Raze the roof for green.

I’ll let you in on one of my secret eco-dreams: to tear down dilapidated buildings and allow nature to recover the land. As it turns out, this just might be a new municipal strategy in combating urban blight.

The first site of this radical experiment? Flint, Michigan: a sprawling and impoverished, underpopulated city. At 34 square miles, Flint requires a lot of maintenance and upkeep (think: garbage trucks, road repair, electricity lines).

So, how to maintain a city’s integrity without the taxpayer base to support it? …

Tags: city , city planning , flint , michigan , nature , urban decline , urban sprawl

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With the current barrage of amazing new green building projects, it’s nice to see the old-timers are getting in on the action as well.

More specifically, the most famous profile on the New York skyline – the Empire State Building. This Wonder Of The Modern World looks set to impress the next generation of eco-friendly architects by being the focus of a major efficiency overhaul. Excitingly, not only are the redevelopers shrinking the building’s energy footprint by over a third (and in doing so saving $4 million …

Tags: architecture , city planning , energy efficiency , green , technology

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Can an entire city eliminate the use of fossil fuels?

One Swedish city is going to try. The city of Kalmar, located in southeast Sweden, plus the surrounding 12 towns in the region, are trading in nearly all gas, oil, and electric furnaces.

Instead, the residents will get their energy requirements from “district heat” – energy that’s created from burning sawdust and waste wood from timber companies. The remainder of energy requirements will be supplied by hydropower, windmills, and nuclear power.

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Tags: city planning , energy independence , engineering , fossil fuels , hydropower , Kalmar , Sweden

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We’ve always thought we had roofs covered. They had to be barren, hostile places the rain and the wildlife slid from before they could do any damage. Nature had no place on our roofs. Except…we couldn’t have been more wrong. A green roof may required a little extra engineering behind the scenes, but it’s far better than its non-living counterparts for regulating house temperature, filtering out pollutants, scrubbing the surrounding air, controlling stormwater run-off, absorbing sound and many more factors that impact our quality of life. A green roof is a healthy roof….

Tags: architecture , city , city planning , civil engineering , environment , green , green roofs , health , lifestyle , natural , nature , urban , urban design , wellness

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