Hacker News Reader

Comment by radu_floricica | Hacker News Reader

Funny thing is, making cities more green isn't even _that_ difficult. I see above conversations on living closer to nature, or mountains vs parks - but the vast majority of time spent is walking and driving in the cities. So it seems a no-brainer that before everything else, before thinking about taking a 2 hour drive to hike, or making the time for a weekly visit to the park, we should first make sure the places people actually walk through and live in every day are as green as possible.

There is no one solution, of course, since at the very least climates and budgets can be wildly different, but a good start is making sure every street has a green canopy above, starting with the largest. After that, take every space you can and put something living on it.

View on HN

I've been involved in the design of a green neighborhood in my city [1][2]. We spent quite some time taking in account as much considerations for sustainability and integration with the environment. It wasn't easy, at all. The hardest part, still fully unsolved, is operating with current legislation and outdated city planning rules. Those normatives revolve around high density and cheap development. Nature takes space and efficient buildings are expensive so housing constructors will have a hard time buying into the green zone.

Efficient city planning is not easy, and requires well intended coordination on many fronts.

On the other side I'm personally convinced closeness to nature is a life saver on many aspects so renewing those policies is a battle worth having.

[1] https://arquitectura-sostenible.es/el-barrio-multiecologico-... [2] http://concellodelugo.gal/es/actuaciones/proyecto-lugobiodin...

> The hardest part, still fully unsolved, is operating with current legislation and outdated city planning rules. Those normatives revolve around high density and cheap development. Nature takes space and efficient buildings are expensive so housing constructors will have a hard time buying into the green zone.

where i live there is constant discussion of "we need high density housing" and this is exactly what comes to mind. eventually this would end up with something like soviet style block housing, which doesn't seem so well received around the world. not to mention this style of housing is very constrictive in terms of lifestyle - maximum 2 child family with minimal space for hobbies/interests, limited sunlight, high noise pollution, etc.

this city in Estonia [0] for example, is somewhat pleasing to look at from a birds eye view and seems to check the boxes for having green space but i wonder about the range of residents' experiences.

[0] - https://www.traveller.ee/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/852...

You can do high density without block housing! Many European cities are good examples of this. Paris, for instance, has very high density because it's packed with mid-rise (~7-8 floors) buildings[1]. Another good example is the section of Manhattan between Midtown and Lower Manhattan, which is also primarily mid-rise and very dense.

Apart from that I do think it's true that block housing separated by large parks (as shown in your picture) doesn't work well; it's discussed in e.g. Jacob's _The Death and Life of Great American Cities_.

[1]: https://images.adsttc.com/media/images/6238/5b71/3e4b/31a8/5...

I agree re: European examples but my argument there is many of these cities developed over long time periods with stable growth in population, stable industry etc, whereas now it seems like the idea is to simply explode urban housing capacity asap, which leads to the block style or high rise glass and steel.

and of course we can't forget that many places are at an inflection point in population growth so all of this capacity could be vacant in 15-20 years.

The issue is that people want to explode housing capacity ASAP in relatively limited geographic areas within cities. If mid rise was actually broadly incentivized, it wouldn’t be that challenging to rapidly increase that stock.

Strong towns [0] advocates a more bottom up approach to development, and is a good resource for anyone interested in how to add density in a sane manner.

[0] https://www.strongtowns.org/

How do you properly forecast housing need so your development curve (and the foundational urban planning necessary) aligns with the housing demand curve while keeping said housing affordable?

The CCP seems to have been very successful with their "build an entire city and move people into it model" (seeing the cities have filled), but I'm unsure how it works in a more capitalistic model.

As long as there is zoning in place for sufficient increases in supply, the market will build to meet demand.

The issue in the US is that zoning is excessively restrictive.

Even mid-rise is kind of bad. You tend to share walls with a few neighbours still and there's no opportunity for any private garden space. It's not great for pet ownership, either. I'm not convinced it's a lot better than high rise/block housing as a space to actually live in. I say this presently living in a mid-rise in the UK. Edit: I should probably add that the leasehold system in the UK makes them a particularly bad proposition if you want to actually own your home as well.

Terraced housing has kind of okay density, at least it's not a total land crime like US suburban detached housing but affords many of the freedoms associated with it.

