How This Swiss City is Using Green Roofs to Combat Climate Change
Sourced from EuroNews
Basel, Switzerland has become the first city in the world to make green spaces a legal requirement on new buildings.
As inner-city living becomes ingrained in much of our social and work lives many of us are missing out on access to green space.
With burgeoning evidence to suggest that greener cities make for healthier cities, it is vital that city planners make space for biodiversity.
With this in mind, Basel, a major city in west Switzerland, has come up with an ingenious way of adding some much-needed greenery to urban areas. Utilising their once empty flat-roof space, Basel’s city planning authority have made green roofs compulsory. This new requirement adds patches of green space which defuse humidity and help to cool buildings off quicker during the summer months.
As part of Basel’s biodiversity strategy, for the past 15 years, green spaces have been mandatory on all new and retrofitted buildings with flat roofs. Now that this has been made compulsory, more than 1 million square metres of green roofs have been constructed, making it the leading city in ‘greening’ its urban spaces.
From the Living Architecture Monitor
