space. But where exactly is it? Honestly, most cities don’t know. And when so many of the benefits that cities love to talk about are localized to the neighborhoods near the gardens, not knowing who lives nearby is a problem.
Published:
Few topics have grabbed the attention of urban scholars and policymakers like “gentrification,” a process first described in Ruth Glass’ 1960s work about displacement of working-class residents in London. Today, most folks define gentrification as the process by which lower-income communities are displaced by higher-income communities — this manifests as a combination of shifting business landscapes, higher taxes and rents, and increased state investment (including police presence). In the early 2000s, geographers began to point to policies and planning strategies that were rapidly accelerating gentrification while cities pointed to it as an important part of urban revitalization. Meanwhile, activists and low-income communities the world over have pointed to gentrification as perhaps the single greatest threat to the cultural and historical roots of those communities in cities.
Published:
In 1798, Thomas Malthus wrote one of the most influential essays in the history of environmental thinking. In 134 short pages (can you imagine a 134-page article today?), Malthus explained that food production grew linearly with increased acreage, while population grew exponentially, and that this disconnect would inevitably lead to widespread famine. Malthus was, of course, wrong — modern agricultural innovations have meant that more calories are produced per person today than at any time in history, even though the population is 8 times higher than in Malthus’ day. Despite that, Malthusian thinking — or the framing that population is fundamentally the driver behind many of our environmental problems — has persisted. Today, popular thinkers like Paul Ehrlich point to population as the key variable that is driving habitat loss, climate change, and other environmental challenges. So far, he too has made something of a career out of being routinely wrong — though famines have occurred since 1970, his prediction of a global, catastrophic famine by 1985 did not materialize, and some of his more objectionable proposals like the end of food aid have been widely derided by governments and scientists globally.
Published:
The 15-minute city has become one of the most talked-about ideas in urban planning. The premise is simple: everything you need for daily life — work, groceries, green space, community — should be accessible within a 15-minute walk or bike ride. Paris has made it the organizing framework for its urban development strategy. Cities across the world are using it as a lens for thinking about what equitable urban infrastructure looks like. But when we say “everything,” what exactly do we mean?
Published:
After many years of trying to figure out where I fit (discipline-wise), I’ve settled into a comfortable middle ground, somewhere between engineering and geography. So I always get excited when I see my engineering colleagues start talking about social justice and the need for collaborative research with social scientists to unlock more equitable solutions. This week Dr. Joe Bozeman and a number of folks from around the world published a perspective piece in the Journal of Industrial Ecology arguing for just that. In fact, they outlined three key research priorities for a more just and sustainable urban future: equity, circularity, and digital twins.
Published:
Cities across the country are home to farms and gardens producing food, building community, and greening urban landscapes. And yet federal support for this work remains thin, fragmented, and perpetually at risk. In a policy brief published in the Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development, my co-authors Capnerhurst and Quigley join me in laying out why that needs to change — and what a more serious federal commitment could look like.
Published:
Cities across the country are home to farms and gardens producing food, building community, and greening urban landscapes. And yet federal support for this work remains thin, fragmented, and perpetually at risk. In a policy brief published in the Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development, my co-authors Capnerhurst and Quigley join me in laying out why that needs to change — and what a more serious federal commitment could look like.
Published:
A recurring tension in debates about urban agriculture is the question of scale. Advocates argue that urban farming could play a meaningful role in feeding cities. Skeptics counter that cities simply don’t have the space. Both positions have historically been more comfortable with assertion than evidence. A new paper I published with Dimitrios Gounaridis, Joshua Newell, Benjamin Goldstein, Silvio Caputo, and a large international team in Landscape and Urban Planning tries to bring some empirical clarity.
Published:
A recurring tension in debates about urban agriculture is the question of scale. Advocates argue that urban farming could play a meaningful role in feeding cities. Skeptics counter that cities simply don’t have the space. Both positions have historically been more comfortable with assertion than evidence. A new paper I published with Dimitrios Gounaridis, Joshua Newell, Benjamin Goldstein, Silvio Caputo, and a large international team in Landscape and Urban Planning tries to bring some empirical clarity.
Published:
Cities across the country are home to farms and gardens producing food, building community, and greening urban landscapes. And yet federal support for this work remains thin, fragmented, and perpetually at risk. In a policy brief published in the Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development, my co-authors Capnerhurst and Quigley join me in laying out why that needs to change — and what a more serious federal commitment could look like.
