Reforesting Cities

A great post on Urban Omnibus investigates the potential of implementation of urban reforestation blended into existing buildings in our urban areas. From author Vanessa Keith, author of the article: "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."


:: image via Urban Omnibus

While the ideas of terrestrial re-forestation have been discussed often in urban areas, the proposals attempt to incorporated this into existing building stock is a unique way of augmenting this. The post goes through a range of typologies of interventions including white roofs, greenscreens, green roofs, windbelts, and a range of blue-roof strategies (see Veg.itecture for more exploration of this).


:: image via Urban Omnibus

So, pulling it all together, starts to looks like a eco-district scale project typology, with a range of building and terrestrial opportunities exploited: "Large scale urban farming which takes place indoors and on large expanses of roof, greenscreens to let plants to climb the vertical surfaces of the city, trees which are now able to grow on the city roofscape. Roof ponds and artificial waterfalls for cooling and electrical generation. Solar and wind devices which form sculptural elements in the city, performing a function as well as having an aesthetic. Ports for plug-in electric vehicles which gather energy from photovoltaics. Solar panels incorporated into street poles, and vertical wind turbines which form a rhythm in the streetscape. Bicycle lanes, room for walking and the incorporation of still more trees."


:: image via Urban Omnibus

The concept of building retrofit has gained much attention, both as a economic necessity as building slows down, but also as shown in the article, the usable surface area of the city isn't just composed of the left-over terrestrial parcels, but a network of building faces, as cited in: " A recent New York Times article quantifies the amount of available roofspace in the city alone as 944 million square feet, 11.5% of the total building area the city holds."

Ignoring this resource will miss a significant opportunity to incorporate more area in our attempts to reforest cities, and also expand our toolkit beyond street tree canopy and dense planting in open spaces.

Elements of Urban Agriculture

I had the opportunity today to see a presentation by local urban agriculture guru Marc Boucher-Colbert (the man behind the Rocket Restaurant rooftop garden here in Portland). Instead of focusing directly on rooftops, he outlined a broad version of urban agriculture through an investigation of a range of possible strategies for our cities. This is all information investigated at length at times here on L+U and Veg.itecture, but I thought it apt to summarize the ideas from the lecture, as they provide a great overview and were a really inspiring collection of ideas woven together into a strategy.

1. Guerilla Gardening
The starting point of the discussion took a look at the thriving guerrilla gardening movement worldwide as a quick response to the bland and life-less environment we exist within in our urban areas. Both safe anarchy and also, via Wikipedia... "political gardening, a form of direct action, primarily practiced by environmentalists. It is related to land rights, land reform, and permaculture. Activists take over ("squat") an abandoned piece of land which they do not own to grow crops or plants. Guerrilla gardeners believe in re-considering land ownership in order to reclaim land from perceived neglect or misuse and assign a new purpose to it."


:: image via Wikipedia


:: seed bombs - image via itwasme

A side-note of the discussion dealt with the production of seed bombs (or the less provocative 'seed balls') as a way of simply and efficiently distributing plant life to our streets, vacant lots, and other left-over spaces. Again via Wikipedia: "A seed bomb is a compressed clod of soil containing live vegetation that may be thrown or dropped onto a terrain to be modified. The term "seed grenade" was first used by Liz Christy in 1973 when she started the "Green Guerillas". The first seed grenades were made from condoms filled with local wildflower seeds, water and fertilizer." As a fledgling guerrilla gardener myself, it's pretty damn cool and quite liberating. Give it a try.

2. Front & Backyard Gardening
The idea of front and backyard gardens isn't a new idea (don't tell Fritz Haeg) but have become a cause celebre for re-occupation of our urban and suburban spaces. Call them Victory Gardens, or Edible Estates, or hell, call them 'this is the only place I can find good sun in my yard' - this isn't a new idea come back, but rather something that has always existed and has now re-emerged as a vibrant movement. Growing vegetables at your home is the ultimate in local food, and also engages people in exercise, meditation, and a range of other benefits - making it both a productive activity and a hobby worthy of your time.


:: image via The Blue Marble

Marc explained that while the idea of taking back the lawn is laudable, there is a grim reality to the concept of agri-buisiness, summed up in the following fact: of 'food' grown in the US, 1.5% is fruits and vegetables, while the other 98.5% consists of grain and oilseed, which any reader of Michael Pollan will know goes to meat production, biofuels, various corn products and other detached food we consume in many ways. This led to another new figure in the story - of Stan Cox, who works with one of my heroes, Wes Jackson at The Land Institute, reinventing corporate agriculture through a new model of perennial production based on the tallgrass prairie ecosystems.


