Alis Daniela Torres

Detroit has been documented as a city where urban planning failures, economic activities shifting, migration and population decay have shaped the city present and future. This post aims to evaluate from a different perspective the side effects that these forces have impacted on city environmental sustainability. Several research on Detroit sustainability matters, raise the issue that the city has faced several environmental injustice [1] episodes along its history. Socioeconomic analysis, define that migration flows and economic activities have shaped the city reality nowadays and that Detroit has passed four relevant historical periods. Hence, these periods will be evaluated under a framework of environmental sustainability and city economic growth. The first period occurred before the 1800`s; where native Americans gathered and lived near the Detroit river before the french and other european settlers came to southeast Michigan. The land was occupied by Natives in consonance

Ecological and environmental management principles in the urban planning context seems to be a revolutionary concept and non intuitive at all. The good news is that these notions have been in the urban agenda for decades. Nowadays cities face serious environmental challenges such as climate change; air, water and soil pollution; loss of biodiversity, among others. They also face a reduction of supply of natural resources such as water and energy, due to increasing urbanization patters. In this sense and looking forward to the future, is important to understand how environmental concepts have been included in city planning and development for the last 40 years. It was the year 1969, when Ian L.McHarg published his book Design with Nature , introducing for first time the relationship between landscape architecture, urbanism and ecology. He described several challenges in this relationship. First, the absence of any knowledge between environment and planning, secondly a lack of inte

Actualmente hay mucha discusión sobre la necesidad global de datos específicos y acceso libre a distintos tipos de información. En la era del “open data”, los altos índices de penetración de internet en el mundo,y la evolución de sistemas de sensorización,  debemos estar seguros de que existe información sobre monitoreo del clima y parámetros ambientales que puede ser usada con muy buenos propósitos. Existe una extensa cantidad de datos abiertos de temas ambientales y del clima dispersos en la red o en repositorios de información, que están esperando ser utilizados. En este post reflexiono sobre la importancia de tener información climática para una mejor toma de decisiones. Ésta puede usarse para sistemas de alerta temprana, planificación para respuesta a emergencias o simple conocimiento de los ciudadanos. Uno de los mayores grupos de información de carácter ambiental en el mundo es el proveniente de sistemas de monitorización meteorológica. Actualmente, estos datos y números est