Since Europe has to deal with increased heat waves, cities are looking for new ways to keep urban areas cool and worth living
With a limited space for new parks and trees, a new creative solution unfolds that has spent itself in green spaces.
All over Spain and Italy, projects such as Big4Life and Life+ A_Greenet use the use of green roofs and facades to combat rising temperatures, to improve biological diversity and to improve urban life.
Buildings to living ecosystems
In the Spanish region of Catalonia, the Big4Life project works in Barcelona, Lleida and El Prat de Llobregat to integrate green into existing buildings. This concept, which is known as a building -integrated green (BIG), includes characteristics such as roof gardens and vertical vegetable walls.
Instead of building new parks, the projects reorganize the urban landscape by adding structures such as offices, houses and public facilities. Overall, the goal is to mitigate the municipal Heat Island effect in which dense concrete and metal absorb heat and create healthier and quieter environments for the residents.
One example is an office building in the Tibidabo Joint Park in Barcelona, in which plants grow along the outer walls. In the historic old town, a residential building has a green roof, which serves as the community of the community.
Sustainable green for a hard environment
Urban environments, especially in the Mediterranean, face challenges for maintaining green. Concrete and asphalt intensify the heat while the water resources are limited. Big4Life addresses this through xeriscaping, a water -efficient landscape design in which drought -tolerant plants and soil cover such as stones or mulch are used to minimize water evaporation.
The project also includes local communities to maintain green roofs and facades. By strengthening construction owners and residents, the initiative ensures that these rooms remain alive and sustainable over time.
A greener roof was recently revived on the L'Arteà auditorium in El Prat de Llobregat after the failure of weed overgrowth. The team replaced it with heat and drought-resistant plants such as Sedum, a low-maintenance way that is ideal for roof gardens. Camera traps are now used to monitor wildlife activities at these locations and show visits to birds such as magpies and sparrows.
A common European efforts to cool cities
Big4Life is part of the city refresh campaign, which is led by the EU Federation of the Mayor and promotes natural-based solutions for cool urban areas. It also complements the new European Bauhaus initiative and the EU strategy for adapting to climate change and places environmentally related sustainability in the heart of urban development.
In Italy, life+ A_Greenet project in Italy makes similar progress along the Adriatic coast. The initiative combines green walls, restored soils, urban forests and water features such as fountains and lakes and aims to reduce the city's surface temperatures by 4–10 ° C by 2030.
In the summer of the heat wave 2023, A_Greenet's climate and health observatory urged urgent measures when he claimed longer temperatures above 30 ° C. The recommendations included less asphalt and more green, which are now integrated into long -term urban planning.
The future of urban life
Both4life and Life+ A_Greenet show that climate management is not only a technical challenge in cities, but also about the redesign of life, work and interaction with their surroundings. By converting buildings into green oases, these projects offer practical and scalable solutions that bring nature back into the heart of the city.