Cities are home to about 50 percent of the world’s population, but they generate 80 percent of our planet’s greenhouse gases, which contribute to global warming and climate change. To reverse the destructive momentum, cities must become part of the solution.

According to architect Stefano Boeri, greener buildings can minimize the carbon footprint of cities around the world. He envisions buildings that are energy efficient and made from renewable materials. He also envisions buildings that are shrouded in greenery. He calls his concept the vertical forest.

The focus on the relationship between city and nature leads to the creation of Vertical Forest, a model of metropolitan reforestation that integrates vegetation as an essential element of architecture. The vegetation offers multiple benefits to a building, including efficiency and resiliency.

The vegetation offers multiple benefits to the building, community, city and planet.

Completed in Milan in 2014, the first Vertical Forest earned many international awards, including the International Highrise Award in 2014 and the Best Tall Building Worldwide Award in 2015 by CTBUH. Introducing the concept of biodiversity in architecture, Boeri works on the development of the Milanese model and on Urban forestry. He presented his project of Forest City in the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP21), becoming one of the main actors in the debate on climate change in the field of international architecture.

“The vertical forest is a new format of architectural biodiversity,” said Stefano Boeria, founder and namesake of Stefan Boeri Architectti. “The model focuses not only on human beings but also on the relationship between humans and other living species. It brings the human and natural worlds closer together, while forging a new alliance between nature and urban buildings.”

The first example, built in Milan’s Porta Nuova area, consists of two towers that are respectively 80 and 112 meters high. They support a total of 800 trees (480 first and second stage trees, plus 300 smaller ones). It also features 15,000 perennials and/or ground covering plants and 5,000 shrubs, providing an amount of vegetation equivalent to 30,000 square meters of woodland and undergrowth, concentrated on 3,000 square meters of urban surface.

Vertical Forests can impact global land use. They can help manage urban sprawl and they can become sources of urban food production, which can minimize the need for farmland. Urban food production also minimizes the need for transportation of crops to urban areas. Each tower is equivalent to about 50,000 square meters of single-family houses.

Unlike conventional facades in glass or stone, the plant-based shield does not reflect or magnify the sun’s rays. Instead, it filters the sun. The green exterior regulates humidity, produces oxygen and absorbs CO2 and micro particles. The natural solution has earned several awards, including the International High-rise Award from the Deutschen Architekturmuseums in Frankfurt (2014) and the CTBUH Award for the best tall building in the world from the Council for Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat at Chicago’s IIT (2015).

“It seemed crazy at first”, said Manfredi Catella, CEO of COIMA, the developer of the towers and the surrounding area. “Once the towers were completed, the Vertical Forest of Milan became a landmark for the city and a symbol for world architecture.”

Once completed, the towers became wildly popular, both among residents and across the city. They nested occupants in a green respite, absorbed CO2, minimized heat-island impacts, reduced energy consumption, and hosted a wide variety of plant and animal species. They also helped invigorate (along with new parks and towers by several top architects) an area that was once dominated by unused railroad tracks and decaying industrial buildings.

The towers feature large, overhanging balconies that accommodate large planters for vegetation. Larger trees have plenty of room to grow upward without obstruction. Once the vegetation fills in, the buildings resemble a pair of gigantic trees. The variations in color and shapes of the plants produce a tremendous iridescent landmark in every season.

The plants are grown in imbedded prefabricated containers. They are nourished by an irrigation system that is digitally and remotely controlled. The water is largely drawn from filtered effluent from the towers. Once a year, the flying gardeners descend from the roof of the buildings, using mountaineering techniques, for pruning.

A few years after its construction, the Vertical Forest has given birth to a habitat colonized by numerous animal species, including about 1,600 specimens of birds and butterflies.

The company has several projects around the world. In China, for example, about 80 kms from the city of Wuhan, a crane has just lifted the first tree of the Easyhome Huanggang Vertical Forest City Complex to the 25th floor. Each tower will feature 395 trees, 3,600 shrubs and 12,000 perennials. The project will be completed in February 2021.

