Welcome to Urban Ecology

San Francisco, California Urban Ecology is partnering with Literacy for Environmental Justice (LEJ) to provide a participatory design process involving four LEJ youth Community Geographers. Urban Ecology will introduce the youth to the concepts involved in site...

Noe Valley Streetscape

San Francisco , California Background The Noe Valley Community Benefits District on 24th Street in Noe Valley is a busy commercial street running for six city blocks in the heart of San Francisco. It is filled with popular coffee shops, restaurants, bookstores, and...

Green Business Certification

Summary The San Francisco Green Business Team includes Urban Ecology, the San Francisco Department of Public Health (SF.DPH), San Francisco Department of the Environment (SFE), and the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SF.PUC). This team provides free...

Active and Healthy Parks and Schoolyards

Oakland, California Challenge Residents of Oakland’s Eastlake, Lower San Antonio, and Fruitvale neighborhoods suffer disproportionately from illnesses such as heart disease, hypertension, and asthma. A range of factors contribute to the prevalence of these illnesses...

Visitacion Valley

San Francisco, California Challenge Visitacion Valley in San Francisco, California, has been changing steadily as immigrants from Asia have added to the community’s diversity, and as mounting real estate prices in other parts of San Francisco have driven...

Urban Promise Academy Campus Improvement Plan

Urban Promise Academy Campus Improvement Plan read more

Community Design Consulting Services

Some of our past projects.

The Clinton Park Plan

The Clinton Park Plan read more

Visitacion Valley Community Vision

Visitacion Valley Community Vision read more

16th Street BART Community Design Plan

The 16th Street BART Community Design Plan is the result of a nine-month community planning process organized to address neighborhood concerns about the 16th Street BART station area in San Francisco. The Community Design Plan provides both general guidelines and...

Visitacion Valley Neighborhood Center Plan

Visitacion Valley Neighborhood Center Plan read more

Telegraph-Northgate Neighborhood Plan

Just north of downtown Oakland, the Telegraph-Northgate neighborhood displays familiar signs of disinvestment: the major retail corridors are lined with vacant storefronts; the older houses are crumbling; and the parks are filled with graffiti and shards of glass. But...

24 th Street BART Plazas Community Design Plan

24 th Street BART Plazas Community Design Plan read more

Past Articles from Our Journal

You can visit our contact page to submit your own article! Find all our past journal articles here.

Angola Project Wins Planning, Architecture Contest

Angola Project Wins Planning, Architecture Contest read more

Ecological Development Around the World

Germany Moves Toward an Eco-Economy Germany already leads the world in recycling, with its requirement that manufacturers take back their packaging and a system in which all items marked with a Green Dot are picked up by a recycling consortium paid for by...

Divided We Stand: A Biography of New York’s World Trade Center

Divided We Stand: A Biography of New York's World Trade Center read more

Combating Supermarket Flight In Los Angeles

By Michelle Mascarenhas Over the past 30 years, supermarket chains in Los Angeles have closed older, less profitable urban stores to build bigger and more modern markets in the suburbs. This trend follows the out-migration of middle-class households from the city....

Communities Making Themselves Heard: Environmental Justice as a Means to Equity

by Enrique Gallardo Since the 1970s, groups of concerned citizens have mobilized in response to environmental degradation in their neighborhoods. The concept of environmental justice originally denoted a negative freedom: the right to live free of environmental harm....

Jobs and Environmental Stewardship in Taiwan

by Randy Hester The waters of Tsengwen River and Chi Ku Lagoon along Taiwan’s southwest coast are the scene of a controversy that is increasingly familiar around the world. Taiwan’s President Lee Tung Hui and many land speculators support a 7000-acre development...

Signs of Hope: Bay Area Success Stories

Edited by Stephen Wheeler Although the Bay Area is moving away from sustainability in many ways -- in terms of automobile use, resource consumption, suburban sprawl, affordable housing and equity, for example -- it is making progress in other areas. Following...

City Front Shorts

City Front Shorts read more

Common Place: Toward Neighborhood and Regional Design

by Douglas Kelbaugh reviewed by Stephen Wheeler One the most important challenges facing urban ecologists currently is to develop a language of urban design that integrates different scales -- the building, site, neighborhood, city and region -- in ways that further...

The Habitat II Conference: Moving Slowly Toward Sustainable Cities

by Stephen Wheeler During the first two weeks of June 1996 more than 12,000 urban planners, government officials and activists converged on Istanbul for the United Nation's Conference on Human Settlements, also known as Habitat II or the "City Summit." This...

Green Building Materials

by Darrel Deboer Through the 1980’s, if one claimed to be an "environmentally-oriented" designer, people’s first reaction was to look up on the roof for the solar panels. The environmental impacts, toxicity, and origin of building materials were rarely questioned....

Fighting Urban Poverty Around the World