A Notion About Cities
How many times have you stared out of your window to see some trees and many buildings towering over a typical cityscape? Of course, this cityscape comes with a few comforts that large cities have to offer, however, the truth is that the price we pay for these comforts is evident in all the gadgets we need to survive in it. From our Air conditioners and air purifiers to refrigerators and washing machines. Our lives are geared to maximise efficiency and increase productivity. I am sure that economists of the old would genuinely appreciate this, but the truth is that there must be more to life in the city than just the collection of labour factories that they are today.
The idea of having sustainable and green cities is not new or revolutionary. Neither is the idea of bringing back greenery to our cities. For as long as we have had modern cities, governments have placed varying amounts of importance on this issue and initiated various plans to bring back the greenery to our city spaces and also try and cool down the environment in cities, which is a much-needed bonus.
Fun Fact: today, Singapore has more air-conditioning units per capita than anywhere else in South-East Asia. For the last decade, they have been trying to mitigate this issue by cooling down their city using technology and effectively reintroducing greenery.
One method to cool down cities starts with the theory that a forest is not a large space of treetops. It depends on the idea that a forest can be a densely populated area of tree coverage within a space as small as 30 square meters…in other words, lesser than the typical size of an apartment. This is the idea behind the Miyawaki Method. This method focuses on aggressively planting a diverse range of native tree species to a designated region with a coverage of 2–4 trees per square meter. With care and maintenance within 2–3 years, these pockets of land then become fully self-sustaining forests and coexist within the man-made structures of a city. These ‘micro forests’ help lower temperatures in concrete heat islands reduce air and noise pollution, attract local birds and insects and create carbon sinks. While this is not the entire solution to cooling down our cities it is definitely part of the mix of solutions needed to combat this issue that many of us around the globe face.
Singapore as part of their cooling the down city initiative also announced the “digital urban climate twin”-DUCT for short, which is a modelling plan to help policymakers and urban planners test out the temperature impact of different scenarios. Furthermore, the design, layout and materials used in the construction of buildings within the city play an important role in keeping cities cool. In extremely hot and humid climates features like deep verandas, cavity walls and an internal courtyard keep houses around 2 and a half degrees cooler than the outside. They are also some of the classic features of buildings found in Chennai.
The truth is that there are many elements of design, urban planning, governance and city space utilisation that could do more to keep our cities cool. The point is that by trying to maintain cooler temperatures within our cities we build spaces that work less like labour factories, use lesser energy in order to artificially maintain habitable temperatures and also reduce our carbon footprint in the process.
