Coromandel Place, Guildford Lane, Katherine Place, and Meyers Place in Melbourne are set to go green as part of the ‘Green Your Laneway’ pilot project by the City of Melbourne.  With over 200 laneways in central Melbourne, totalling nearly 9 hectares, the Green Your Laneway program aims to transform the city’s laneways into relaxing places to sit and enjoy, full of leafy, green spaces with vertical gardens and new trees.

The Green Your Laneway pilot project argues that laneways should be greened for the following reasons:

• Providing shading and local cooling
• Improved aesthetics and local amenity
• Ecological benefits
• Health and wellbeing flow on effects
• Increasing landscape permeability (and hence flood mitigation and passive watering)
• Creating opportunities for relaxation and recreation

Working closely with residents and businesses, preliminary concept designs have been released for the four selected laneways showing a range of greening options that can be considered for each laneway. The concepts will be refined with further community engagement, and funded by the City of Melbourne.

The public is invited to share their views by exploring the initial designs and providing feedback on the Green Your Laneway site.

To find out more about the latest in vertical garden technology, click here.

Source:

https://www.theurbandeveloper.com/melbourne-lanes-to-go-green/

Singapore exceeds greening targets two decades ahead of schedule:

Urban greenery in the form of vertical gardens has been widely embraced in Singapore, with the city hitting its greening targets two decades ahead of schedule. Not ones to rest on their laurels, the Government has decided to raise the bar significantly.

As of last year, plants covering building exteriors totalled more than 61ha, an area the size of 195 school fields. This far exceeded the target of 50ha the government had hoped to hit by 2030. The new target is now 200ha of building greenery by the same deadline.

A spokesman from the National Parks Board (NParks) attributed the rapid increase of skyrise greenery to several programmes, including: the Urban Redevelopment Authority’s enhanced Landscaping for Urban Spaces and High-Rises (Lush) programme, and NParks’ Skyrise Greenery Incentive Scheme, which offers incentives and subsidies to encourage the installation of skyrise greenery.

The greenery targets were outlined in the Sustainable Singapore Blueprint – first in 2009 and again in the latest document released this year. Green roofs, vertical greenery, and gardens in the sky can reduce urban heat gain, which could translate into energy savings, said Mr Tan Seng Chai, group chief corporate officer of CapitaLand and chairman of the CapitaLand Sustainability Steering Committee.

“In land-scarce Singapore… more skyrise greenery can maximise the use of space to bring about many benefits,” said Mr Allen Ang, head of innovation and green building at property developer City Developments.

This new target of 200ha of building greenery by 2030 should lead to many innovative and exciting projects, so stay tuned.

photo credit . wiki

AILA puts Focus on Green Spaces for Schools:

The Australian Institute of Landscape Architects (AILA) has teamed up with the University of Canberra (UC) and Torrens Primary School in the ACT to completely overhaul a courtyard located in the centre of the school.

Concerned about the lack of funding for outdoor environments in schools, AILA Chief Executive, Shahana McKenzie, said this is a pilot project for a national competition to be launched in September, with the aim to highlight the benefits of quality green spaces in urban areas – including schools.

Ms McKenzie said, “Children spent 20 per cent of their time outdoors when they’re at school. But unfortunately there isn’t 20 per cent of funding going from facilities’ funding to the outdoor environment.”

AILA National President, Mark Frisby, said he would like to see government funding increased for outdoor spaces. “It is one of the most effective ways to address growing community issues such as obesity and mental health, and it requires significantly less investment than constructing new buildings,” he said.

The project kicked off with a workshop involving 30 students from the school, and UC landscape architecture students. Landscape architecture student, Christopher Norris, said the students’ passion for their school was obvious during the workshop, including their insistence on using school colours.

Unfortunately, grand ideas such as chocolate fountains, water slides, and a rollercoaster did not make the cut. But many suggestions did, including a grass mound, a multi-level concert stage, a water feature for science education, and an outdoor lunch space for teachers. Torrens Primary School principal, Sue Mueller, said the new space would contribute to the learning and wellbeing of current and future generations of students.

The courtyard is expected to be completed by October 2016. Stay tuned for more information on the upcoming national competition.

image credit . The Canberra Times . Graham Tidy

Raising The Roof on Urban Landscape Design: Greenroof Future

As humans, we focus on what we see every day. It stands to reason that much of the discussion of urban canopy and landscape projects and developments take place at ground and subterranean level.

With each passing year for approximately the past 15 years, however, more and more design visionaries and their taskforces are raising their eyes upward…to our rooftops. With the massive amount of square miles taken up by buildings, re-purposing their roofs help us reclaim some of the lost land and create a whole other kind of landscape.

Diana Balmori of Balmori Associates, NY couldn’t agree more. “We need to create a different balance between the inert surfaces and the living surfaces,” Balmori said. With the exception of pockets of urban parks, cities have the sky, the earth, and stories of glass, metal, cement and rock between them. Watching how city dwellers flock to those park spaces, Balmori realizes that there’s a wealth of untapped, unutilized potential not only for the human city dwellers, but the flora and fauna grasping for a foothold in a gray world.

A robust example of the success a rooftop landscape is Balmori’s own 667 acre Public Administration complex in Sejong, Korea. Balmori Associates says, “We proposed a new approach to city-making, one that starts with landscape architecture. The master plan consists of a continuous linear park on a continuous roof joining all the ministries.” In conjunction to providing a reprieve for persons, the task of building a green roof with wildlife in mind requires a whole other set of considerations. “Creating biodiversity on a green roof or green wall is significantly different than restoring it on ground level. On a rooftop there is no preexisting ecology to enhance; everything is from scratch,” states the Green Roof Service webpage of Jörg Breuning, owner.

Given this, the plants, animals and insects are essentially living under an altered set of circumstances, which could affect their continuing habitation and ability to thrive under the new conditions, even with a perfect replication of a landscape indigenous to any particular area.

From an infrastructural standpoint, the installation of green roofs presents vast benefits, including prolonging the life spans of rooftop materials, decreased use and energy consumption of HVAC units, stormwater management, and significant moderation of the Urban Heat Island effect.

Green Roofs for Healthy Cities Community webpage states, “Through the daily dew and evaporation cycle, plants on vertical and horizontal surfaces are able to cool cities during hot summer months and reduce the UHI effect. The light absorbed by vegetation would otherwise be converted into heat energy.” With such evidence of benefits being discovered and explored from several standpoints: the human element, ecology, and infrastructure, a future with more green roof designs should be just on the horizon for landscape design experts, scientists, engineers, and others.

photo credit: Green Roof Gardner, CC

Singapore’s Building and Construction Authority (BCA) announces S$20 million scheme to support green building innovation:

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