An initial cost of 16 million, and yearly maintenance of 600,000, for a city of 2.5 million? Per person, $5 initially and $0.25 per year.
That seems incredibly cheap for the benefits. Colombia looks to have a GDP per capita about 1/10th of the US, so if we scale it up 10X...
I live in a relatively cold climate, and I would still be delighted to pay $2.50 a year for this kind of infrastructure development. Heck, even scaling it up 100X seems like it would be worth considering.
Maybe there's a cost I'm missing here, but for a hot city, the AC savings alone seem like they would be worth it, not to mention the 40% reduction in respiratory infections through increased air quality.
You have to keep PPP in mind when you look at numbers like this. In San Francisco, for example, the park and recs dept gets the budget in the tune of hundreds of millions. Does it mean they are wasting the money? Absolutely not. Land acquisition, construction, hourly wages (with minimum wage at $36000/year excluding benefits) etc. are all very expensive in absolute dollars in some parts of the world, while in others, it is very cheap. You simply cannot compare the two.
Colombia is equatorial. It rains a lot; the green spaces probably don't need irrigation. It might not be so easy or cheap to pull this off in places like Los Angeles, Los Vegas, or Phoenix.
To pull off a rain forest yes, but to get green is not impossible.
The problem for LA is that most of the drainage is there to move storm water away as quick as possible, which means that local water is hard to come by.
Truly they don't, but even inside Medellin the precipitation rates are not as great as the lands around...
...because of the deforestation that /already/ happened, say, 50 years ago...
Ain't no commercial high rise neighborhood (semi-common in Medellin) that can "pull in" as much precipitation as a virgin forest no way, and you can see this if you visit there and then you visit an actual virgin rain-forest...
...but of course, this is what they are trying to alleviate and if the outskirts of the city are super-green it can help...
Btw all of the outskirts aren't super green but a lot of them are...
In a cold climate, these wide boulevards lose their leaves in the autumn and the turn into enormous ducts for cold wind to traverse freely. You freeze just while crossing it.
In cold climate, you definitely do not want tall buildings with space between them, or straight roads. Unfortunately that's what gets built.
Medellin is bursting with greenery! Everywhere I look, trees stand tall, and many of the newer buildings boast impressive vertical gardens. This not only creates a visually stunning cityscape but also sparks my imagination, making me dream of a future where other cities around the world embrace a similar level of environmental integration.
I would say that beyond the green corridors, the main difference is how global it feels now. Lots of international cuisine, international DJs playing here, foreigners around, real estate ads in English, etc.
We were there in January. There are some amazing, modern, clean and green parts of the city. The botanic gardens (Jardín Botánico de Medellín) are beautiful and considerably cooler than the surrounding parts of town. The metro - with cable cars linking off to the hillside neighborhoods - is very clean, modern, and efficient.
We saw the city hall vertical garden - pretty neat.
An immense amount of effort has gone into revitalizing the city in recent years.
One thing that struck me though, is that the rising tide hasn't quite lifted all boats - or people to be more precise. I saw a lot more beggars, people living on the streets, and homeless encampments than in Bogotá, or Cali or other cities. It feels like a disconnection from community and family that is still present in other places - especially smaller cities and towns. I hope they can figure out ways to help the bottom 1%. (Realizing that is a common refrain worldwide.)
One possibility is that some homeless may move to the city in hopes of either finding work or catching a break to get out of the homelessness.
We see that a lot in Seattle, that people who became homeless out in Enumclaw or Goldbar or wherever slowly get drawn towards the city because the systems that support the homeless are there, whether it be infrastructure that can be used for shelter or soup kitchens or day labor or even just a good corner to beg from.
Its not the only source of the homeless by any stretch of the imagination, but it is a source.
It really does make sense. If you have no job and are at risk of homelessness why would you hang around some small town with no jobs and no services instead of going to the economic centre of your region? The odds of both getting support and work are highest in the cities.
It turns out that, in spite of what libertarians might like to tell everyone, people and societies aren't actually boats and marinas. Who would've thought?
I hate when writers describe plants as an ongoing carbon sink. They are a one-time carbon sink. So using "cars" as a comparison to carbon volumes is confusing, because cars will keep emitting after a plant is full grown and starts shedding leaves and wood that turn back into methane or carbon dioxide.
The key benefit of the plants is cooling the city without electricity, which is an ongoing effect.
Similarly, we can't plant enough trees to offset our total carbon emission because we've released SOOO much carbon that was previously just buried underground as oil. We would need to plant more trees than we have ever seen.
Of course. But for the most part it's beautiful. My best friend used to drive taxi and when I had nothing to do I would go with him in the car while he was working, so I've been around. I like the architecture in the barrios.
I'm really interested in the geotextile pavements that were mentioned at the end of the article. As someone who lives where it can get pretty rainy, having a cheap yet effective geotextile driveway would be great.
It is impressive, sure, but it also seems prone to clogging, and if it clogs just a bit under the surface, how can you clean it? A pressure washer will be no use, since it only cleans the surface, right?
This is what I'm afraid of. We already have too much microplstics in our environment, and is it worth reducing water runoff when the solution involves even more microplastics?
I love Medellin and lived there for many years, but the air quality is terrible and getting worse. You can talk with any locals and they say that the climate is noticeably different than it was in the past.
Medellin is surrounded by mountains and the contaminated air cannot escape. There didn't used to be a lot of cars, but now there is financing so the number of cars is growing significantly.
The hills are steep and old busses spew black smoke.
Saying Medellin's temp decreased by 2 degrees Celsius based on "Mejorar el microclima hasta 2°C" is a misinterpretation. I think this article is quite misleading.
