In densely populated cities, land values are often at a premium, and land for parks or urban farms is often too expensive to provide. This makes the provision of roof parks an opportunity for building owners, planners, and politicians to accomplish multiple goals. A review of parks like the Salesforce Transit Center in San Francisco demonstrates how converting air space over infrastructure into roof parks should become more commonplace.

Over the past decade, there has been a lot of talk, research, and pilot projects around the concept of "smart cities", integrating technology into our cities. For the most part, nature, the very foundation on which cities are built, has been left out of these discussions. Dr. Nadina Galle shares with us here her pioneering work on a new concept she calls the "Internet of Nature".

Green roofs and walls can provide a myriad of energy benefits, from moderating heat through the building envelope, to improving solar PV efficiency, to reducing the urban heat island, and more. A new report provides an exhaustive summary and literature review of these benefits and how designers can maximize them on their projects.

In Georgetown, the largest freestanding Green Wall in the Seattle area stands as a banner to community health in action, hiding an ugly concrete barrier. The Green Wall is not only a successful, sustainable structured landscape ‘intervention’ in its inherent functionality, but delivers benefits that satisfy the goals articulated in the participatory design process.

There is a great potential for and an essential role for making green roofs with native plants. If conservation practices are not taking place at the ground level, or if the native plant communities have already been significantly altered, then living roofs may provide a last chance to support the ecological heritage of the region. This article explores four approaches to make living roofs with native plants.

A growing number of urban/rural communities are developing this kind of co-operative, food-friendly approach. Instead of building a residential development around a swimming pool, a tennis court or some kind of hard landscaping, more innovative developers are creating “agrihoods” - neighborhoods with a farm as the central focus.

Green roof pioneer Germany has a green roof market that continues to grow. The building greening sector already provides thousands of jobs - and this employment trend is increasing in line with the growth. Supportive policy and new trends featuring integrated water management and solar PV integration continue to drive the industry.

Living in greater harmony with the environment requires that we do our best to understand the environment and design solutions that provide the most benefit and create little or no harm. Technology – such as via monitoring, smart controls, and modeling – contribute immensely to both that understanding and design.

Did you ever have a school assignment growing a seedling? Did you ever do that on the roof of your school building? There is a bill in Congress that could make this a reality for our country’s learners. Not only that, it would help mitigate climate change, reduce the urban heat island, create jobs, and grow our economy for generations to come.

The General Services Administration's Public Buildings Service has over 2.2 million square feet of green roofs on 80 buildings around the country. PBS is currently implementing a comprehensive plan to ensure the long-term maintenance and functionality of green roofs.

New York City’s current Green Roof Tax Abatement (GRTA) Program is the result of an ongoing 13-year stakeholder advocacy effort. A GRTA working group is helping to advocate for improvements to the program which will increase program uptake and green roof benefits.

Living architecture also offers us an opportunity to right historical environmental injustices and meaningfully engage the communities in which these projects are built. We can leverage green roof and wall investments to achieve not just environmental and economic goals - but also social ones.

In cities, we can reverse climate change trends if we renature urban areas. By interweaving green infrastructure within the built environment, we can tackle some of the effects of human-induced warming locally. At the same time, we can limit further urbanization, which will increase the severity of heatwaves as well as precipitation and resulting runoff intensity.

Journal of Living Architecture, Volume 8 Number 2 Pages 1-19

Fall/Winter events, including CitiesAlive; innovative online training; and new GRHC corporate and individual members