Midtown Blogger/Manhattan Valley Follies: Die Welt- The Problem with Green Cities

"The 'green infrastructure' is the capital of each city and each district and contributes to ecological-climatic compensation for recreation, health, beauty of the city and to increase in value." That means at least Michael Groschek (SPD), the North Rhine-Westphalian Minister of Construction, and with it much of the German planning office manager. You want to tap a lot of money in the context of urban development and ERDF funding to get it to advocate and to score points with voters.

Green roof, facade Green Street Green, Berlin even flow green because you want to bathe in the river Spree and previously filter the water with reed plantations in the center, arrives at the public good, for they know not what they barter for it.

Budding Prospects. Green Pioneers go with shovel and bucket through the streets and call for "Urban Gardening" new parkland in the heart of the city centers, the boundary of Kung streetlights and planting of avenues. You want to ventilate the cities, loosen, turn into "urban landscapes".

Dictatorship of the Begrüner

The greening and loosening delusion is now so widespread that architects and initiatives strongly make sure to turn the Spree river in a river pool in front of the Pergamon Museum. The dressing rooms are to be pushed under the national monument. And even that is the green fans do not go far enough. The whole center of Berlin between newly erstehendem Castle and Alexanderplatz is to be designed unique permanent in the world, as a city park. But the rule of thumb of beneficent Green is wrong. It takes the urban planning astray.

The Begrüner have the sympathy of the urban society on their side. Because by nature is a blessing each green. Entire regions on earth suffer deserted, drought and bush fires. The future of the planet, the CO₂ budget and the climate, the existence of entire nations depends on the rescue of forests and green before his exploiters, marketers, pick Zern and fire from harvesters.

But in the cities? So you have - what apparently is lacking today in so many planning authorities the expertise - be weighed very responsibly. Report this green and the observed years ago "Hang for naturalizing" can be socially and environmentally harmful - to the limit of what is tolerable to achieve the high climate targets.

Sets the compactness of the city is not at risk

The "green lungs" just in the cities are indispensable. Your care is expensive and is designed mercy of special use of the municipal authorities. Also, no one can seriously dispute that facade and roof Green enrich the urban landscape. But at parks, urban wasteland, lakes and due to the anachronistic line construction "residual green" and a lawn the fun stops. The compactness and density of cities should not be put at risk. Who writes the sustainability and ecological-climatic balance on its flags must be aware that the loosening of the cities with the overall environmental savings targets contrary.

The dispersed, greened city is a heresy of the 20th century, with the cities, as propagated should be made human, but actually resolved. They wanted to bring light, air, sun in the concrete jungles and harsh eibauen in this way healthy, hygienic, rural housing conditions. The out of the spirit of hygiene and "public health" adult ideal was laudable, as a consequence, but a madness. That this is so, you only know today.

For loosening and greening tear apart the city, leading to longer routes, timetables, higher fuel consumption, more exhaust gases and subsequently to increased particulate pollution and health numbers. The infrastructure costs (roads, pipe networks) is more and more cities financially and logistically already barely manageable, the land use of the sprawling cities of all the objectives of landscape and agricultural protection, resource conservation and environmental stewardship detrimental. Because the wayside the "productive green" - the only thing that really slows the heating of the globe.

Ten years ago, conjured seer horror scenarios of the urbanization of the earth that will supposedly make a full end of humanity. Today we know: The City as a model settlement and cultural achievement is the most ecological form of settlement at all. It bundles, networked and streamlines all consumptions and made effective the budget of the human species on a never attainable in rural areas manner.

For this purpose, but it must be applied compact and limit the proportions of open spaces and green areas with cold mind to a reasonable level. Open cut and detached cottages provide the unökologischste design is at all - they may, in both senses of the word, not run wild.

Germany's cities are as green as ever before in its history. Therefore, the greening mania evidence has long ceased to look ahead, but from his flat populism. Hence, the identification of ever new detached territories occupied in the land use and development plans, particularly East German cities not about citizen-friendly, but lack of knowledge of the planning department head of the seven-year-old "Leipzig Charter on Sustainable European Cities". It also undermines the energy savings targets that have set Germany and the EU, and makes the billion-dollar insulation programs into a farce.

Of course it affects sympathetic and noble touchingly when juvenile Green Pirate urban wasteland "occupy" and there, where stone deserts and neglected rest rooms spread plant cabbage, beans and marigolds. If however characterized, such as blocked in some districts of Berlin, much needed housing projects, it is common harmful. Although then have five or ten people a lot of fun, but the thrifty city planning falls by the wayside.

Full verquer is the claim so many ambitious planning department head, with "loosened" construction methods and additional green spaces will only mention the comprehensible residential needs of urban residents accepted, that would otherwise end up back in the country and paid their taxes elsewhere. The new massive influx from the countryside to the cities says yes to the contrary.

People are looking for the city because they want to live urban, because they value urbanity and short distances because they want to reach the shop, the pub, the doctor and the sports club foot and save the second car. Anyone who thinks that even having to grab the green idyll of their abandoned mansions on top of them, which dissolves the functional network of the city - and thus sacrificing what it represents. As a consequence, this means that the "new urban nomads" are cheated out exactly what they were looking for.

Satellite town slaves in dead areas

The same applies to the cribbed from America "gated communities", those with fences fenced and possibly guarded by gatekeepers residential complexes that do not offer just urban mix and liveliness, but sterilized, monofunctional, green decorated bedroom community Tristesse. It may, depending on the level of education, take a while until the "user" observe the deception, tear down the fence and release the ground floor for the installation of shops, restaurants and artist studios. Until then, of course, are the Trabantenstadtenklaven middle of the Municipal dead tissue that paralyzes the urban blood flow and is drawn by the predisposition to myocardial infarction.

Everyone can literally have to be green "on the doorstep" in the city, namely in the sheltered from road noise, fumes, cyclists and skaters yards. Nothing against street trees, front yards, the neighborhood park. But Park must remain Park. If it is held by the chirping of crickets Grill swaths fulfilled his role is played as a green lung. Each occupation of public space by means individual deprivation for others.

For Whom the city to "stone" that needs to move to the country. There, entire regions are almost everywhere in Germany free. Already there again "wild" landscapes, anarchic proliferating Ökosteppen and natural forests. In Rhineland-Palatinate are 40,000 rural homes empty. Country Life is feasible, neighbor. But city must remain city.