Convivial Greenstreets: A Concept for Climate-Responsive Urban Design

Ken Tamminga,Michiel Bakx,João Cortesão

doi:10.3390/su12093790

Ken Tamminga, Michiel Bakx + Show 1 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/su12093790

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Abstract

This paper presents a conceptual framework for using “convivial greenstreets” (CG) as a resource for climate adaptation. When applied consistently, CG can become an emerging green practice with a positive impact on urban adaptation to climate change: CG may provide localized climate amelioration in ways that support social engagement outdoors. However, as spontaneous phenomena, CG should neither become an academic nor an aesthetic prescriptive tool. How then can CG be used as an active resource for urban adaptation to climate change while avoiding these two potential pitfalls? To explore this question, we present the concept of CG and the ways it can be situated in theoretical urbanism and analogous urban morphologies. We profile the CG inventory corpus and conceptualization that has taken place to date and expand them through a climate-responsive urban design lens. We then discuss how CG and climate-responsive urban design can be brought together while preventing the academization and aestheticizing of the former. This discussion is illustrated with a group of visualizations. We conclude by submitting that climate-responsive urban design and extensive and robust CG practices can co-operate to promote more resilient communities and urban climates. Finally, the conceptual framework herein sets an agenda for future research.

Highlights

This paper presents a conceptual framework for using the concept of “convivial greenstreets” (CG) as an active resource for climate adaptation in urban areas
This section presents the findings from the comparison of the theories, concepts, and spatial elements presented in the previous section. In this preliminary exploration on the topic, we observed that the reciprocity between CG and climate-responsive urban design comprehended two core aspects: CG are applied over the whole streetscape; and CG deal with spatial elements frequently used in climate-responsive urban design
Future research should include active means of engaging local actors into expanding, for instance, on the issue of aesthetics, and scholars on the issue of academization. With this introductory explorative study, we argued that convivial greenstreets can be used as an active resource for urban adaptation to climate change, while preventing its academization and aestheticizing, in two ways: by informing citizens that convivial greenstreets can boost conviviality and the climate-responsiveness of cities, so that these become a more systematic city-making practice; and by stimulating urban designers and other early-adopters to incorporate convivial greenstreets into a design schema, and to suggest to local populations how to undertake their own installations while ensuring that these informal interventions fit into a coherent climate-responsive design proposal

Summary

Introduction

This paper presents a conceptual framework for using the concept of “convivial greenstreets” (CG) as an active resource for climate adaptation in urban areas This is an exploratory study around the hypothesis that CG, when applied consistently and widely, can become an emerging green practice with impacts on the climate adaptation of urban areas. This hypothesis builds on preliminary work on the conceptualization of CG [1,2] and expands it with knowledge on climate-responsive urban design, in particular on the thermal retrofitting of outdoor public spaces in dense urban areas [3]. These informal actions might take place in semi-private areas encompassed by the streetscape (e.g., facades, front stoops, or flowerbeds) or overlapped on the public streetscape

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