> I love Medellin and lived there for many years, but the air quality is terrible and getting worse
The good thing about hill cities such as Medellin (sadly not a format available for big cities say in Europe or the US) is that you can choose your altitude, and at around 2000 thousand meters (the city starts at ~1500m) the air quality is not so bad, used to be worse years ago (maybe you lived there 2 or 3 years ago), but now it's much better.
> You can talk with any locals and they say that the climate is noticeably different than it was in the past.
Yeah, the city is much warmer compared to say 10 years ago, whether this is due to the city growing into previously-forest areas or /global/ warming I don't know... but yeah, locals agree it was MUCH colder 10 years ago...
> Medellin is surrounded by mountains and the contaminated air cannot escape.
See comments above about living at 2000m altitude (up in the mountains a bit away from the high-rise buildings and such, think of Beverly Hills or something like that.).
> The hills are steep and old busses spew black smoke.
As of now, there's almost no remaining old busses spewing black smoke anymore, but there's some cargo trucks still doing it.
> Saying Medellin's temp decreased by 2 degrees Celsius based on "Mejorar el microclima hasta 2°C" is a misinterpretation. I think this article is quite misleading.
I wouldn't know, but locals do say that it was a much more colder city in the past...
Readit News
That seems incredibly cheap for the benefits. Colombia looks to have a GDP per capita about 1/10th of the US, so if we scale it up 10X...
I live in a relatively cold climate, and I would still be delighted to pay $2.50 a year for this kind of infrastructure development. Heck, even scaling it up 100X seems like it would be worth considering.
Maybe there's a cost I'm missing here, but for a hot city, the AC savings alone seem like they would be worth it, not to mention the 40% reduction in respiratory infections through increased air quality.
But yeah at 10x that’d be taking away from significant programs never mind 100x.
The problem for LA is that most of the drainage is there to move storm water away as quick as possible, which means that local water is hard to come by.
Truly they don't, but even inside Medellin the precipitation rates are not as great as the lands around...
...because of the deforestation that /already/ happened, say, 50 years ago...
Ain't no commercial high rise neighborhood (semi-common in Medellin) that can "pull in" as much precipitation as a virgin forest no way, and you can see this if you visit there and then you visit an actual virgin rain-forest...
...but of course, this is what they are trying to alleviate and if the outskirts of the city are super-green it can help...
Btw all of the outskirts aren't super green but a lot of them are...
Ah, yes, but costs for public projects like this in the US is far greater than 10x Colombia's.
In cold climate, you definitely do not want tall buildings with space between them, or straight roads. Unfortunately that's what gets built.
Higher density of vegitation is what I dearly miss in the sprawl centric cities of California and what I like about my city back in India.
We saw the city hall vertical garden - pretty neat.
An immense amount of effort has gone into revitalizing the city in recent years.
One thing that struck me though, is that the rising tide hasn't quite lifted all boats - or people to be more precise. I saw a lot more beggars, people living on the streets, and homeless encampments than in Bogotá, or Cali or other cities. It feels like a disconnection from community and family that is still present in other places - especially smaller cities and towns. I hope they can figure out ways to help the bottom 1%. (Realizing that is a common refrain worldwide.)
We see that a lot in Seattle, that people who became homeless out in Enumclaw or Goldbar or wherever slowly get drawn towards the city because the systems that support the homeless are there, whether it be infrastructure that can be used for shelter or soup kitchens or day labor or even just a good corner to beg from.
Its not the only source of the homeless by any stretch of the imagination, but it is a source.
It turns out that, in spite of what libertarians might like to tell everyone, people and societies aren't actually boats and marinas. Who would've thought?
The key benefit of the plants is cooling the city without electricity, which is an ongoing effect.
Depends how you manage them, and their detritus
If you burn it, you are correct
There are other approaches that sink the carbon and improve soils.
https://www.elcolombiano.com/antioquia/restricciones-por-mal...
...or maybe just fewer cars because of global recession...
(The nice parts are pretty nice though.)
Dead Comment
https://youtu.be/ERPbNWI_uLw
Medellin is surrounded by mountains and the contaminated air cannot escape. There didn't used to be a lot of cars, but now there is financing so the number of cars is growing significantly.
The hills are steep and old busses spew black smoke.
Here is some more info on pollution in Medellin: https://medellinguru.com/medellin-pollution/
Saying Medellin's temp decreased by 2 degrees Celsius based on "Mejorar el microclima hasta 2°C" is a misinterpretation. I think this article is quite misleading.
I think a good first step would be ditching all the diesel vehicles that have minimal/non-existant exhaust emissions systems.
The good thing about hill cities such as Medellin (sadly not a format available for big cities say in Europe or the US) is that you can choose your altitude, and at around 2000 thousand meters (the city starts at ~1500m) the air quality is not so bad, used to be worse years ago (maybe you lived there 2 or 3 years ago), but now it's much better.
> You can talk with any locals and they say that the climate is noticeably different than it was in the past.
Yeah, the city is much warmer compared to say 10 years ago, whether this is due to the city growing into previously-forest areas or /global/ warming I don't know... but yeah, locals agree it was MUCH colder 10 years ago...
> Medellin is surrounded by mountains and the contaminated air cannot escape.
See comments above about living at 2000m altitude (up in the mountains a bit away from the high-rise buildings and such, think of Beverly Hills or something like that.).
> The hills are steep and old busses spew black smoke.
As of now, there's almost no remaining old busses spewing black smoke anymore, but there's some cargo trucks still doing it.
> Saying Medellin's temp decreased by 2 degrees Celsius based on "Mejorar el microclima hasta 2°C" is a misinterpretation. I think this article is quite misleading.
I wouldn't know, but locals do say that it was a much more colder city in the past...