Published:
A few years back, colleagues and I set out on the FEW-meter project — a multi-country effort to systematically measure what actually goes into and comes out of urban farms and gardens. Since wrapping up that data collection, the team has produced a steady stream of papers, and I’ve written about several of them here. This latest piece, led by Agnès Fargue-Lelièvre and co-authored with Benjamin Goldstein, Lidia Poniży, and Erica Dorr, is something of a synthesis: what does the full body of research — ours and others’ — actually tell us about urban agriculture’s impact on people, places, and the planet?
Published:
One of the questions I get asked most often — at conferences, after talks, from journalists — is whether urban agriculture is actually good for the climate. The intuition is appealing. Local food, shorter supply chains, no trucks crossing the country. But sustainability research has a long track record of complicating appealing intuitions, and this one is no exception.
Published:
The 15-minute city has become one of the most talked-about ideas in urban planning. The premise is simple: everything you need for daily life — work, groceries, green space, community — should be accessible within a 15-minute walk or bike ride. Paris has made it the organizing framework for its urban development strategy. Cities across the world are using it as a lens for thinking about what equitable urban infrastructure looks like. But when we say “everything,” what exactly do we mean?
Published:
One of the most important contributions of the FEW-meter project is the large-scale tracking of inputs and outputs for urban agriculture. We recently published the results of this work in Agronomy for Sustainable Development, an effort led by Erica Dorr. One of the most interesting challenges of this work, which I think is worth thinking about here, is the diversity of urban ag sites we see around the world today. Our work focused on work in industrialized nations, specifically the US and Europe, and we were tasked with figuring out how to meaningfully bin those farms and gardens into categories that were both useful and insightful.
Published:
The central project of my dissertation, the FEW-meter project, is drawing to a close, and we’re working to synthesize some of our findings so far into policy recommendations for the future of urban ag. This month, we released a roadmap to resource-efficient urban agriculture. While we argue that urban ag is likely to expand in the future and that this is likely to come with many social benefits, we also acknowledge that resource-efficient and environmentally-friendly urban ag is not a guarantee. Food production has a huge environmental footprint, and if urban ag is to help reduce this instead of expanding it, we’ll need policy and planning optimized to make that happen. To explore these policies, we conducted interviews with urban ag stakeholders across several countries and followed these interviews with an internal scenario-building process, during which we used back-casting to explore possible urban ag futures and their relationships to urban sustainability. We identify seven key factors and develop key recommendations for how each factor can be leveraged to support more sustainable cities.
Published:
Urban ag is a highly place-based practice. No two gardens are the same, and it’s difficult to say that what you know about one garden will apply to many others. This means that the research is almost always case studies, and it’s very rarely generalized to a broad spectrum of farms or gardens. To generate insights relevant to a wider variety of urban ag sites, it’s necessary to put together a big sample of farms and gardens (ala FEW-meter) or to combine the insights of a bunch of case studies. Rao et al. take the second approach in their recently published systematic review, where they analyzed 320 studies of urban ag to understand the geographic and thematic trends in urban ag research to-date.
Published:
Cities love to talk about urban agriculture. It’s a green infrastructure, it’s food justice, it’s community space. But where exactly is it? Honestly, most cities don’t know. And when so many of the benefits that cities love to talk about are localized to the neighborhoods near the gardens, not knowing who lives nearby is a problem.
Published:
The international FEW-meter project is slowly drawing to a close — but there’s a whole lot of work still to do with the fabulous dataset that the project generated. Three years after I arrived at Michigan, the FEW-meter dataset has become the center of my dissertation — and the folks I’ve worked with on that project have taught me so much about research and life. So on the occasion of the final report going public, it seems like a good time to revisit — what is the FEW-meter project and why does it matter for my work?
Published:
People on the coasts of Michigan are facing a housing crisis. This isn’t new, but my question is — are we only seeing the beginnings of it? A recent article from Crain’s Detroit pointed out that seasonal workers can no longer afford to live in the small tourist towns they power, and it’s not news that Airbnb sites and second homes have driven up prices all along the Michigan shoreline. But what if this is only the beginning?
Published:
Really excited to share that our recent analysis of the distribution of urban gardens in Detroit was featured by WDET last week. This was my first radio interview for a publication, and Pat was great to chat with. I’m really pleased with how this turned out and hopeful that the attention this paper is garnering will influence decision makers to more equitable gardening in Detroit.
