Why not both? Green spaces and buildings are necessities insofar as they provide important amenities for mental health, pollution/heat island management, and placemaking, and in this sense they are critical infrastructure. But many cities, even big ones, operate at scale without investing in important infrastructure, such as public transport, traffic engineering, third places, and affordable housing; it is unsurprising that the operators of such cities should see green spaces as luxuries in a similar fashion.
Aluminum moka is cheaper than machine. To pour boiling water into the cup with ground coffee is even cheaper. And we are not talking about beans itself, which are all sorts of quality.
I would have guessed you could get a coffee maker for $10 anywhere but it seems they cost $20 nowadays. Still even a $10 mocha pot would be a luxury by that definition when you can make folgers cowboy coffee and drink it out of the single pan that you use for everything.
Coffee is a luxury. It is a very carbon and labor intensive product of growing fruits in tropical areas, only using the seeds, throwing away the pulp of the fruit, transportation, roasting grinding and then the semi boiling of the seeds before it reaches your cup. White sugar might be cheap in price but it's unnatural and has many processes which are also very intensive in labor.
And then also think about carbon footprint of keeping animals in cruel tight cages and force then to eat only coffee fruits to gather coffee beans in their poo and sell for 100$ per kilo.
iPhones are only commodities to iPhones, which if you accept that definition means that everything is a commodity. An iPhone is not a commodity to most other phones.
In the US, in Manhattan, you can probably make do. And there are other cities where you can probably manage with some combination of Uber and short-/longer-term rentals. And just foreclose on certain types of activities for the most part. But I suspect for a lot of people out of school, "I don't need a car" means the same thing I did as an undergrad, namely lean on people who had one.
You can get by in a lot of cities, like Seattle, without a car if you don’t have kids. You don’t even need to bum rides. Even in LA, I wouldn’t have bought a car if it wasn’t for my wife getting pregnant.
In Boston/Cambridge I could probably get by if I mostly didn't leave the city but I know lots of people outside the city and I do lots of activities that would be outside the city. Unlike Manhattan, the assumption is that you have a car as an adult if you aren't right out of school. There's one job I had (for about 1.5 years) that I could have managed without a car.
I think you're generally OK if most of your activities work via transit and Uber. As you suggest, as well, kids and pets probably make things more difficult.
In several parts of Seattle you genuinely don't need a car, with few compromises. Virtually everything is walkable. Even many of the popular trailheads in the mountains have seasonal bus service. Just about the only time I use public transportation is when I take light rail to the airport. I know quite a few people that live this way.
I do own a car but that is only ever used for traveling to another State or to get into more remote parts of the mountains. For anything else, using a car would be inconvenient.
I'd probably be similar if I lived in Boston/Cambridge these days without a need to commute. I wouldn't use a car day to day. But I'd use one to go to outdoor activities or to visit people outside the city. Even if the economics didn't quite work out, I'd want one customized for my liking just so I didn't need to think about it.
Well, green spaces do involve tradeoffs. Someone living in Manhattan who is at least OK with the price of housing may wholeheartedly approve of Central Park (and all the smaller parks) while someone who might want to move there would rather some more apartment blocks were built in some of the space.
Of course there are other ways of making space not all of which are totally voluntary to current residents/owners of property. Cities (including NYC) used to be much more cavalier with remaking areas in this manner.
A city doesn't have space restrictions. It has transportation restrictions.
If you manage to make people travel around faster, you increase the housing supply by a much higher amount than you can by converting local land into housing.
So, everybody would be better by increasing the reach and area for train tracks, even if you convert a reasonable amount of nearby area into parks, if also, while you are at it, you provide some way for local transit to integrate with the long-distance one.
The dichotomy on the article is just plainly wrong. Transportation enables you to improve on both, and without transportation you will have neither.
Geography also matters of course. And many many companies are not actually located in a city.
