Greening the city !
Lecture on Conference 'Grönblå brunnshög' at Lund, Sweden, 26.8.2009
Helga Fassbinder
In the spring of 2009 James Lovelock published his latest book, a book with dramatic content. “The vanishing face of GAIA” (Pub. Perseus Books Group). You may remember James Lovelocks GAIA hypothesis.
Lovelock is British chemist and biologist of great renown. He has a number of patented inventions that were done when working for NASA; he is a member of the British Royal Society and was awarded the Heineken Prize by the Royal Dutch Academy of Science. 30 years ago Lovelock caused quite a sensation with his GAIA hypothesis. In Greek mythology GAIA is the name of mother earth. Lovelock uses the term Gaia as a metaphor for the entire sun-earth system. He describes Gaia as a self-regulating system that in its’ entirety is viewed as an interlinked organism. According to his hypothesis the surface of the earth is a dynamic environment wherein the complete biosphere (the sum total of all forms of life) is supported and stabilized by the return effect therefore making evolution possible. In spite of heavy critique in the beginning there are many followers of this theory in scientific circles meanwhile and astronomers, biologists, and environmental scientists presently use this theory as a given.
In Lovelocks’ earlier book of 2006, “The revenge of GAIA,” he wrote already in a dramatic warning “Climate change is bringing the whole system in its current form and structure in grave danger with disastrous effects to life on earth, particularly that of mankind. Intense use of fossil fuels has already caused a rise in global temperatures that will impact the return effect in the coming decades leading to an escalation of global warming, especially when the curbing effect of dust and mist falls away that have come into existence due to fossil fuels."
Now, 3 years later. Lovelock has published his latest evaluation. In this book he discusses not only climate change, but also global population growth and the growing standard of life in countries such as China. The title, ‘The vanishing face of GAIA’ says it all: We are now engaged in crossing boundaries.
The fact that an International Climatology conference about dimming has taken place this springtime shows just how serious this is being taken. The participating scientists discussed the disturbing question "Would the possibility of spreading fine particles into the atmosphere provide shade allowing partial sunlight whereby warming would be slowed down". It seems not to be the solution: The particals would remain only about 6 weeks in the upper atmosphere and then slowly sink down contaminating our air...
In 2007 Lovelock stated the following in an interview: “I don’t believe people are quick enough to react or smart enough to deal with oncoming events. Kyoto took place 11 years ago and nearly nothing has been achieved except endless negotiations and meetings.”
Never the less Lovelock does not see his book as scenario of doom but more as a last warning. We can still turn this around. And indead we see a rising global consciousness.
CO2 emissions. Climate change and peak oil are on our minds. It is this knowledge that runs uncontrollably through our sub conscience. The popular disaster films are proof of this. Subconsciously we realize the danger, people are frightened.
Politicians on the national level as well as local are making efforts to turn the tide. Not only through conferences but also in leadership. The aim now is to attack at all levels, all areas and put into effect all useful strategies that will lead to an end of this insane development. It’s no longer about this or that but this and that.
What can WE do about it?
We are architects, urban planners, ecologists, sociologists, local politicians – in a broad range that what the French name ‘urbanists’, people who are professionally engaged with cities.
And so we are in the middle of the fight !
Let’s have a look at our field of battle:
Our cities are clear sources of heat. They are stone deserts. The areal photo above on the right is an infra red view of the Bay of San Fransisco. The red color defines the captured heat emission. The air above the cities is 3 degrees warmer then out of town. This is called the “urban heat island effect.” And the cities will further grow globally. At the moment more than half of the world population is living in cities. Add to this the fact that we have to expected another 3 billion people on earth already during this century, perhaps even doubling of the world population, and imagine that 95% of the population of that growth will live in cites, and that globally more and more people will participate in a higher level of prosperity - all this will cause even more warming.
What can we do as ‘urbanists’ ?
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We are developing sustainable cities. (By the way: Americans mostly use the short word ‘green’ also for sustainable - for us Europeans is green still connected with vegetation and I also use ‘green’ in this European sense.) Okay, we are developing sustainable cities. We are making plans for reducing traffic, we stimulate the use of bikes. We support the zero emission city movement, which has started a worldwide network.
On the level of buildings we we do great efforts of insulation, we have started different approaches of winning alternative energy by wind, solar collectors, turbines etc.
We certainly have to do all this. And it is not enough. And it goes slow.
But we can do something which is in short time to do, which is comparatively extremely in-expensive, highly efficient and besides this, it is something which is nice to do and highly pleasant and beautiful in it’s effects – and people like it:
We can green the city. Green by real green, the green of vegetation .It is just recently that we have discovered this secret weapon against warming up and its accompanying problems:
Green, vegetation in cities can play an important role, even better, must play an important role in the fight against global warming with all the ramifications..