Published:
Cities love to talk about urban agriculture. It’s a green infrastructure, it’s food justice, it’s community space. But where exactly is it? Honestly, most cities don’t know. And when so many of the benefits that cities love to talk about are localized to the neighborhoods near the gardens, not knowing who lives nearby is a problem.
Published:
Few topics have grabbed the attention of urban scholars and policymakers like “gentrification,” a process first described in Ruth Glass’ 1960s work about displacement of working-class residents in London. Today, most folks define gentrification as the process by which lower-income communities are displaced by higher-income communities — this manifests as a combination of shifting business landscapes, higher taxes and rents, and increased state investment (including police presence). In the early 2000s, geographers began to point to policies and planning strategies that were rapidly accelerating gentrification while cities pointed to it as an important part of urban revitalization. Meanwhile, activists and low-income communities the world over have pointed to gentrification as perhaps the single greatest threat to the cultural and historical roots of those communities in cities.
Published:
There’s often nothing better than learning by doing. Yet, opportunities are limited for early career sustainability professionals to practice key tools of the trade like co-production of knowledge. In a recent paper published by Urban Transformations, Matt Feagan led a team of collaborators (including me) to figure out how we might address this.
Published:
People on the coasts of Michigan are facing a housing crisis. This isn’t new, but my question is — are we only seeing the beginnings of it? A recent article from Crain’s Detroit pointed out that seasonal workers can no longer afford to live in the small tourist towns they power, and it’s not news that Airbnb sites and second homes have driven up prices all along the Michigan shoreline. But what if this is only the beginning?
Published:
Circular economy has achieved near-universal approval as an idea while remaining frustratingly difficult to define. Everyone — industries, cities, policymakers, NGOs — is for circularity. The concept has become so elastic that it risks meaning everything and nothing at once. In a paper just published in Resources, Conservation and Recycling, Benjamin Goldstein, Danielle Levy, Brandon Marc Finn, and I try to get more precise about what circularity actually looks like in an urban context — and why the distinction matters.
Published:
After many years of trying to figure out where I fit (discipline-wise), I’ve settled into a comfortable middle ground, somewhere between engineering and geography. So I always get excited when I see my engineering colleagues start talking about social justice and the need for collaborative research with social scientists to unlock more equitable solutions. This week Dr. Joe Bozeman and a number of folks from around the world published a perspective piece in the Journal of Industrial Ecology arguing for just that. In fact, they outlined three key research priorities for a more just and sustainable urban future: equity, circularity, and digital twins.
Published:
Last week I attended the 2022 Industrial Ecology Gordon Research Conference — and it was a whirlwind introduction to the industrial ecology community. For anyone reading this debating on whether or not to go to a Gordon Research Conference, I can only say that I highly recommend! Between the Gordon Research Seminar and Conference, it was about a week of getting to hear from and talk with some of the brightest minds in the field. Since it was my first conference in the subject, it was all a breakneck introduction to the people, ideas, and places that have shaped this relatively young field.
Published:
Decarbonization is the fundamental challenge of our time. For more than two centuries, fossil fuels have fired the global economy. With that unprecedented power came unprecedented global impacts, and climate scientists estimate that we have 7 years to cut global carbon emissions in half if we hope to see less than catastrophic global warming. People have proposed endless solutions to reach that goal — from electric cars to replanting the Amazon to shutting down oil extraction. There is really only one consensus — this is going to take all hands on deck, not just one approach.
Published:
As part of rolling out this website, I’m going to revisit some old projects. From 2019 to 2020, I got the chance to work with a great group of folks (led by Dr. David Yu at Purdue) across institutions and countries to ask: How do we assess resilience in designed systems like infrastructure? What happens when those systems contain social, ecological, and technological components? We published our findings in Risk Analysis — “Toward General Principles for Resilience Engineering”.
Published:
How do you design international service-learning projects to foster the best outcomes in partner communities? That’s the question we tackle in our new open-access paper in the International Journal of Research on Service-Learning and Community Engagement — https://doi.org/10.37333/001c.31383.
Published:
How do you design international service-learning projects to foster the best outcomes in partner communities? That’s the question we tackle in our new open-access paper in the International Journal of Research on Service-Learning and Community Engagement — https://doi.org/10.37333/001c.31383.
Published:
One of the questions I get asked most often — at conferences, after talks, from journalists — is whether urban agriculture is actually good for the climate. The intuition is appealing. Local food, shorter supply chains, no trucks crossing the country. But sustainability research has a long track record of complicating appealing intuitions, and this one is no exception.