:: Perennial Agriculture - image via The Land Institute

The other models beyond reoccupying the land you have is the sub-economy that include yard sharing or other means that leverage open land with the energy and desire of those to garden. By taking the land of folks that have surplus, or don't have the time to garden places like Your Backyard Farmer or Hyperlocavore offer a range of options to use land in cities for productive uses. Again this trend can also go beyond just gardening to include other trends such as backyard chickens, pygmy goats (great for blackberries) or other trends suitable for urban locales.


:: Backyard Chickens - image via Flicker (zbar)

3. Community Gardens
Another vital aspect of both food production and urban life is the community garden, where the interactions between people are just as important as the growing of vegetables. The idea of a range of programs, including those run by the city (such as in Portland), cooperatives, and other models. While a large part of the eventual urban agriculture puzzle, many communities are currently dealing with huge demand and a lack of funding to provide more supply. While the need to fund these programs will continue, there is also a need to look beyond the plots to a larger picture of gardening in cities.


:: image via The Daily Green

The overall conceptual framework of community gardening can be found at the resource-rich site for the American Community Gardening Association (ACGA) which provides information on starting and maintaining community gardens throughout the country. As Marc pointed out, much of the training and education for the ACGA is focuses on engaging community resources and partnerships - taking the tack that is you build community, this is lead to a thriving garden - and you can figure out the training of food production and other added services later.


:: food preservation - image via Eat. Drink. Better

Finally, the idea of subsistence and market farms, or a combination of the two, offers a range of opportunities to offer gardening, community, and the ability to make money through the use of these sites in cities - offering for green job creation. Also, included in the idea of community gardening and education is the value-added ideas of food preservation, chickens raising, small animals, beekeeping, and other more agriculturally related ideas to round out the potential for urban ag.

4. School Gardens
While encompassing a range of institutional gardens such as hospitals, prisons, and other urban uses, school gardens provide a unique opportunity to provide food and education, as well as utilizing large amounts of available land. Modeled after the ground-breaking Edible Schoolyards" program in Berkeley started by chef Alice Waters "...to create and sustain an organic garden and landscape that is wholly integrated into the school’s curriculum, culture, and food program." which has been copied around the country in many locations.


:: image via Edible Schoolyard

A local project that provides a bridge for schools and food in Portland has been taken on by the fantastic local non-profit Ecotrust called the Farm to School program, which: "...enable schools to feature healthy, locally sourced products in their cafeterias, incorporate nutrition-based curriculum in all academic disciplines, and provide students with experiential agriculture and food-based learning opportunities, from farm visits to gardening, cooking, composting, and recycling." These connections between food and school continue to offer many possibilities in cities throughout the world.

5. Rooftop Gardens
Covered in detail on the web, the idea of rooftop gardens is definitely a love of Boucher-Colbert, who installed the project on the Rocket (now the Noble Rot) which has become a model project that gets a lot of comments for the kiddie-pool planters, (an inspiration from Joe Ebenezer from Chicago - read about him here) as a low-cost planter alternative and using it as a test for production techniques which are used in the restaurant one floor below.


:: Boucher-Colbert atop the Noble Rot - image via City Farmer

Obviously there are some limitations to rooftops, and difficulties with gardening due to wind, temperatures and other issues. As we provide incentives for more eco- and green roofs atop buildings, growing vegetables will become a continually growing trend as urban land costs make terrestrial farming a less financially viable proposition.

6. Vacant Lands
The use of vacant lands for farming is definitely a hot topic in areas like Detroit, but even in a number of locations like Oakland, which recently identified 1200 sites available for farming - or Montreal, which has implemented permanent agricultural zones that are protected from development - consisting of almost 4% of the Cities total land.

The focus in Portland is on the much discussed and somewhat disappointing implementation of the Diggable City project in 2004-05 which looked at city-owned lands as possible opportunities for establishing: "... an inventory of vacant, publicly-owned land in the Portland area, and to start a conversation about how that land might be used to support urban agricultural activities." The large number of sites have over time been whittled down to a few - and little has been done on any of this pilot projects - even though hundreds of brownfields, vacant lands, and other opportunities still exist.


