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Comment by lmf4lol | Hacker News Reader

One thing that I really really like about living in Amsterdam, is that we have trees and plants everwhere. Also, for 2 years now, city stopped cutting most of the plant growth in parks and on the side of roads. Its so beautiful green and colourful now and insects are having a great time. I counted this year already 6 different sorts of humblebees in my garden.

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Also us Dutchies have this thing called "tegelwippen":

https://www.nk-tegelwippen.nl

It's a competition about which municipality can remove most pavement tiles & replace with greenery.

People do this on their own too - guerilla gardening style. It's not uncommon to ride through a city street, and see a strip of pavement tiles removed & some flowers in there. Or some plants dangling from a pot attached to a street light. As long as postal workers & elderly people with strollers can still pass, most municipalities support this.

We did this in front of out old house in Scheveningen. The hofje had a very small shared space behind us so we pulled up the first foot of bricks in the street side of the house and planted flowers.

Still, apparently Amsterdam somehow doesn't satisfy the 30% criterion at all. Can anyone find detailed numbers? I live there and my street is lined with large trees.

This is the dataset they used: https://land.copernicus.eu/en/products/high-resolution-layer...

Was thinking the same. There must be some glitch in how this is calculated, as we definitely have >30% tree coverage in every city. Maybe the vast areas of shrub-filled countryside and farmland are skewing the data.

Not sure. 30% sounds like a lot. The streets in central Amsterdam _might_ have 30% cover if you don’t count the water, but what about the houses, gardens, etc?

True, but then I wonder how other cities get that high without essentially being a park with a few buildings dotted here and there.

trees over roads, parking lots, etc.

But then, as you scale towards higher density (e.g., replacing parking lots with garages), you end up with less space for trees. Unless you put them on top of buildings, ofc.

One of the reasons I moved from London to the town I'm in now was how much effort our local council puts in to maintaining the town's greenery. There's dedicated wildflower areas all over the place to encourage insects, which in turn encourages the bird life.

Haha. Those are things I like about Hackney

This is a good reminder that "green" does not have to mean perfectly manicured

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