Published:
Sustainable Development Goal 6 is “Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all.” This follows on the heels of Millennium Development Goal 7.C, which aimed to cut in half the number of folks without access to safe drinking water and sanitation. Remarkably, the UN reports that that goal was met five years ahead of schedule, and that 2.6 billion people gained access to improved drinking water sources between 1990 and 2015.
Published:
Really excited to share that our recent analysis of the distribution of urban gardens in Detroit was featured by WDET last week. This was my first radio interview for a publication, and Pat was great to chat with. I’m really pleased with how this turned out and hopeful that the attention this paper is garnering will influence decision makers to more equitable gardening in Detroit.
Published:
Twitter is a really interesting platform. These days, the algorithms are confused, the ads are plentiful, and the hate speech is growing. Despite all that, it remains a central pillar of academic social networking — probably because we’re all slow to adapt to new platforms as much as anything else. Most of the time, the different sections of my Twitter are talking about their own things — Dr. David Shiffman is talking about sharks and Dr. Katharine Hayhoe is tweeting about climate change — and, of course, Andy Naylor is reporting on Brighton and Hove Albion Football Club, since that’s the other half of my Twitter presence.
Published:
Last week I attended the 2022 Industrial Ecology Gordon Research Conference — and it was a whirlwind introduction to the industrial ecology community. For anyone reading this debating on whether or not to go to a Gordon Research Conference, I can only say that I highly recommend! Between the Gordon Research Seminar and Conference, it was about a week of getting to hear from and talk with some of the brightest minds in the field. Since it was my first conference in the subject, it was all a breakneck introduction to the people, ideas, and places that have shaped this relatively young field.
Published:
There’s often nothing better than learning by doing. Yet, opportunities are limited for early career sustainability professionals to practice key tools of the trade like co-production of knowledge. In a recent paper published by Urban Transformations, Matt Feagan led a team of collaborators (including me) to figure out how we might address this.
Published:
How do you design international service-learning projects to foster the best outcomes in partner communities? That’s the question we tackle in our new open-access paper in the International Journal of Research on Service-Learning and Community Engagement — https://doi.org/10.37333/001c.31383.
Published:
Twitter is a really interesting platform. These days, the algorithms are confused, the ads are plentiful, and the hate speech is growing. Despite all that, it remains a central pillar of academic social networking — probably because we’re all slow to adapt to new platforms as much as anything else. Most of the time, the different sections of my Twitter are talking about their own things — Dr. David Shiffman is talking about sharks and Dr. Katharine Hayhoe is tweeting about climate change — and, of course, Andy Naylor is reporting on Brighton and Hove Albion Football Club, since that’s the other half of my Twitter presence.
Published:
Decarbonization is the fundamental challenge of our time. For more than two centuries, fossil fuels have fired the global economy. With that unprecedented power came unprecedented global impacts, and climate scientists estimate that we have 7 years to cut global carbon emissions in half if we hope to see less than catastrophic global warming. People have proposed endless solutions to reach that goal — from electric cars to replanting the Amazon to shutting down oil extraction. There is really only one consensus — this is going to take all hands on deck, not just one approach.
Published:
The central project of my dissertation, the FEW-meter project, is drawing to a close, and we’re working to synthesize some of our findings so far into policy recommendations for the future of urban ag. This month, we released a roadmap to resource-efficient urban agriculture. While we argue that urban ag is likely to expand in the future and that this is likely to come with many social benefits, we also acknowledge that resource-efficient and environmentally-friendly urban ag is not a guarantee. Food production has a huge environmental footprint, and if urban ag is to help reduce this instead of expanding it, we’ll need policy and planning optimized to make that happen. To explore these policies, we conducted interviews with urban ag stakeholders across several countries and followed these interviews with an internal scenario-building process, during which we used back-casting to explore possible urban ag futures and their relationships to urban sustainability. We identify seven key factors and develop key recommendations for how each factor can be leveraged to support more sustainable cities.
Published:
In 1798, Thomas Malthus wrote one of the most influential essays in the history of environmental thinking. In 134 short pages (can you imagine a 134-page article today?), Malthus explained that food production grew linearly with increased acreage, while population grew exponentially, and that this disconnect would inevitably lead to widespread famine. Malthus was, of course, wrong — modern agricultural innovations have meant that more calories are produced per person today than at any time in history, even though the population is 8 times higher than in Malthus’ day. Despite that, Malthusian thinking — or the framing that population is fundamentally the driver behind many of our environmental problems — has persisted. Today, popular thinkers like Paul Ehrlich point to population as the key variable that is driving habitat loss, climate change, and other environmental challenges. So far, he too has made something of a career out of being routinely wrong — though famines have occurred since 1970, his prediction of a global, catastrophic famine by 1985 did not materialize, and some of his more objectionable proposals like the end of food aid have been widely derided by governments and scientists globally.
