All I Want For Christmas …

… is the biggest, fattest book I have ever contributed to, almost unknowingly. Imagine my surprise when the  large parcel, almost too heavy for the postman to carry, arrived on my desk, containing a copy of the 1465 page Technical Report of the UK National Ecosystem Assessment. What had I done to deserve this? Well I appear to have contributed to Chapter 10: Urban – 48 pages about the urban condition of the UK written by an assorted team of 25 authors for which it would appear I wrote something about population distribution in the UK and provided a couple of my own computer graphics – yes done by me, not ArcGIS, from raw code – or so I remember – well memory isn’t what it was, but it’s Christmas.

See for yourself. Click the link to download the chapter – sorry it isn’t there yet. I will sort this soon. But if you want to read the entire thing – which incidentally is the last word on Ecosystem Services, and also heavily influenced the White Paper on “Building on the National Ecosystem Assessment” – then there is a handy web site where you can download the entire volume. In fact you can get chapter 10 if you scroll down this web page and then download it directly from the link.

Beautifully produced book I must say and actually extremely useful. Even for urbanists like me who only live in the country at weekends, I learned a lot. Quite good on urban boundaries – and on land use in Chapter 10, not by me, I think – Mechanicity team please note the work on boundaries.

If you want to see the book itself, it is outside my office between my mac and my smackmac. Come and marvel at the scale and size. In a time when people say the days of the physical book are numbered, they seem to be getting larger and presumably will reach infinity in 2026. In joke for those who know. Sorry. Happy Christmas.