Here in Utrecht the Netherlands they are trying to greenify the city to reduce heat stress during the hot months. They try to plant as much trees and plants as possible, they try not to mow grass often and let it grow, they encourage homes to remove tiled gardens and add green, they have programs to turn roofs into green roofs.
Same in Zurich, where the city tries to establish a “Schwammstadt”. But the tree growth is actually negative, because on private properties people are chopping down their trees to build lucrative housing.
If you look at bellevue i personally think it's disgusting, that loveless massive sechseleutenplatz, lot's of cars always using the horn, what a waste of that iconic place constricted between traemli and a always busy street, tbh even Delhi is less stressful, let alone Vienna.
EDIT: Do you mean Schwanstadt right? That lovely smell of birdshit in the sommer plus the massive stink of piss and puke after (and up to 10 days) streetparade is the pure soul of Zurich ;)
I live at the boundary between city and forests and in summer the temperature drop is really 'incredible'. The amount of energy wasted by urban areas is as much so. But at the same time it's nice because we can restore more trees for shade easily
I live in foothills of a lower range of hills (European Jura), and it has numerous effects. The air is normally blowing down the mountains towards us in the evening (katabatic wind), so it doesn't matter how hot the day was, evenings are pleasantly cool and night gets colder than expected. This wind also cools hot surfaces pretty effectively.
Even just entering a dense natural forest during the day, one can sense drop in temperature around 3-4C during summer, and increase in humidity during dry periods.
Portland, OR, has similar green roof code mandates, as well as tree replacement laws as well... although there is pressure from "developer-friendly" electeds to suspend these mandates. Boo for being short-sighted.
I live there as well, and while I'm sure it could be worse, it's nothing compared to Johannesburg. I would like to see much more green throughout the city. Hopefully they will keep up the trend.
One of my biggest complains for American cities is the risk adversity with respect to trees.
In SF, the city went in a rampage to prune and tear down trees (mostly ficus) because of the risk of the branches falling. There are lots of rules for where you can and can't plant trees based on road visibility, signage, electric cables etc. Result is that you have a lot of tree-less spaces in a city where basically anything grows.
In contrast, Mexico City has an almost anarchist version of urban greenery. Trees overflow streets and side walks. Yes, there are issues from dealing with the urban greenery, but the city is incredibly pleasant to walk in. Also, despite being an incredibly noisy city, trees and buildings mute out a lot of the noise.
I'd argue there is so much good that the tradeoff of trees killing a few humans is worth it.
The biological diversity that returns - birds, carbon soil. The air quality. Less chance that the heat will kill our senior citizens. Trees prevent floods.
From NotJustBikes channel, trees and bushes can be used to obscure road visibility, which naturally forces drivers to slow down at a curve, which makes streets safer for pedestrians (43k deaths a year in USA from cars)
>From NotJustBikes channel, trees and bushes can be used to obscure road visibility, which naturally forces drivers to slow down at a curve, which makes streets safer for pedestrians
This is dumb. The same way wrapping cars in bubble wrap would be dumb but also make the cars safer. Most of the ideas in that channel are just insane emotional propaganda that make everyones lives worse because people don't understand geography or refuse to build properly.
For an opposing view, look at what happened during the freeze in Austin, Texas for an example of policies that allow for minimal tree pruning.
It was a significant issue that caused the city an incredible amount of damage. Electric was shut down for days, cars were destroyed, houses had trees fall on them, etc.
Might still be worth it, but an interesting data point nonetheless.
Albeit being a valid datapoint, the conclusion could as well be that it might be better to put electric power down in the ground, get better insurance, don't park under a tree, and so on…
Center City Philadelphia has a series of squares fro green space and they are laid out in such a way that one can chart a course through the squares to navigate on foot.
In Australia power companies will butcher any tree that gets close to overhead powerlines. Understandable, but result is an ugly streetscape and very little opportunity for green spaces outside parks.
Australian greenscapes in public areas is fine. It's just that people's land is now devoid of trees because of:
1. extra work all year.
2. solar panels
3. roots
There is nowhere in Australia where the government has cheaped out on greenery on public land. But home owners definitely hate trees. Go take a look through time of housing on Google maps.
Streetview shows this very nicely for Mexico City. I wonder if having so many trees in the city would make chopping down of few trees for some new public development less frowned upon by residents?
