LA and Chicago show how dense urban areas can become more nature friendly, by planting on their roofs, and you have to see the pictures at the link!
An excerpt.
Top-Down Greening In The Urban Core
27 July, 2006 - 7:00am
Author: Nate Berg
Can cities get back in touch with nature? Planners, developers, architects, and policy makers convened in Los Angeles June 7 to face the challenge and develop a plan of action to help bring life onto the rooftops of L.A.'s downtown.
Now available in a Planetizen Podcast are highlights of a speech given at this symposium by Paul Kephart, an ecologist and land-use planner with Rana Creek Restoration Ecology in Carmel Valley, California. The Podcast can be heard here.
Top-Down Greening In The Urban Core: Coverage of the Los Angeles Green Roof Market Development Symposium
"Nature" is increasingly represented in the urban world as an incidental garnish -- a potted shrub at the door of a towering high-rise; a bush inside the loop of a freeway onramp.
These greening gestures calmly try to suggest a connection between the urban environment and the natural one. Yet other than providing window dressing, they contribute little to counter the harm that cities inflict on the natural ecology.
So what is a densely developed and thoroughly paved American downtown to do?
Such was the topic of discussion at the recent Green Roof Market Development Symposium in Los Angeles. The conference, which was sponsored by Green Roofs For Healthy Cities, an industry association representing thousands of architects, engineers, planners, horticulturists, developers, and policy makers in the U.S. and Canada, was one of many events that the group has organized around the country.
The organization has been working for more than seven years to promote rooftop gardens as a way to get some greenery back into cities while actually improving the environment, and advises local governments, planners and developers on the different methods they can use to implement green roofs.
Attended by nearly 100 developers, planners, architects and public servants, the symposium offered a wealth of knowledge about rooftop gardens, from their design, to the various products used in their construction, to the challenges of convincing developers to double or even triple their roofing costs to integrate plant life. The overall goal of the event was to help develop a rooftop garden plan for Los Angeles.
