A Japanese Neighborhood Where Time Stopped: Virtue in Slowness
Stories and images from Kitakagaya, an old Osaka neighborhood with little money, yet a wealth of strange, beautiful, and useful ways of approaching life, work, and cities.
Patrick M. Lydon
Lydon is founder of City as Nature, and serves as the arts editor for The Nature of Cities (New York). He has written about urban ecology and art for Kyoto Journal, YES! Magazine, Routledge Press, and others. In 2019, he co-curated the Forum for Radical Imagination on Environmental Knowledge at Sorbonne University in Paris, and previously served a city-council-appointed role as Arts Commissioner for the City of San Jose (USA). His internationally exhibited artwork inspires empathic relationships between humans and nature, drawing on years of nomadic study with the farmer-philosophers of East Asia. He holds an MFA with distinction from the University of Edinburgh’s “Art, Space & Nature” program, with previous studies at Aichi University of Art, and California State University, San Jose. Together with his wife Suhee Kang, he co-directed the internationally-acclaimed film Final Straw: Food, Earth, Happiness, which has been translated into seven languages and continues to be screened around the world. He currently lives in Osaka, Japan, and tends to a natural urban garden with Suhee.
Slow Village, Cute Organic Lawnmowers
Nothing much of interest to GDP or the stock market ever happens in Urugi Village. Yet there is an unexpectedly resilient human ecosystem here. What answers could places like Urugi offer for an environmentally-sane future?
Film + Talk with RAKUDA from Saudi Arabia
Albara Al-Ohali & Abdulrahman Ba-Adheem engage in discussion, music, and storytelling about what it means to live life ‘effectively’ for each of us as individuals, and as a global community.
Forum for Radical Imagination on Environmental Knowledge (FRIEK)
Taking place within a global academic conference on urban nature, FRIEK plays the role of disrupter. However, the ethos of our disruption is not to attack, blame, or separate, but instead to open new channels of awareness, collaboration, and connection.
A Tiny Book, and the Beauty in Uneconomic Actions
Written in four languages, this small art book produced in Kyoto, highlights international artists, and the power of sharing.
Springtime: Urban Herb Foraging & Herb Whiskey
For our urban herb foraging event, Suhee prepared a ‘herb map’ of the neighborhood, and slowly guided our participants on a walk to discover these plants, and how we can use them.
Forest is the Artist
A Korean forest known as “Gomsil” is having its own art exhibition in Seoul, and the organizer plans to throw the profits into the forest.
‘SocieCity’ is now ‘City as Nature’
To ring in the new year, SocieCity is announcing a new name and more focused direction. From 2019, we’ll continue working with art and ecology in cities, but in a way that more explicitly helps cities and their inhabitants become partners within the ecosystems where they exist.
Food, Earth, Happiness
The way we grow food has become one of the largest threats to our survival as a species, yet we’ve had a simple answer for millennia…
“With Nature” Exhibition and Workshop at MUJI
Invited by the Japanese retailer MUJI, to host a series about ‘connecting to nature’ in their new flagship store, we aimed to plant seeds of change in people’s minds.
Nature Mandala (aka: Finding Nature in a Shopping Mall)
For two hours, we asked shoppers in the world’s largest MUJI store (無印良品) near Osaka, Japan to stop shopping, slow down, and re-connect with nature. Here’s what happened…
One Minute of Traditional Mochi Making
Part of a series of short meditative films, putting you in the midst of nature-connected cultures and places around the world.