As a fellow writer friend of mine recently said, “City = landscape. Treat it that way.” Sometimes we’re so caught up in doing the right things to get away from city life that we forget how rich the urban landscape itself can be. We all know that we should be making an effort to spend more time outdoors, but if you’re not lucky enough to live with acres of, say, a protected wildlife refuge in your backyard, it can be difficult to find the time to invest in driving a few hours just to take a quick hike. Which is why I love the concept of urban hiking.

Yes, I am fully aware that the words “urban hiking” can easily be equated to “walking,” but somewhere along the line we lost respect for this simple, yet energizing and fun, activity. Urban hiking is taking the simple human function of walking and turning it into a vehicle to slowing down and truly exploring the nooks and crannies of new cities, and even our own neighborhoods that we think we know like the back of our hands.

Sometimes the best adventures are right down the street, and we’ve got a list of tips and suggestions to make sure you find them, and enjoy yourself while you’re at it.

1. Plan a fruit hunt.

Spring and summer are quickly approaching, and you know what that means? Fruit picking season. Finding fresh fruit isn’t limited to rural environments, there are plenty of cities filled to the brims with fig trees, apple trees, plum trees and beyond. Urban fruit harvesting groups have popped up around the country with one simple goal: making use of fruit that would otherwise go to waste.

Many cities have fruit groups that even provide maps. Two such projects are Forage Oakland and the Philadelphia Orchard Project. If you’re in the Los Angeles area, check out Fallen Fruit. And if you can’t find a local organization that maps out fruit hot spots, take an afternoon to explore a neighborhood and make your own.

2. Pack a picnic.

There’s no point in going hungry on your urban hike, and packing a picnic allows you to do two things: prepare a tasty, organic meal and explore a local park. Figure out ahead of time where you want to spend your lunch hour and plan accordingly. Then fill your backpack with a gourmet picnic. How about a Quinoa Salad with Dried Cranberries and Pumpkin Seeds partnered with a fresh baguette and some goat cheese? Just make sure to pack reusable utensils and drinking vessels.

3. Keep a detailed urban hiker’s travel journal.

Take time to truly appreciate your local urban surroundings and start documenting them. You don’t have to be a Picasso or Proust, just willing to take a couple of notes and sketches now and then of what you’ve seen and done. Journaling lets you explore your creative side and also gives you a reference point for places you might want to remember later.

4. Don’t dress to kill.

Nobody said urban hiking adventures meant dressing in dowdy sweat pants and muddy trainers, but you should still probably keep the heels at home. That being said, there’s no reason you shouldn’t be looking good while staying comfortable, and there are some great eco-picks out there if you’re looking to inject a breath of fresh air into your urban hiking wardrobe. Check out our From Yoga to Yardwork picks for starters.

5. Take friends!

Make your urban hike a girl’s day out. Plan a shorter itinerary to allow for a slower pace – more talking equals less walking – but that hits a few key hot spots: cute cafe for lunch, a local bakery for afternoon coffee and a corner bar for evening cocktails. If you’re having trouble thinking about where to go, pick a theme for the day: Boutique Shopping, Urban Parks, Undiscovered Food Carts, etc.

Photo Credits: Ewan-M, ginnerobot, Anna Brones, Anna Brones, mugley, Let Ideas Compete

Soot, screeching sirens and forbidding skyscrapers; is this your definition of the big city? Think again. The urban landscape might seem like the epicenter of everything that’s wrong with the world, but in fact cities are where some of the most interesting components of the green movement are currently taking place.

With everything from urban farms and electric cars, large cities are surprisingly livable, and now there’s another trend on the rise: urban hiking. Living the city life has long been equated with staying indoors and neglecting to feed our human need for spending time in nature, but the onslaught of urban hiking tours is showing us that it is in fact possible to get outside, be active and explore new places in the process.

What is Urban Hiking?

Forget the days of mindlessly jumping in a taxi to go from point A to point B. Urban hiking is all about planning, executing and enjoying the journey, another great example of slow travel. According to the Urban Dictionary, urban hiking is “the exploration of diverse urban environments on foot.” Conservation and travel groups alike promote urban hiking, as it not only gets people outdoors and active, but also allows them to explore the ins and outs of urban landscapes.

