Is there enough green in your life? Is a lack of nature dragging you down? Research tells us such a lack in built environments undermines our very well-being. Do you see too much of this?
And not enough of this sort of thing?
That's a reclaimed space in Paris called the Promenade Plantee, which was the world's first elevated park when it was made atop a disused rail line in 1994. Below are several more projects, some of them radical, in other cities around the globe that might provide inspiration to reclaim and reshape some of Melbourne's urban spaces. There are some extraordinary things going on.
Here's one, the A7 freeway in Hamburg. It's being covered – the road will still operate underneath – to create a giant park.
Here's how Joe Benke envisages that sort of thing working with one of Melbourne's biggest patches of concrete and bitumen, the Tullamarine Freeway.
Australia has one of the world's most urban and fastest-growing populations, but are we doing enough to increase the amount of shared green spaces?
As City Editor Clay Lucas recently reported, there were more townhouses, apartments and semi-detached buildings approved in the year to June than there were stand-alone houses, a reversal of the situation as recently as five years ago. Medium- and high-density dwelling approvals 20 to 30 kilometres from the CBD are running at nearly a fifth higher than the average over the past ten years.
As higher-density housing options are becoming more common, even on the fringes, we need to plan for community green spaces for both recreation and the growing of food.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull is pushing the idea of innovation, so now is a good time to imagine what we could do about increasing the amount of nature in the built environment, because innovation is not just about technology.
Today's instalment of The (Ideas) Zone gives you a chance to join a discussion about how to boost nature in our built environments, and to share examples of what you think works and what doesn't. Perhaps we can start a green revolution throughout Australia's cities simply by reclaiming our nature strips. Here's one photographed in Melbourne by Joe Armao – it's outside my house, and is far easier to look after than lawn.
This other Melbourne example is done by Gilbert Rochecouste, founder and managing director of Village Well, a company that creates community spaces around the world.
Earlier this year, I wrote about a suggestion to rip up part of Elizabeth Street to incorporate the waterway that flows under it, Williams Creek, into the life of the city. Here's an artist's impression of how that might work:
That prompted an adjunct professor at RMIT University's School of Global, Urban and Social Studies, Peter Fisher, to contact me with a range of suggestions of how to boost the amount of nature in Melbourne.
"Many American cities have undertaken bold initiatives to reverse a trend to hardscape – which was necessary given that 100,000 square kilometres of the USA is asphalt, which is equal to the entire area of Ohio," Peter says.
"Research is revealing that, although we may have left the savanna, it's still a part of our wiring. Hospital patients, for example, who have a view of some sort of nature – even a tree outside their window – recover faster and need less medication. There's a real concern that the young have a fraying intimacy with the natural world."
Peter will be online today to respond to your questions and comments, which you are invited to leave below.
It's in our best interest to get this right. A fresh study from the European Commission underlines that "living close to nature can have immediate positive effects on mental and physical health", and that "adding diverse vegetation to residential streets and backyards, and developing more urban greenways, has the potential to improve human health".
That Tullamarine Freeway idea is one of Peter's. It would obviously be a multibillion-dollar project, but one that would benefit generations of citizens. Here's a list of some of his other ideas:
1. Uncover the top section of Williams Creek, up near Lincoln Square. Here's a reconstruction by RMIT of what the creek used to look like.
2. Clean up, replant with indigenous plants – particularly the magenta flowering pigface that was a signature plant of the swamps and much of early Melbourne – and reintegrate the part of the Moonee Ponds Creek that runs through to the Yarra and to the bay. Peter says this should become part of the Port of Melbourne Corporation's shared spaces landscape plan.
3. Create a bird flight corridor along a recovered Tullamarine Freeway. This would feed into and enrich the existing sanctuary at Royal Park.
4. In a twist on the nature strip notion, create "pavement gardens", like this one Peter, that's him in the pic, came across in Kobe in Japan.
He reckons this would work particularly well on hilly streets, because flowing water could be a feature. In the CBD, he suggests Market, Bourke and LaTrobe streets.
5. Create acacia mini-parks. There are acacia species that bloom at different times – so it is possible to make parks with a perennial display of blooms. An example of where this would work, Peter suggests, is this site at the corner of Errol and Kind streets in North Melbourne.
6. A wetland as part of the massive Fishermans Bend redevelopment. The image below was prepared by RMIT's Interdisciplinary Conservation Science Research Group in collaboration with the RMIT Design Hub.
5. Pop-up parks, or parklets. Popular, for example, in San Francisco, these are simply big wooden boxes of plants used to create temporary parks, usually to extend restaurants or to provide public seating.
Sydney has been doing some great work on this sort stuff. The Barangaroo Point Park, part of a massive harbourside development, has 75,000 indigenous plants. Here's a glimpse:
Melbourne, too, has been doing some excellent things. It has, for example, an Urban Forest Strategy. Part of this strategy is defensive – drought. Water restrictions, extreme heat and ageing stock mean that close to 30 per cent of Melbourne's 70,000 council-owned trees, worth an estimated $650 million, are forecast to be lost in the next decade.
You can see an interactive map of trees here. This is a threat to Melbourne's internationally feted liveability – one of the city's most defining and attractive features is large parks. The City of Melbourne's forest plan, which is also a response to climate change and the extra heat generated in urban areas, aims to almost double the amount of the city under cover of trees by 2020. Doing this is crucial, but there is so much more we might do. Here are some terrific projects elsewhere.
1. The High Line in New York City. Paris' Promonade Plantee inspired this one in Manhattan. It's a disused, elevated chunk of railway that has become hugely popular – it gets about 5 million visitors a year – and has also increased property values by giving the entire precinct a lift.
2. That, in turn, prompted the world's first underground park, also in New York, called, funnily enough, Lowline – also repurposing a disused rail line.
3. Another one from Paris, the redevelopment of the former central market area, Les Halles. Here's how that'll look.
4. The greening of central Perth. The WA Planning Commission's Capital City Planning Framework document, released in 2013, says central Perth is to be "reconceived as a world-class, multi-functional green network".
5. Berlin's Tempelhof Airport has been turned into a public park and is a key habitat for endangered birds, plants and insects. (It is going to be used, for a while, as a camp for people seeking asylum in Germany from the horrors in Syria and elsewhere.)
There are many more examples. Then there are too, of course, community gardens for growing food. Why are there not so many more of them – why not several or more in each municipality in Australia – particularly as we build more and more apartments? Here's one in St Kilda.
Rooftop gardens offer a similar opportunity. Here's one run by The Urban Beehive on the roof of 50 Martin Place in central Sydney.
So, over to you. Do you think we should introduce more nature into our built environment? What would you like to see? Have you been involved in creating any such changes? You are welcome to leave questions and comments here for Peter Fisher and for each other.