Europe does this much better. It's not so difficult to find yourself on a quieter, greener path just on your way to work. The countryside has a network of footpaths that connect everything. Wherever I am in Europe, I can count on a quiet evening walk.

Berlin is outstanding for this. Wherever you are, it's easy to escape loud traffic and sit in a green, public space. Some have cafés and Biergarten in them.

I find returning to Canada difficult because there is no way to escape loud roads. There's no path along the fields, forests or rivers. If you want to walk in nature, you have to drive to it.

Berlin is better than most other places I've lived, but there is still so much room to improve. In my (sub-)district, pedestrians, cyclists, bars and trees share around 30% of the space on the street, while an additional 40% is parking and the last 30% is driving. The thing is, only around 35% of households here even own a car, and the vast majority of those probably just have it as a convenience. Public transport is quite good, and Berlin is super flat, so also really good for cycling.

Very slowly things are moving in the right direction, but it is a constant fight against a loud minority and old local and federal rules favoring cars above all.

Like you said, things are improving. There is a slow move towards wide bike lanes and pedestrianised neighborhoods. I love where things are going!

I will throw Rome here, often overlooked when talking about this stuff, but Rome has the widest green area in Europe, parks, gardens, reserves, green areas in general cover more than 65% of the total surface, totaling 85,000 hectares (~850 km2).

In Berlin in comparison only 30% of the city area is green spaces and woodland, totaling ~260km2.

One of the reasons why Berlin population is 1.2 times larger than Rome, even though the surface of the city is only 70% of the Italian Capitol.

How was that calculated; populations and areas of cities are often calculated in very different ways. You have to show these things on a map and describe why you choose what area and how the population number was calculated. Just "what is a park" differs between cities, even what is a parking space is different. E.g. cars needs a lot of room around them on motorways, that areas is not always counted as "motorway" but can be counted as "green space" in some papers.

I have not seen ANY good examples of comparisions between cities, but I know these problems comes up alot when we discuss cities here on HN.

I know a lot of people are skeptic about this, but I was surprised as well when I discovered how green Rome is.

As a Roman, I also thought that Paris or Berlin were greener or bigger, they are not.

> You have to show these things on a map

Here it is

Berlin and Rome, same zoom level on Google maps

https://imgur.com/WU3dWEJ

I've highlighted on the left the area that is actually Rome's territory, Google maps only highlights the area inside the "Grande raccordo anulare" [1], but the city of Rome extends much farther than that, also the area on the beach (the one called Ostia) is actually part of the city even though it is disconnected from it.

That's Rome, the city, then there's the Metropolitan City of Rome Capital [2], which is much larger and includes many smaller municipalities around it, which is in turn smaller than Rome metropolitan area [3]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grande_Raccordo_Anulare

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_City_of_Rome_Capi...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rome_metropolitan_area

I like the London practice of having a small square of park in the center among the homes. Although it seems a practice of wealthier urban areas, the parks are gated, the home owners have a key and they pay for the upkeep. I don't know how common this is. NYC Central Park is beautiful and vast, but sometimes I wonder if cities need more smaller little parks. There's a lovely lawn behind Rodin's house in Paris where people go and stretch out, tall trees on the perimeter and open space, it's very beautiful and relaxing to view.

Parks and gardens seem an afterthoughts in American urban planning. The National and state parks are gems but not accessible near the cities.

Edited to add, there's a very good Economist article about building miniature forests in cities, I can't find it right now but here's an article that was referenced: https://daily.jstor.org/the-miyawaki-method-a-better-way-to-...

Somebody mentioned Rome downstream, one more thing I love about Rome, all the public fountain water is potable. There's something so awesome about going to the fountain and getting water that you can drink. (Native Romans, don't crush my dreams by telling me I was a dumb tourist and who knows what I drank when I took my chances with the public fountains.)

Those gardens in London are privately owned and maintained. And far from ubiquitous - they’re mostly in wealthy areas.

It’s nice that they exist. But it’s not so nice that they’re a perk for the rich and not accessible by an average resident.

And AFAIK, there is no planning rule that requires they be added with new (re-)development. Only maintaining what’s there.

