The future of urbanization is green! Redshift by Autodesk recently featured an in-depth look into “Six Ways Cities are Turning Urban Cities into Nature Havens.” Some cities are now bringing nature back into their urban cores and finding great benefits to this practice. While this “blog” is typically about “metal,” highlighting trends in urbanization and understanding the impact it will have on the design and construction industry carries some weight.
Redshift highlights six individual articles that dive into the following topics: “Bringing Nature Back to the Urban Core,” “The City Within a Garden,” “Biophilia: Turning Conventional Architecture Inside-Out,””How Do You Bring Wildlife Back to the City?, “Herbal Remedy: Making Space for Nature in Cities,” and “Stanford Researchers Propose a Way to Build Nature Into Cities for Better Mental Health.”
As cited in an article by Next City, Instead of the historically done, “land clearing,” many cities are now focusing on “urban renaturing—an attempt to reinstate balance and sustainability to the city’s relationship with nature.” Cities are doing this by protecting and enhancing ecosystems and biodiversity and providing people with ways to immerse themselves in nature. For example, Singapore started a major tree-planting initiative that turned into a multifaceted, citywide renaturing effort. A tree canopy now covers 50% of the city, including corridors that link parks and natural areas.
An international team of researchers from Stanford University and the University of Washington are working to bring the mental-health benefits of nature back to city dwellers. They are helping city planners, architects, developers, and others anticipate the mental-health impacts of conserving nature and incorporating it in urban areas. The Stanford News reported, “Spending time in nature can improve mental health, but people are increasingly removed from it. A new model proposes a way of bringing those benefits to more people by incorporating nature into urban design.” The article goes on to say, “By 2050, close to two-thirds of the global population will live in cities. For people in urban areas, modern living often involves more time spent indoors, on screens and removed from nature. At the same time, worldwide, an estimated 450 million people are dealing with a mental or neurological disorder, and many of them live in cities.”
Urban rewilding projects are tempting nature back into our cities, from creating city butterfly meadows to building unlikely homes for deadly birds of prey.
For more on this topic and ways to reverse the effects of the “concrete jungle,” continue reading the article HERE.