Who said that cities have to be dull, grey and boring? And no I am not implying we should paint all the buildings in bright yellow and pink, but we can make our rooftops green. I read an article about this in National Geographic and I think the idea seems feasible and useful.

A large surface area of a city is normally covered by buildings. Thos buildings we tend to think about them as structures that replace whatever else was there on this land. We remove forests, grassland and agricultural land in order to put a building instead. But what happens if those buildings mushroomed out of the ground instead? They just popped up from the depths of the earth. What you would expect is to find that piece of grassland still on the roof. And that is what we should aim to recreate.

Go to the roof of your buiding and plant some green, you could be planting your own vegtables as well, not just grass and flowers and helping reduce the amounts of land being converted from their natural state to agricultural land. Add to that the benefit of having a garden in every building and you will suddenly find trouble in giving this some monetary value when you are decining whether it’s worth it or not.

One of the problems facing green roofs is rain. While rain is free water for the plants, the soil can get pretty heavy as it soaks up the water. So you don’t want your roof falling down, especially when it is raining. Green roofs have come a long way and now they tend to use a number of layers in order avoid this problem. Instead of using traditional soil, soil composites are used. There are also storage and drainage layers so that in dry seasons the water is stored for the plants and when the water is in excess it just overflows the storage and drains away.

So now that green roofs are becoming more and more feasible, we should expect more people to adopt them. Probably start with institutions and evetually spread to homes. So what are you waiting for? Start looking into how you can make your roof green today.