Better commuter rail/light rail is desirable. On the other hand, a commute is still a commute. I'm actually quite convenient to a commuter rail station that ties into the city's subway quite well. But I pretty much hate commuting into the city on the few days I have to do it because it still takes a big chunk out of my day.
Better commuter rail/light rail is desirable. On the other hand, a commute is still a commute. I'm actually quite convenient to a commuter rail station that ties into the city's subway quite well. But I pretty much hate commuting into the city on the few days I have to do it because it still takes a big chunk out of my day.
If the speed isn't actually fast, then transportation needs to be improved.
I'm about 45 miles outside of the city. Once you have 15 stops or so I'm not sure how much you can improve things?
Express train line, which means fewer stops or no stops at all between destination.
There's probably various inefficiencies such as infrequent service and slowdown of the train due to track issue.
For me, it's the issue of the train not being local to where I live, and infrequency of service, which means I could be waiting up to 20 minutes for the train to arrive in some cases. Stops are not as unbearable for me which felt like a minute or shorter for each stop.
My train line eliminated semi-express service during the pandemic and it's still very clearly much below pre-pandemic ridership. The transit service did make improvements a number of years back but it's still clearly operating well below economic breakeven. (Which may be OK.)
The station is fairly convenient to me to go in for morning rush hour. It's unusable for an evening event. The train is basically empty if I even take it at the tail-end of rush hour. And trains are understandably infrequenty scheduled outside of rush.
Transit demand has a chicken and egg problem, in that demand will increase if the service quality is high but in a place like yours the service quality is low so demand remains low. I don’t think this improvement can happen without a clear vision and integrated plan for achieving it, initial low metrics be damned.
It's hard to make commuter rail work outside of commuting hours beyond a few locations like Manhattan that are so painful and expensive to drive in and park.
I'd have trouble justifying subsidizing every off-hour rider with a $100 bill given there are trains; it just will probably take you 2 or 3x the time relative to driving if you want to head home after a play or a dinner.
Tell that to every small city in the world not in the USA that has a commuter rail system, there are too many to count but Americans think it’s an impossibility anyway.
An easy way to improve things is to simply move closer. 72km is a really long way to commute; you need long-distance train service for that, and that's always going to be expensive, or slow, take your pick.
Why should I? No desire to drive into the city all the time. Most of the time I haven't been working in the city. Happy to be living on 5 acres or so. These days, only go into the city about once a month.
When I did commute semi-regularly there were regulars going into the city though I only did so a couple days a week; wouldn't have been sustainable.
I didn't think I was complaining. Just, like lots of people, it takes a while to get in by whatever transportation mode so I don't do it often.
The greater metro area around where I live has far more jobs in many areas than the city itself does. I'm not sure there were any sizable tech-industry companies in the city proper for a long time although there are more now.
I was mostly responding to a comment way upthread somewhere that, even with a fairly good public transit system, going into a city can take a fair bit of time if you have to use multiple modes of transportation. So the answers are pretty suck it up, move closer, or don't go into the city much.
>going into a city can take a fair bit of time if you have to use multiple modes of transportation. So the answers are pretty suck it up, move closer, or don't go into the city much.
Well, yeah? Those answers are your alternatives if you choose to live far from the city, and I would think they should be obvious. You can't change the laws of physics. Or economics: I mean, you could build a bullet train between your rural town and whatever exact destination in the city you want, but obviously that's economically infeasible.
What about people who don’t want to live near train tracks? Or people who currently live on land that would be seized if train tracks were to be built? Not everyone wants to live in a city.
The polled preferences of Americans look something like 60-40 in favor of single family homes. The actual land distribution in metropolitan areas looks more like 95-5.
To some degree, building more train tracks and allowing dense housing relieves pressure on the remaining areas.
What about people who don’t want to live near train tracks? Or people who currently live on land that would be seized if train tracks were to be built? Not everyone wants to live in a city.
You see those gigantic parking lots and 4 way stroads? Many of the parking lots are empty for much of the day, and stroads are dangerous and inefficient.