Elsewhere in China, trees have started to reach the balconies of the towers of the Nanjing Vertical Forest, (the first Vertical Forest built in Asia by Stefano Boeri Architetti), which will host a total of 27 native plant species, 600 large trees, 200 medium-sized trees and more than 2,500 shrubs and hanging plants. The greenery will cover 4,500 square meters of surface, while contributing to local biodiversity. It also will absorb 18 tons of CO2, while producing up to 16.5 tons of oxygen every year.

The first tower is 200 meters high. It is crowned by a green canopy that will creep over and down the building. The second tower will include a Hyatt Hotel with 305 rooms and a swimming pool. The two Nanjing towers will open in 2021.

In 1980, Boeri graduated in Architecture at Politecnico in Milan. In 1989, he received his PhD from Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia (IUAV). As a full Professor of Urban Planning at Politecnico in Milan, Boeri has served as a guest professor at various universities, including Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design (GSD), the Strelka Institute in Moscow, the Berlage Institute in the Netherlands, and the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. He served as designer and member of the Scientific Board at Skolkovo Innovation Center, a high tech hub near Moscow. Boeri is director of the Future City Lab of Tongji University in Shanghai. For more information, about Boeri and the vertical forest, visit https://www.stefanoboeriarchitetti.net/en/vertical-foresting/

Greener Cities is a division of Crossbow Communications. Greener Cities is a resource for sustainable and resilient cities and communities around the world.

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As global oil prices continue to drastically fluctuate up and down over the years, the Kingdom of Jordan has announced that all of their mosques will soon run on solar energy, in an attempt to save money and promote sustainable development.

Jordan is a country almost devoid of natural resources – most of the land is completely barren. 

The Jordanian economy is beset by insufficient supplies of water, oil and other resources, and to make things even worse, they import 96 percent of the energy used.

Ahmad Abu Saa, of the Renewable Energy Department at the ministry stated “that photovoltaic solar systems for power generation will be installed at the Kingdom’s mosques under a project to be implemented in the course of this year.” The project will start by covering 120 mosques and tenders will be soon floated to install such systems at other mosques across the country, he added. It may not seem like much, but mosques actually use a lot of energy.

“Mosques use large amounts of electricity and the project will help to significantly reduce their electricity bills as around 300 days in the year are sunny,” Abu Saa noted. The funding is a pioneering move in the Middle East, and will hopefully pave the way for other countries. “Based on the funds that we secure, we will go ahead with the project. The more finance we get the faster the project will be implemented. Some of the mosques will get such systems this year,” he said.

Jordan will obtain 10 percent of energy from renewable resources by 2020.

Greener Cities is a division of Crossbow Communications. Greener Cities is a resource for sustainable and resilient cities and communities around the world.

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While its official opening is nearly three months away, the Bullitt Center is already being dubbed the greenest commercial building in the world, and the University of Washington’s Integrated Design Laboratory is getting in on the ground floor, literally.

Currently located just west of campus on Northeast Northlake Way, the lab is preparing to move into the first floor of the Bullitt Foundation’s new headquarters at 1501 East Madison Street between downtown and Capitol Hill in late April.

The six-story, 50,000 square-foot building will be the first urban mid-rise commercial building in the United States to meet the goals of the Living Building Challenge. This certification promotes the most advanced measurements of sustainability in buildings. Designed with a lifespan of 250 years, the building includes 26 geothermal wells, deep wells that use the earth’s energy for heating and cooling, and has a 56,000-gallon cistern in the basement to capture rainwater.

The 50,000-square-foot building will generate all of its energy using solar panels, and all of its water will be provided by harvested rainwater.

There are indoor composting toilets, a system of geothermal wells for heating, and the building’s wood-framed structure is made out of Forest Stewardship Council certified wood.

“Now that fossil fuels face serious constraints, it makes sense to turn back to ecology for lessons on how to best organize our cities and industries,” Bullitt Foundation President Denis Hayes said. “We started asking what a building might look like if we viewed it as an organism with a brain, a nervous system, a respiratory system, a digestive system, etc., and that provided for its own needs without harming its neighbors.”

Steve Whitney, a program officer at the Bullitt Foundation, said the building serves as a way for the foundation to show how more buildings can be constructed with sustainable practices in mind.