:: Portland Vacant Land - image via Diggable City

7. Green Building
The integration of agriculture in green building is definitely making strides, as certain points for LEED ND, and potentially other systems can be achieved through the addition of garden plots of agricultural land. This allows for more multi-functional landscaping that includes productivity and use, which was difficult at times to reconcile with green buildings due to added water use and lack of totally native and adapted plantings. Our next task is to develop more year-round, lower maintenance permaculture-based planting that meet aesthetic and functional goals long-term.

Another aspect which spans this category and the next is the concept of Building Integrated Sustainable Agriculture (BISA), which begins to work with walls, rooftops, and other spaces to integrate food production in buildings. This also begins to expand beyond this to using waste heat and water from buildings to heat greenhouses and extend growing seasons to increase productivity. Examples abound, including Mithun's concept urban agriculture project (using the Living Building principles) as well as older examples like Eli Zabar's rooftop garden in Manhattan, to name a few.


:: Mithun's Vertical Farm - image via Treehugger


:: Zabars Vinegar Factory - image via Vison for our Cities

The concept also begins to looks at other agriculture products like chickens, bees, aqua- and hydroponics to maximize space and maintenance as well as blend systems together into closed-loop systems that treat waste as food for other phases of the system.

8. Vertical Farming
Picking up on the threads popularized by Dickson Despommier et.al, the idea of the BISA mentioned in green building is now blown up into the full-fledged phenomenon of vertical farming, which is exciting but needs some serious thought as to the viability of how this actually works and what the economic and social implications are. Boucher-Colbert was interested but skeptical, as there seem much more obvious low-hanging fruit (pardon the pun) to look at first - but as density and food security become more important, all the options must be on the table.


:: Vertical Farming - image via Vertical Farm

In closing, the eight concepts here span a wide range of possible agricultural interventions in our urban environment for getting to the root of food in our cities. It goes beyond production to include community, interaction, and a range of benefits such as habitat, beauty, and cooling - making the mix as important as the individual ideas. Peak Oil will warrant a close look at cities and a re-thinking of what we eat, where it comes from, and how much transportation is used to get it from farm to fork. So, as we transform from city-dwellers that keep nature and farming outside of the city to those that integrating food production into our spaces and daily lives - these tools provide a valuable arsenal for making the 21st century city a vibrant, healthy, and productive environment for all.

EcoCity Hamburg

Hamburg, Germany's new planned EcoCity by TecArchitecture and Arup has received a lot of attention as of late... let's take a look:


:: image via WAN

Wind turbines... check. Green roofs and walls... check. Water and futuristic, semi-biomorphic building forms... check. Reuse of structures... check... Multiple green rating systems... check! Looks like an eco-city...

Ok, I'm being coy, because I think the idea is interesting and it's obviously a sales tool, but I always want to see the social side of the eco. Here's some of the info via WAN: "Comprising ten major structures, ECO CITY offers a variety of different spaces for different purposes, bringing both large-scale industry and creative start-ups together in one, cooperative, and ecofriendly business community. The spaces range from studios to large warehouse and production facilities."


:: image via WAN

So there is a glimmer of social equity with industry + startups... and all living in perfect (yet sort of sterile) harmony... any issues with this particular juxtaposition of old and new?


:: image via WAN

World Architecture News adds some details: "The majority of all visible roofs will be green roofs, serving to slow storm water runoff and significantly reducing the heat island effect of ECO CITY. Green areas will be elevated to the second story where there is more access to air and sunlight. In addition to roof gardens, more than half the site will be covered with vertical gardens, further minimizing the development’s carbon footprint and maximizing leisure space. These raised green beltways will create a microclimate of sorts, allowing workers and visitors ample outdoor recreation space."

As always - nice form... now for the follow through. Read and see more at ArchDaily, and Treehugger.

Local Flavor: Oregon Sustainability Center

Based in Portland, Oregon I sometimes forget the fact that what we consider everyday is often innovative in the larger global scale. My blog reaches beyond to interject many global ideas into our local work, but also to place what we are doing within a larger ecological design concept. One project worth noting is the current work being completed for the Oregon Sustainability Center, which aims to be the pinnacle of green architecture and a catalyst for sustainable planning and business locally.

:: image via Oregon Sustainability Center

The design team consists of uber-green local developer Gerding-Edlen, along with a interesting dual team approach using local firms GBD Architects and SERA Architects along with a cadre of local consultants rounding out the team. A quick glance at the blog offers some views of the current state of the project: "Yet its early designs, each a unique exploration into the extremes of form and function, reveal that by working within parameters that maximize highly efficient harvesting and use of energy and water, a living building on an urban scale can, in fact, be possible."