Published:
There’s often nothing better than learning by doing. Yet, opportunities are limited for early career sustainability professionals to practice key tools of the trade like co-production of knowledge. In a recent paper published by Urban Transformations, Matt Feagan led a team of collaborators (including me) to figure out how we might address this.
Published:
A recurring tension in debates about urban agriculture is the question of scale. Advocates argue that urban farming could play a meaningful role in feeding cities. Skeptics counter that cities simply don’t have the space. Both positions have historically been more comfortable with assertion than evidence. A new paper I published with Dimitrios Gounaridis, Joshua Newell, Benjamin Goldstein, Silvio Caputo, and a large international team in Landscape and Urban Planning tries to bring some empirical clarity.
Published:
Circular economy has achieved near-universal approval as an idea while remaining frustratingly difficult to define. Everyone — industries, cities, policymakers, NGOs — is for circularity. The concept has become so elastic that it risks meaning everything and nothing at once. In a paper just published in Resources, Conservation and Recycling, Benjamin Goldstein, Danielle Levy, Brandon Marc Finn, and I try to get more precise about what circularity actually looks like in an urban context — and why the distinction matters.
Published:
A few years back, colleagues and I set out on the FEW-meter project — a multi-country effort to systematically measure what actually goes into and comes out of urban farms and gardens. Since wrapping up that data collection, the team has produced a steady stream of papers, and I’ve written about several of them here. This latest piece, led by Agnès Fargue-Lelièvre and co-authored with Benjamin Goldstein, Lidia Poniży, and Erica Dorr, is something of a synthesis: what does the full body of research — ours and others’ — actually tell us about urban agriculture’s impact on people, places, and the planet?
Published:
One of the most important contributions of the FEW-meter project is the large-scale tracking of inputs and outputs for urban agriculture. We recently published the results of this work in Agronomy for Sustainable Development, an effort led by Erica Dorr. One of the most interesting challenges of this work, which I think is worth thinking about here, is the diversity of urban ag sites we see around the world today. Our work focused on work in industrialized nations, specifically the US and Europe, and we were tasked with figuring out how to meaningfully bin those farms and gardens into categories that were both useful and insightful.
Published:
Urban ag is a highly place-based practice. No two gardens are the same, and it’s difficult to say that what you know about one garden will apply to many others. This means that the research is almost always case studies, and it’s very rarely generalized to a broad spectrum of farms or gardens. To generate insights relevant to a wider variety of urban ag sites, it’s necessary to put together a big sample of farms and gardens (ala FEW-meter) or to combine the insights of a bunch of case studies. Rao et al. take the second approach in their recently published systematic review, where they analyzed 320 studies of urban ag to understand the geographic and thematic trends in urban ag research to-date.
Published:
The international FEW-meter project is slowly drawing to a close — but there’s a whole lot of work still to do with the fabulous dataset that the project generated. Three years after I arrived at Michigan, the FEW-meter dataset has become the center of my dissertation — and the folks I’ve worked with on that project have taught me so much about research and life. So on the occasion of the final report going public, it seems like a good time to revisit — what is the FEW-meter project and why does it matter for my work?
Published:
As part of rolling out this website, I’m going to revisit some old projects. From 2019 to 2020, I got the chance to work with a great group of folks (led by Dr. David Yu at Purdue) across institutions and countries to ask: How do we assess resilience in designed systems like infrastructure? What happens when those systems contain social, ecological, and technological components? We published our findings in Risk Analysis — “Toward General Principles for Resilience Engineering”.
Published:
Circular economy has achieved near-universal approval as an idea while remaining frustratingly difficult to define. Everyone — industries, cities, policymakers, NGOs — is for circularity. The concept has become so elastic that it risks meaning everything and nothing at once. In a paper just published in Resources, Conservation and Recycling, Benjamin Goldstein, Danielle Levy, Brandon Marc Finn, and I try to get more precise about what circularity actually looks like in an urban context — and why the distinction matters.
Published:
A recurring tension in debates about urban agriculture is the question of scale. Advocates argue that urban farming could play a meaningful role in feeding cities. Skeptics counter that cities simply don’t have the space. Both positions have historically been more comfortable with assertion than evidence. A new paper I published with Dimitrios Gounaridis, Joshua Newell, Benjamin Goldstein, Silvio Caputo, and a large international team in Landscape and Urban Planning tries to bring some empirical clarity.
