Bringing Ecological Urbanism and Urban Political Ecology to transformative visions of water sensitivity in cities

Ecological Urbanism and Water Sensitive Urban Design have a central contribution to make in protecting and caring for people, nature and water in cities but readings of Urban Political Ecology evidence how ecological metaphors in urban design can easily translate into discriminatory urban development processes. This paper posits that for UPE...

Green Rooftops

Rio de Janeiro is an ever-changing and expanding city that is facing challenges interms of food security, urban sprawl, and the fragmentation of the green infrastructure. By mapping the surface area of the urban rooftop landscape and finding spatial synergies with the city’s socially and environmentally vulnerable areas, a case can be made in...

Reconnecting green: Towards a multi-dimensional biophilic city

Densification and greening of cities seem to exclude one another. How to deal with this? This research shows a first exploration of how city green can be optimized by integrating the facade-and rooftop green into the neighbourhood landscape. To do this, biophilic design principles were applied from a landscape architectural perspective. Due to...

More than just a Green Facade: The sound absorption properties of a vertical garden with and without plants

Up to 44% of EU residents are exposed to noise levels that are detrimental to health. In this context, vertical gardens could play an important role in architectural acoustics, where the main absorber material is the substrate soil. Plants have a beneficial effect for higher frequencies when planted in a large density. In this paper a vertical...