Kevin Parker

GREEN CITIES SERIES  |  ARTICLE 12 Shanghai is sinking. The city centre has subsided more than three metres since the late nineteenth century, while the sea rises around it. In response, China has rolled out the most ambitious urban water-management programme in history — the Sponge City Initiative...

The Living Marsh Feature · The Living World The world’s remaining wetlands, the work they do for the planet, and the intelligence of water At first light, the marsh breathes. Mist rises off black water in slow exhalations, and the reeds shiver under the weight of birds too small to...

Is modern slavery surging, or just better counted? Inside the contested 49.6 million figure, forced-labour supply chains and the new trade crackdown.

GREEN CITIES SERIES  |  ARTICLE 10 In 2017, Shenzhen became the first city in the world to operate a fully electric public bus fleet. In 2019, its entire taxi fleet followed. These are not incremental improvements or pilot schemes — they are structural transformations, achieved at a speed...

Clean energy is booming, yet emissions keep breaking records. A clear-eyed 2026 look at climate action—what's working, what's failing, and what it will take.

Inside Barcelona's radical push to reclaim streets from cars. How the superblock grid battles noise, heat, and tourism to recover Cerdà's vision.

May 2026 LLM Landscape: AI becomes vital infrastructure, forcing a pivot to narrative ethics as global challengers disrupt Big Tech's oligopoly

GREEN CITIES SERIES  |  ARTICLE 8 Every Sunday, Bogotá returns the streets to its people. That act — repeated for fifty years, in a city of nine million at 2,600 metres above sea level, in a country still reckoning with decades of violence — is both a practical...

Global democracy is in a high-velocity retreat. Explore the 2026 V-Dem data on systemic autocratisation and blueprints for democratic resilience.

GREEN CITY SERIES| ARTICLE 11 How river daylighting changed the argument in South Korea’s capital — and why the harder work of a green city lies beyond one celebrated stream Few urban projects have entered the global planning imagination as forcefully as Seoul’s restoration of the Cheonggyecheon. The removal...

GREEN CITIES SERIES  |  ARTICLE 9 For fifty years, urban planners have travelled to Curitiba to study what happened when a young architect-mayor decided that a city was not, fundamentally, for cars. What they found was real, was replicable, and was also — when examined carefully — more...

This is an updated and revised version of a piece that I published last year. Regrettably, all is not well in the golden valley of apricots when it comes to climate change reversal, it just keeps getting hotter and the weather wilder. All is not lost though...