Solarpunk Urbanism

VIENNA — At the edge of a wide, grassy park in Vienna, there's a modern building with lots of windows and a sleek wood facade. For the past six years, Sebastian Schublach has lived here with his family in a light-filled four-bedroom apartment on the fourth floor.

Up on the roof, where Schublach can relax in the communal library with a view of the city and park, there are solar panels to reduce climate pollution. There's a rooftop garden full of rosemary — the greenery helps keep the building cool in summer. Thick, insulated walls reduce the need for heating and cooling — Schublach's apartment doesn't even need an air conditioner. "It's not cold in winter times. It's not hot in summer times," Schublach says. "It's very comfortable."

In the United States, high-quality, climate-friendly apartments like this are mostly rare and unaffordable, says Daniel Aldana Cohen, professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley and co-director of the think tank the Climate and Community Institute. But in Vienna, sustainable buildings like Schublach's aren't just affordable, they're widespread. Schublach's apartment is what the Viennese call "social housing" — housing that's built or supported by the government. Now this social housing is a key driver of Vienna's ambitious climate action.

• Trees growing school yards in Niger’s two largest cities are helping to cool classrooms and illustrate the value of urban forests.
• A study of green spaces across 60 schools in Niamey and Maradi two cities found that trees in schools help mitigate extreme heat, a source of food and income, and enhance learning.
• School yards represent a form of protected area within cities, and the study’s author encourages municipal and educational authorities to integrate urban forestry into planning for school infrastructure.

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Spain, like other countries, is having to adapt to more extreme weather. And, in the Valencia region, EU-funded innovation has spawned a new solution, right under people’s feet.

The concept of footpath paving has been redesigned using ceramic tiles, placed and spaced on their sides, to maximise absorption of water into the ground.

Experts say it wouldn’t prevent the type of disaster seen last year, with the overflow of a river system, but would improve drainage capacity and reduce flooding risks when heavy rain hits urban areas.

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This guy in Pisa, Italy, has planted 4 trees in a public space and by speaking to nearby people he agreed with some of them to provide water during summer time. Moreover he repaired a public drinking fountain that the administration closed (to avoid repairing), also to help provide water needed for nearby plants.

Follow the mastodon thread, maybe with the help of automatic translation.

We need more people like this!

Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) holds the secrets to designing more resilient homes, cities and critical infrastructure.

Many of these techniques were pioneered by ancient architects.

In the mid-1990s physicists Geoffrey West and Louis Bettencourt collaborated with biologists to study allometric scaling laws, where it is generally found that larger organisms are more efficient consumers of energy than smaller ones. After mathematically explaining these laws through fractal network effects, the researchers began applying them to the human built environment, particularly cities.

Certain environmentalists and sustainability advocates mistook the significance of these results, leading to decades of policy work and investments in urban growth that, West now admits, are doomed to fail.

The fact that so many, including the originators of the work, got this story wrong reflects the cultural blinders and techno-biases that typify most of us living in high energy modernity. Doing the opposite of our conditioned response to the overshoot predicament will likely lead to more favorable outcomes.

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Thought-provoking perspective.

As storms and floods become more frequent, intense, and expensive in terms of finances and lost lives, city life is becoming more precarious.

Amit Prothi, the director general of the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure, has spent decades working on making communities more resilient across more than 15 countries in North America, Asia, and Europe. He said that American infrastructure – like power lines, water drainage systems, and housing development – and building policies that govern such projects may not account for the changing risks brought about by climate change.

But there are several strategies U.S. cities can put in place to become more resilient. As a bonus, implementing these strategies can also make cities more beautiful and community-oriented – and in most cases, are also financial no-brainers.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/20559234

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New York Harbor was a haven of incredible underwater biodiversity—until centuries of pollution turned it into a cesspool. Today, an alliance of architects, restaurateurs, scientists, and high school students is working to restore the harbor and protect the city from climate change. At the heart of the effort is a tiny creature with an outsized talent for cleanup: the extraordinary oyster.

Mayor Anne Hidalgo has floated a plan to “revegetate” 500 Parisian streets to make the city more liveable. Critics say it would deepen divides between urbanites and commuters.

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The conservation story of Totonicapán – a city in Guatemala home to half a million people – begins with its people’s relationship with the land.