More "Living Façades" on building exteriors by Edificionado

Thanks for your contribution to the challenge, "Living facades" in buildings is a sustainable idea. However this idea is not new, this has been around for a long time. So to add value to the existing idea, you should consider exploring following queries.

1. How can we add "Living facades" to existing buildings at a consumer level, what are the products that users can use to grow Plants in buildings. 

I mean products like this.

http://www.thisisinsider.com/garden-tower-2017-5

2. What changes or innovations need to be made during construction of these buildings to include living Facades.

3. What are the additional unexplored benefits it can bring to buildings and consumers.

Dear Aadhithya and Ralf,

Thank you for the links and comments.  I have tried to integrate the content/responses in the proposal.

I included an explanation behind the country selection. I'd be comfortable changing the selection to highlight projects going on elsewhere, as appropriate.  Until a recent bugfix, I had to re-select the country fields with every small edit to any field in the proposal.

Hi María,

Thanks for your support! I have edited the proposal. I'm aware that most national governments have their Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) from the Paris agreement. Do you know of any that specifically refer to green walls or living façades or vertical forests or similar? Do you know of any national governments that are involved in projects implementing this practice, which are not referenced in the proposal? Especially in the United States, we have learned that we cannot presently depend on our national government for any actions addressing climate change, including any steps to advance our own INDC or honor other terms from the agreement.  We are instead more focused on actions and practices that can be implemented locally by subnational governments and/or non-governmental actors (like building owners and architects).  Of course, national governments elsewhere might be more supportive.

Best wishes,
Ben

Hi Ben, 

It is great to see the positive dynamics as feedback from others come in and is embedded in the proposal pulling up new feedback. And this also triggers new connections. The ReGen Villages concept by James Ehrlich (entrepreneur in residence at Stanford University) comes to my mind in this context. 

@Maria, many thanks for the info on the approach Buenos Aires takes towards reaching the climate goals. 

Best regards, Ralf 

Hi Ben, 

Thank you for taking into account my comments.

I agree with you, but we can pull up these proposal together. 

I don´t know about the INDC´s related, but here you have a new link to show you how the local and national goverment can work as a team:

www.buenosaires.gob.ar/noticias/la-ciudad-frente-al-cambio-climatico

Thank you Ralf for your comments too!

Best regards,

María

@Aadhithya Thanks for the links!  The last two especially seem particularly interesting, and should be integrated with the proposal text (though I unfortunately don't have time to do that personally just now).   

In the first, the "garden houses" of ancient Egypt seemed to be just houses near/with a lot of gardens, where a garden was typically an enclosed area for plants.  I wouldn't be completely surprised if something like this used to exist somewhere, but I still think it's a good practice that could use a lot more widespread adoption (it's currently seen as a limited or novelty kind of thing in many places), and that wider adoption could bring significant benefits.   

The hydroponic living walls article opens with a focus on novelty, explaining the lack of prior coverage because "technology was still being developed for vertical walls."  I think that helps boost the argument for points on the "novelty" judging criteria.  

For only carbon absorption benefits, it's probably more cost-effective to put extra greenery in non-urban places (or to just stop burning down rainforests etc. to make room for e.g. grazing land), than to put that extra plant matter on or around buildings.  However, putting these extra plants on the sides of buildings especially in dense urban cores has many stronger benefits that are more direct to the people (and other species) living there, as outlined in the proposal (e.g. air quality, noise reduction, lower stress, better physical & mental health, etc.).  Further, getting people more mentally connected to and aware of the importance of the natural world can help shift individual actions and build political will for collective actions that have a larger impact on climate.

@Pla Green roofs are important too!  I included a note about these in Related Proposals from very early in proposal development, but I think trying to cover that topic in detail here would overwhelm the focus of this proposal. 

Thanks for your support!

P.S.: I do not plan on running social media campaigns during the voting period - so if you want to see the proposal do well in "People's Choice," mark your calendar to spread the word!

As an update, I have integrated content from those two articles as planned & noted in prior comments.  

Thanks again to all who support and comment helpfully on the proposal!

Ben - If you want to add technology to the mix, to monitor and assess the success of the green walls/roofs - you might want to see Radu Motisan's creations - The portable environmental monitor project or the uRADMonitor Model D https://www.uradmonitor.com/hackaday-prize-2015-best-product-finals/ and Model D https://www.uradmonitor.com/model-d-production-ready/