Choose a Theme

The key to a great urban hike is planning. Pick a theme to your hike so you can choose specific points of interest to visit. This allows you to explore a certain aspect of the city you’re in and makes it easier to plan an itinerary. Here are some possible themes to consider:

1. Local food – Find three restaurants or cafes that all focus on serving local food and plan for an appetizer at each.
2. Markets – Markets abound in big cities – Paris and San Francisco in particular come to mind – and offer everything from local foods to crafts. Pick out a few you want to explore and track your route.
3. Parks – For a more natural experience, explore the green spaces that your urban environment has to offer. Choose a few within a walkable distance and pack a picnic item for each.
4. Architecture – Explore the designs and spaces that make the city that you’re in unique. Cities like Los Angeles have already started offering architecture-inspired guided urban hikes.
5. Art galleries - If you want a chicer urban hike, give it an art theme. Many cities offer an Art Walk on a certain night of the month. This is a great chance to plan a quick and easy urban hike itinerary. Plot out some of your favorite galleries that you want to check out and end the evening with a glass of wine at a local bistro.

Planning your route

Easy tools like Google’s pedometer will help you track how far you will be walking. Plan realistically; if you’re going with a group of friends, you’ll go at a slower pace than you expect. Assume you’ll cover about one or two miles per hour. A great day trip could be 5 or 6 miles with several stopping points incorporated, keeping you active but also ensuring that the day is enjoyable.

Be sure to bring

Just because you’re in the city doesn’t mean you can throw traditional hiking rules of thumb out the window. Carry a bottle of water and some healthy organic nuts or dried fruit to snack on.

If you’re planning on making stop off at a cafe, bring your reusable thermos or mug. And just in case you come across a to-die-for item in an unknown corner boutique, make sure you’ve got a reusable bag on hand.

Resources

If you’re looking for urban hiking suggestions, tourism websites are a great place to start, and many have suggested routes if you don’t want to plan your own. Guidebooks that have walking tour routes are also a great resource.

But remember, the best part about urban hikes are that you can tailor them to explore all the things that you’re interested in, so don’t be afraid to break out of the box!

Do you have a favorite urban hike? Tell us about it!

Image: brartist

If you want a glimpse of our world in centuries to come, stroll round a city. Dystopian-mongering pessimists will now be holding their heads in their hands and groaning. Can we blame them? Urban areas are too commonly associated with poverty, pollution, neglect and a brutalizing of the environment for the sake of a fast buck. Pretty? Only from high up.

But that’s the old model of city life. Crocodile Dundee wasn’t too far off the mark when he said cities must be friendly because so many people want to live together. They’re the biggest physical expressions of our social nature on this planet. They’re filled with people, every one of them an individual – and so in these eco-conscious times where everyone can step up and contribute, cities are where things happen.

Here are 10 urban trends that will shape of the cities of tomorrow.

Keep The City Buzzing

Bees are on the wane, and we have no idea why. Entire populations are dying or disappearing as part of the baffling phenomenon known as Colony Collapse Disorder. Bad news in itself, but the sting in the tale is that without bees, many of our staple crops are doomed. While scientists search for the answers, the urban backyard remedy is obvious – and here’s how it works. Bee hives only need a little land to thrive – and you’d be following in the footsteps of committed enthusiasts like Scarlett Johansson and Samuel L Jackson. Further incentive needed? One word: honey.

Urban Growth

Escalating food prices, and all that land out back? Put the two together and turning your place into an edible garden is a no-brainer. But even if you’re squeezed into a concreted corner or you’re halfway up a towerblock, there’s still room for some horticultural creativity. Agricultural skyscrapers are on the rise (as it were) but while city-planners develop a coherently green strategy, it’s all about self-expression. Snake some vines over your balcony or up the wall. Let your potted plants grab onto windows and railings. Make your city come alive!

Up Where The Air Is Green

But whatever is done in the vertical is being done tenfold in the horizontal. Green roofs have captured the urban imagination like no other eco-craze, and it’s not hard to see why: they’re beautiful, they have a deeply practical element, and…did we say how beautiful? Of course there are new architectural challenges that come with having tons of topsoil and greenery piled on your ceiling – and there’s the usual amount of half-hearted bandwaggoning. (Yes, Astroturf is cheating). But wouldn’t it be nice to have a little less of the “concrete”, a little more of the “jungle”? I bet the local wildlife would think so.