Kind of an odd flex given how walkable San Francisco is, but the "risk adversity" is because people actually die. Last year, five people died from fallen trees in a single storm (two in the city).
Mexico City is one of the largest cities in the world. Five people out of 21 million is nothing. Sure, every death is tragic, but there are a lot more efficient ways to spend time and money preventing deaths than tree trimming.
On the other hand, trees cool down the area so having lot of them should lead to fewer heat-strokes. Last week we hit 95F in my area and I wouldn't be able to walk my dog if not for the trees.
An unkempt mess of trees and grass and roots doesn't sound nice to live in, even if you love nature.
> has an almost anarchist version of urban greenery
I actually just street view'd Mexico city and it looks like this isn't even remotely true and you mislead me. Their street foliage is quite well manicured apart from the larger tree branches and power line mixup.
Where I live, Sheffield in the UK, the council was nearly toppled because they chopped down some street trees. They still haven't fully recovered from it:
I'm also against chopping down trees - but sometimes tree protection turns into a pretext for NIMBYism, especially if it's against projects that are also good for the environment, such as public transport (felling 189 trees for a bus lane sounds like a lot, but if the trees shown in this photo https://proarbmagazine.com/controversial-sheffield-bus-lane-... are representative, those look more like shrubs)
It was a bigger scale. The plan was to cut down 17,500 of 35,500 street trees, all due to a total mis-reading of a report.
Instead of backing down the council ploughed on, got people arrested and even tried to jail one of its own councillors for protesting. It was a huge fiasco.
"one more lane" a buss lane means more hard and hot surfaces in a city. As long as you just add hard surfaces you are still making things worse. With that said buss lanes are more important than car lanes.
Spent last week in South California, visiting family. Flying into LAX made me feel like I was flying into a hell scape. From the air, no green was visible for miles. Compared to my home (London, originally Manchester), I thought it not just odd but barely liveable. You could almost the heat off the concrete by looking at it from the air. Driving around as far south as Orange County for the next week I was happily surprised when I saw any indication of nature at all. Perhaps it’s just me and what I’m used to, but the only spot I visited that felt really relaxing was up around Griffith Observatory.
Next time you visit family get them to rent a house in Santa Barbara. Technically it's "central" California but it's only 90 minutes from LA and it's probably the coolest and most livable place in the whole state.
The change of landscape from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara always gives me prehistoric or jurassic vibes for some reason.
Flying into LA from Europe and seeing slabs of reflecting concrete and buildings strech out for miles into the horizon from the desert really does give you the feeling that you are seeing the future of the climate apocalpyse in the present. As Gibson says, the future is already here it's just unevenly distributed.
And then you drive north and you run into vegetation that wouldn't be out of place in a dinosaur movie.
In that sense, Santa Barbara is nice but what exactly is "cool" sbout it? Americans awkward relationship with class is kind of in full view there frankly. There is almost no normal social interaction between the residents and the Latino blue collar community that prop up everyone's gardens and landscapes.
Have you ever taken a bus around town in Santa Barbara? It's like, "Oh, so this is where the real people are." Don't get me wrong, there's lots of interesting and nice people that live in Santa Barbara but the lack of cross-over is a little depressing. In Europe, you can be living in an nice expensive place in the city and run into the guy that cuts your hair at the corner barbershop at a music festival and hang out together with their friends the rest of the day.
Also with the exception of downtown Santa Barbara, like most of the US, it's incredibly anti-pedestrian. Make the mistake of google mapping a spot 20 min walk away and you'll find yourself on the highway walking for half an hour cause all the residents take short cuts through private property.
What I found incredibly uncomfortable when moving from Eastern to Western Europe is a lack of shade in residential areas. Yes, there’re parks, but the buildings often don’t have enough shade (anecdotal evidence). With the rising temperatures, many homes are exposed to sun whole day. I live in a city that’s been growing really fast and none of the newer residential houses have any trees around them. Mind you it takes many many years to grow a proper tree.
> You can still see a stark difference between rich and poor neighbourhoods to this day based purely on tree cover.
You can see that here in Sydney. The poorer Western Sydney suburbs have a noticeable lack of tree coverage when compared with the richer inner west, northern, and eastern suburbs.
I don't know which direction cause and effect goes. It is plausible that affluent suburbs can afford to plant trees, but it is also plausible, especially here in Australia, that trees lead to nicer climates that are more appealing to folks who can afford it.
