Assuming the structure can support the weight, I'm all in favor of green roofs. Though, most buildings are privately owned and therefore are not true replacements for proper public greenspace within a city. I think it's also important not to get distracted from the primary source of land waste within cities: car infrastructure.
this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2023
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Solarpunk Urbanism
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A community to discuss solarpunk and other new and alternative urbanisms that seek to break away from our currently ecologically destructive urbanisms.
- Henri Lefebvre, The Right to the City — In brief, the right to the city is the right to the production of a city. The labor of a worker is the source of most of the value of a commodity that is expropriated by the owner. The worker, therefore, has a right to benefit from that value denied to them. In the same way, the urban citizen produces and reproduces the city through their own daily actions. However, the the city is expropriated from the urbanite by the rich and the state. The right to the city is therefore the right to appropriate the city by and for those who make and remake it.
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Lately I've been thinking about how a city would look if you could take up street and sidewalk, plant trees, and keep just a bike path through the middle. The logistics challenges (maintaining access to buried infrastructure/protecting them from roots, and making sure vehicle-based emergency services like firetrucks and ambulances can get everywhere, handicapped people have options/access everywhere) are keeping me busy but I have a couple ideas for photobashes of solarpunk streets to try out eventually.
Like the video already outlines... lots of structural issues for having trees there, while planted cascades and similar green-roofs are much simpler and easier to build. I think this is one of the cases where the result does not justify the costs/efforts required.
Probably doesn’t make sense for standard residential buildings but for these tall buildings that are highly engineered, does it really increase the costs by that much? Trees offer a large increase in benefits over other types of vegetation due to the shade and many times greater biomass.
That said, simpler green roofs should also be more widely used in cases where trees are too heavy or expensive. And vines and green walls too. I want to see the concrete jungle become an actual jungle!
That huge below surface cistern and the efforts to anchor the trees against wind would seem to add significantly to the cost over artificial shading structures with ranking plants for example.
I suppose it would depend on the costs and benefits which I haven’t seen quantified. But in general those things don’t provide anywhere near the benefits trees do.