For that matter, freeways and interstate highways are valuable resources we could repurpose for train tracks.
We have grossly inefficient transportation corridor that could easily be made more efficient.
Now, there will still be need to demolish homes and businesses for public benefit, but reducing traffic and making good use of land more efficiently means less homes will needed to be demolished.
There are still plenty of four- or five-storey walkups in Manhattan. These can be razed and replaced with residential high-rises. Manhattan's ability to build up (as opposed to out) is essentially unlimited.
Historically, "urban renewal" has involved the city government just taking drastic action. If you want to turn low/mid-rises into high-rises at scale, that probably won't happen organically.
I concede that past efforts at urban renewal have usually neglected to take into account the needs of all (or even most) stakeholders. It's an intractable problem, but not impossible. Perhaps the perfect storm of a housing crisis, climate change, and lower property tax revenue from a collapse in commercial RE might force rational heads to come together.
Perhaps. But if jobs are not a reason to live in a city, I expect that will change the housing equation for many people and they'll just move somewhere that isn't as crowded.
Which is probably even a good result overall. Lower housing prices for people who want to live in a city for other reasons--albeit perhaps with reductions in services and other favored urban features overall.
That is ridiculous considering the towering apartment blocks you can see anywhere that isn’t covered by a steep mountain in the region. And those get tunneled through by subways so all the places that can be built on are. The same is really true with any mainland Chinese city. And still people complain about the rent being too high.
Just because you have a lot of high skyscraper doesn't mean you have an adequate supply.
I have seen pictures of those high rise apartment buildings. What's clear to me is that they're frequently skinny and tall. The tallness of these structures can be misleading, because we're not accounting for total volume of a building.
You can have a lot of density with relatively low height and greater area of space occupied. These may be green spaces or parks. Filling in those area with more building volume doesn't mean green spaces are impossible, but it would be an engineering challenge to put green spaces on the roof.
If you wish to see truly insane population density. You should see images of Kowloon walled city and compare that to Hong Kong. They're not really comparable. Kowloon Walled City is only 10 to 14 of stories high. There are certainly buildings higher than that in Hong Kong.
In any case, housing cost is determined by demand and supply. If there's sufficient supply of housing, the price would go down. If there's insufficient housing, the cost would rise. It doesn't matter if your city is hyperdense or not.
Apartment buildings in Asia are around 30 stories tall, which is the limit where you can use low skill labor and cheaper materials (going higher requires more skill and cost). Each floor has around 4-5 units, they have to be like that due to window requirements. Even China isn’t going to let you build a fat deep building with many non window units, which are called death traps. I lived in these buildings for 9 years, they are about as dense as you can get until things get very expensive or very dangerous.
Kowloon walled city was torn down in the early 90s for good reasons.
That's simply a problem of engineering design and building code regulation, and the current assumption of how we design and construct buildings. You can double the volume of a flat area by adding a story height worth of flat area. Thrice, if you triple it.
The fact is, the world we live in isn't constructed in 3D, but rather 2.5D.
In any case, this is not an engineering problem, but a sociopolitical one.
Its an engineering/cost problem. Yes, you can create spansive narrow but long building that go up N stories and have long corridors of apartments with only one wall of windows (and you can go back and front on that). But you need to be able to get the people down in case of fire (and not have them jam), so more stairs, and elevators to handle the amount of traffic. It isn't because people are dumb that they don't do this by default, they run cost benefit and realize building towers works out to about the same economy as building walls, people also want some green, so courtyard complexes are common (towers surrounding a central courtyard, this is a very chinese design).
> In any case, this is not an engineering problem, but a sociopolitical one.
It turns out they not only have to fund the construction of these buildings, but also sell them when they are completed.
If it's really a fundamental engineering challenge, then reporting on the issue should have reflected that. They do not. It's basically broadly the same problem elsewhere. Hong Kong's challenges are political, not engineering, irrespective of the debate whether to build tall or wide(in my opinion, both).[1]
You need a lot more zoning capacity than housing demand because for various reasons buildings don’t turn over very quickly.
