Seeding the City

It’s hard to imagine now, in the dead of winter, the return of summer, but it will come and once again, those of us who live in cities will find ourselves sweltering in our urban heat islands. Unlike the suburbs or those areas that still retain a large amount of green space, our cities are mostly concrete, glass, asphalt, and steel. Our tall buildings create artificial canyons in which the warm air never escapes, the asphalt absorbs the heat, and the glass walls reflect sunlight back and forth like a hall of mirrors. The result is that the temperature of our cities rises at faster rate then the surrounding, less densely built areas. And so every summer, those of us who live in large cities, fight the heat by cranking up our air conditioners. But the hot exhaust from our air conditioning systems increases the temperature outside, exacerbating the urban heat effect. On top of all this, we waste a tremendous amount of energy, running the millions of air conditioners that cool our cities. So what to do?

The artist, Eve Mosher, addresses the climate problems of our urban environment in her latest project “Seeding the City”, which combines social networking, green roofs, and urban mapping. “Seeding the City” is a public art project that gives individuals small green roof modules (special self-contained low planter boxes with native plants or sedum) to plant on their roofs. Each location is marked with a roof top flag and a ground level street flag. At the same time an on-line virtual map is created to mark the growing network of tiny green plots as they spread virally across the city. This is a work of art that exists as an on-going social collaboration, rather than a static object.

And yet, given the scale of this project, its biggest impact will not be on the physical climate, but rather the social climate, opening minds to the idea of green roofs as an effective strategy for improving our urban environment.