As long as you can look into it from the street you'll have some benefit at least. Walking along other people's gardens can be quite relaxing too as long as high walls are not allowed.

There’s a mix - some are walled off, some internal to housing (interior of a block), some just fenced off.

The Eaton Square viewed on Google Maps shows a variety. The main square is shoulder-high iron fencing. But many blocks have walked or internal gardens.

The problem is those private gardens don't give you a chance to take a walk in them, and they don't connect together in any way to make them friendly for birds.

I live in a mid-sized city in the States, and all of our streets are tree-lined. Our fields too, which used to just be grass for sports, are getting more and more trees planted.

And the Roman water is potable, yes, and delicious because of the limestone it filters through. Although if you drink or fill a bottle from the bottom of the sprout, instead of putting your finger underneath and letting the water spurt up from the little hole, someone will tell you that's disgusting, because that's where the dogs lick. Nevermind that the water coming out the hole is still touching that bottom portion of the pipe.

European expat here. My experience on the Canadian west coast is quiet the opposite.

Downtown vancouver near stanley park might be for you :)

And make it bicycle friendly. People like nature but they also like and need exercise.

There's a number of European cities that have made huge leaps in recent years beautifying themselves while allowing more people to bike every day.

> And make it bicycle friendly. People like nature but they also like and need exercise.

even better, make them walkable.

This! I love going mountain biking but commuting on a bike does not fit well with my person. And I t’s not missing bike lanes that are the problem with commuting, it is the numerous other issues a bike commute introduces to your life that are so often overseen. Cities must become walkable first again to succeed, making them bike friendly only pushes traffic problems a few years away…

5min walking through a park + 5-10 minutes in high speed, transport that is the future

Why not both?! Cycling and walking aren't mutually exclusive

Personally I don't enjoy cyclists zipping around me on the sidewalk and cycle paths require space, so to me they sort of are.

Of course you can remove roads to create cycle paths, but there's a point at which this starts to affect public transport and services - after all it's not just cars that use the roads.

IMO they do not compete, but they are almost orthogonal problems.

Walkability is an harder problem to solve than biking in modern car centric cities.

Bikes can easily use repurposed space from existing roads, walking lanes solve no problem if things are not at walkable distance.

Hi,

what do you mean it doesnt fit your person? i am curious because it feels like such a weird statement.

Well, I think it is a combination of things

1. I despise biking in non-ideal conditions (and where I live this is roughly 60% of the time) 2. From my observations as a pedestrian, driver, biker I have concluded that other bikers are bikers own worst enemy when it comes to the commute, a problem that has not improved with improved bike infrastructure 3. Bike commuting kinda never is at home anywhere, at rush hour you are not at home at the bile lane, you are way to slow for general traffic and way way too fast for the pedestrian sections and there is no solution to this, you have to cross at some point somewhere where you are the „bad guy“ 4. I get sweaty when I bike and I don’t like having to shower away my commute before I start my work day (I’ve usually showered already before taking off..) 5. Running errands on the commute route is also problematic with a bike as at rush hour there is just too much going on and too little space in European cities. If we assume that everybody/majority commute by bike this just exacerbates 6. there’s more but I think the reasoning becomes clear

All in all I applaud people for doing it, I just couldn’t live with it and prefer to be a pedestrian that uses fast transport for the big sections. And yes, I also think that mass bike commuting is a delusion, low hanging political fruit that is being pushed to pump greenwashing agendas and does only kick the problem further down the road. The future should be pedestrian first with well decentralised cities, work from anywhere Job culture and fast (ideally self driving) shared transport.

But that’s just my 2c

> making cities more green isn't even _that_ difficult.

On the contrary it takes quite a bit of effort to keep the nature at bay. Neglect a corner of your house and next thing you notices small ecosystem developing full with small grass, mold, insects and what not. When Indian cities were locked down for a few months all sorts of birds and animals started appearing in the neighborhood.

> Neglect a corner of your house and next thing you notices small ecosystem developing full with small grass, mold, insects and what not. When Indian cities were locked down for a few months all sorts of birds and animals started appearing in the neighborhood.

Is this a downside or a positive?

Mold in your house is a health risk, so yeah nah, any life in the house is best left as intentional, potted plants and the like.

