What are the benefits of a Green Urban Infrastructure?
The addition of green urban infrastructure to a city has many advantages for the environment and all its inhabitants.
Green roofs have the potential to provide solutions to many of our new problems that urbanisation has created.
Australia is a unique country with a different climate and spectacular plants, we need to accept this distinctiveness and start to add native plants to each of our green infrastructure projects
In 1985, Edward Wilson, a Harvard entomologist, brought widespread attention to the concept of biophilia with his biophilia hypothesis, the love of life or living systems.
Kaplan said that looking at nature enhances humans in doing tasks that require long periods of direct attention.This theory is called ‘Attention restoration’.
What is Biomimicry?
Benyus (1997) defined the term Biomimicry being innovation inspired by nature; a design methodology that seeks solutions to human challenges by exploring what nature has to offer. We are grieving in our cities and urban areas the loss of nature but we seem to be too afraid to integrate it into our surroundings.
Green roofs provide biodiversity benefits to the local environment that have been replaced by urban encroachment; they also represent to us the connection that has been lost between nature and increasing urban development.
As more people chose the urban lifestyle over rural, health professionals are seeing increased health problems in our society that are costing governments millions in heath care, not to mention the social cost to our communities!
A greener urban environment will improve the overall health, wellbeing and mental state of our populations. The addition of nature provides relaxation, comfort, play and learning in a natural environment.
Other problems of urban development, like pollution and water quality, can be abated by filtering particles through the leaves of vegetation, or slowing the storm water of an urban environment with water saving urban design.
Economically a city will conserve energy with green urban infrastructure; the value of the land will increase, as will the productivity and creativity of the city.
Greening a roof in a city is likely to help the biodiversity of a region, as well as improve the quality of the ‘work life balance’ that many people and businesses are striving to achieve.
Urban farming is a way to connect the city with rural activities and reduce the transport cost of much of our produce.
Other environmental benefits could include the protection of a threatened or endangered species on a green roof or green wall, well away from its natural predators.
Groups of green roofs could act as steppingstones, a pathway to connect isolated remnants, increasing the genetic diversity of flora and fauna,
Braaker et al (2014).
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