:: images via Oregon Sustainability Center


:: image via Portland Architecture

There are definitely inspirations of Ken Yeang's bioclimatic skyscrapers here in the early renderings for sure, a combination of the verdant and functional that provides functional and aesthetic form to the building - essential in a Living Building proposal on this scale. While the process has yielded some of the expected cliche ridden text about the guiding principles such as 'Integrate natural systems to benefit all species' and 'Make less do more' in easy to digest nuggest that have pretty much made a career for Bill McDonough, this is pretty much inevitable, especially for a project aiming for such a high level of transparency. The designers want to present a vision but not paint anyone in a corner at this point, so broad principles that can be interpreted widely are usually the product. It's interesting to see the sketchy process of a building and site, versus the more dressed up and refined presentation graphics that typically emerge after weeks of work.

:: images via Portland Architecture

Read also the coverage from the great local resource Portland Architecture, on the OSC status. If successful it will become a model for sustainable development that will showcase Portland's potential for innovation. It will be interesting to follow the progress to see if budgets and creativity will ... and see if they can pull it off. I'll post on it periodically as it comes together.

Veg.itecture Spin-Off

It's fun to see something that seemed relatively nascent a few years back grow into a full-fledged phenomenon. The growth of vegetated architecture projects and the number of sites covering this topic has literally exploded of late, and I was fearful that the entire Landscape+Urbanism blog would be eclipsed and framed by Veg.itecture rather than a more rounded view of issues related to landscape architecture and landscape urbanism.

In a move driven mostly by maintaining my sanity with L+U (because, as always, this is about me), I've launched a new blog entitled, simply 'Veg.itecture'.



The idea, simply enough will be to carve out some terrain specific to the Vegetated Architecture and allow for a singular focus on the concept in a different venue. As of right now, I have saved around 150 projects that just have no room amidst the admittedly broad scope of L+U. This site will continue to feature certain projects, and there will be cross posts with some interesting overlaps, but the majority of the overtly vegitectural will reside on the new site. This will complement the book deal that will be inevitable as well as...

I also included a link in the sidebar for easy access... the site will evolve over the next few weeks - so add it to your RSS feeds and readers, and I do hope you enjoy reading as much as I enjoy writing.

Re:Vision Dallas = Vertical Green

The annoucement of three winners for the Re:Vision Dallas Competition on Bustler was telling in some of the interesting forms, and the consistency of veg.itecture as a vital building element - particularly the use of roof and walls faces for environmental, aesthetic, and productive means. Check out the full array of info and pics on Bustler's excellent site... and as a teaser, here's a few pics of the winners:

Forwarding Dallas
Atelier Data & MOOV (Lisbon, Portugal)






:: images via Bustler

Entangled Bank
Little (Charlotte, North Carolina)

:: images via Bustler

Greenways Xero Energy
David Baker and Partners Architects and Fletcher Studio (San Francisco, California)

:: images via

Bustler

It's interesting to see the different ways that a competition will push boundaries, particularly when you apply these to a specific site and/or program. Again, these are all visions (or re:visions) so there are some practicalities as play, but that's the key difference between competition and project - the lines are less distinct and the urge to color outside them is part of the fun.

Salad Days

Not the first version of this, but another cool living edible wall, via Core77 - for a product called Reviwall from an Italian group called ReviPlant.


:: image via Core77




:: images via ReviPlant

Another cool idea of this is from Green Living Technologies (GLT) which has sponsored, along with Campbells soup, a series of community edible living walls in New Jersey along with a local group Urban Farming. Cool stuff.

:: images via GLT

And a cool system of growing wheatgrass, with some interesting cost payback stats due to the rapidity of renewal.

:: Wheatgrass Wall - images via GLT

VIA: 11-20

And more from Veg.itecture in Action...

VIA 11: Living with Skin

:: images via Greenmeme

VIA 12: Green Roof Maintenance

:: images via Urban Greenery

VIA 13: Parliament House Canberra

:: images via Gardenvisit

VIA 14: Penn State Green Roof

:: images via Treehugger

VIA 15: Brooklyn Green Roof

:: images via Urban Greenery

VIA 16: Bostons bath mat Green Wall

:: image via Urban Greenery

VIA 17: W Midtown Hotel

:: image via G-Sky

VIA 18: The Met Roof Garden

:: image via Urban Greenery

VIA 19: Cooper Point House

:: images via inspiration wall

VIA 20: Laneway House

:: images via Treehugger