Seed-Bomb It Back To The Stone Age

If you’re heartsick of seeing drab, neglected patches of municipal land blighting your neighborhood…you could be a guerrilla gardener waiting to join the green revolution. “Fighting the filth with forks and flowers”, these law-skirting folk are on a mission to bring budding life to every corner of our cities by any means possible. They sneak out at night with seeds and trowel, beautifying furiously before daylight exposes their efforts to the cops, or they plant greenery while hidden in full view. Sound like your kind of thing? Sign up here (you rebel, you).

Cleaning The Streets: Electric Cars and Friendly Rides

It’s been on the horizon for years (far too many of them) but now the electric car is starting to make headway in the place it’s best suited for – the urban grid. Where else is it practical to build recharging stations at the kind of density that suits the electric car’s shorter range? Ah, but that’s changing too – some of the models on our 2009 roundup hold enough juice to compare favorably to their gas-powered counterparts. These admirable advances aside, do you really need your own car? If not, and if braving the public transport isn’t an option, grab a lift with someone else – because urban carpooling is here to stay.

Commute Yourself Slim

In the convenience-drugged city of tomorrow, the only sweat you’ll break is when you’re deciding which button to push. Utopian dream? We say: urban nightmare. We spend our day in the thrall of convenience technology…and then heads straight to the nearest super-expensive gym to compensate. With modern life in full swing, who needs The Onion? Luckily there are architects who recognise the danger and, like Nintendo, are sneaking gyms into our lives without us realising. Their thinking is: why consume electricity when calories can be burnt instead? So the urban fabric gets a healthy makeover, like the much maligned stairwell. Cars are zoned out of existence and replaced with their human-powered counterparts (saving you cash in all sorts of ways). Parks and paths are expanded, and everywhere can be reached by a sidewalk. Healthy commuter, coming through. For specifics, check out the New York City Department of Design + Construction’s Active Design Guidelines.

One for Me, One for You…

My mum has a logistics problem. Thanks to some absurdly prolific fruit trees, her freezer is permanently half-full with surplus she has to freeze or it goes to waste. What she needs is a local fruit exchange – a social network (online and offline) that collects and distributes surplus produce for the good of the neighborhood. Take San Francisco’s version, Neighborhood Fruit, working like a foodie’s version of Freecycle – the goods are there for free, you collect them yourself, and first come is first served. If you like free food (ie. if you have a pulse) or want to reclaim your freezer, find your local fruit exchange…and if there’s none at hand, why not start one (pdf)?

Serving the Needy (With Servings)

Gone are the days that it’s acceptable for shops to chuck unused food away at closing time (and having worked as a barista for a certain worldwide coffee chain, I’ve seen my fair share of that). While up to a third of household groceries still go into the trash, restaurants are acting rather more respectably by offering up their output to local charities and nonprofit organisations, or directly into the hands of the homeless on the street. Check out the National Restaurant Association’s food donation work, and their guide to doing it (PDF).

It’s Cheaper Online (or, How We Killed The High Street)

Here’s a phrase to fill a shopkeeper with dread: “No, I won’t buy it here, I’ll get it on eBay / Amazon /Craigslist”. Online retailing is gargantuan business, simply because it’s usually the way to pick up the best goods from anywhere in the globe at the best price. Is it green? With minimal packaging and low overheads, you’t think so – except it’s also the quickest method of wiping out profits for urban retailers and for killing small traders. (Even the big ones aren’t safe – take the fate of Borders UK.) However, counter that with the fact that they’re billion-dollar recycling machines that often do a lot of good.

No matter your view, the bottom line is that online retailing is on the rise – and shopping is changing forever.

Neighbors are a Big Deal

But why spend money at all? Before money there was bartering, and thanks to the people-connecting power of the Internet, it’s firmly back in fashion (although we wouldn’t say “money is dead” – merely looking a bit peaky). If it fits through the post, it’s being swapped: books, DVDs, clothes, gadgets, plant seeds and tons more. Yet cities are where this is taking place in person, exchanging goods and services and reinforcing social bonds. Bartering binds people together.

And for the more intrepid barterer – why not trade homes with a complete stranger?

Images: telmo32, NNECAPA, axiepics, bbjee, ubrayj02, frankh, emrank, Alex E. Proimos, eHow and paul(dex) busy @ work

Destruction in the Amazon. Clear-cutting of virgin forests. These are sad, infuriating events, but they can also seem distant – even abstract. How about the wanton destruction of a thriving Los Angeles community garden? Now that brought me to tears.