Where I live, the city encourages citizens to make tiny gardens against the facades off their building. If you request them, the municipality will pop out some tiles from the sidewalk and supply the soil.

The idea is that citizens themselves are then responsible for the gardening, and as you say "keeping nature at bay". The city has become prettier because of it.

Very nice, where is it?

>the municipality will pop out some tiles from the sidewalk

Where do you walk, then?

It's time for pedestrians to take back the streets.

You are right, which is why the challenge is to have a symbiosis.

Most people don't like mold, ants or snakes in their home. Me neither, and I love sleeping outside.

This is part of why I love visiting Japan, so much nature scattered throughout otherwise urban areas. Lot's of other places in the world like it as well. Makes me jealous since I love in the concrete wasteland that is Phoenix.

Take a stroll around the intersection of north Randolph road and north 14th street. Randomly stumbled upon this when I was visiting Phoenix and it was a nice surprise. Overall I would say that concrete wasteland is a bit too harsh, at least the parts I walked through had a decent amount of vegetation here and there.

Hey fellow Phoenician!

I actually have a different experience in Arizona. The masterplan communities here are great at prioritizing community space. My neighborhood is connected by an interior park-like trail that twists and winds for 22miles. Most houses are within 2 blocks of an entrance to the trail system, and there are two separate k-12 schools attached to the trails so kiddos can ride their scooters/bikes to school in the morning.

There’s also some of the best hiking in the world around here. The camelback ridge line is awesome, a bunch of abandoned mines with surrounding settlements to go explore, etc. and it’s only 45minutes to the rim where, thanks to the jump in elevation, you start seeing more green.

Lucky! I'm happy to have my house given the real estate situation these days, but I'm definitely in a "poorer" area :) Can't get anywhere green / nature without some sort of car.

Part of the reason I am jealous of these other countries is there isn't as much of a divide between who gets the nice / and who is relegated to the commuting "concrete wasteland" as I phrased it. There's a strong sense of community / wanting everyone to have access. I'd love for our cities to start investing in the same way so everyone can reap the benefits (which I think are numerous, it has crazy dividends and life long impacts). Hard to push that here though.

Sweden is pretty similar, lots and lots of nature with urban areas scattered on it.

Stockholm, as an example, does it very well: a dense but small city-centre with lots of parks and greenery with the remaining sprawl outside the centre being scattered urban areas in the middle of the green with great public transportation connections.

Stockholm is almost cheating though, with all the water flowing through the city.

What's impressive though is that Stockholm manages to keep (most of) that water clean, and you can go swimming in the city center, without ever visiting a swimming pool!

I was walking in Glasgow, everything felt grey, bland and depressive.

At some point I realized they have zero trees in the streets. Also means no bird sounds in the background, no green leaves adding some colors to the concrete, no blossoming in the spring.

Being in a city where every street is filled with trees I realized how big of an impact it is.

It is however not "easy", the old big trees you want, destroy your streets, branches fall in storms, sometimes even whole trees fall over.

This is similar to the feeling I get when I travel from London to Manchester.

While I know London isn't everyone's cup of tea, it has a ton of parks, trees and nature compared to many other cities, and it's usually quick to dip away from the bustle into a relatively quiet oasis. You're rarely more than a 5 minute walk away from a small park.

Sydney takes this to another level, being lots of parks and lots of suburbia (which unfortunately means more car reliance, but there is a lot of green space). Even lots of beaches and a national park!

I imagine a lot of it is “topographically forced” by the harbour / rivers intruding everywhere.

The problem with making cities green, like the problem with everything else, is terrible city design. There is quite a bit of greenery where I live and it is all anxiety inducing because it is planted near intersections and cutting off line of sight so you can't see pedestrians well or oncoming traffic. There are certain areas that have these wonderful bushes, too bad they opted for those bushes instead of sidewalks but hey, who cares about pedestrians am I right?

> it is planted near intersections and cutting off line of sight

You've just described a wonderful and very intelligent form of traffic calming.

When done well, yes, it calms traffic. But random trees or bushes at an intersection on an otherwise wide open road isn’t a good idea.

They aren't calming when I can't see shit when pulling out into an intersection and turning.

I guess its wonderful if you like killing people. Reducing visibility around corners is unsafe in the US, far too many people will drive the same and just take a chance that its all clear, I know of a couple people who died that way.