The real problem is that to be healthy, the housing market in New York needs a lot more capacity in recognizance of this fact. There is no such thing as full zoning capacity in the same way that zero unemployment is not realistic or good.
Trees also generate oxygen, which can be an issue in cities since (BBC Science Focus):
> "A human breathes about 9.5 tonnes of air in a year, but oxygen only makes up about 23 per cent of that air, by mass, and we only extract a little over a third of the oxygen from each breath. That works out to a total of about 740kg of oxygen per year. Which is, very roughly, seven or eight trees’ worth."
You might think the problem would be minimal due to atmospheric circulation, but like with smog accumulation, some weather patterns can lead to problems:
"(2021) Declining Oxygen Level as an Emerging Concern to Global Cities"
That doesn't sound like that much, especially in less-dense cities and if you count "embedded" forests/parks. Looking at local newspaper articles suggests Prague has possibly more than that, but mostly in forests, not on streets. I don't know enough to say if/how much that would help with air quality.
I live in a city with trees, an adult tree normally takes up the space of a big block, you can have maybe 20-30 on a space where 400 live if you cover the street.
Most likely plants can be more a efficient way. Probably everything fast growing is more oxygen converting, and co2 storing
For my current home I've got 7 trees and several bushes for four people. I don't exactly live in a forest. My neighbor who lives alone has at least four trees on their property.
I agree. Singapore is the greenest city but it's hardly green. Construction is always dirty, a few trees won't change that. The sands are stolen from other countries.
They dress up the carbon causing steel beams and concrete with trees but don't forget the tree roots also destroy infrastructure, and at the end of the day it's (toxic) lipstick on a pig, and the continuous maintenance of the lipstick until the pig dies. Cities and human habitats are either being reclaimed by nature or fighting it. Until that fundamentally changes green cities are as realistic as carbon negative oil.
Humans themselves also need constant care and maintenance. It's a fact of life. Nothing exists in static equilibrium. The way I see it, humans and human settlements are also a part of nature.
Most cities are hostile towards people. Maybe we should make them non hostile first, and then we can think about the green part.
The biggest factor contributing to this hostility seems to be personal motorized vehicles. Reducing the number of motorized vehicles (and the space dedicated to them) whenever possible should have a much better impact than introducing greenery.
Put another way, I think people live better in a city made of concrete with few cars than in a green city with lots of cars.
"Low density" is a relative term and there are ranges in everything. You can have a city mostly made of huge, packed tower blocks, or a city mostly made of small buildings with some space in between.
I think suburbs and urban sprawl could be described this way. But urban core at least here in Toronto is very people friendly and it's definitely possible to live well here without a car. I'm fact most people in the downtown core don't own a car.
I hear downtown Vancouver is also this way. Montreal's urban core and Quebec city also fit this bill.
I do admit everywhere else in Canada is terrible for being people friendly. Not sure about other places
Part of the reason cities are hostile is due to their un-greenness. For every street that bisects a block, consider how many trees could go there. Then consider what that would afford the local ecosystem. Then consider the reduction in noise, the reduction of heat in the hottest months, the reduction in pollution, and the increase in beauty. Of course, less connective tissue also makes for less ease of driving, and so the battle inches forward to returning cities to its citizens.
Making space for more green is good for us precisely because it makes cities less hostile perhaps in a more roundabout way.
Not sure what your point is. You can remove an intersection, plant trees, and put a footpath or bike lane through it. The point is precisely to downsize roads. It would make it safer for pedestrians too.
The solution will involve a multifaceted approach with significant investment from all levels of government (federal, state, local). In general it involves working towards sustainability.
We keep coming up with “solutions” that solve or partially solve one part of the equation. In the article it mentions in order to prevent another incident of Hurricane Sandy, the city decided to build a massive flood mitigation project.
But has anybody stopped to think that maybe our best protections against nature is nature itself? Trees are a good start and definitely help brighten up a concrete jungle, absorb and store CO2. But this is only one aspect.