“It really is a program-related investment,” Whitney said. “The building is offering us some leverage to identify where policies and practices need to be changed and to demonstrate how they can be changed to make buildings like this far more common in the future than they are today.”

While the design lab’s daylight-testing chamber has been moved to a new daylighting lab in the basement of Gould Hall, the rest of the lab’s work will move to the new building.

Rob Péna, an associate professor in the UW Department of Architecture and a building performance consultant at the lab, said the new building will allow them to expand their research, education, and outreach efforts.

“We’ll be teaching UW courses on net-zero and high performance buildings; we’ll be having a series of national forums on how to create high performance buildings, and we’ll be leading public tours everyday on the building,” Péna said.

Péna said the building will also receive a good deal of attention internationally, allowing them to promote the work they’re doing at the lab and the UW as a whole.

“We’re preparing for quite a lot of attention and with that, hopefully, comes an opportunity to showcase what we do at the UW, as well as provide opportunities for research and education for multiple disciplines across campus,” Péna said.

Heather Burpee, a research assistant professor and health design specialist at the lab, said it’s exciting not only to be part of a building that has great goals but also has the opportunity for outreach.

“I think it’s a really important building for Seattle, for the Pacific Northwest, and for the nation to see how we can do things different and in a positive way,” Burpee said.

As the first building of its scale to strive for this level of sustainability, Whitney said the Foundation was able to identify obstacles that come with green building and how to get past them. With that in mind, they’re hoping their work serves as a catalyst for further advances around the world.

“If in ten years, our building is still the greenest commercial building on the planet, we’ll be disappointed,” Whitney said.

Péna said the Design Lab will begin moving into the Bullitt Center sometime in mid-March. The official grand opening of the building is scheduled for Earth Day, April 22.

Greener Cities is a division of Crossbow Communications. Greener Cities is a resource for sustainable and resilient cities and communities around the world.

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After our recent affordable green housing project post, several readers expressed an interest in learning more about the details. You might be surprised to learn that the elements of an affordable green home are really not all that mysterious. In fact, many of them are already becoming common practice because they just make sense.

I would have to say, that the biggest advantage to any green home building project is that it gives everyone involved  an opportunity to evaluate new technologies and practices. This leads to the discovery of smarter construction methods, more efficient and affordable homes and reduces the impact on the environment.

The planning process is the single most important element of an affordable green home project. Creating detailed builder specifications makes the process much easier. Because of the advances in home construction and system technologies, it is constantly becoming easier to implement green elements. Thorough research in the planning stage gives the home builder valuable information that makes the implementation much easier.

According to Monte Stock, the architect of the project in Kahoka, Missouri, “That project was able to meet the requirements of building to National Green Building Standard without being complex or a big hurdle.”

Monte and I agree that the upfront work that went into the plans and specifications helped to attract a builder that could really do the job well and establish a great working relationship. There were three general areas that were the focus of this recent project. Sustainable Planning, Green Design and Building Techniques and Owner/Tenant Education and Documentation. Below you will find some examples of the elements of each of these general areas. The planning process focused on 3 goals:

• Incorporate sustainable or “green” and energy efficient design, building and materials
• Reduce operating, utility and maintenance costs
• Designed and built to meet the Bronze level of the National Green Building Standard™ under the “Green Building” path.

Optimizing Site Orientation and Placement of Building Components

• Extended roof overhangs to protect from sun and moisture
• Infill lots used
• Landscaping – Drought resistant trees and plantings

Resource Efficiency

• House size under 1500 square feet
• Roof trusses used
• Building components that require no additional site finishes – windows, siding, gutters, porch railings and columns
• Covered front and rear entries (ample porches provide shade and water protection)
• Water resistant exterior barrier – “house wrap”

Energy Efficiency

• Building Envelope Well Sealed and Insulated
• Efficient Heating, Ventilation and Cooling Systems
• Appliances, lighting fixtures, and ceiling fans that have received Energy Star™ certification.

Water Efficiency

• Plumbing fixtures and toilets are WaterSense™ certified or provide low-flow/low water usage.
• No irrigation system needed for outdoor landscaping

Indoor Air Quality

• Controlling the entry of pollutants, especially VOCs with choices of low VOC paints, adhesives and flooring choices
• Ventilating with exhausts in kitchen and baths to move pollutants and moisture out of the home.
• Managing moisture in the build and operation of the home.
• No garage. Reducing exposure to harmful exhaust.