This is such a long-standing difference that Sydney newspapers will use the word 'leafy' to describe a suburb as having significant social capital. The local governments in the 'leafy' areas are extremely protective of their trees, for example, have a look at Hornsby Shire Council's regulations on trees[0]. They will fine you significant amounts of money if you kill or significantly prune a tree on your own property without permission.
West Sydney was rural fields until it was developed during the later half of the 20th century
I’m fairly sure the issue stems from insanely dense urban packing with a refusal to develop almost anything other than single family homes
They try to maximise house size on small blocks leading to an almost impossible block to plant a tree on
———
Also pointing out Greater Western Sydney is one of the worst urban places in the world for tree cover given the climate
I could never afford to live in Sydney, but my late father’s upbringing in the then “poor” North Sydney is starkly different to the quality of life available to the youth in “poor” areas of 21st century Sydney
Agreed, although I still don't get the fact we continually plant trees that grow taller than the overhead power lines and then the council has to continually prune them into weird shapes to prevent interference.
Mostly urban density ideas were incompatible with green space in the decades prior. The more you want to fit people to "lower" rent, the less you can allocate for grass or trees.
I don't know. When thinking about "urban density in decades prior" the first thing that comes to my mind are the "commie blocks" of the 50s-80s. The thinking of those often explicitly included green space: put people in denser higher buildings and you have space for green spaces in between. The execution wasn't always stellar, but it was in no way incompatible with trees.
Its super expensive to put in trees and maintain them. Most slumlords cut the trees down and do things like pave the entire plot. Rich people don’t move for trees. They create rich neighborhoods where there aren’t any trees all the time, then they bring in trees from nurseries and hire landscapers.
The ACT is full of really thoughtful planning in general. A reminder that experiment and sanity coexisting sometimes prevails when planning in the very long term for development :)
One thing I'm very frustrated by is my city's(Salt Lake) push for water conservation to the point they're paying residential owners to xeriscape their property. We've spent over a century terraforming the desert into a beautiful green canopy, and every day they're building more concrete and asphalt jungles with nearly no greenery while existing properties are tearing out greenery and replacing it with rocks. We even had one politician try to say we needed to cut the trees in the canyon down to save the Salt Lake, because they're absorbing too much water.
In the state, residential water usage is almost a single-digit percentage and unmetered secondary water systems have been a standard feature of neighborhoods built over farmland. They're now going around putting meters on the secondary water systems and no new developments even have them at all.
I'm really worried as the city is beginning to resemble hellscapes like Las Vegas and LA. The developer-captured legislature is just pushing shit through without much thought for their livability or scalability. Couple legislative sessions ago they removed the requirement for them to review referenda brought by concerned residents, which is one of the only methods we still had to push back against overdevelopment.
Lots of chopping trees seems to come from a laziness of thinking, where certain people in the city adminsitration are just used to the idea "trees cause costs". They never think any further about benefits beyond finances.
Or, as in Sheffield in the UK misaligned incentives: the company that was paid to manage the trees realised it was cheaper for them to cut them down, so started labelling trees as diseased that weren't.
Readit News
I like it, the city feels nicer to life in.
https://healthyurbanliving.utrecht.nl/fileadmin/_processed_/...
https://healthyurbanliving.utrecht.nl/our-vision-for-utrecht...
https://aiph.org/floraculture/news/utrecht-is-crowned-the-ne...
EDIT: Do you mean Schwanstadt right? That lovely smell of birdshit in the sommer plus the massive stink of piss and puke after (and up to 10 days) streetparade is the pure soul of Zurich ;)
Even just entering a dense natural forest during the day, one can sense drop in temperature around 3-4C during summer, and increase in humidity during dry periods.
In SF, the city went in a rampage to prune and tear down trees (mostly ficus) because of the risk of the branches falling. There are lots of rules for where you can and can't plant trees based on road visibility, signage, electric cables etc. Result is that you have a lot of tree-less spaces in a city where basically anything grows.
In contrast, Mexico City has an almost anarchist version of urban greenery. Trees overflow streets and side walks. Yes, there are issues from dealing with the urban greenery, but the city is incredibly pleasant to walk in. Also, despite being an incredibly noisy city, trees and buildings mute out a lot of the noise.