For decades, cities around the country have been destroying natural ecosystems in favor of single family developments (ie, suburbs) and highways. These concrete structures and monoculture ecosystems that replaced once diverse green spaces are terrible at absorbing and mitigating the effects of nature.
Man made drains get clogged or overwhelmed. Mitigation techniques fail quickly over time if one or more designs were built poorly. The build up of water slowly erodes the soil beneath the concrete and thus leads to formation of sinkholes. I think it’s expected that man made infrastructure will only last 25-30 years before needing a full replacement.
On the other hand, those once diverse ecosystems were great/amazing at absorbing the effects of Mother Nature. Trees, woodlands great and thrive here without any intervention from human beings. They also used to support living organisms — insects such as bees, and animals.
Some intervention needed in case of fire prevention (ie, “controlled burns”). But it’s otherwise self sustaining.
I think federal protection is needed on all green spaces. Not just national parks. Freeze and stop future development of the suburbs. Divest from car centric transportation and infrastructure (highways, roads, parking lots, parking garages, street parking). Destruction of highways.
Return the land to the people to build places where we can live, play, eat, and work. Scale up. Do not scale horizontally. End implied and direct subsidies given to SFH developments. End all subsidies on O&G (a multi trillion dollar industry by the way). Regulate O&G and use fines to pay for a greener future.
Greener cities are absolutely a necessity for humanity, but sadly will be reserved for the wealthiest who can afford the "Luxury" of such things as clean air, clean water and greenspace.
Until the extreme inequality at the core of capitalist society is addressed in a meaningful way (so never really), any so called "Green cities" will just be gated enclaves of the wealthy, and the poor will be forced to live surrounded by the pollution the rich are ultimately responsible for, yet are able to afford to isolate themselves from.
If you live in a med sized city you likely have the chance to be the change you want to see if you're willing to be in somewhat questionable legal territory. I'm part of a local arborist group that has the goal of getting my and the surrounding neighborhoods up to 40%+ tree cover. It started with two guys who planted hundreds of (now) 60-100ft native trees under the city's nose in alleyways, hellstrips, the yards of rental properties, newly sold houses. By the time they got found out neither the city nor the residents could really be mad at the positive vandalism and so they went legit and now the city just pays our little group to keep doing it.
It's so fun going door to door and being like, "would you like to accept our lord and savior the silver maple into your yard?" We recruited an ecologist recently so we're expanding into native gardens and grasses.
A green city is a city with mixed use medium density housing, sidewalks, bike paths+trees, pub transport with own lanes and semaphore priority, a few parking spots with dynamic pricing.
The next lvl would be good insulation for all buildinngs combined with solar panels on the roofs.
Next level is requiring electric vehicles.
The first lvl is not a luxury, usually this type of planing costs less money to maintain from a city perspective and the density is high enough to meet huge demand.
Next lvls related to solar panels and electric vehicles are more on a luxury side imo but that's more due to the pricing
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[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 195 ms ] threadI think you're generally OK if most of your activities work via transit and Uber. As you suggest, as well, kids and pets probably make things more difficult.
I do own a car but that is only ever used for traveling to another State or to get into more remote parts of the mountains. For anything else, using a car would be inconvenient.
Of course there are other ways of making space not all of which are totally voluntary to current residents/owners of property. Cities (including NYC) used to be much more cavalier with remaking areas in this manner.
If you manage to make people travel around faster, you increase the housing supply by a much higher amount than you can by converting local land into housing.
So, everybody would be better by increasing the reach and area for train tracks, even if you convert a reasonable amount of nearby area into parks, if also, while you are at it, you provide some way for local transit to integrate with the long-distance one.
The dichotomy on the article is just plainly wrong. Transportation enables you to improve on both, and without transportation you will have neither.