Greener Cities is a division of Crossbow Communications. Greener Cities is a resource for sustainable and resilient cities and communities around the world.

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As e-commerce siphons an ever-larger portion of retail sales, what keeps businesses and consumers congregating at shopping malls?

For Simon Property Group, the largest real estate company in the world with approximately 326 retail properties in North America and Asia, at least part of the answer is tied its innovative sustainability agenda.

By testing groundbreaking new energy-efficiency and waste-management processes, for example, the mall operator hopes to encourage successful retailers to take up residence because their operating costs might be lower in a Simon Property than elsewhere.

“These systems range from very simple to very complicated, but the common theme is how can we make it easier for our tenants,” said George Caraghiaur, Simon Property Group’s senior vice president of sustainability.

Energy management systems have been installed across a large portion of its facilities, which cover a massive 245 million square feet. Daylight harvesting technology helps handle tasks such as turning lights on and off when appropriate, while telematics applications are being deployed to help malls automate their cooling and heating settings according to ever-changing variables, such as outside air humidity. The team also is evaluating its demand-response options, in order to earn price breaks when utilities face peak load situations.

Managers can access all of the data that Simon Property collects so they can compare consumption to other sites.

Aside from what it can do for tenants, Simon Property seeks to attract the sort of shopper who cares about his or her individual environmental footprint. One demonstration is its substantial investment in electric-vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure, meant to help assuage lingering range anxiety associated with EVs.

“Malls are somewhere between work and home, so it’s a natural place to put them,” he said. “If people come to the mall, they will spend time here.”

Caraghiaur is the first to acknowledge that some programs Simon Property is trying are challenging and unproven, which is one reason the company lets individual property managers take the lead when tackling new initiatives. But two ongoing pilot programs make it clear the company is willing to take risks.

In North Carolina, for example, the Concord Mills outlet mall has created a dedicated “Plastic Room” where a hydraulic baler is used to compress clear packaging materials such as shrink wrap, garment bags and other shipping materials generated by the local retailers and notoriously difficult to sort out. Local partners pick up the 160-pound bales at regular intervals for recycling.

Over the past six months, 140 retailers at the Concord Mills site have helped the mall staff collect about 20,000 pounds of materials, diverting it from landfills, according to Caraghiaur.

One big challenge was figuring out where to install the baler and store the bales.

“Most malls are designed to house tenants and make the shoppers’ lives comfortable, but they are not necessarily configured to make it easy to do recycling,” he said.

The plan is to collect a year’s worth of data to document costs versus benefits. That information will be used to identify other locations where similar projects might be feasible.

“Our goal is to learn what issues we will face,” Caraghiaur said. “In the end, we will take the lessons learned and apply them elsewhere.”

Simon Property has been aggressive in installing charging stations as a perk for EV drivers, placing about 100 systems at more than 40 properties so far, mirroring EV adoption trends.

It hasn’t stopped there: Its location in Carmel, Ind., agreed in early 2013 to test a first-of-its-kind system developed by several technology companies, including Toshiba, Duke Energy, ITOCHU Corp., Tom Wood Automotive Group and Indiana’s clean tech program, called Energy Systems Network.

The fast-charging system relies on 10 kilowatts (10 kW) of solar generating capacity and it comes with an integrated, 75-kW battery from Toshiba to store that power, so the chargers still work when it’s cloudy or after dark.

Simon Property doesn’t charge for usage. Instead, Caraghiaur said, it views the chargers as an amenity for shoppers who happen to be parked at the mall.

Greener Cities is a division of Crossbow Communications. Greener Cities is a resource for sustainable and resilient cities and communities around the world.

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Several corporate leaders, including Kohl’s, HEI Hotels and Resorts, Staples and Walgreens, have volunteered to reduce energy use 20 percent by 2020 as part of a challenge initiated by President Barack Obama. But that’s not the big deal.

