<
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2023/01/green-cities-climate-change-density-open-space/672709/>
"When I moved from small-town Oregon to Paris’s 11th arrondissement last
summer, the city seemed like a poem in gray: cobblestones, seven-story
buildings, the steely waters of the Seine. But soon I started noticing the
green woven in with the gray. Some of it was almost hidden, tucked inside the
city’s large blocks, behind the apartment buildings lining the streets. I even
discovered a sizable public park right across the street from my building, with
big trees, Ping-Pong tables, citizen-tended gardens, and “wild” areas of
vegetation dedicated to urban biodiversity. To enter it, you have to go through
the gate of a private apartment building. Very Parisian.
Dense cities like Paris are busy and buzzy, a mille-feuille of human
experience. They’re also good for the climate. Shorter travel distances and
public transit reduce car usage, while dense multifamily residential
architecture takes less energy to heat and cool. But when it comes to
adapting to climate change, suddenly everyone wants green space and shade
trees, which can cool and clean the air—the classic urban trade-off between
density and green space.
Or, you know, maybe there’s no big trade-off at all. A new analysis of cities
around the world published today in the journal
People and Nature found only
a weak relationship between population density and urban greenery. The team of
scientists, led by Rob McDonald, an urban ecologist at the Nature Conservancy,
compared satellite images with population-density data in 629 cities across the
world. Globally, denser cities had less open space overall than if everyone had
private yards, but the amount of
public open space was basically unrelated to
density and had more to do with history, policy, and culture. One calculation,
using data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development for
cities outside the U.S., found that a 10 percent increase in density was
associated with a 2.9 percent decline in tree cover. Overall, there was a lot
of variability, and there were a lot of outliers: Some cities and neighborhoods
have both high density and lots of trees or open space. “Density is not
destiny,” McDonald told me.
Broadly speaking, the researchers found two ways to avoid the trade-off between
density and green space. Take Singapore, one of the densest countries in the
world. There, plants are installed on roofs and facades, turning the familiar
gray landscape of skyscrapers and overpasses into a living matrix. By law,
developers must replace any natural area that they develop with green space
somewhere on the building. Meanwhile, in Curitiba, the largest city in southern
Brazil, which has tripled in population since 1970, dense housing is built
around dedicated bus lanes and interwoven with large public parks and
conservation areas. Curitiba also uses planted areas to help direct and soak up
stormwater, buffering residential areas from floods. In Singapore, nature
shares space with the built environment, while Curitiba packs people in tightly
and then spares land for other species inside the boundaries of the city."
Via
Future Crunch:
<
https://futurecrunch.com/goodnews-global-democracy-cancer-usa-rhinos-india/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