Better commuter rail/light rail is desirable. On the other hand, a commute is still a commute. I'm actually quite convenient to a commuter rail station that ties into the city's subway quite well. But I pretty much hate commuting into the city on the few days I have to do it because it still takes a big chunk out of my day.
If the speed isn't actually fast, then transportation needs to be improved.
Express train line, which means fewer stops or no stops at all between destination.
There's probably various inefficiencies such as infrequent service and slowdown of the train due to track issue.
For me, it's the issue of the train not being local to where I live, and infrequency of service, which means I could be waiting up to 20 minutes for the train to arrive in some cases. Stops are not as unbearable for me which felt like a minute or shorter for each stop.
The station is fairly convenient to me to go in for morning rush hour. It's unusable for an evening event. The train is basically empty if I even take it at the tail-end of rush hour. And trains are understandably infrequenty scheduled outside of rush.
I'd have trouble justifying subsidizing every off-hour rider with a $100 bill given there are trains; it just will probably take you 2 or 3x the time relative to driving if you want to head home after a play or a dinner.
When I did commute semi-regularly there were regulars going into the city though I only did so a couple days a week; wouldn't have been sustainable.
The greater metro area around where I live has far more jobs in many areas than the city itself does. I'm not sure there were any sizable tech-industry companies in the city proper for a long time although there are more now.
I was mostly responding to a comment way upthread somewhere that, even with a fairly good public transit system, going into a city can take a fair bit of time if you have to use multiple modes of transportation. So the answers are pretty suck it up, move closer, or don't go into the city much.
Well, yeah? Those answers are your alternatives if you choose to live far from the city, and I would think they should be obvious. You can't change the laws of physics. Or economics: I mean, you could build a bullet train between your rural town and whatever exact destination in the city you want, but obviously that's economically infeasible.
The GP isn't replying to people interested in making his particular commute better.
To some degree, building more train tracks and allowing dense housing relieves pressure on the remaining areas.
You see those gigantic parking lots and 4 way stroads? Many of the parking lots are empty for much of the day, and stroads are dangerous and inefficient.
For that matter, freeways and interstate highways are valuable resources we could repurpose for train tracks.
We have grossly inefficient transportation corridor that could easily be made more efficient.
Now, there will still be need to demolish homes and businesses for public benefit, but reducing traffic and making good use of land more efficiently means less homes will needed to be demolished.
Perhaps. But if jobs are not a reason to live in a city, I expect that will change the housing equation for many people and they'll just move somewhere that isn't as crowded.
Which is probably even a good result overall. Lower housing prices for people who want to live in a city for other reasons--albeit perhaps with reductions in services and other favored urban features overall.
Hong Kong really does explore the limits of unlimited growth upward.
I have seen pictures of those high rise apartment buildings. What's clear to me is that they're frequently skinny and tall. The tallness of these structures can be misleading, because we're not accounting for total volume of a building.
You can have a lot of density with relatively low height and greater area of space occupied. These may be green spaces or parks. Filling in those area with more building volume doesn't mean green spaces are impossible, but it would be an engineering challenge to put green spaces on the roof.
If you wish to see truly insane population density. You should see images of Kowloon walled city and compare that to Hong Kong. They're not really comparable. Kowloon Walled City is only 10 to 14 of stories high. There are certainly buildings higher than that in Hong Kong.
In any case, housing cost is determined by demand and supply. If there's sufficient supply of housing, the price would go down. If there's insufficient housing, the cost would rise. It doesn't matter if your city is hyperdense or not.
Kowloon walled city was torn down in the early 90s for good reasons.
The fact is, the world we live in isn't constructed in 3D, but rather 2.5D.
In any case, this is not an engineering problem, but a sociopolitical one.
> In any case, this is not an engineering problem, but a sociopolitical one.
It turns out they not only have to fund the construction of these buildings, but also sell them when they are completed.
1. https://www.thinkchina.sg/whats-stopping-hong-kong-fixing-it...
The real problem is that to be healthy, the housing market in New York needs a lot more capacity in recognizance of this fact. There is no such thing as full zoning capacity in the same way that zero unemployment is not realistic or good.