I’ve seen this sort of thing work in London, so my theory is that traffic calming only works if you don’t treat vehicular manslaughter as akin to petty theft or even less as we do in the US. Good luck changing that, way too many people operate a vehicle everyday for them to want to take on that liability. Also young men are going to continue to drive with a devil may care attitude. Traffic calming measures in a motorist society like the US, in my observation, ironically cause much more aggressiveness on the road, and to me are the transportation equivalent of hostile architecture.

This is why I like the work of †Christopher Alexander so much. He doesn't only point out that our cities are bad for us but also gives solutions.

For example moving parking space and roads to the back of the shops and create a green walking area in the front of the shops.

I think there's a lot that the people that actually live there can do. When I think of American housing, it's either big dense cities, or suburbs. The suburbs are all... bland, a concrete driveway and grass. All very low maintenance. If those were to do some gardening - plant a tree, some bushes, flower perks, longer grasses, etc - you already will get a much nicer place to live.

And in the cities, people can do things like hanging baskets out of windowsills, or potted plants out the door. And of course things inside the house.

I will acknowledge though that this is from a position of privilege, we have a lively plant and flower industry in my country and hundreds of garden centers around the country.

The crazy thing is grass lawns are HIGH maintenance. It’s effectively an economic signal - “look at me, I have time and money to maintain this useless patch of grass!”

It’s much easier to plant a mix of greens - clover, grasses, etc (effectively pasture seed blend). Requires less water, less mowing, and much less fertilizer.

This is one benefit of commieblocks nobody's talking about. They lead to green cities.

This is how commieblock districts of my city look like: https://spoldzielnialsm.pl/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Obecni... https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ud9-Z0UHVHg/W7-qUjfNT9I/AAAAAAAAi...

Modern car-centric districts are much worse, and single houses districts are car-centric concrete hell in comparison.

Living alone or in small families also means a lot of space for not a lot of people. In Berlin (which has been mentioned above as a very green city) there are also many communities of people that live together despite not being in a family or relationship. Such flatshares/apartment sharing is more ecologically sustainable because one kitchen can serve 3-4 people that would otherwise have to buy their own kitchen and appliances.

Personally, I would not mind sharing a TV (barely use one) or washing machine or garden with more people, but the way western society works in terms of building defaults is biased towards individualism not community building.

We had trees on the main streets in my home city. Then they "modernized" it, widened the roads and cut the trees (even though there was still enough space for them, or at least newly planted ones!).

Now it looks pretty shit (just imo), and it's hellish in summer - no shade, hot as hell, the buildings with their new windows and white finishes are blinding. I used to love walking there, now I avoid them.

Yeah, the Soviets and central planning get a lot of deserved flak, but as someone who grew in that part of the world, I hold that they got high density urban planning right. Not the execution, of course - the endemic corruption saw to that, all those buildings need a lot of repairs and upkeep, but the plan was sound. You have small quiet commercial buildings on the ground floor and every district has basic amenities within walking distance, with large communal green spaces. Sadly we're now trying to do everything the American way, i.e. the way 80s-90s America is presented by TV. You can look at a new building and pinpoint which sitcom served as inspiration. Picture perfect buildings being plopped on the outskirts of the city with frankly absurd connections to the roads around them. Residential-only buildings being built right to the edge of the road and cannibalising all the green space. New roads cutting right across old footpaths with no way to cross them. At least there's a little bit less corruption and a bit more freedom.

Good luck trying to reallocate space from motor transport to greenery. Few things have mobilised a loud minority quite like it in London.

It’s tedious to take a 2 hour drive to go hiking, but it’s basically impossible for most of us to make our cities considerably greener. Obviously if it were a realistic possibility, I would be all for it, but for most of us it depends on factors well outside of our control and anyway it would be a decades-long initiative.

At HealingGardens.co we are bringing people closer to nature. We served 1400 customers so far in 1 year and plan to do more.

Actively looking for a cofounder who can develop full stack. If interested, please email abhi@healinggardens.co

This is great as long as you aren’t fighting your local environment. So much green has no place in desert cities where water tables are plummeting. (Looking at you, Vegas and Phoenix)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com