See the Forest for the Buildings
by Tony Chavira
Urban Omnibus, a really slick blog that's pieced together by the architectural league of New York, has a cool and pretty convincing post about the process of covering buildings in urban environments with enough greenery that your city literally absorbs all of the carbon it emits:
Retrofitting our urban building stock to address climate change need not be limited exclusively to increasing their energy efficiency. If “one of the primary causes of global environmental change is tropical deforestation” (Geist & Lambin, 143), then we should approach the adaptation of our buildings as an exercise in reforestation. Deforestation is too often divorced from urban discourse around climate change. In an attempt to redress that, my investigation into sustainable retrofits has included research into some causes of and solutions to deforestation, including a list of interventions already being implemented in the developing world (click here to read more). We must learn from both the causes of climate change and attempts to combat it as we attempt to reforest the city.
It's wild to think about it, but the rooftops of buildings account for about 20 to 25 percent of all urban space! If we covered all of that surface space with greenery, we'd literally be living in a city that was 20 to 25 percent trees and forestation, enough to absorb just about all of our city's collective carbon emissions. But we don't have to just plant stuff on the roofs to cut down on our brutal environmental impact.
Some you can probably do at home to your place. Here are the highlights:
1) Paint Your Roof White: "If all of those surfaces were switched to a reflective material (or color) in the 100 largest urban areas in America, his calculations show, this would offset 44 metric gigatons of carbon dioxide. That’s more than all countries emit in a single year. Further, that’s worth about $1.1 trillion at current carbon trading rates."
2) Slap Up Some GreenScreens: "The surface area of buildings multiplies the ground footprint of the city many times over, making vertical gardening and the integration of growing walls into our buildings an interesting practical solution. The roofscape of most cities is an area that is often forgotten but that could easily be used for the application of green technologies beneficial to all. Greenscreen is a type of metal structure that can be attached to existing walls or used to create freestanding growing walls."
3) Install Wind Belts and Green Roofs: "Windbelts could be used on the facades and roofs of existing buildings as a sculptural element, taking advantage of the building envelope as an available surface upon which to attach. Trees may be planted on the roof by using either planters or by using a new Japanese soil substitute, Pafcal, which is much lighter than earth."
4) Put a Pond on Your Roof: "Insulating panels cover the roof and are opened during the day in the winter to absorb the heat of the sun, and at night, the panels are closed, allowing heat to radiate to the building’s interior. In the summer, the process is reversed."
5) Spray Your Roof With Water: "Here water is cooled by spray at night, via evaporation and night sky radiation, and then stored for use during the day in the building’s cooling system."
6) Collect All the Water and Sun You Can Manage: "Water can be collected via a system of gutters on the building, and then can be piped and recycled to generate the necessary flow. This water can also be used to flush toilets and for other non-potable applications.[...] The roof in this scheme is envisioned as a space in which the entire surface area is covered by solar coils."
What's pretty slick is that they outline an implementation strategy for executing all of these tactics, and Urban Omnibus is pretty clear about the companies you want to get in contact with in order to buy the stuff you need. It's almost smart to get an architect or engineer on board so that you don't have things like leaky roofs or energy loss, but for the most part a lot of these little steps can make a lot of difference. Besides, who wouldn't want to live in a Los Angeles where we had plants and water reclamation on the tops of every building?
I mean, our health certainly can't get any worse for doing these things.
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