Christiane Engel Books

The introduction to this vividly colourful book explains its reason. By 2050, two out of every three people will be living in a city, and because nature is essential to our planet’s survival and humans’ mental health, the book attempts to explore how we can and have brought nature into our cities.

Each double page highlights real-world examples such as the garden cities of the High Line in New York, the bus stops for bees in Utrecht, nature corridors in London, and wetland parks in Sanya Dong’an. The pages are beautifully illustrated, integrating the colours of nature, such as the greater green snakes, Hainan hares, snowy egrets and more in China, with side panels imploring the reader look and find.

The book is inspirational, with its living walls, edible food forests, allotments and more – some ventures being smaller and localised rather than town-planned. But the text is difficult with many multi-phrasal sentences with complicated domain-specific vocabulary. The author has tried to blend the beauty of nature into her words, using alliteration and literary devices but it is hard to read in places, and these are tricky topics to understand. A worthy and informative book, beautiful to look at, and bound to provoke questions.