Tag Archives: green roofs

blue-green roofs in the Netherlands

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Blue-green roofs seem like a good idea.

Beautiful green roofs have popped up all over the world: specially selected plants growing on structures specially designed to manage the extra weight of biomass. Amsterdam has taken that one step further with blue-green roofs, specially designed to capture rainwater. One project, the Resilience Network of Smart Innovative Climate-Adapative Rooftops, or RESILIO, has covered over 100,000 square feet of roofs in Amsterdam, including 86,000 square feet on social housing complexes. Citywide, the blue-green roof coverage is even bigger and growing, currently estimated at over 500,000 square feet.

Wired

Making this widespread would be great, because buildings represent a large proportion of impervious surfaces in urban areas, and in the type of dense, walkable urban areas some of us think are best for people and the environment overall, there is not always enough room to deal with runoff from rooftops when it gets to the ground. So dealing with it on rooftops is great.

But alas…despite the impression that this is a new technology, it has been around for a long time and it is just not catching on in the United States. Because the construction industry in the United States is change resistant, inefficient, unproductive, and unimaginative. One could imagine this changing – there is a lot of money that could be made and a lot of jobs that could be created. More prefabricated building components is one idea that has been tossed around and around and implemented elsewhere. But decade after decade after decade, we just do not change in the United States. Call it the old American can’t do spirit.

green roofs

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Green roofs continue to catch on very, very slowly in the U.S. They are pretty common in Europe. Toronto has a fairly aggressive ordinance requiring them on most new non-residential buildings. Meanwhile, in the U.S. we have scattered demonstration projects and a few tax incentives. San Francisco has just become the first U.S. city to take steps toward requiring them in private development.

We have a strange relationship with technology in this country. We have embraced information technology, but in more traditional fields like civil engineering, architecture and construction our professionals seem to lack information, imagination, and intellectual curiosity about what is going on elsewhere in the world. The thinking typically goes that a new technology is not cost-effective because it is not common, and it is not common because it is not cost-effective. Short-term market forces don’t drive development of the technology in this situation, especially for long-lived technologies like buildings, highways, or pipes. Government can estimate the potential long-term benefits of adopting new technologies, then fund research, development, and lower barriers to new business creation by, to give just one example, freeing entrepreneurs from the burden of having health care tied to a full time corporate job. But our politicians seem incapable of understanding these slightly complex issues, and our citizenry is not demanding that they do.