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I want to tell you why this episode opens Season 7.
This season is supported by the Van Leer Foundation and guided by a question I can’t stop thinking about: what does urban nature actually mean for parents, babies, and young children? Many of the conversations ahead explore how the environments we build shape health, caregiving, and development in the first thousand days of life.
But before any of that, something has to happen first.
You have to notice.
That’s what this episode is about. And that’s why it goes first.
I met Nuno Curado at Eindhoven’s High Tech Campus on an unseasonably warm October day. We walked from the campus all the way along the river Dommel into the center of Eindhoven — three, maybe four kilometers — and we were barely on a road the entire time. Nuno had planned the route, and it threaded through green corridors, along the riverbank, under canopy, past a patch of heathland that was almost certainly earmarked for development. You forget you’re in a mid-sized Dutch city. The traffic noise thins. Birds fill the gaps.
Along the way, Nuno pointed out things I would have walked straight past. He ID’d birds by their songs. He told me about the beavers — how they’d been gnawing young trees right in the urban core, under a railroad bridge next to the university. He talked about mushrooms, about how the Dommel had been given room to meander again, about which species had returned and which ones people had simply stopped seeing.
By the time we sat down on a bench by the river, microphones on, I’d already learned the most important thing about Nuno’s work: it doesn’t start with information. It starts with attention.
The first mushroom
Nuno moved to Eindhoven six years ago from Portugal. His wife got a job; the family followed. He’d spent years working in nature education back home and wanted to do something similar here.
So he started Wild Eindhoven. The idea: help people discover the nature that already exists in their city. Not the idea of nature. The actual living things.
He runs nature walks — many of them at lunchtime, on purpose, because that’s when people already go outside to eat a sandwich, in Nuno’s words. All they need is a reason to look up. Some come back again and again, even when they’ve heard the same material. It’s not the facts that pull them. It’s the act of going out, together, with purpose.
And then something shifts.
Nuno describes it with mushrooms. The first one is always the hardest to find. But once you see it, you start seeing them everywhere. People come up to him days later — that mushroom you pointed out? I found them here, and here, and here. Same with birdsong, with flowers, with seasonal change. Once it clicks, the city looks different. Not because anything changed, but because they did.
A lot of the people who show up to Wild Eindhoven walks are newcomers. People who moved for work and are still finding their feet. When you land in a new city, you think about the basics — school, groceries, commute. But you don’t usually think: what lives here? What’s the name of this river? Where are the wild spaces?
I wrote about this in The Nature of Our Cities — how disconnected most of us are from the ecology of the places we call home, and how much of that disconnect is just a matter of never having been shown. Nuno gives newcomers something most welcome guides don’t: not information about the city, but a relationship with the place itself. The ground. The living part.
The beaver show
In 2020, a beaver was spotted in Eindhoven for the first time. Right under the railroad, in one of the most urban stretches of the Dommel. Camera traps confirmed it. Since then, beavers have become an Eindhoven mainstay — dams north and south of the city, regular incursions through the center along the river corridor.
Most people don’t know they’re here.
Beavers are mostly active at sunrise and sunset, when most of us aren’t outside. They’re shy. They carry an aura of a “wilderness” animal — the kind of thing you expect in a (Canadian) nature documentary, not between apartment blocks.
So when Nuno’s walking group encountered one — maybe five meters away, in good late-afternoon light, completely absorbed in its own life, gnawing a stick — everything else stopped. The birds he’d been explaining? Irrelevant. The planned route? Gone. Nobody cared about anything else. It was all beaver.
He called it “a very marking moment.”
And I think he’s exactly right. Not because beavers are rare — they’ve made a remarkable comeback across the Netherlands since their reintroduction in the 80s, Nuno thinks — but because the encounter cracks something open. The assumption that wildlife belongs somewhere else. That cities are for us and nature is for... out there, somewhere far, far away.
Not a blank canvas
The conversation took a turn I didn’t expect.
Nuno also works at Trefpunt Groen Eindhoven — trefpunt means “meeting point” in Dutch — an organization that’s been around for 25 years and that, frankly, I think more cities need to know about. (They’re also the ones who invited me to give a lecture at the Eindhoven Public Library that evening, after our walk — so I owe them for a very full day!)
Here’s what it does. Eindhoven has dozens of nature and green groups — the local chapter of the Dutch Association for Field Biology, bat specialists, bird groups, you name it. Instead of the municipality trying to manage input from all of them, Trefpunt acts as the coordinated voice. One door. One liaison. And critically, they’re brought in early — before plans are set in stone. A sewer replacement where trees might be felled. A new apartment tower on a site with monumental trees. A public square redesign. They review it all.
Their input can range from “looks fine, go ahead” to “don’t build there.”
And here’s the thing that got me: because that step exists, some developers now come to Trefpunt proactively, saying…we know there are important trees on our site, and we designed around them. That’s the dream. That’s the scenario where Trefpunt wouldn’t even be needed. And it’s starting to happen precisely because the checkpoint is there.
I use this analogy a lot: most developers treat a site like a blank canvas. What we need is for them to see it as a finished landscape painting — and figure out how to build within/around it. Nuno made the point that this isn’t about blocking development. Eindhoven is expecting 40,000 new residents by 2040. For a city of 250,000, that’s enormous. The building will happen. The question is whether the green corridors, the river corridors, and the ecological connection zones survive the growth, or get paved over by it.
I kept asking Nuno why more cities don’t have an organization like this. He didn’t have an answer. Neither do I. But if your city is struggling with fragmented green advocacy and a municipality that doesn’t know who to listen to, Eindhoven’s been running this experiment for a quarter century. It works.
Render vs. reality
Near the end, we talked about something that comes up in almost every conversation I have in this field: getting ecologists to the table early. Not as a compliance checkbox — any bats? need a permit? — but as a design partner from the start.
Nuno’s argument is about knowledge. And about what happens when people with different backgrounds actually sit together. Ecologists, landscape architects, engineers, arborists, developers — in the same room, early enough that plans can still change.
I feel this one in my bones, because even when the intentions are good — even when an architect has a huge green heart and says, “it’s not a building unless it’s surrounded by trees” — the render can be stunning and the reality devastating. Mature trees in the image. No root zone in the plan. No soil volume specification. No watering plan. The gap between the vision and the execution is where trees die. We keep seeing beautiful renders of 60-year-old canopies on buildings that haven’t given those trees a fighting chance to survive their first summer.
That gap doesn’t close with goodwill. It closes with different people in the room.
After recording, I kept thinking about something Nuno said almost in passing. He was describing people who come on walks and tell him: I run through this park every day, and I never noticed how many bird species live here.
That’s it. A person who was already outside every day. Who started hearing what was there all along.
Season 7 goes to a lot of places from here — maternal health, early childhood development, biophilic real estate, rewilding, schoolyards, public space. But this is where it starts. Before nature can shape us, we have to see it. Before it can heal us, we have to know it’s there.
Nuno’s work is about that first noticing. It’s small and local, and it happens on a lunchtime walk in a mid-sized Dutch city. And I think it might just be the most important thing.
Find Nuno and Wild Eindhoven on his website and on LinkedIn.
Happy trails,
Nadina
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