The big deal is that they have agreed to publicly disclose how they’re doing it. Factories, data centers, stores and other large energy users often balk at revealing their energy efficiency strategies. After all, saving energy reduces the cost of doing business and gives them a competitive edge. By sharing details, they tip off the competition to better practices.

By not sharing details, however, they force others to reinvent the wheel — if they invent it at all — thus slowing U.S. progress in reaching national energy productivity goals aimed at bettering the economy.

“The real goal is to figure out who is leading in the space and how we can learn from their learning and replicate their activities in the marketplace quickly,” said Maria Vargas, director of the Better Buildings Challenge at the U.S. Department of Energy.

Vargas described the Obama strategy June 18-19 at the Northeast Energy Efficiency Partnerships’ (NEEP) annual summit, an event that drew more than 300 people to Springfield, Mass.

“I have children, and they watch a show called ‘Mythbusters,'” she said. “So the way I think about the Better Business Challenge is as ‘barrier busters.'”

Some companies participating in the program have pursued energy efficiency for a decade or more, so can bust a lot of myths and offer substantial guidance. She relayed two examples where participants offered a useful strategy or technology.

Kohl’s was interested for years in pursuing energy efficiency, but the energy team could not convince the department store’s chief financial officer. It was largely a communications problem, as Vargas tells it.

“The CFO kept looking for different criteria than they had. They finally said, ‘This is crazy. We’re literally speaking different languages,'” she said.

Then, Kohl’s added someone from the CFO’s office to the energy team. That changed everything.

“All of a sudden, they move to the different country, and they are forced to speak the language,” she said.

As a result, Kohl’s is now “very much moving down an energy efficiency path and seeing tremendous savings across its portfolio,” she said.

Vargas also told the story of HEI Hotels & Resorts, owner of the Hilton, Marriott, Westin and other hotels. The company has developed an “easy, yet sophisticated” energy dashboard. “It was very proprietary,” she said.

A snapshot of the Energy Looking Glass, HEI’s energy management tracking tool.

But after getting a direct request from Obama, Kohl’s CEO said, “The president asked me to share, and I’m going to share,'” Vargas said. “So they have.”

Ultimately, though, Vargas sees the federal program as a way to bolster innovation for communities, cities and states — the true launching pad for an energy-efficiency revolution.

“I firmly believe that all politics, all success, all life is local,” she said. “The Department of Energy can tell somebody what to do, and people will be like, ‘That’s nice, pass the muffins.'”

NEEP, host of the conference where Vargas spoke, works within one of the nation’s most active regions for energy efficiency. In keeping with the idea that it helps to get information about successful companies out there, NEEP announced several business leader awards. Videos or written profiles are available about the energy efficiency efforts of the 12 companies and organizations.

This year’s winners were American University, Atlas Box & Crating Company, Anheuser-Busch (New Hampshire and New York), Baystate Health, Boehringer Ingelheim, Boston College, Cape Cod Commercial Linen Service, Covidien, ESPN, Green Mountain Coffee Roasters and Woodstock Inn Station and Brewery.

Greener Cities is a division of Crossbow Communications. Greener Cities is a resource for sustainable and resilient cities and communities around the world.

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In a sheltered corner of one of the greatest megacities on Earth, there is a place where lizards careen around tree trunks, butterflies drink nectar from vermillion flowers and hummingbirds whisk the heavy air with their wings. Stand in the botanical gardens of the Bosque de Chapultepec (the Chapultepec forest) and listen carefully enough, and something remarkable happens: birdsong begins to pierce the groan of trucks and the screech of taxi horns from the long avenue that bisects the park.

The gardens are home to one of a growing number of azoteas verdes – or green roofs – that are springing up around Mexico City as part of the metropolis’s efforts to purge its air of the pollution that has long been among its least-desired claims to fame.

The azotea verde atop the circular single-story offices of the botanical gardens, is planted with hardy stonecrop, which can withstand the Mexico City summer, but which also produces oxygen and serves as a filter to draw out the carbon dioxide and heavy metal particles in the air. As well as providing the park’s squirrels with an arena in which to practise their parkour, the roof help regulates the temperature of the offices below and soaks up rainwater to keep the building dry.