Published:
Twitter is a really interesting platform. These days, the algorithms are confused, the ads are plentiful, and the hate speech is growing. Despite all that, it remains a central pillar of academic social networking — probably because we’re all slow to adapt to new platforms as much as anything else. Most of the time, the different sections of my Twitter are talking about their own things — Dr. David Shiffman is talking about sharks and Dr. Katharine Hayhoe is tweeting about climate change — and, of course, Andy Naylor is reporting on Brighton and Hove Albion Football Club, since that’s the other half of my Twitter presence.
Published:
How do you design international service-learning projects to foster the best outcomes in partner communities? That’s the question we tackle in our new open-access paper in the International Journal of Research on Service-Learning and Community Engagement — https://doi.org/10.37333/001c.31383.
Published:
As part of rolling out this website, I’m going to revisit some old projects. From 2019 to 2020, I got the chance to work with a great group of folks (led by Dr. David Yu at Purdue) across institutions and countries to ask: How do we assess resilience in designed systems like infrastructure? What happens when those systems contain social, ecological, and technological components? We published our findings in Risk Analysis — “Toward General Principles for Resilience Engineering”.
Published:
Cities across the country are home to farms and gardens producing food, building community, and greening urban landscapes. And yet federal support for this work remains thin, fragmented, and perpetually at risk. In a policy brief published in the Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development, my co-authors Capnerhurst and Quigley join me in laying out why that needs to change — and what a more serious federal commitment could look like.
Published:
A few years back, colleagues and I set out on the FEW-meter project — a multi-country effort to systematically measure what actually goes into and comes out of urban farms and gardens. Since wrapping up that data collection, the team has produced a steady stream of papers, and I’ve written about several of them here. This latest piece, led by Agnès Fargue-Lelièvre and co-authored with Benjamin Goldstein, Lidia Poniży, and Erica Dorr, is something of a synthesis: what does the full body of research — ours and others’ — actually tell us about urban agriculture’s impact on people, places, and the planet?
Published:
There’s often nothing better than learning by doing. Yet, opportunities are limited for early career sustainability professionals to practice key tools of the trade like co-production of knowledge. In a recent paper published by Urban Transformations, Matt Feagan led a team of collaborators (including me) to figure out how we might address this.
Published:
One of the most important contributions of the FEW-meter project is the large-scale tracking of inputs and outputs for urban agriculture. We recently published the results of this work in Agronomy for Sustainable Development, an effort led by Erica Dorr. One of the most interesting challenges of this work, which I think is worth thinking about here, is the diversity of urban ag sites we see around the world today. Our work focused on work in industrialized nations, specifically the US and Europe, and we were tasked with figuring out how to meaningfully bin those farms and gardens into categories that were both useful and insightful.
Published:
Sustainable Development Goal 6 is “Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all.” This follows on the heels of Millennium Development Goal 7.C, which aimed to cut in half the number of folks without access to safe drinking water and sanitation. Remarkably, the UN reports that that goal was met five years ahead of schedule, and that 2.6 billion people gained access to improved drinking water sources between 1990 and 2015.
Published:
The central project of my dissertation, the FEW-meter project, is drawing to a close, and we’re working to synthesize some of our findings so far into policy recommendations for the future of urban ag. This month, we released a roadmap to resource-efficient urban agriculture. While we argue that urban ag is likely to expand in the future and that this is likely to come with many social benefits, we also acknowledge that resource-efficient and environmentally-friendly urban ag is not a guarantee. Food production has a huge environmental footprint, and if urban ag is to help reduce this instead of expanding it, we’ll need policy and planning optimized to make that happen. To explore these policies, we conducted interviews with urban ag stakeholders across several countries and followed these interviews with an internal scenario-building process, during which we used back-casting to explore possible urban ag futures and their relationships to urban sustainability. We identify seven key factors and develop key recommendations for how each factor can be leveraged to support more sustainable cities.
Published:
Urban ag is a highly place-based practice. No two gardens are the same, and it’s difficult to say that what you know about one garden will apply to many others. This means that the research is almost always case studies, and it’s very rarely generalized to a broad spectrum of farms or gardens. To generate insights relevant to a wider variety of urban ag sites, it’s necessary to put together a big sample of farms and gardens (ala FEW-meter) or to combine the insights of a bunch of case studies. Rao et al. take the second approach in their recently published systematic review, where they analyzed 320 studies of urban ag to understand the geographic and thematic trends in urban ag research to-date.
