What Are the Good Sorts of Green Space?

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I love the analogy of a city as a coral reef, with all the diversity of uses. Are there worries that certain individual preferences are going to ruin the good intentions of building greenspace? If someone really ants a polo grounds and there's not really anyone around to play polo, these are all heavily debated issues. You can have a river that has been an industrial waste zone for a century, and you can clean it up to the point where people can swim in it. And what used to be a scuzzy, nasty canal is now highly sought after re development opportunity.

The concept of the city is a crucial one for human civilization: people living in proximity, bringing in resources from outside, separated from the labors of subsistence so they can engage in the trade of goods and ideas. But we are still learning how cities grow and adapt to new conditions, as well as how we can best guide them to be livable as well as functional. I talk with urban scientist Catherine Brinkley about the structure of cities, including the fractal nature of their shapes, as well as what we can do to make cities thrive as much as possible.

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Catherine Brinkley received a Ph.D. in City and Regional Planning as well as a degree in Veterinary Medicine from the University of Pennsylvania. She is currently Associate Professor of Human Ecology and Faculty Director at the Center for Regional Change at the University of California, Davis. She has been awarded fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity, and the Santa Fe Institute.