Last year, the city’s environment secretariat spent almost $1m (£595,000) on the azoteas verdes project, bringing the total area of green roofs in hospitals, schools and government buildings to 21,949 sq m. This year, the investment will rise by a third.

Mexico City’s environment secretary, Tanya Müller, says: “In a city like ours where urban development puts pressure on the space we have at ground level, we have to take advantage of our rooftops to create a green urban infrastructure.”

The green roofs do far more than simply purify the air: they reduce the “heat island effect”, teach children about nature and speed up the recuperation rates of hospital patients, she adds. A little way across town, not far from the city’s ancient heart, the Zócalo, sits the secretariat’s air-monitoring lab. It too has been given over to greenery and from its neatly planted roof, where dedicated staff congregate for lunchtime exercise classes, the haze that blankets the capital is plain to see. It smudges the outlines of distant towerblocks, as well as the mountains that enclose the city and its 21 million inhabitants.

But, as Müller is keen to point out, fighting air pollution demands rather more technological solutions than sowing seeds on rooftops. Her glass-and-steel office, which overlooks the Zócalo, feels like a curious hybrid of an internet startup office and an architectural practice. On the wall by her desk is an enormous screen with a live Twitter feed and electronic maps showing the temperature and ozone levels of Mexico City and the surrounding area. On a wet April afternoon, the ozone levels are creeping above the normal levels, but other pollutants are within the usual range.

“I have this dashboard on my smartphone and it’s the same dashboard as the department of air monitoring has and the mayor has,” Müller says. “We know how the air quality is every day and whether we have to take decisions.” Readings from the 29 air-monitoring stations in the city and the surrounding state of Mexico can trigger a variety of responses.

If pollution levels are seriously high and remain so for 48 hours, the environment secretariat’s Hoy No Circula (No driving today) ban kicks in, and those cars with registration plates of a certain colour and two-digit code are not allowed on the roads. Anyone found driving when they shouldn’t be has their plates taken away and must pay what Müller describes as a very harsh fine of 20 days’ pay based on the Mexico City minimum wage.

“Even though the measures aren’t very popular – we’re the first administration not to have suspended Hoy No Circula for any holiday – they are very responsible,” she adds proudly. Unsurprisingly, Müller, who cycles to work, is a big fan of pedal power. The two mountain bikes parked in a rack outside her office, up the stairs from the Diego Rivera murals that decorate the walls, suggest that her staff are too.

By expanding the city’s Metro system and investing in the Ecobici bike hire scheme – which is used for about 26,000 journeys a day – she hopes to wean people off their dependence on cars.

“We still have a long way to go: although 80% of the population uses public transport, the city is still very car-orientated,” Müller says. “What we’re trying to do is make people conscious of how you use your car: it has to be in a much more rational and responsible manner.”

Other initiatives to improve the city’s air quality over the past two decades – such as moving refineries beyond its boundaries and introducing cleaner buses – appear to be paying off. Between 1990 and 2012, levels of ozone fell from 43 parts per billion to 27 parts per billion; sulphur dioxide from 55 parts per billion to five parts per billion, and carbon monoxide from 84 parts per billion to 10 parts per billion.

Muller says air quality is her priority “because it has an impact on your health and that obviously has consequences for your quality of life”. She adds: “We’re working on air quality and climate change together, because whatever we do for air quality and emissions will have a positive effect on climate change. At the end of the day, we want a city that can offer better quality of life for its citizens.”

Mexico City’s efforts to clean up its act have not gone unnoticed; Müller recently met officials from Tehran who wanted to compare notes, while members of the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group have also shown interest in the city’s smartphone apps.

As Mexico begins to shrug off its smog and attendant grimy reputation, Müller believes its strategies could help cities further north. “What’s very interesting for us is what’s happening right now in Paris and London: we somehow have this perception that in these very developed, first-world European cities with great transport and infrastructure, you’ve overcome these issues of air quality,” she says.

“But we’re seeing that it’s not so. The origin and the problem is the same: it’s the use of private automobiles. People need to know that even if you have a great public transport system, if you do not rationalize private car use, you’re going to have problems.”

Greener Cities is a division of Crossbow Communications. Greener Cities is a resource for sustainable and resilient cities and communities around the world.

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