I have shared most of these links in previous posts but I wanted to collect them into one post, which I hope will serve as a resource to help us citizens in my city/bioregion prevent the construction of yet another generic, ugly condominium tower on the beachfront. Or or push for truly eco-friendly design of any new building. Maybe we can motivate elected leaders and developers to really care about beauty and ecosystems; we need to help them understand that those things are compatible with making money.
If we let developers build along the coast at all anymore, we need buildings like the ones being shown in these videos, but with sea grapes, saw palmetto, & other vegetation native to our bioregion. This would actually help PROTECT neighborhoods while providing beauty, heat mitigation, and of course housing.
Also if we build on the beach, I say the developers/owners need to keep/make a public access path so the condo doesn’t serve as a hostile barrier to beach access.
• 60 Condos, 150 Trees, + Wellbeing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PX7cSZSp5ac&t=9s Forest condominium in Italy — you have to see this! Video by Kirsten Dirksen (she’s known for her many many videos about tiny homes and other dwellings, and communities, that are integrated beautifully with nature).
• Vertical forest in Milan: https://www.stefanoboeriarchitetti.net/en/project/vertical-forest/ So pretty, and those numbers of trees are amazing! “The Vertical Forest is the prototype building for a new format of architectural biodiversity which focuses not only on human beings but also on the relationship between humans and other living species. The first example, built in Milan in the Porta Nuova area, consists of two towers that are respectively 80 and 112 metres high, housing a total of 800 trees (480 first and second stage trees, 300 smaller ones, 15,000 perennials and/or ground covering plants and 5,000 shrubs, providing an amount of vegetation equivalent to 30,000 square metres of woodland and undergrowth, concentrated on 3,000 square metres of urban surface. The project is also a device for limiting the sprawl of cities brought about through a quest for greenery (each tower is equivalent to about 50,000 square metres of single-family houses).”
• The Nature of Cities: Passive cooling & vegetation on skyscrapers & other tall buildings was a major topic at TNOC — The Nature of Cities virtual conference, which I attended back in 2021. https://tnoc-festival.com/wp/#about We saw so many great examples!!
• Steep “Hugelkultur” beds can produce for decades without watering or fertilizing: Nicely illustrated article from returntonow.net, about how to turn logs and other yard “waste” into spectacular tall berms that can be used to grow veggies etc. while also building healthy soil and mitigating drought-flood extremes.