Cities
A great website dedicated to skyscrapers worldwide is Skyscrapers.com.
Planning
In the USA, the planning profession is represented by the American Planning Association. The equivalent in the United Kingdom is the Town & Country Planning Association. Planum provides news on planning in Europe. Cyburbia bills itself as the Internet's most active urban/town planning-related bulletin board. Cyburbia Forum members include planners, students and others from around the world who are interested in the built environment.
Camillo Sitte - One of the few sites in English on this key European planner of the 19th Century. Web document by John W. Reps, Professor Emeritus, Department of City and Regional Planning, Cornell University
Engineers
The American Society of Civil Engineers is the professional organization in the USA. The Institution of Civil Engineers is the international body.
Architects
The American Institute of Architects is the professional organization for that country. In the United Kingdom there is the Royal Institute of British Architects. This Open Directory page is a good source for architecture organizations on the international level. Atlas for Architecture of the Future provides visions and conceptions from all over the world about the architecture and the town of tomorrow.
Urban Interest Groups
There are a number of groups advocating for future urban environments supportive of healthy, productive and rewarding human lives. Urbanicity is sponsored by the United Nations. The Urban Land Institute has taken an international role. NewUrbanism.org is an informational website promoting good urbanism, smart transportation, transit oriented development, and sustainability. The Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) promotes walkable, neighborhood-based development as an alternative to sprawl. According to their website, New Urbanists are providing leaders with the tools to reverse course and strengthen the character, livability, and diversity of their communities. Project for Public Spaces (PPS) is dedicated to creating and sustaining public places that build communities. Smart Growth is a coalition of organizations working to improve the ways we plan and build. Planetizen is a network that communicates to users the latest ideas in planning and city development. An organization advocating for liveable cities in the Bay Area of California is the Greenbelt Alliance.
Wilderness
The World Conservation Union is the world’s largest and most important conservation network. The Union brings together 82 States, 111 government agencies, more than 800 non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and some 10,000 scientists and experts from 181 countries in a unique worldwide partnership.
Preserving Ecologies
Many governments have been quite active in preserving natural areas within their jurisdiction. If effort is measured by the percentage of the natural landscape so protected, the little country of Costa Rica in Central America would be a winner. The Nature Conservancy is the non-profit organization that has probably preserved the most land worldwide. The Trust for Public Land (TPL) is an American land conservation organization that conserves land for people to enjoy as parks, community gardens, historic sites, rural lands, and other natural places. There are numerous local organizations working to directly preserve land by purchasing land using privately donated funds. The Peninsula Open Space Trust has been active in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Advocates
The Union’s mission is to influence, encourage and assist societies throughout the world to conserve the integrity and diversity of nature and to ensure that any use of natural resources is equitable and ecologically sustainable.The World Wildlife Fund directs its conservation efforts toward three global goals: saving endangered species, protecting endangered habitats and addressing global threats such as toxic pollution, over-fishing and climate change. The Global Forest Watch is an international organization that works toward preserving the remaining natural forests worldwide.
North America
The Wilderness Society focuses on advocating wilderness preservation in the United States through government action. The Wildlands Project works to reconnect the continent beginning with "MegaLinkages"--vast pathways that tie natural places together. Within each continental MegaLinkage it proposes regional systems of core protected areas connected to one another by "wildlife linkages," mosaics of public and private lands that provide safe passageways for wildlife to travel freely from place to place. The Rewilding Institute works to advance continental-scale conservation in North America, particularly the need for large carnivores and a permeable landscape for their movement.
Information
The International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources maintains a database of endangered species throughout the world. The World Wildlife Fund has a map-driven, searchable database of more than 26,000 species worldwide, with a powerful search tool that allows users to discover where species live or explore wild places to find out what species live there. Wilderness.net provides a database regarding wilderness in the USA. Mammalian Species is published, on line, regularly by the American Society of Mammalogists with 20-30 new accounts issued each year. Each account summarizes the current understanding of the biology of a single species, including systematics, distribution, fossil history, genetics, anatomy, physiology, behavior, ecology, and conservation.
The Tree of Life Web Project (ToL), a collaborative effort of biologists from around the world, provides information about the diversity of organisms on Earth, their evolutionary history (phylogeny), and characteristics. Each page contains information about a particular group of organisms. ToL pages are linked one to another hierarchically, in the form of the evolutionary tree of life. Starting with the root of all Life on Earth and moving out along diverging branches to individual species, the structure of the ToL project illustrates the genetic connections between all living things. Deep Green provides a tree of life just for green plants.
Outer Space
The Planetary Society, the world's largest space-interest group, is dedicated to inspiring the public with the adventure and mystery of space exploration. The National Space Society (NSS) is an independent, educational, grassroots nonprofit organization dedicated to the creation of a spacefaring civilization. Space Daily and Space.com are more commercial and focus on current news. The Space Frontier Foundation is dedicated to opening the space frontier for all humanity within our lifetimes. Moon miner is an interesting space exploration advocacy site.
Solar System
Respecting the solar system, some excellent overviews are provided by Views of the Solar System by Calvin Hamilton and The Nine Planets by Bill Arnett. An official version that focuses on human exploration of the solar system may be found at the NASA site. An excellent site from Europe is brought to you by the BBC.
A faster way of getting around the solar system is crucial to the future of space colonization. NASA is researching a method using antimatter.
Extrasolar
A site focusing on the search for new planets is sponsored by NASA. A site created by an international planet searching team provides information directly from the source. A wealth of detail on the search for extrasolar planets may be found at the Extrasolar Planets Encyclopaedia website maintained by Jean Schneider at the Observatoire de Paris. A fun NASA site lets you design a hypothetical planet habitable for humans.
Imaginary Places
Orion's Arm is a website that encourages the submittal of visions of the far future that are internally consistent and abide as much as possible with the accepted facts and theories in the physical, biological, and social sciences. Some of the visions created are quite impressive and demonstrate a high level of skill in computer graphics. As stated on their welcoming page, the period of interest spans the next ten thousand years of terragen galactic history, from the near future interplanetary colonization to the far future where the colonised part of the galaxy is ruled by vast ascended intelligences, incorporating both hard science, and the "soft" or social sciences, as well as mythological, archetypal themes, as the gods of the collective psyche incarnate in unforeseen new forms.
