Posts Tagged ‘trees’

Tweet “The more money you have, the more vegetation you have and the less urban heat island you experience”, said Chris Martin, a landscape horticulturist and ecosystem stress plant physiologist, at an urban heat island panel discussion I attended yesterday in Tempe organized by ASU’s Sustainable Cities Network. Another panelist, Professor Harvey Bryan, a building technology expert with the ASU School of Sustainability, confirmed Martin’s sentiment saying, “wealthier communities are cooler than poorer ones.” The fact that wealthier communities enjoy a cooler summertime temperatures than their poorer neighbors resonated deeply with me because I see it everyday in my own…

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Tweet The Marq2 was a 48-block long redevelopment project in downtown Minneapolis.  This project utilizes the Silva Cell, to contain large amounts of bioretention underneath the paving.  Photo courtesy of The Kestrel Design Group. Do you know what green infrastructure is?  It’s the stuff inbetween gray infrastructure (streets, piping, roofs, bridges, drains) and blue infrastructure (the lakes, rivers and other natural bodies of water).  Green infrastructure helps filter, clean and minimize the amount of gray infrastructure run-off that goes into our lakes, rivers and natural bodies of water. I learned all this from the brilliant landscape architect Peter MacDonagh, partner…

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Tweet As I’ve discussed in the previous weeks on the Wednesday Phoenix Tree and Shade Masterplan series, the first step outlined in the Masterplan to restore our urban forest is Raising Awareness.  The second is Preserve, Protect and Increase.  Today I’ll be talking about the third and final step towards the Masterplan’s 2030 goal of a 25% canopy coverage in Phoenix – Sustainable, Maintainable Infrastructure. The goal of this step, according to the Masterplan, is to “Treat the urban forest as infrastructure to ensure that trees and engineered shade are an integral part of the city’s planning and development process”. …

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Tweet Last week, in the third installment of the series on the Tree and Shade Masterplan, I promised to talk about steps 2 and 3 in the implementation of the plan.  But I’ll talk about those things next Wednesday and this is why:  just a few hours ago I had lunch with the authors of the marvelous Tree and Shade Masterplan – Ken Vonderscher, Richard v-C Adkins, and Lysistrata Hall – and I learned so much from them that I wanted to share it with you today, while it’s fresh on my mind.  Ken, Richard and Lysistrata all work for…

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