Getting to the other side

World-Changing's regular feature The Week in Green Design writes about green roofs this week. The article focuses on both the economic benefits (which would also translate into environmental benefits).

The heat trapped by dark, flat roofs elevates city temperatures as much as ten degrees Fahrenheit

...

The easiest and quickest solution to combat the urban heat effect is simply to turn hot dark roofs into "cool roofs" by painting them with a basic coating of light-colored water sealant. ... If all the roofs in New York City were "cool roofs", the city would save some $100 million dollars per year in cooling costs.

An even better alternative to cool roofs (albeit one that requires more time and effort) is to turn waste roofs into landscaped Green Roofs. Green roofs having the same cooling effect of white roofs, with the added benefits of:

• Providing amenity space for building users ó replacing a yard or patio
• Increasing roof life span
• Reducing storm water run off
• Providing noise insulation
• Filtering pollutants and CO2 out of the air
• Providing locally grown food (with roof-top vegetable gardens)
• Increasing wildlife habitat in built up areas
• Reducing heating (by adding mass and thermal resistance value) and cooling (by evaporative cooling) loads on a building
• Reducing the urban heat island effect

Strangely, they don't mention psychological benefits, although they write much about the aesthetic aspects. Unfortunately, what they present as good aesthetics looks like a dreary fake lawn to me.

While rooftop lawns are almost as depressing for me as endless pavement. A rooftop garden is a different story. Even "tending to" (looking at, touching, watering, and petting the caterpillars) the "green roof" I have built outside our kitchen window -just a planter with some beans and spinach- does wonders to raise my spirits each day.

If I have to spend my days surrounded by gray drab buildings, it would be great to have a little garden plot of my own that I could work on in my lunch hours. I have reason to believe that thirty minutes of "farming" each day while at work would greatly increase my productivity through an increase in positivity.

In the recent past there have been a few articles about rooftop gardens popping up in the Nikkei (which I didn't clip out), but I don't recall them mentioning anything around my new office.