Patch Atlas: Integrating Design Practices and Ecological Knowledge for Cities as Complex Systems: Victoria J. Marshall, Mary L. Cadenasso, Brian P. McGrath and Steward T. A. Pickett, ISBN 978 0300239935, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021 128 pp., 104 colour illustrations, $45 USD (cloth or paper)

Modern urban planning treats cities as orderly composites of homogenous land uses, however, like a rich quilt, the urban landscape is an amalgam of different social, ecological and material areas or ‘patches’, a term used in urban ecology. Urban designers, landscape architects and architects may be familiar with urban and landscape analysis systems such as McHarg’s ‘layer cake’, the figure-ground, typology and urban morphological studies, however Patch Atlas offers a novel way of representing the social and ecological complexity of the urban realm, which is called ‘heterogeneity’ by landscape ecologists. The particular backgrounds of the authors of Patch Atlas two urban ecologists and two designers frame the intention of the book: Victoria Marshall is a landscape architect, founder of Till Design and at the National University of Singapore, Mary Cadenasso is a landscape and urban ecologist at the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences at UC Davis, Steward Pickett is a plant and urban ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies at Arizona State University and Brian McGrath is an urban designer at the Parsons School of Design and founder of Urban-Interface. Correspondingly, the Patch Atlas originates from an inquiry that attempts to conceptualize the totality of the urban system from the perspective of ecology, and urban ecology in particular, providing an opportunity for designers to engage with an ecologically rigorous framing of urban heterogeneity as a system for design