Via Verde project in Mexico City (citizen-led)

Have you seen this?  Even just looking at this image makes me feel calm!  I'd love to drive on a highway like this - imagine if Toronto did this to their highway downtown!

Great facts about the project:

- 40,000 meters of roadways and concrete pillars will be covered
- will fight pollution, beautify the city and decrease stress levels of motorists
- the green walls will generate oxygen, absorb pollutants and moderate traffic noise
- an automated irrigation system supplied by rainwater will be used
- the project is being funded by private donors, government and advertisers

From Upworthy and Now This:

Two Depave Projects right here in Ottawa!

I first blogged about a Depaving project in California and the organization in Portland in 2012 - finally Ottawa is implementing its own "depave" projects!

Lansdowne Park is a large scale project (replacing 11,000 square metres of pavement for grass) where they are "putting the park back into Lansdowne Park".

From CTV News:

"The new park includes plenty of pathways and seating areas, places for events, a farmer’s market and other vendors, and plans for features like a children’s play area, a water plaza, skateboard park and outdoor rink. 

Workers have planted over 850 new trees and thousands of shrubs. There’s even an apple orchard in the north-east corner of the park where some trees are already producing fruit. “There’s seven or eight different varieties of apple trees that will be open to the public for picking and there’s a pathway system and a picnic table area in there,” says Doug Clunie of D&G Landscaping – the Ottawa company in charge of building Lansdowne’s urban park. 

Lansdowne’s urban park is slated to open August 15th."

The other Depave project is one by the Depave Paradise organization - working through Ecology Ottawa.  It is being done at Kitchissippi United Church: The Alcove Garden Project (630 Island Park Drive).

Gravel Garden - Danforth (Toronto)

Ecoman shared this link with me - great project in Toronto (this was a small project done after an extensive 6000 square foot rooftop garden had been created. Cool that once the first project was done - they started looking for other areas that could be improved!)

From Ecoman's website:

GRAVEL GARDEN REHABILITATION

In an effort to transform Gravel Garden into something a bit more visually and ecologically pleasing, Green Access staff teamed up with Ecoman to take on a mini naturalization project that included edibles, native plants, and even some medicinal species!

Over the summer, purple flowering raspberry (Rubus odoratus) thrived and red currant bushes bore a tasty first harvest. Solomon’s Seal, Hepatica and Comfrey started to get established in the shady areas. We experimented with growing hardy Kiwi (Actinidia kolomitka) and a specially bred variety of honeysuckle with edible berries (Lonicera caerulea). Bugbane (Cimicifuga) and Virginia Mountain Mint (Pycnanthemum virginianum) were also nice additions.

Two small transplanted honey locust trees (Gleditsia triocanthos) and one lilac suffered a bit in the hot and dry parts of summer but they ultimately became well-established. Finally, later in the season a couple of America Elder (Sambucus nigra) trees were added. 

*****
Love that they rescued some trees from a Canada Blooms installation (saving costs!) for the Gravel Garden. And do hope that they post some after shots - would be great to see what it looks like now.
Thanks Ecoman (Jonas Spring) for sharing the info!

another parking lot to paradise project

Ponds to Paradise at Cootes Paradise - interesting proposal at McMaster University in Hamilton.

Hamilton Spectator video about the History Hike in March 2012.

Biocentric Cities: solar groves

“Parking lots are this wasteland – they’re the last thing that gets attention,” Mr. Noble said in an interview. “Here’s a market the size of Alpha Centauri that’s never been tapped.” In 2005, Mr. Noble founded Envision Solar, now the country’s leading developer of solar carports. The company’s signature product is “solar groves,” 1,000-square-foot canopies that shade parking lots while generating clean power from an array of photovoltaic panels. 

The company is now branching out into electric car generation by outfitting its solar canopies with charging stations for plug-in hybrids and electric vehicles. It has developed a pilot project with the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Lab in Golden, Colo., while also working with Coulomb Technologies, a developer of electric vehicle charging stations. 

Read the full article here:
The Parking Lot as ‘Solar Grove’
By JOHN COLLINS RUDOLF
New York Times - Green Section


D & C's Biocentric Cities post is a monthly post that features options for energy and heating systems that would reduce our demand on natural and non-renewable resources outside the city.  A city's consumption is many times its city limit size and impacts nature that we don't even see. My hope is that a city can produce its own energy, heat and clean water within its city boundaries.

Portland's bioretention facilities

From the: Sustainable Cities Collective

Portland's Green Street programme redevelops formerly asphalt areas into bioretention facilities. Before the Green Street treatment, this was an asphalt parking lot that routinely flooded. 

Image via Streetsblog San Francisco. Thanks to David Mann on Pinterest for the find.

dark skies lighting

We hear about light pollution and how not only is it wasteful but also how it affects wildlife (nocturnal and those that migrate at night).  Here's a "Cool Green Feature" in Tartan's new development in Barrhaven called Havencourt (taken from their website):

Dark Skies Street Lighting
The purpose of streetlights is to light streets and sidewalks, not to block out views on starry nights. Havencourt will feature innovative downward directed street lighting—focusing the light where it’s needed. Get out your telescopes!

