05/31/2026
The kickoff for our urban ecology project with the Mitchell Avenue neighborhood was a smashing success!
Thanks to the generous support of a education grant, we have teamed up with the Mitchell Avenue Neighborhood Organization (MANO) in Lexington KY to develop a new program around community resilience and self-organization at the neighborhood scale.
For Geomancer, "urban ecology" isn't just about how the non-human world interacts with the urban environment; it's also about how we can apply ecological principles to the decisions being made about all aspects of how cities function.
As with all of our projects, topics such as urban tree canopy or stormwater management are really just a foot in the door to get people talking about the shared material circumstances of their lives.
There is an amazing power in just getting people together around a map of where they live and asking them to tell stories about it. People who had never met before will realize that they are neighbors, and patterns on the landscape begin to coalesce into distinct points of reference that a community can orient to when planning for the future.
Our work is simply to curate these spaces so that such conversations can unfold naturally. As neighbors work through the challenges of urban land management, they build confidence in their collective organization and, most importantly, a sense of common interests.
The work we are doing at Mitchell Avenue is being undertaken with the express intention of developing a model for urban ecology at the neighborhood scale that we can bring to supporters in other areas. This isn't some speculative pantomime of what self-governing communities could look like; it's real people making real decisions about what kind of world they want to live in.
