#urban environment

[route22ny]

Children playing in vacant lot, Chicago (1941)

Photo: Russell Lee, Farm Security Administration via SK at Bluesky

[dibenedettogiuseppe]

the heart on the door ©Giuseppe Dibenedetto 2025

[rjzimmerman]

Pocket gardens: The tiny urban oases with surprisingly big benefits

Little bits of greenery are popping up in cities, making them cooler, quieter, healthier and a whole lot nicer for everyone.

Excerpt from this story from Grist:

It’s not just easy to miss, but often downright hard to notice. A simple patch of greenery in a city may seem like a blip in the concrete jungle, but it’s an extremely powerful way to solve a bunch of problems at once: Studies have shown that green spaces improve urbanites’ mental health, make summers more bearable, and prevent flooding by soaking up stormwater. 

When these plots are planned — as opposed to letting vacant lots grow wild, which is valuable in its own right — they become extra powerful. You may have even enjoyed one without knowing it: the “pocket garden.” Tucked into spaces accessible to pedestrians, like sidewalks, hospital grounds, and campuses, they can be engineered to turn heat-absorbing concrete into air-cooling oases packed with vegetation and seating for people to escape the metropolitan bustle. 

“This increasing prioritization of creating green spaces in unexpected spots and underutilized spaces in communities is not only going to be making our communities more resilient, it’s going to be making people healthier,” said Dan Lambe, chief executive of the nonprofit Arbor Day Foundation, which promotes urban forestry. “A little bit of green goes a long way.”

Pocket gardens aren’t gardens in the agriculturally productive sense, but ornamental grounds. (Though there’s nothing stopping a designer from adding a fruit tree or two.) Ideally, they’re host to native plant species, which bring several benefits. For one, they attract native pollinators like insects and birds, which get a source of food that powers them to go on and fertilize plants elsewhere, like crops in urban farms. And two, if the vegetation is adapted to a particular region or condition, it’s already used to the local climate — drought-tolerant varieties, for instance, won’t require as much water to survive. Furthermore, choosing native grasses that don’t need mowing can cut down on maintenance costs. And picking trees with big canopies will increase the amount of shade for people to use as refuge from the heat. (Sorry, palm trees, that means you’re disqualified.)

Biodiversity — mixing tree species as opposed to planting 10 of the same kind — is key here. That attracts a broader range of pollinating animals, and builds resiliency into the system: If you only plant one variety of tree and a disease shows up, it can spread rapidly.

And speaking of disease, trees have an additional superpower in their ability to scrub urban air of the pollutants that contribute to respiratory problems. In addition, the vegetation of a pocket park releases water vapor, bringing down air temperatures. This mitigates what’s called the urban heat island effect, in which cities absorb the sun’s energy all day and slowly release it into the night. Combined, reduced air pollution and temperatures improve public health. 

[cultofthewyrm]

Motorbike Girl by EJ Dela Cruz

[defeatedai]

The night was heavy with humidity, the kind that clung to skin like regret. Red traffic lights glowed overhead, casting the intersection in an eerie wash of color. A wrecked sedan idled quietly in the background, steam rising in thin, ghostlike trails.

Milo Varren stood barefoot on the pavement, wearing nothing but a pair of brightly colored promotional underwear he’d gotten for free at a summer festival. His wrists were secured in handcuffs above his head. Milo’s face was wet with tears, though he tried to hide them.

A few yards away, Jalen Corcoran who had been driving the other car, stood watching. He held his jacket loosely, unsure whether to feel angry, relieved, or just exhausted. His car was damaged, but he was unhurt. The same couldn’t be said for Milo’s pride.

When Jalen asked Milo for his insurance, the moment unraveled.

He didn’t have any.

He had bought the car from a cousin-of-a-friend, promising he’d “handle the paperwork later.” Later had never come. Milo had been so desperate to feel independent—to feel like he had direction—that he convinced himself shortcuts were the same thing as solutions.

Now reality was laid out on concrete.

[redshift-13]

Colliding Birds is an ongoing series of entombed bird specimens cast in iron, memorializing the staggering toll of glass collisions in the United States, an estimated one billion avian deaths each year. By preserving these fragile bodies in a material associated with permanence and weight, the work confronts viewers with the quiet violence of human-made environments and the unseen casualties of urban architecture. Each cast becomes both a grave and a monument, asking us to reckon with our complicity and to mourn what often goes unnoticed.

Selva Aparicio (b. 1987, Barcelona, Spain; currently based in Alfred, NY, and Chicago, IL) is an interdisciplinary artist working across sculpture and installation. Her practice explores themes of memory, intimacy, death, and the temporality of life, often through works that celebrate the cyclicity of the natural world. Raised on the outskirts of Barcelona in a landscape once cherished by the Catalan bourgeoisie and later abandoned during the Spanish Civil War, Aparicio draws inspiration from this evolving environment—first a refuge for squatters and outcasts, now a reclaimed natural park. This early and intimate connection to nature fueled her enduring interest in the ephemeral.

-selvaaparicio.com/

[kalinthewoodss]

Downtown San Jose, Christmas in the Park! :D

[dylandoesart]

A page from the sketchbook: a bathing cat floats above a cobblestone street