Who owns the land?

In 1992, after the Los Angeles riots, a 14-acre community garden was formed in an industrial section of South Central LA. Over 350 families banded together to create an urban paradise and grow their own food in the middle of a largely forgotten and blighted concrete jungle.

There was only one problem. Although they were clearly stewards of the land, they never legally owned it. Thus began a saga that played out for years and garnered the active support of the likes of Daryl Hannah. The families had been granted a revocable license to use the lot, but in 2004 the original owner decided to sell it and a few years later bulldozed the lush gardens (watch the heartbreaking video and you’ll be moved to tears) to build another warehouse in an already industrial part of town. The gardeners banded together as the South Central Farmers and protested to save their community gardens, but it wasn’t to be. The story is poignantly told in the Academy Award nominated documentary entitled The Garden.

Adding insult to injury, the proposed warehouse to be built on the now bulldozed and barren lot is a storage and distribution center for Forever 21. The South Central Farmers are working hard to stop that from happening too, and if possible, reclaim their beloved land to create paradise once again.

Listen to Joni Mitchell: Big Yellow Taxi

Green design is an enormously popular trend in modern architecture. Take a look at these 17 examples – some in place today, and others still on the drawing board. We may have got it wrong in the past, but we’re certainly making up for lost time…

ACROS Fukuoka, in Fukuoka City, Japan. 35,000 plants, 76 species – and the city’s best view from an office window.

Art and Exhibition Hall roof garden – Bonn, Germany.

Chicago City Hall – the coolest place to be, thanks to this $2.5 million rooftop garden (not open to the public – the 11-storey drop might have something to do with this).

California’s Academy of Sciences (SF) is covered in rolling hills – the perfect place for students to grab their lunch in the sun.

Looking like the ultimate vegan pizza, the Pennsylvania State University’s Center for Green Roof Research is a department that practices what it preaches.

Marriott Hotel, Victoria, BA. Keeping an underground car park cool in the summer, toasty-warm in the winter.

The forwarding link isn’t working, but this rooftop garden (wherever it is) found on This Girl’s Gone Green is an extraordinary achievement – it grows crops!

This design by architect Hoerr Shaudt graces the roof of 900 North Michigan Avenue, Chicago. A haven of natural tranquility, 10 floors up.

After a long, hard day in the School of Art Design and Media at Nanyang Technological University (Singapore), what more cathartic way to unwind than to walk all over it?

This idyllic spot may look terrestrial, but it’s a thing of the air, roofing Toronto’s Mountain Equipment Coop.

The Waldspirale in Darmstadt, Germany, is all about being unique. It doesn’t look like any building you’ve ever seen. Every one of its 1,000+ windows is different – ditto for all the doorhandles. And running along spiraling rooftop is a tree-lined garden (the wald or “wood” in its name).

Turfed roof near Gol, Norway. In days past, this sight would be grounds to condemn your neighbors as the laziest people on the planet. Now they’re obviously the cleverest (although we’re a little worried about that bowing roof).

Vancouver Public Library, Canada. Beautiful, useful, and definitely out of bounds – note the lack of protective barrier around the edge.

And now to more speculative matters. This proposed village for Heden, a sleepy cityblock in Sweden’s  Gothenburg, has more than a touch of Hobbiton about it…

…as does this proposal by designer Friedenreich Hundertwasser.

Should green roofs be built to be scaled on foot? The designers of this proposal for the 2007 Fit City 2 conference in New York certainly think so – and there’s a good reason for thinking they’re right.

And finally – this example looks as speculative as they come. But it’s reality: the blueprint for the Vancouver Convention Center, currently expanding rapidly in time to host the 2010 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games. The 6-acre living roof will house a whopping 400,000 varieties of native plant life – Inhabitat has a closer look here.

More information: Green Roofs (what else?)

Images: hans s / metaefficient / Deutsche Telekom / NREL / California Academy of Sciences / Inhabitat / Treehugger / pnwra / food2gro / trendir / Nanyang Technological University / sookie / Hundertwasser / IGPOTY / Terri Meyer Boake / Kjellengren Kaminsky Architecture / Ecogeek / Archidose / Inhabitat.