HAVENSTAD2050 SHANT MOUSHEGH

URBAN GREEN
REVOLUTION
1
 Urban Green Revolution

The world is moving faster, with every eye-blink another two babies are born 15. We
Metroplis;
need more jobs, we need more offices, we need more houses, we need to build more. Movie in 1927
The city needs more high-rise, the higher the better, to ease its demands and console
it’s residents. But the growth won’t stop, it will only grow faster.

The 21e first century will be about urban densification: we need to build more and
use less space to do it. The Worldbank predicts that at this rate, by the time of 2050
approximately 70% of the population will live in the cities 14. Since the end of the last
economic crisis, bigger cities in the Netherlands are growing much faster than smaller
cities, villages and countryside’s 3.

Apparently, most of us in the future will live in the city and take part in this
competing realm. We will live in dense places where the paths on the street tell us
where we have to walk or bike. Places where public transport is efficiently structured,
so that one can reach the other end of the city in just a few footsteps and during this
trip not even look outside, once. And why should we? There is a Wi-Fi-connection
everywhere, so we can see the reality through a 5.5 inch screen.
Future cities might have the greatest social diversity and at the same time the
greatest social isolation. Different studies have shown that living in cities increases
the risk of anxiety and mood disorders by roughly 30% 5. But this doesn’t need to be
the only reality for the living environment of our future.
Robot Cities; a next step in
Smart Cities,
Artist impression in 2018
Over the years, scientists have shown that nature can help with stress relief,
increase social interaction and encourage physical exercise 10. Even patients with
mental illness have indicated that interaction with nature helps them as a distraction
from their disease 19. So when cities get more radical, then nature should also be
used more radically, to balance it out. When cities get more structured, then nature
should be used even more chaotically. Spread nature over a city, in and off the grid,
so there can be blank spaces, that can challenge us to step out of the designed grid,
our manmade comfort zone, and surprise or energize us. Our biologic roots can’t be
denied. We are not robots, we are humans. We need more breathing spaces instead
of concrete landscapes, especially in the growing city.

