Tokyo Babylon

The idea I have of rooftop gardening is basically right hemisphere thinking, gestalt, environmentalism and total systems design. Hey, nice catchwords you’ll say but how do you connect them altogether. Well says I, you’ve probably got the idea already. You see the right half of the brain is the part that synthesizes, sees the larger picture, makes logical jumps to join seemingly unrelated concepts, while the left hand of the brain is the part that breaks things down into the their components, puts things into sequential and chronological order, tots up figures etc.Thus you have to look at a city as a city as well as a collection of individual buildings, roads etc. While city designers and architects can do the unit stuff fairly well (though I’d argue that it’s debatable since I would argue they start from weak premises) they don’t seem to know how to organize them into systems. You see if our bodies ran as inefficiently as most buildings we’d need to eat the contents of an entire fridge every day in order to maintain our body temperature and probably be connected to the water tip to supply our sweat glands. Our body’s don’t work as a collection of discrete systems, which is why I wrote about accupuncture before.  However planning systems of this sort requires a major increase in complexity as far as design is concerned. But hey aren’t we living in the fully computerized, CAD CAM knowledge society?

Now rooftop gardens have proven to be multifunctional to a very high degree. They reduce the heat island effect that comes from sticking concrete slabs under the burning sun all day and letting them bleed heat into the building and the environment. Rooftop gardens reduce heat build up in buildings, which of course means less AC use, which means less of an electricity demand spike in summer. In winter they provide additional insulation and therefore buildings require less heating, preventing a heater demand electricity spike in winter.  You might ask whether Tokyo Electric Power Company would like rooftop gardens. The answer would probably be less since they have to keep power stations mothballed for six months of the year just so they can be brought online for the summer and winter spikes. This is very, very expensive. Conservation methods are almost always cheaper than paying for additional capacity.

As an aside, when you see ads from oil companies telling you that to supply a city the size of Paris with renewable electricity would require millions of wind turbines they’re basically talking out of their ass. What they’re doing is calculating peak demand, without conservation measures. However given that most cities are scandalously inefficient users of energy and materials this is  view of the world that unsurprisingly biased  towards their self interest.  ‘We are global warming villains, you may hate us  but you don’t want to be cold this winter, so you need us”

What electricity companies would most like to see is static constant demand so that they can make a constant profit without having to mothball plants, fire up their their least profitable power stations every time there’s a spike in demand or spend billions on new power plants. Some utilities in the US gave their customers more efficient light bulbs to do exactly what I’m saying here. However a rooftop garden unlike a bulb is multifunctional, and it is this multifunctionality that makes a rooftop garden so much more desirable. It can be designed to be part of a larger system that provides economic, environmental, social and psychological benefits.

In order to make the connections and build the system you need to use the right hand side of your brain more. You need to see the big picture ‘gestalt’, you need to see how that system fits into the environment and benefits it. You need to see how  bringing people and nature together in cities makes for better communities.