Cities stripping out concrete for earth and plants
bbc.com
bbc.com
The former is the central business district and surrounding area, the one with 33,000 open air car parks of which the local academic they interviewed appears to be proposing 11,000 be replaced by greenery. It is a nice thought, but the City of Melbourne (think Westminster or City of London in a London context) is notoriously reliant on revenue from those car parks and isn’t about kill that goose yet. Their policy [0] is to “support the conversion of car parking spaces to be used for another function where there is a strategic need to do so” - and the list of functions doesn’t include greenery for its own sake. In fairness, there are already a lot of parks within the municipality.
The latter is the metro area of 5 million people 100km across, and most of it has plenty of green space. For example, most residential streets have a wide grassed verge with street trees. There is definitely a problem with gardens disappearing under apartments and McMansions, but it’s mostly not car parking that’s driving habitat loss.
[0] https://www.melbourne.vic.gov.au/SiteCollectionDocuments/par...
From the book Where Does Money Come From (2011): The Dutch brought the concept to England following the successful invasion by the Dutch Prince William III of Orange in the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688, who displaced the reigning monarch. Under the reign of William III (and Mary), the charging of interest (usury) was soon allowed and bank-friendly laws were introduced. Given the previous repeated defaults by indebted kings and a raid on the national mint; Parliament and creditors of the state (namely the merchants and goldsmiths of the Corporation of London) lobbied for the creation of a privately owned Bank with public privileges – the Bank of England – and the secession of one square mile of central London as a quasi-sovereign state within the state.
You wouldn’t use “city of Melbourne” in conversation for any reason other than to talk about the council of that area.
The origins of the many LGAs is likely due to satellite towns being absorbed over time, but I'm not sure (and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_government_in_Australia doesn't really detail this).
>>So I think that we should start a movement to—one hour a day or one hour a week—take a little chisel, a little hammer, and put a little hole in some of this plastic, and just see some earth coming up and put a seed there. And then put a little ring of—mandalic ring—of something around it. I can see the highways, and I can see the subways, and I can see the patios, and so forth: suddenly the highway department comes along, and says, “There’s a rose growing in the middle of Highway 101!” And then—then—the robot power group will have to send a group of the highway department to kill the rose and put the asphalt down on the gentle, naked skin of the soil. Now, when they do that we’re getting to them. There’ll be pictures in the paper. And consciousness is going to change. Because we’ve got to get to people’s consciousness.
https://www.organism.earth/library/document/houseboat-summit
I guess the "robot power group" lost this little battle, but the war goes on.
> From 21 March to 31 October 2024, the NK Tegelwippen will take place again! Everyone can participate by bouncing tiles in their own front, back or façade garden and municipalities will compete against each other.
> Of course, the championship is not just about rivalry, but has a higher, common goal. When tiles are replaced by grass, flower beds, trees and façade gardens, the Netherlands becomes more climate-proof, more comfortable for insects and animals, cooler on hot days and much more beautiful!
And the trend recently is also 'verdichting', which basically transforms existing city greenery and open spaces into more housing, because that is more profitable for the city council.
I totally get it from a maintenance perspective, especially when they are so small already, but at least get fake turf or something!
Hopefully in another twenty years there will be more grass :)
https://mastodon.social/@onderhoudsarmoe
The name is pun, directly translated it's 'maintenance poverty'
When you mix the fecundity of urban life with these types of areas, eventually you either have massive rat problems or massive "raptors that ate rat poison" problems. We are lobbying our town to ban the use of these poisons by the town, but without them the growing number of community gardens would simply become havens for rats, especially as having free ranging cats becomes more frowned upon.
Doing it for a town would seem difficult.
If you’re blessed (cursed?) with a population that consists of a large number of ground dwelling birds, rats are the enemy. I’m in New Zealand.
Coywolf aka Eastern Coyote in it's NYC habitat.
Of course, neighbors have started using more and more rat poison, so sometimes I do see some rats dead on the ground, rotting in the sun. And recently, I've started seeing dead raptors in the farmland close to us.
Last I read, it's been very effective.
The fancy one that gives a kill count is quite appealing.
The more traditional DOC 150/200/250 are a good option too. They are powerful, don’t mess about with them.
https://predatorfreenz.org/toolkits/trapping-baiting-toolkit...
They've much refined the design and their product line. Also now avail in the US. Yay!
Every square foot matters to the builder. I guess it gives them 2% more profit, or is passed along as 2% cheaper rents.
I'm sure everyone would love to see that in their post box. "We decided to add some new bushes in town, that'll be a 10% increase in council tax please."
This is usually meant to retain enough water to prevent building lots of grey infrastructure. The Thames Tideway tunnel to lower the amount of sewage outflow in London is 4.3B pounds. In that context, building a lot of mini-retention ponds for tens of thousands of pounds is a lot cheaper. and this isn't the only strategy; a lot of modern parks, for example, are built with facilities like courts for sports below the ground level of the park, so that during flood times they turn into bathtub holding ponds as well.
This isn't a universal problem, but it means there's a pretty big benefit to reducing runoff, and the city has been pursuing it aggressively for the last 20 years or so, to good effect.
(The runoff also leads to localized road flooding, which is again both dangerous to road traffic and expensive to mitigate.)
Not only that, green space helps reduce the heat island effect and manage/capture storm run off. Both saving a lot of money and resources.
It might net neutral or net benefit. Now the lack of maintenance and underinvestment is visible, but you're taking strain off the (mostly invisible and no doubt underinvested in) storm water system by swapping impermeable surfaces for permeable ones. (This is a good way to save money on storm water systems in general).
That said, my cynical side would still somehow expect my local council to screw it up anyway.
I do not know what the impact on maintenance costs of greening public spaces is though - hard surfaces need less frequent maintenance, but it is more expensive when needed.