Green roofs contribute to insulation bringing with it lower energy costs with the added greater efficiency of solar panels. It protects the main roofing materials, absorbs rainwater and converts CO2 into biomass. Green roofs diminish the effects of energy loss caused by strong winds. The urban microclimate is improved. It offers green recreation near the home and work place. In addition it offers a living space for animals and plants.
Greening is the trump card we hold in our hands in the fight against global warming!
A considerable amount of foreign cities have already instituted policies to stimulate planting roof tops:
- By offering subsidies per square meter
- Through indirect subsidies e.g. tax advantages in the form of lower sewage taxation
- By obligation: there are many communities that have ruled obligatory green roofs for new buildings in which case subsidies are not granted.
Linz, Austria is an acclaimed example of compulsory greening of rooftops, which began in already 1989 stimulating through subsidization. Many more cities in Austria, Switzerland and Germany, especially southern Germany, have already made it compulsory or stimulate with various forms of subsidization. Canada is following suit. Vancouver and Toronto pride themselves on their greening of rooftops.
The mayor of New York called for a greening of the city in a passionate speech held with an aerial photo behind him of Manhattan with all the rooftops of the skyscappers colored green. Even the Bronx has a program to green up social housing. “Green the ghetto” is their slogan. One can even book a tour of green rooftops. Chicago is praised internationally thanks to its green roof policy: Every government building must have a green roof.
Stimulation concerns also green gables:
Paris f.i. stimulates green gables by offering plants and maintenance by public services.
All this enthusiasm is not pure coincidence. Below is a list of the advantages:
Cooling and warming insulation en saving energy costs:
A green roof and a green “skin” gable have insulating properties. It provides warming insulation in the winter and in the summer a cooling insulation. This results in lowering energy costs.
The cooling effect is caused by green roof evaporation whereby radiation warmth diminishes. Here is a short technical explanation:
Protecting the “skin” of the roof is another positive effect: Gravel is, in fact, better then nothing. It hardly lasts longer then an uncovered roof. Weather conditions and ultra violet rays negatively affect exposed flat roofs. This causes material fatigue: destruction of the quality of the materials. Add to that the eventual cracking and decompression of the actual roof layer.
Through green roofing climate and environmental influences are weakened. The roof layer itself is kept damp, is in the dark and stays cooler. This, without a doubt, doubles the life of roofing materials. It may be more costly in the construction but is cheaper in the long term.
The green roof acts as a sponge. Depending upon the construction and weather conditions 50-90% of rainfall will be soaked up and through evaporation brought right back into the natural course of recycling. In this way sewage systems are no longer overburdened.
For the owner this is a money saver: In Germany, for example, those who have a green roof pay 30-50% less sewage tax depending upon a given communities’ taxation.
A green roof also absorbs fine particulate matter. The EU rulings threaten to paralyze further building projects in the cities because the limit has already been exceeded. Green roofs soak up as much as 20% of fine particulate matter from the air. Several researchers have stated 30% depending upon the type of planting.
Since the use of vehicles cannot be brought down to zero any other efficient method is important. Greening can, therefore, contribute greatly in achieving the EU norms.
Add to that this little surprise: The reduction of noise and radiation. One unpleasant added factor to technological progress is noise. Green roofs and gables lower noise levels and work as sound insulation. According to the research done sound levels are lowered by 5db. This is very important in relation to noisy areas in cities. Electro-magnetic high frequencies (i.e. cell phones) are efficiently reduced as well. This has also been proven through research.
Finally I would like to point out something special: A green roof is a free bit of land in the middle of town, a garden above our heads for birds and for ourselves with a panoramic view.
And greening beautifies the city…The picture above on the right shows an inner area (surrounded by buildings) on the Kennedylaan in Amsterdam. The city had planned the building of a parking garage. The people living there protested loudly and a compromise was made. That compromise was the planting of the roof of the parking garage!
Another field open for green environmental and beauty improvement are the large industrial areas close to the cities which are filled with mostly windowless buildings. How much better would these industrial areas been integrated in the surrounding landscape by greening! Greening not only the roofs bust also the vertical sides. That would mean: Although used industrially, we would give the land back to nature!
Seeing green roofs, underground garages covered in green and green walls/gables improves life in the cities. Just a few green blooming islands will contribute in breaking the monotony of concrete, asphalt and bricks. Just a few green blooming islands will already contribute in breaking the monótony of concrete, asphalt and bricks.