I'd argue there is so much good that the tradeoff of trees killing a few humans is worth it.
The biological diversity that returns - birds, carbon soil. The air quality. Less chance that the heat will kill our senior citizens. Trees prevent floods.
From NotJustBikes channel, trees and bushes can be used to obscure road visibility, which naturally forces drivers to slow down at a curve, which makes streets safer for pedestrians (43k deaths a year in USA from cars)
This is dumb. The same way wrapping cars in bubble wrap would be dumb but also make the cars safer. Most of the ideas in that channel are just insane emotional propaganda that make everyones lives worse because people don't understand geography or refuse to build properly.
>43k deaths a year in USA from cars
Not from people being ran over on the sidewalk...
Dead Comment
It was a significant issue that caused the city an incredible amount of damage. Electric was shut down for days, cars were destroyed, houses had trees fall on them, etc.
Might still be worth it, but an interesting data point nonetheless.
1. extra work all year. 2. solar panels 3. roots
There is nowhere in Australia where the government has cheaped out on greenery on public land. But home owners definitely hate trees. Go take a look through time of housing on Google maps.
Deleted Comment
> has an almost anarchist version of urban greenery
I actually just street view'd Mexico city and it looks like this isn't even remotely true and you mislead me. Their street foliage is quite well manicured apart from the larger tree branches and power line mixup.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheffield_tree_felling_protest...
Instead of backing down the council ploughed on, got people arrested and even tried to jail one of its own councillors for protesting. It was a huge fiasco.
Still a tree though, and all trees are good trees.
Flying into LA from Europe and seeing slabs of reflecting concrete and buildings strech out for miles into the horizon from the desert really does give you the feeling that you are seeing the future of the climate apocalpyse in the present. As Gibson says, the future is already here it's just unevenly distributed.
And then you drive north and you run into vegetation that wouldn't be out of place in a dinosaur movie.
In that sense, Santa Barbara is nice but what exactly is "cool" sbout it? Americans awkward relationship with class is kind of in full view there frankly. There is almost no normal social interaction between the residents and the Latino blue collar community that prop up everyone's gardens and landscapes.
Have you ever taken a bus around town in Santa Barbara? It's like, "Oh, so this is where the real people are." Don't get me wrong, there's lots of interesting and nice people that live in Santa Barbara but the lack of cross-over is a little depressing. In Europe, you can be living in an nice expensive place in the city and run into the guy that cuts your hair at the corner barbershop at a music festival and hang out together with their friends the rest of the day.
Also with the exception of downtown Santa Barbara, like most of the US, it's incredibly anti-pedestrian. Make the mistake of google mapping a spot 20 min walk away and you'll find yourself on the highway walking for half an hour cause all the residents take short cuts through private property.
You can see that here in Sydney. The poorer Western Sydney suburbs have a noticeable lack of tree coverage when compared with the richer inner west, northern, and eastern suburbs.
I don't know which direction cause and effect goes. It is plausible that affluent suburbs can afford to plant trees, but it is also plausible, especially here in Australia, that trees lead to nicer climates that are more appealing to folks who can afford it.
[0] https://www.hornsby.nsw.gov.au/environment/flora-and-fauna/t...
I’m fairly sure the issue stems from insanely dense urban packing with a refusal to develop almost anything other than single family homes
They try to maximise house size on small blocks leading to an almost impossible block to plant a tree on
———
Also pointing out Greater Western Sydney is one of the worst urban places in the world for tree cover given the climate
I could never afford to live in Sydney, but my late father’s upbringing in the then “poor” North Sydney is starkly different to the quality of life available to the youth in “poor” areas of 21st century Sydney
e.g. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-10-18/pruning-street-trees-...
A lesson on how not to do things. I'm all for appropriate trees though.
https://www.nca.gov.au/education/canberras-history/charles-w...
In the state, residential water usage is almost a single-digit percentage and unmetered secondary water systems have been a standard feature of neighborhoods built over farmland. They're now going around putting meters on the secondary water systems and no new developments even have them at all.
I'm really worried as the city is beginning to resemble hellscapes like Las Vegas and LA. The developer-captured legislature is just pushing shit through without much thought for their livability or scalability. Couple legislative sessions ago they removed the requirement for them to review referenda brought by concerned residents, which is one of the only methods we still had to push back against overdevelopment.