Terraces and balconies in Madrid become urban gardens
Unit of The Bureau of the Greens, a coalition that includes the different organic groups, push the program in Madrid ecocity, which is referred to the creation of organic gardens in the courtyards, terraces and balconies of the city to grow organically without fertilizers, chemical insecticides and fungicides to produce small quantities of vegetables for consumption. To do so, they provide to the people, through partnership agreements with environmentalists and naturalists, access to material for the creation of the garden.
Urban gardens, an international experience. Esteban Cabal, The Green candidate for mayor of Madrid, has proposed the creation of urban gardens in an environmental reclamation project, following the experiments carried out successfully in cities like Tokyo, where the metropolitan government passed a law in 2001 requiring new buildings to a private deck over a thousand square meters, covering at least 20 of its area with gardens, or Hartford (USA), which has implemented the planting of orchards to extract Indian mustard lead from soil. A similar experience took place in Barcelona, where the Department of Environment, in collaboration with the Earth Foundation, launched the initiative in creating the balconies and patios of Barcelonans to cultivate orchards whit natural products for consumption.
Germany currently has more than thirteen million square feet of green roofs. Switzerland, Austria, Great Britain, Hungary, Netherlands, Sweden and the United States are among the countries where it promotes and regulates the installation of green roofs by local officials, often in cooperation with private entities to integrate in constructions urbanites properties that help combat the albedo effect or urban heat island effect, a phenomenon responsible for the increase of temperature inside the perimeter of a city due to warming gases produced by vehicles and air conditioners, as well as solar energy absorbed by the urban areas to the atmosphere as heat.
According to Esteban Cabal, this proposal will be under the Program to concur with the election to the polls in May 2007. For the candidate of the Greens, the facilities in these green lungs in Terrazos are interventions that do not affect the physical structure or the dynamics of the city and are above all a free choice of its people to actively improve the quality of in the life, bringing nature and incorporating its essence and positive expectations of achievement by giving the facades of these buildings that look to the sky.
Source: Los verdes