Besides the esthetic dimension of green beauty there is another: psychologists and physicians can tell you a lot about the positive effects of green for body and soul, based on an amount of empiric research… Green makes people happier, even ill people recover sooner with a view on green through the window.
Regarding all these advantages, which greening offers without nearly any use of electric energy we might ask:
Why don’t we have green roofs, vertical green on buildings, and trees along the streets as a standard equipment of all our planning and building activities?
Why for goodness sake??
One answer lays in technological reasons: only since not so long ago we have save materials and good experience to build with green (instead of defending it).
Another answer, which plays probably even a greater role, lays in our esthetic history.
It is hidden in architectural tradition of modernism and in the professional education of the past. Many of the planners and architects are stil thinking and feeling in the spirit of modernisme. In this view green is separated from buildings - vegetation is as another world for them. For health reasons there are parks and woods, not integrated, but separated from buildings. Incidentally green used as a more solitarian decoration.
What we need now is a complete switch in our mental and aesthetic approach of the city. This is what makes things so difficult – as you know: the highest barriers are never material or technological, they are mental. All of us, especially we architects, urban planners, investors and politicians, we will have to revise our ideas about priorities and about what a building, a street, a city should look like.
Well, there is always the mainstream, there is an avant-garde and there are tail lights. Let’s have a look at the avant-garde.
There is a first beginning in handling green in the city differently, there are signs of changing ideas among architects and urban planners. In some places we can observe a real switch in practice.
There are extraordenary new green projects, mostly in Asia and in de Middle East, designed by internationally appreciated architects - just have a look at the exhibition at Louisiana Museum going on at the moment. But also in good old Europe there are towns that dare to take exceptional steps in the direction of more green on a broad scale. I will give you two examples, one of top down and the other one of buttom up:
The first one is the reality of greening the densest city on the European continent: Paris. Paris has deemed, as policy, that all forms of greening are to be applied in the city.
Greening Paris
Paris has an enormous problem to live up to the European standards of microscopic particles and CO2 content of the air.
And Paris suffers greatly from the heat island effect. This was proven during the heat wave in 2003 when thousands of elderly people died. There was talk of between 4000-14000 people!
It is also because of this shocking fact that city government decided to implement measures in order to improve the urban climate.
After the elections of 2001 for the first time in history the socialists became the biggest party in Paris - but they became not big enough: they were forced to look for a partner. The only one on hand was the green party.
So the municipal government changed into a coalition of the socialist party and the green party as the junior partner.
The socialist M. Delanoe became mayor of the city - and now something astonishing happened: he embraced the green issues without hesitation and made it to one of the favorite points of his policy – and his image… His coalition developed an offensive to tackle the environmental problems of the city with the whole range of all that can help.
On the one hand measures have been taken to reduce individual traffic and increase public transport and the use of bikes - the new bike-utilities of Paris are already famous. On the other hand a broad green-campaign has been started.
In the citys’ masterplan, the PLU, the entire city within the ring has been deemed as a zone for green enforcements.
And there is a sensation – at least for the planning profession:
In the PLU you will find a new planning category – additional to those, by which in Sweden and in all European countries are used to describe the rules of building:
The PLU has introduced the planning category ‘vertical green’ for green gables of buildings…
But greening the city cannot only be done by the local government – citizens have to play their part as well.
In order to warm Parisians to the idea of greening Paris the city council in 2007 en 2008 planted a temporary garden in front of city hall between Rue Rivoli and the Seine.
There they gave an impressive exhibition of plants, gardens and example arrangements. On stands citizens could get information on how they could contribute to the greening with municipal help.
Inside city hall plans and realized projects were also shown.
Planting new parks and city gardens is included in this policy.
Ground, however, in the city is scarce.
Already in the 90’s the idea grew to plant public roof gardens on the roofs of transportation infrastructure.
This was realized on the roof of the railway station Montparnasse where the Jardin Atlantique was planted. Surrounded by high buildings met apartments and offices the garden became a popular place to sit during lunch breaks in the late afternoon.
Now, during the last few years more than 40 new parks, different kind of gardens and small pocket gardens have been realized.
But however, ground in the dense city is scarce and expensive. Another solution of the scarce good ground was the idea to create vertical gardens instead of only horizontal gardens.
This had as a result the new planning category ‘vertical green’ I just mentioned. And in a stimulation campaign to create vertical gardens.
During the period of the exhibition of 2007in front of the city hall there were demonstrations showing how this can be achieved. Therefore even a small department in the city administration is set up for vertical green.
Homeowners and tenants were now eligible to put in requests to green their gables.
A civil servant would inspect the gable, give advice on the type of planting to be used and even the plants would be delivered. Very inexpensive because one needs at the most two plants of Virginia Creeperor ivy. The city even takes care of pruning when necessary. It poses no problem because municipal trucks drive around with telescopic ladders to prune trees, anyway.