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Healing environments The ‘biophilia hypothesis’ was proposed by Erich Fromm and later introduced in
biological sciences by Edward O. Wilson. Biophilia literally means ‘love of life’ and
this term simply implies that humans and nature are genetically forever bonded with
each other 11. That’s means that we, as humans, become mentally energized when we
come in touch with other living creatures. For example, a hospital that has a garden,
reduces the levels of pain and stress of ill people, and therefore boosts the immune
system to heal faster than some other medications 12. In our daily life, taking a long
walk in a green environment, or even looking at it through a window can help to
revitalize our minds a little bit more 10. It is also a good excuse to put down our phones
to not be hyperconnected with every single person around us, so our minds have the
time to breath and reflect again.
Taking a walk Being outdoors, also contributes greatly to one’s physical health, because of a
combination of fresh air, sun radiation, exercise, social contact etc. Unfortunately,
in the growing interconnected cities, where transportation and technology are key,
this activity probably will be less attractive. In the discussion of how growing urban
cities should be developed in the future, ‘smart cities’ are hailed as a solution, as they
provide the most convenient tools for humans 7. However in this digital grid, which
is interconnected with basically everything, humans are being treated as bits; and
there seems to be no space in the discussion of how this digital grid will affect human
beings. Instead the debate focusses mainly on the question how convenient a system
this is 13. To further complete this vision and persuade us in a new technology era,
different tools, like drones, oculus rifts and a walking treadmill will be accepted as a
fixed requirement. But what would you rather have, an oculus drift on your head and
walking on a treadmill in an empty space, while drones do your groceries, because it
is convenient? Or walk to your supermarket through nature-like environments?
Growing up As it seems, urban kids definitely need to take a walk through parks, according to
the BREATHE project, by Barcelona Institute for global health 8. In 2012 till 2016 they
researched 253 schoolchildren every three months over a course of an year with an
MRI-scanner and certain exercises. They divided the children in two groups, a group
with sufficient green area’s in the direct environment and a group with insufficient
green environments. They founded that the group in which the children grew up
in area’s with poor facilitated green environments had less activity in the brain,
associated with learning and social communications. With this research they proved it
is essential for children to grow up in a richer green environment. This will give them
a bigger chance to have success academically and socially 9. Future cities should take
this aspect into account in the design-process, because eventually, children are the
future.
Our air Healthier and more pleasurable environments should require more green
environments, in which trees will play an important element. Sometimes we take trees
for granted, but these natural pillars are providing us with fresh air by filtering out the
pollution, and are the only organisms to do so 13.
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For example, in the denser urban cities in China, the air pollution has got to such
a degree, that the city dwellers have to walk with a white cap in front of their faces, to
prevent them for inhaling too much smog. Which is understandable, because smog
can cause different diseases, like asthma, strokes, increase the chance of long-
cancer, and in general, just decrease the quality of life. Air quality and particles will
become a very critical topic, when we densify our cities. Right now, we are inventing
new ways to solve this, like spraying the streets with adhesives or implementing smog
free towers of Daan Roosegarde. But it is much cheaper and easier to plant trees
across a dense city 22. However, there is one important requirement when planting
trees everywhere, and that is water. Luckily it is raining every day in the Netherlands,
so this is not an issue.
Our planet We are living in the era of the so-called industrial revolution of the 21st century. Yet
we still haven’t dealt with the problems, analyzed from the first industrial revolution,
specifically global warming. To prevent a possible doomsday in the future, in 1972
the Club of Rome published their ‘Limits to Growth’. In this book, an amount of future
doom scenario’s was forecasted, but also an amount of solutions, to insist the public
to take sustainable measures, right away 4. This topic only really resonated with the
public on a world scale, when former vice-president Al Gore filmed his presentation in
‘An Inconvenient Truth’, to point out that we as humans after the Industrial revolution,
still emit too much carbon dioxide 23. A. Gore showed the negative effects of global
warming, like rising sea level, bigger tornado’s, droughted of lakes, extinction of
certain species etc. Although we can’t completely stop this process and have no more
carbon oxide emissions anymore, we can lower it with a no-tech solution, by planting
more trees and create more green environments 6. Trees have the ability to use the
CO2 to grow and convert it to O2. But by the rate that we are emitting carbon oxide, it
won’t even help to cover the whole planet with trees, as this will only solve 10% of the
amount of carbon oxide 2. So planting that amount of trees won’t solve the problem, as
we drastically have to start using less vehicles, food, products etc. But it would be a
great profit, especially in this fight for our own future, where every tree counts.
Up or Down It seems that this message is coming across faster, as there is a growing trend
over the world, of integrating trees in build environments. Compared to the 19th
and 20th century, when parks were designed to create nature spaces for different
social groups, like Frederick Law Olmsted with the Central Park in New York City or
Siegfried Nassuth with the Bijlmer in Amsterdam, we now implement them mainly
for climate and sustainability reasons. We went from designing parks in the city, to
green roofs, to trees on roofs and now even to trees on balconies, so nowadays we
can have towers full of trees. The first so-called ‘vertical forest’ or ‘treescraper’ was
made by Stefano Boeri in Milan in 2014, in which his project ‘Bosco Verticale’ won
the Highrise Award in 2014 and was named by the CTBUH as the ‘best tall building
worldwide’ in 2015. S. Boeri came up with this concept in 2007, out of concerns for the
environmental footprint of the world 21, because trees in towers have a lot of benefits
for the inhabitants and the city; these towers act as a huge pollution filter, reduce the
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 carbon oxide emissions when it’s build, acts as a sound barrier and at the same time
Bijlmer, 1962;
Artist impression create healthier environments for the dwellers, and so on. Aside from these glorified
positives, there are also some relevant negatives of trees in buildings, such as heavier
structures to compromise the extra weight of trees, extra waterpipes to water the
plants, maintenance of all the trees, and so on 17. When all these pros and cons are
stated, one can actually argue whether trees in buildings indeed are a good solution
for the climate change, or maybe these towers do more harm than good, and is it more
practical to not engage with this concept and leave the trees on the ground floor 17.

Radical and Practical But to what extent do we have to merge landscape and architecture, so that it
makes sense in all cases, socially, physically, environmentally and financially. Off
course there are a lot of new proposals in which you can see a lot green public
spaces, even on the roofs where no one will ever go, and over-exaggerated
renderings with the most exotic trees and with the same happy people, that are
seemingly always socially, physically and financially fine. I can’t help, but doubt
whether certain proposals can really pull the dwellers out of their protected shell
and actually enjoy their natural environment. A sad example were the historical
advertisements for the Bijlmermeer area in Amsterdam. Even though the ‘Bijlmer’
was designed as a park landscape, this project wasn’t a big success because of its
huge scale, the program and lack of social control. An enormous park of 4.2 square
kilometer like Central Park probably can’t be the answer for Amsterdam either. While
Liuzhou’s plans for a ‘Forest
City’; these past projects were pretty radical for their time, we have to come up with some
Artist impression
radical visions for our time. China has already gotten to the point in which planners
are embracing the ‘vertical forest’ concept as a city-solution for the pollution problem,
but I can’t imagine living in a place that radical, where literally everything is nature 16.