Published:
A recurring tension in debates about urban agriculture is the question of scale. Advocates argue that urban farming could play a meaningful role in feeding cities. Skeptics counter that cities simply don’t have the space. Both positions have historically been more comfortable with assertion than evidence. A new paper I published with Dimitrios Gounaridis, Joshua Newell, Benjamin Goldstein, Silvio Caputo, and a large international team in Landscape and Urban Planning tries to bring some empirical clarity.
Published:
Cities across the country are home to farms and gardens producing food, building community, and greening urban landscapes. And yet federal support for this work remains thin, fragmented, and perpetually at risk. In a policy brief published in the Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development, my co-authors Capnerhurst and Quigley join me in laying out why that needs to change — and what a more serious federal commitment could look like.
Published:
A few years back, colleagues and I set out on the FEW-meter project — a multi-country effort to systematically measure what actually goes into and comes out of urban farms and gardens. Since wrapping up that data collection, the team has produced a steady stream of papers, and I’ve written about several of them here. This latest piece, led by Agnès Fargue-Lelièvre and co-authored with Benjamin Goldstein, Lidia Poniży, and Erica Dorr, is something of a synthesis: what does the full body of research — ours and others’ — actually tell us about urban agriculture’s impact on people, places, and the planet?
Published:
One of the questions I get asked most often — at conferences, after talks, from journalists — is whether urban agriculture is actually good for the climate. The intuition is appealing. Local food, shorter supply chains, no trucks crossing the country. But sustainability research has a long track record of complicating appealing intuitions, and this one is no exception.
Published:
The 15-minute city has become one of the most talked-about ideas in urban planning. The premise is simple: everything you need for daily life — work, groceries, green space, community — should be accessible within a 15-minute walk or bike ride. Paris has made it the organizing framework for its urban development strategy. Cities across the world are using it as a lens for thinking about what equitable urban infrastructure looks like. But when we say “everything,” what exactly do we mean?
Published:
One of the most important contributions of the FEW-meter project is the large-scale tracking of inputs and outputs for urban agriculture. We recently published the results of this work in Agronomy for Sustainable Development, an effort led by Erica Dorr. One of the most interesting challenges of this work, which I think is worth thinking about here, is the diversity of urban ag sites we see around the world today. Our work focused on work in industrialized nations, specifically the US and Europe, and we were tasked with figuring out how to meaningfully bin those farms and gardens into categories that were both useful and insightful.
Published:
The central project of my dissertation, the FEW-meter project, is drawing to a close, and we’re working to synthesize some of our findings so far into policy recommendations for the future of urban ag. This month, we released a roadmap to resource-efficient urban agriculture. While we argue that urban ag is likely to expand in the future and that this is likely to come with many social benefits, we also acknowledge that resource-efficient and environmentally-friendly urban ag is not a guarantee. Food production has a huge environmental footprint, and if urban ag is to help reduce this instead of expanding it, we’ll need policy and planning optimized to make that happen. To explore these policies, we conducted interviews with urban ag stakeholders across several countries and followed these interviews with an internal scenario-building process, during which we used back-casting to explore possible urban ag futures and their relationships to urban sustainability. We identify seven key factors and develop key recommendations for how each factor can be leveraged to support more sustainable cities.
Published:
Urban ag is a highly place-based practice. No two gardens are the same, and it’s difficult to say that what you know about one garden will apply to many others. This means that the research is almost always case studies, and it’s very rarely generalized to a broad spectrum of farms or gardens. To generate insights relevant to a wider variety of urban ag sites, it’s necessary to put together a big sample of farms and gardens (ala FEW-meter) or to combine the insights of a bunch of case studies. Rao et al. take the second approach in their recently published systematic review, where they analyzed 320 studies of urban ag to understand the geographic and thematic trends in urban ag research to-date.
Published:
Last week I attended the 2022 Industrial Ecology Gordon Research Conference — and it was a whirlwind introduction to the industrial ecology community. For anyone reading this debating on whether or not to go to a Gordon Research Conference, I can only say that I highly recommend! Between the Gordon Research Seminar and Conference, it was about a week of getting to hear from and talk with some of the brightest minds in the field. Since it was my first conference in the subject, it was all a breakneck introduction to the people, ideas, and places that have shaped this relatively young field.