Within this framework meanwhile about 100 gables have been planted - which may not be much, compared to the enormous amount of gables, but it does have a stimulating effect. Everywhere gables are being planted privately with vines, ivy and Virginia Creeper, including historical buildings. In France and in Paris there is an old tradition of planting gables and firewalls, anyway.
Today these vertical gardens have literally and figuratively grown into an art form.
The acclaimed architect Jean Nouvel has made use of the new vertical gardens in his design of the Musée du Quai Branly on the banks of the Seine.
The Museum has grown to be a prominent tourist attraction…
Jean Nouvel has applied this green art to another museum he designed, The Foundation Cartier, a center of modern art. Above the glass door of the entrance hangs a green “sculpture” .
The “artist” behind those green gables is Patric Blanc. He travels the world designing and planting green gables. He is so renowned and honored in France that an exhibition of his work was shown at, of all places, the energy company of Paris with long lines of people waiting to get in the door. Young and old, every age group and social class came to see the exhibition.
Well, that was about a top down approach of greening the city.
We have also the other way rond, greening from buttom up:Amsterdam, the old capital of anarchism in Europe....
Greening Amsterdam
The swimming pool also shows another side of vertical green: The fencing is covered in ivy making it a beautiful living wall and indeed it looks much better then a naked fence.
There is however another fine idea: green as a division between bicycle paths and the busy street- ivy which once planted needs no further care.
Beautifully planted gables can also be found in Amsterdam also without rulings dictated by municipal policy. One can find green walls on older buildings in Amsterdam everywhere, planted by citizens....
Yet another good idea: planting the soil surrounding city trees. Paris has policies specifically for this goal. People on a particular street can form an association and then receive, as it were, the soil surrounding the trees in their street from the municipality and are also offered advice on planting. This affords a perfect little garden for city children right outside their own doors.
This seems to be a normal thing to do in Amsterdam. There are beautiful little gable gardens in every shape and size…
One can see rare wild plants amongst and between sidewalk tiles and bricks that are watched over and protected from street cleaners.
All of this green is not reserved just for humans. Biologists have discovered that biodiversity is greater then in the countryside.
Urban green, it’s useful biomass, our CO2 storage serves also as a food for a variety of creatures. We as human urbanites can observe various types of birds and other creatures surviving in the cities.
In 2008 the municipality of Paris began building beehives within the ring and also in the Jardin de Luxembourg. The success of the hives was phenomenal. The Beekeepers Association of Ile de France announced during a press conference that Parisian bees produced 10 times as much honey as their country cousins and there were no die offs as has been seen elsewhere.
All this means:
The time has come to look at cities in a different light. The old divide between city and countryside no longer holds water. We must reorganize our thought processes.
With greening it is possible to profit on all fronts:
We heighten biomass by greening our cities.
We gain free insulation, free water storage en air filtering, plus nature is nearby, something we all yearn for right in front of our doors. The greatest plus point with greening policies in town is the simple pleasure that is given to all.
In fact such buildings of steel and glass warm easily up by sunlight and are gigantic heaters for global warming. It is hard to understand that such buildings and architects won prizes.
Let us join in the rewards of a new and different type of building, buildings that honorably integrate nature.
The Hundertwasserhaus in Vienna, for example, though loved by many citizens was despised in the world of architects.
At the moment the building has been rediscovered and looked from a different angle.
The same goes for the Baumhaus in Darmstadt designed by Ot Hoffman. It is a regular concrete building but looks fantastic.
More and more young architects are adopting the concept of integrating planting into their designs and plans. To mention one, Eduard François with his Flower Tower of social housing in a Paris neighborhood.
I mentioned in the beginning there are rather futuristic green projects going in other parts of the world. Here the 2008 - price winning design Gwanggyo City Centre, new city for 77.000 inhabitants just south of Seoul, South Korea. To be finished in 2011, by MVRDV architects.
Voila, you don't need to go that far. You have taken the tour of new horizons and how we can make the necessary changes in the world and I invite you to look around you, seek out nature in the city and strengthen it by planting more.
It’s about changing direction as soon as possible. I wanted to show that, luckily, there are strategies in the form of planning, building, and management (custodianship) that can effectively contribute in the fight against climate change with something that can also bring joy to occupants and others working in the cities:
Green roofs, green gables, trees, window plants, green balconies, green sidewalks and more, that in the ever growing cities green sanctuaries are created for body and soul. Let us begin greening our cities with rapid enthusiasm wherever possible to become a part of the solution to save Gaia from the threat of global warming.