So, considering the fast developments and growing technologies of the 21th
century, we have to get to work as quick as possible. I don’t think the solution lies in
huge scale projects, as the outcome of these projects is hard to predict, but it is in
small scale projects. The quickest and most practical solution, is the implementation
of certain radical ‘green’ rules. For example: ‘Every new building must achieve a
certain min./max. proportion of trees and green environments on the building plot.’ To
encourage the maximum use of trees and green environments on the building plot,
there can be a point-reward system in the form of subsidies. This will be granted to
the landowners, who are willing to fill a part of their plot with public green. So the first
reguirement for this subsidie will be: How much percentage of your plot can be used
as public green? Other requirements can be about; the connection of that public green
with the public streets; or with the public green of your neighbour plot; the amount of
trees that are implemented on the plot, etc. With a rule and point-reward system like
this, there will be a top-down system with a bottom-up fill in. As a outcome, architects
will independently create a public green web together over the urban grid.
So in summary, we need as fast as possible, some practical rules, that assures us
that we won’t end up with a monotonous black and white city, but with cities in which
nature and architecture are more in balance with each other. So we can live and
produce in a dense city and at the same time be able to take a break and connect with
different individuals in a soothing environment when it all goes to fast.

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 Source list

Websites/Articles: Film:

1. Bijlmer voor beginners. De Geschiedenis van de Bijlmermeer YouTube

https://bijlmervoorbeginners.wordpress.com/2016/10/16/de-geschiedenis-van-de-bijlmermeer/ 18. The B1M. When Trees Meet Buildings | The B1M
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4w7lsydq8ks
2. BusinessInsider. There’s so much CO2 in the atmosphere that planting trees can no longer
save us 19. Saskia.
https://www.businessinsider.com/so-much-co2-planting-trees-cant-save-us-2017-5?utm_ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDo-GYH95A4
content=buffer367e0&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer-
biuk&r=UK&IR=T 20. Smart Cities: Solving Urban Problems Using Technology
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnyRZotnPSU
3. CBS. PBL/CBS prognose: Groei steden zet door.
https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/nieuws/2016/37/pbl-cbs-prognose-groei-steden-zet-door 21. TEDxTalks. Trees in the sky – a vertical forest in Milan: Stefano BOERI at TEDxTirana
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jH4Q6ddchPc
4. Club of Rome
https://www.clubofrome.org/ 22. Vox. Why cities should plant more trees
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKyvGHycngM
5. The Guardian. Sick cities: why urban living can be bad for your mental health.
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/feb/25/city-stress-mental-health-rural-kind Movies
23. Al Gore. (2006) An Inconvenient Truth
6. The Guardian. To what extent could planting trees help solve climate change?
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/nov/29/planting-trees-climate-change

7. InformationAge. Smart cities in India: Embracing the opportunity of urbanisation

https://www.information-age.com/smart-cities-in-india-123474005/

8. ISGLOBAL. BREATHE
https://www.isglobal.org/en/project/-/asset_publisher/qf6QOKuKkIC3/content/breathe-brain-
development-and-air-pollution-ultrafine-particles-in-school-children

9. KCET. Long Term Exposure to Green Spaces Affects Children’s Cognitive Development
https://www.kcet.org/shows/socal-connected/long-term-exposure-to-green-spaces-affects-childrens-
cognitive-development

10. NCBI. Biophilia: Does Visual contact with nature impact on health and well-being?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2760412/

11. Psychology today. The Biophilia Effect: Exploring the Healing power of Nature
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/animal-emotions/201801/the-biophilia-effect-exploring-the-
healing-power-nature

12. ScientificAmerica. How Hospital Gardens Help Patients Heal

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nature-that-nurtures/

13. SmartCitiesDive. Urban Trees Boost Quality of Life for City Dwellers Around the World
https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/ex/sustainablecitiescollective/urban-trees-boost-quality-life-city-
dwellers-around-world/245896/

14. The World Bank

https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/urbandevelopment/overview

15. WorldOmeters
http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/

16. YAHOO! NEWS. China has become a hotspot for the ‘vertical forst’ building concept, says
design firm that pioneered the idea.
https://sg.news.yahoo.com/china-become-hotspot-vertical-forest-110220975.html?guccounter=1

17. 99% INVISIBLE. Renderings vs. Reality: The Improbable Rise of Tree-Covered Skyscrapers
https://99percentinvisible.org/article/renderings-vs-reality-rise-tree-covered-skyscrapers/

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