Parks / Lungs

1. An area of public land in a town or a city where people go to walk, play and relax

2. An area of land used for a particular purpose

TThe introduction of green spaces inside cities is a way to make them more livable since ancient times. Centuries ago, parks were witnesses of the noble caste opulence, an urban gateway to remind them of their rural residences more than leisure spaces for everyone.

Despite our new social evolution of urban greenery, we tend to decline it as we have always been used to: as leisure places. We should try to see green spaces as tools to fight the already tangible effects of climate change on human environments, instead.

The analogy with human lungs should be intended structurally: the pulmonary alveoli are capillary structures that pervade the whole lung system. Micro insertions of green spaces on a wider scale throughout cities, both inside the urban fabric and on buildings themselves, could represent a way forward to reduce a range of different problems spanning from the heat island effect to the biodiversity desertification of our city’s agglomerations.

We should try to break the barrier between buildings and the public realm, letting the landscape get inside our living indoor spaces. Biophilic design is the tool for designing urban and domestic environments that connect with nature itself, enhancing our quality of life and our personal experience of a place. The area of the planet occupied by cities is about 2 percent of its total land area.

This area alone produces 70 percent of all CO2 emissions and about 80 percent of all waste. We can quickly understand that it is the concept of the city, as it is structured today, that needs to be overhauled. Biophilic design is one of the design strategies that presents itself as a possible solution to this problem.

PParks are the lungs of cities. Like every aerobic organism that requires oxygen to carry out its metabolic functions, the city organism needs to breathe!

With this approach, cities and nature can co-evolve into one organism, responding to the need for adaptation to ongoing climate change. Humans and natural environments are separated by anthropocentric concrete “jungles” in which we live.

The primary function of the respiratory system is to deliver oxygen to the cells of the body’s tissues and remove carbon dioxide, a cell waste product. Indeed, urban parks perform this function, while buildings, roads, and other elements in concrete are inert objects that remain static in a biologically evolving world.

The spongy appearance of lung tissue and the elasticity of the entire system remind us of the idea of the “sponge city”, resilient to climate extremes because they are designed with nature instead of against it.

Parks, ecological corridors in the city, and green networks implemented in a system have great potential for integrating nature, which has innate abilities to evolve, adapt, and survive through change. What would cities look like if there were no boundaries between humans and ecosystems?

With a global warming climate in a rapidly urbanizing world, the role of greenery in reducing the urban heat island effect and safeguarding urban livability in the future is paramount. Natural landscapes provide thermal and environmental comfort in public spaces and along walking routes, and the placement of greenery goes hand in hand with walkability success.

There are many parallels to be drawn between the role of greenery in urban environments and the role of lungs in the human body: they both allow the (human/ urban) body to breathe through the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide.

WHowever, in contemporary cities where heavy urban development often comes at the expense of pre-existing natural landscapes, specific attention is required to ensure the public space body has enough lung capacity for breathing equally across the territory.

Traditional transport planning has done little to try to preserve the lungs of the city, often replacing permeable green land covers with concrete, choking out the city even further. Today, naturebased solutions and context-sensitive design attempt to balance the ecological health of the environment in which a new infrastructure project is built.

Nevertheless, the road to a decarbonised urban future is intricately linked to a de-car-ed one: a transport planning direction where we gradually move away from the car-centric model and road-based design, giving back valuable road space to humans, plants, and the natural breathing environment.