> "A human breathes about 9.5 tonnes of air in a year, but oxygen only makes up about 23 per cent of that air, by mass, and we only extract a little over a third of the oxygen from each breath. That works out to a total of about 740kg of oxygen per year. Which is, very roughly, seven or eight trees’ worth."
You might think the problem would be minimal due to atmospheric circulation, but like with smog accumulation, some weather patterns can lead to problems:
"(2021) Declining Oxygen Level as an Emerging Concern to Global Cities"
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33904720/
Most likely plants can be more a efficient way. Probably everything fast growing is more oxygen converting, and co2 storing
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1130736/
They dress up the carbon causing steel beams and concrete with trees but don't forget the tree roots also destroy infrastructure, and at the end of the day it's (toxic) lipstick on a pig, and the continuous maintenance of the lipstick until the pig dies. Cities and human habitats are either being reclaimed by nature or fighting it. Until that fundamentally changes green cities are as realistic as carbon negative oil.
Like getting married, doing the deed, having kids etc.
The biggest factor contributing to this hostility seems to be personal motorized vehicles. Reducing the number of motorized vehicles (and the space dedicated to them) whenever possible should have a much better impact than introducing greenery.
Put another way, I think people live better in a city made of concrete with few cars than in a green city with lots of cars.
Definitely not. The former is easily an oppressive 1984-esque metropolis while the latter easily feels nice.
Another key parameter is density. Low density with plenty of greenery and people will feel and be happy even if they may need a car.
I hear downtown Vancouver is also this way. Montreal's urban core and Quebec city also fit this bill.
I do admit everywhere else in Canada is terrible for being people friendly. Not sure about other places
Making space for more green is good for us precisely because it makes cities less hostile perhaps in a more roundabout way.
We keep coming up with “solutions” that solve or partially solve one part of the equation. In the article it mentions in order to prevent another incident of Hurricane Sandy, the city decided to build a massive flood mitigation project.
But has anybody stopped to think that maybe our best protections against nature is nature itself? Trees are a good start and definitely help brighten up a concrete jungle, absorb and store CO2. But this is only one aspect.
For decades, cities around the country have been destroying natural ecosystems in favor of single family developments (ie, suburbs) and highways. These concrete structures and monoculture ecosystems that replaced once diverse green spaces are terrible at absorbing and mitigating the effects of nature.
Man made drains get clogged or overwhelmed. Mitigation techniques fail quickly over time if one or more designs were built poorly. The build up of water slowly erodes the soil beneath the concrete and thus leads to formation of sinkholes. I think it’s expected that man made infrastructure will only last 25-30 years before needing a full replacement.
On the other hand, those once diverse ecosystems were great/amazing at absorbing the effects of Mother Nature. Trees, woodlands great and thrive here without any intervention from human beings. They also used to support living organisms — insects such as bees, and animals.
Some intervention needed in case of fire prevention (ie, “controlled burns”). But it’s otherwise self sustaining.
I think federal protection is needed on all green spaces. Not just national parks. Freeze and stop future development of the suburbs. Divest from car centric transportation and infrastructure (highways, roads, parking lots, parking garages, street parking). Destruction of highways.
Return the land to the people to build places where we can live, play, eat, and work. Scale up. Do not scale horizontally. End implied and direct subsidies given to SFH developments. End all subsidies on O&G (a multi trillion dollar industry by the way). Regulate O&G and use fines to pay for a greener future.
This needs to be tackled at all fronts.
Until the extreme inequality at the core of capitalist society is addressed in a meaningful way (so never really), any so called "Green cities" will just be gated enclaves of the wealthy, and the poor will be forced to live surrounded by the pollution the rich are ultimately responsible for, yet are able to afford to isolate themselves from.
It's so fun going door to door and being like, "would you like to accept our lord and savior the silver maple into your yard?" We recruited an ecologist recently so we're expanding into native gardens and grasses.