Published:
The international FEW-meter project is slowly drawing to a close — but there’s a whole lot of work still to do with the fabulous dataset that the project generated. Three years after I arrived at Michigan, the FEW-meter dataset has become the center of my dissertation — and the folks I’ve worked with on that project have taught me so much about research and life. So on the occasion of the final report going public, it seems like a good time to revisit — what is the FEW-meter project and why does it matter for my work?
Published:
Really excited to share that our recent analysis of the distribution of urban gardens in Detroit was featured by WDET last week. This was my first radio interview for a publication, and Pat was great to chat with. I’m really pleased with how this turned out and hopeful that the attention this paper is garnering will influence decision makers to more equitable gardening in Detroit.
Published:
Cities love to talk about urban agriculture. It’s a green infrastructure, it’s food justice, it’s community space. But where exactly is it? Honestly, most cities don’t know. And when so many of the benefits that cities love to talk about are localized to the neighborhoods near the gardens, not knowing who lives nearby is a problem.
Published:
Few topics have grabbed the attention of urban scholars and policymakers like “gentrification,” a process first described in Ruth Glass’ 1960s work about displacement of working-class residents in London. Today, most folks define gentrification as the process by which lower-income communities are displaced by higher-income communities — this manifests as a combination of shifting business landscapes, higher taxes and rents, and increased state investment (including police presence). In the early 2000s, geographers began to point to policies and planning strategies that were rapidly accelerating gentrification while cities pointed to it as an important part of urban revitalization. Meanwhile, activists and low-income communities the world over have pointed to gentrification as perhaps the single greatest threat to the cultural and historical roots of those communities in cities.
Published:
The 15-minute city has become one of the most talked-about ideas in urban planning. The premise is simple: everything you need for daily life — work, groceries, green space, community — should be accessible within a 15-minute walk or bike ride. Paris has made it the organizing framework for its urban development strategy. Cities across the world are using it as a lens for thinking about what equitable urban infrastructure looks like. But when we say “everything,” what exactly do we mean?
Published:
Few topics have grabbed the attention of urban scholars and policymakers like “gentrification,” a process first described in Ruth Glass’ 1960s work about displacement of working-class residents in London. Today, most folks define gentrification as the process by which lower-income communities are displaced by higher-income communities — this manifests as a combination of shifting business landscapes, higher taxes and rents, and increased state investment (including police presence). In the early 2000s, geographers began to point to policies and planning strategies that were rapidly accelerating gentrification while cities pointed to it as an important part of urban revitalization. Meanwhile, activists and low-income communities the world over have pointed to gentrification as perhaps the single greatest threat to the cultural and historical roots of those communities in cities.
Published:
Circular economy has achieved near-universal approval as an idea while remaining frustratingly difficult to define. Everyone — industries, cities, policymakers, NGOs — is for circularity. The concept has become so elastic that it risks meaning everything and nothing at once. In a paper just published in Resources, Conservation and Recycling, Benjamin Goldstein, Danielle Levy, Brandon Marc Finn, and I try to get more precise about what circularity actually looks like in an urban context — and why the distinction matters.
Published:
After many years of trying to figure out where I fit (discipline-wise), I’ve settled into a comfortable middle ground, somewhere between engineering and geography. So I always get excited when I see my engineering colleagues start talking about social justice and the need for collaborative research with social scientists to unlock more equitable solutions. This week Dr. Joe Bozeman and a number of folks from around the world published a perspective piece in the Journal of Industrial Ecology arguing for just that. In fact, they outlined three key research priorities for a more just and sustainable urban future: equity, circularity, and digital twins.
Published:
New semester, new paper! Our article studying farmer vulnerability to irrigation water loss is in print. An exciting output from my MS work with Dr. Zhao Ma and co-authors Dr. Morey Burnham, Dr. Meg du Bray, Dr. Vicken Hillis, and Dr. Trina Running. Link.
Published:
Sustainable Development Goal 6 is “Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all.” This follows on the heels of Millennium Development Goal 7.C, which aimed to cut in half the number of folks without access to safe drinking water and sanitation. Remarkably, the UN reports that that goal was met five years ahead of schedule, and that 2.6 billion people gained access to improved drinking water sources between 1990 and 2015.
Published:
New semester, new paper! Our article studying farmer vulnerability to irrigation water loss is in print. An exciting output from my MS work with Dr. Zhao Ma and co-authors Dr. Morey Burnham, Dr. Meg du Bray, Dr. Vicken Hillis, and Dr. Trina Running. Link.