More than half of the world’s population lives in cities. I grew up moving between very different urban landscapes—attending high school in West Los Angeles, spending time with friends in the hills of Dana Point and Beverly Glen, and returning home to my family’s house in Hawthorne, California. 

I noticed early on that the quality of landscape differed dramatically. In Santa Monica and Beverly Hills, the streets were shaded by mature established urban street trees. I loved the crisp, autumnal scent of the Santa Ana winds mingled with the oaks, eucalyptus and pine trees. When I went camping for the first time in the Angeles National Forest, I was enchanted by the twisted umber bark of the Bigberry Manzanita (Arctostaphylos glauca). While, at home, the air smelled mostly of airplane fuel from the nearby Hawthorne airport.

My first job was at B. Dalton Bookseller in the Hawthorne Mall in 1991. A good day meant $600 in sales. The mall closed quietly in 1999—after only 22 years—and has now been shuttered longer than it was ever open. In 2014,Tom Explores Los Angelescaptured its haunting beauty in a “A Dead Mall & the Future of American Commerce” where he skateboards through the massive, 20-acre structure, which also served as a film set for Westworld.

Malls across America are meeting similar fates. Between 2017 and 2022, an average of 1,170 malls closed each year. As people turn away from traditional retail spaces, we are left with vast, underused infrastructures. What could they become?

In 2017, I attended a TED speaker training in New York based on an idea I called “The Hanging Gardens of Babylon”—reimagining malls as regenerative, community-centered ecosystems. I envisioned third spaces that were part High Line, part indoor park and library. Places where we could learn from nature, not as backdrop or metaphor, but as a teacher—alive, adaptive, and restorative— in the heart of a city, in a shuttered mall.

Hawthorne calls itself the “City of Good Neighbors.” Its history includes aerospace companies like Northrop Grumman, Boeing, Howard Hughes, and SpaceX. And, asTyler, the Creatorhas said, “Hawthorne is Ghetto.” How do we resurrect these depressed spaces of consumerism and reimagine them as vibrant third spaces? What if they became centers for food growing, carbon sequestration, cooling centers, affordable housing, co-working, small business incubation, workforce development, and play? What if they held seed banks, libraries, and spaces for care, connection, and creativity?

I’ve thought of myself as a Visual Ecologist since my 1998 installation The Last Common Denominator at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Everyday Past—a visual record of every place I’d lived and gone to school for my USC MFA Thesis in 2001. I saw the built environment as inextricably linked to identity, and quality of life. A US Department of the Interior study, found “The average American child can recognize 1,000 corporate logos, but can’t identify 10 plants or animals native to his or her own region.”

Ecology comes from the Greek word meaning “the study of the house.” Conservatory comes from the Latin conservare—to preserve or protect. So the Urban Ecology Conservatory is, quite literally, a place to study the urban home.

The city is my habitat, and I want to become literate in the language of the land. I want to speak the language of plants, to know a bird by the sound of its song, to be in relationship with the land—to cultivate a deep ecology.

This longing to listen more closely to the living world inspired me to found the Urban Ecology Conservatory: a think tank dedicated to cultivating right relationship between people, the built environment, and nature. It is an invitation to grow something transformative and emergent from what has been abandoned.

— Michelle Matthews