Read about more sustainable features on Heartfelt!

Street Canyon Ivy

Here's a link to a new study that suggests that ivy growing on walls may be better than street trees in cleaning the air in "street canyon" situations.  (Street canyons are roads surrounded by tall buildings, where air tends to linger.)

Here's more from the website:

"The researchers ran computer simulations to determine how green walls and roofs might affect pollutant concentrations at street level. Adding plants to walls would cut nitrogen dioxide levels by 15 percent and small particulate matter by 23 percent, the authors estimate. In areas with little wind, those numbers could reach 40 and 60 percent. Green roofs didn’t perform as well because they don’t directly affect the air near the street. 

Trees also help clean the air, but they can keep street-level air from mixing with the air above. At low to medium pollutant levels, planting trees will still reduce air pollution, the team predicts. If a city is very polluted, however, trees could actually increase nitrogen dioxide levels near the street."

Read more here: http://www.conservationmagazine.org/2012/09/breathing-walls/


P.S. Check out my latest "urban wild" nature blog: Wild. Here.
(2017 update)

depave (Portland)

From Portland Oregon:  Depave.org

"Depave promotes the removal of unnecessary pavement from urban areas to create community green spaces and mitigate stormwater runoff. Through community partnerships and volunteer engagement, Depave strives to overcome the social and environmental impacts of pavement with the use of action-oriented educational events, community stewardship, and advocacy to reconnect people with nature and inspire others. Depave is a nonprofit organization based in Portland, Oregon."

Update 2014: Two Depave projects have now happened in Ottawa (Link to blog entry)!

depaving and daylighting (Berkeley)

Founded in 1992, Ecocity Builders is a nonprofit organization dedicated to reshaping cities for the long-term health of human and natural systems.

I really like a couple of their on the ground projects where they daylit a stream and "depaved" a parking lot. From their website:

Codornices Creek Daylighting at University Village
Berkeley/Albany Urban Creek Revival

Grassroots Urban Creek Revival: Cordornices Creek daylighting and restoration project began in 1995. In the first year 375 volunteers contributed to opening the creek and landscaping the restored meander of the water — an important factor in regulating speed and controlling floods — and the area saw a gradual increase in the population of species like crayfish, damselflies, garter snakes, mallards, and egrets.

This section of the city was once a little used parking lot, a street that had been closed, a sidewalk, and a flat earth-filled area covered with fennel. The daylighting project was a satisfying collaboration with Urban Creeks Council, who applied for and got $25,000 from the Department of Water Resources Board and hired a semi-volunteer bulldozer operator, who happily volunteered to work for half pay – said he’d never had the chance to “make a creek” before.

Volunteers took cuttings from willow trees, cut them into stakes about an inch thick (none thicker), sliced the trunk side of the branch at a sharp angle and the end toward the leaves square, and drove them with a hammer into the banks of the creek. Now we have forty foot high willows and alders. Watercress, cattails, horestails and bulrushes showed up on their own. Along the banks, nasturtiums, wild grapes, mint, chicory and plantain, California glory, ceanothis, native grasses, lupine, red and blue flax, clarcia and the ever present California poppy.

Codornices Creek daylighting is a paradise to all sorts of critters: butterflies, dozens of birds, steelhead trout, sticklebacks, crawdads, water snails, frogs, garter snakes, water striders and lots of insects including sulfer-blue damselfies and vermillion dragonflies as brilliantly colored as tiny red flying neon lights.

The planting philosophy was to plant natives along with an orchard. Within a few months volunteers had donated fruit trees of all sorts: apples, plums, apricots, figs, oranges, lemons, nectarines, peaches, cherries, persimmons, and Asian pears.

Image from Ecocity Builders

another parking lot conversion

I'm just collecting all the good news stories about parking lots being reclaimed for nature!! Here's one I just got from my partner:

South Los Angeles Parking Lot Becomes an Inner City Wetland by Perrin Drumm of core77. This used to be an MTA bus parking lot and now it's nine acres of wetland!

Picture by KCET.org

parking lots to paradise (Toronto)

This made me thrilled:

"From Parking Lot to Paradise; The Making of an Urban Garden"
The Right Honourable Adrienne Clarkson

The Ottawa Botanical Garden Society continues to bring to Ottawa important speakers who enlighten and excite us about the world of horticulture. To that end, we are pleased to announce that The Right Honourable Adrienne Clarkson will speak to our members and the general public on Monday, April 26th, 2010, about building her new garden in Toronto where a six-car parking lot once stood. Our former Governor General is a keen gardener, has hosted the Canadian Peony Society national show twice at Rideau Hall, and she and her husband, John Raulston Saul were instrumental in making the splendid gardens at the official residence of the Governor General what they are today.

(I didn't get to attend the talk but would have been great to hear about!)

Streets back to Parks.... (Montreal)

“We’re looking at streets and asking ourselves, ‘Is it really useful’,’’ he said in a recent interview. “We’ve identified about 20 streets that are not useful, that can be taken out and retransformed into green spaces.’’ Mayor of Montreal on the Project Montreal

From Daily Commercial News