The article, especially in its second half, confuses the City of Melbourne municipality with the city of Melbourne.
The former is the central business district and surrounding area, the one with 33,000 open air car parks of which the local academic they interviewed appears to be proposing 11,000 be replaced by greenery. It is a nice thought, but the City of Melbourne (think Westminster or City of London in a London context) is notoriously reliant on revenue from those car parks and isn’t about kill that goose yet. Their policy [0] is to “support the conversion of car parking spaces to be used for another function where there is a strategic need to do so” - and the list of functions doesn’t include greenery for its own sake. In fairness, there are already a lot of parks within the municipality.
The latter is the metro area of 5 million people 100km across, and most of it has plenty of green space. For example, most residential streets have a wide grassed verge with street trees. There is definitely a problem with gardens disappearing under apartments and McMansions, but it’s mostly not car parking that’s driving habitat loss.
I would hazard a guess that this is a false equivalency. Sydney and Melbourne probably started out small and as they enlarged into a huge metropolitan conurbation, only the original part maintained the administrative designation "City of X".
The City of London, while making up part of the ancient city of London, usually refers to The City of London Corporation which was a financial center made (again) independent from royal authority during the reign of William III to allow its banks to charge interest rates.
From the book Where Does Money Come From (2011):
The Dutch brought the concept to England following the successful
invasion by the Dutch Prince William III of Orange in the ‘Glorious
Revolution’ of 1688, who displaced the reigning monarch. Under the reign
of William III (and Mary), the charging of interest (usury) was soon allowed and bank-friendly laws were introduced. Given the previous
repeated defaults by indebted kings and a raid on the national mint;
Parliament and creditors of the state (namely the merchants and goldsmiths
of the Corporation of London) lobbied for the creation of a privately owned
Bank with public privileges – the Bank of England – and the secession of
one square mile of central London as a quasi-sovereign state within the
state.
Australia basically only has one city per state with nothing for hundreds of kilometres in any direction so everything close to the city center is just considered part of Melbourne. With “City of Melbourne” being responsible for a small section of it.
You wouldn’t use “city of Melbourne” in conversation for any reason other than to talk about the council of that area.
Sydney (and to a lesser extent the other capitals) is massive: I think last time I looked it's the third the size of the Netherlands. There are a number of councils/LGAs in Sydney, one of which is the City of Sydney (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Sydney). There is/was an attempt to reduce that number, for various reasons. A similar attempt was done in Queensland, which did make the City of Brisbane LGA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Brisbane) basically the same as "Brisbane".
This reminds me of Timothy Leary's comment at Alan Watt's "houseboat summit" in 1967.
>>So I think that we should start a movement to—one hour a day or one hour a week—take a little chisel, a little hammer, and put a little hole in some of this plastic, and just see some earth coming up and put a seed there. And then put a little ring of—mandalic ring—of something around it. I can see the highways, and I can see the subways, and I can see the patios, and so forth: suddenly the highway department comes along, and says, “There’s a rose growing in the middle of Highway 101!” And then—then—the robot power group will have to send a group of the highway department to kill the rose and put the asphalt down on the gentle, naked skin of the soil. Now, when they do that we’re getting to them. There’ll be pictures in the paper. And consciousness is going to change. Because we’ve got to get to people’s consciousness.
In the Netherlands there's a national campaign to encourage residents to remove the tiles from their gardens in favor of adding patches of grass and plants. From the website (translated with Deepl.com):
> From 21 March to 31 October 2024, the NK Tegelwippen will take place again! Everyone can participate by bouncing tiles in their own front, back or façade garden and municipalities will compete against each other.
> Of course, the championship is not just about rivalry, but has a higher, common goal. When tiles are replaced by grass, flower beds, trees and façade gardens, the Netherlands becomes more climate-proof, more comfortable for insects and animals, cooler on hot days and much more beautiful!
Although a good initiative, it has been the trend in the Netherlands by project an city planners to build new neighborhoods without a front lawn, directly next to the small walking street, followed by a parking spot and then street. There are no longer trees, grass, greenery or shrubberies being planted by the city council, like they did in the 80s.
And the trend recently is also 'verdichting', which basically transforms existing city greenery and open spaces into more housing, because that is more profitable for the city council.
There's a whole Twitter/Mastodon account dedicated to this, with many before/after comparisons when a house gets sold. Really depressing sometimes when beautiful trees get cut down for example
Worth mentioning the depaving efforts in Mexico City, particularly in Pedregal in an effort to replenish the ground water. In this case, for the lava bed, not earth and plants.
If you live anywhere with subsidence due to aquifer depletion, you would be wise to jump on this bandwagon as a means to try to slow the depletion. This includes parts of California and anywhere on the Ogallala Aquifer.
I live in the country. I have huge wild native gardens. I also have dozens of snakes, foxes, and raptors that patrol those gardens.
When you mix the fecundity of urban life with these types of areas, eventually you either have massive rat problems or massive "raptors that ate rat poison" problems. We are lobbying our town to ban the use of these poisons by the town, but without them the growing number of community gardens would simply become havens for rats, especially as having free ranging cats becomes more frowned upon.
I think the rat problem is actually pretty manageable with proper standards of how trash is stored, and the use of Jack Russell Terriers. The lack of political will to put up with the mild inconvenience of the former and the brutality of the latter mean poison is chosen instead.
Unless you have a wild population of rat-dogs they'll never catch enough rats to make a dent in the rat population, and the lack of political will to put up with the occasional poisoned Jack Russell Terrier (or the quite frequent poisoned bird of prey) means that securing trash is the only method that works.
You can get pretty far with trapping. Various localities do it effectively in New Zealand. However it tends to be on islands, peninsulas or pest proofed reserves.
I read a book titled "Rats" once, which was a journalist embedding with the rats of New York, Walden-style, and watching their habits over a year, talking to rat catchers and so on. My general impression is that populations are controlled by available food for rats, and nothing else. Also, rats aren't so bad.
Yeah, e.g. nyc has plenty of rats and little of these grassy areas like pictured in the artixle. It's just because of the trash above ground, and food garbage in sewers. I live in suburban area with plenty of grass, trees.. no rats because of good trash pickup. I really don't think these depaving efforts will cause real vermin issues.
IIRC in New York when COVID happened, the rat population ended up in severe pressure due to lockdowns eliminating virtually all sidewalk and subway food trash overnight, and ended up selecting for the most aggressive rats to survive.
This seems a valid concern to me. I am on the edge of a city, on one side there are endless buildings, and on the other side it's a big open park with some farmland. It's still technically in the city, so there are no stray rats as the city euthanizes them frequently, and there are rats everywhere. My house is full of holes, and they have dozens of ways to come in. I see them frequently.
Of course, neighbors have started using more and more rat poison, so sometimes I do see some rats dead on the ground, rotting in the sun. And recently, I've started seeing dead raptors in the farmland close to us.
Have you seen the novel rat trap from New Zealand? No poison. Uses bait and then de-brain's any rat that enters trap. Rat drops out, to be consumed by other critters. IIRC Each trap kills a few hundred before needing a new CO2 cartridge.
In Silicon Valley, the norm seems to be pushing the building's footprint as close to the street as possible. No room left for trees or shrubbery. Just a narrow cement sidewalk.
Every square foot matters to the builder. I guess it gives them 2% more profit, or is passed along as 2% cheaper rents.
I’d honestly like it if we had shorter setbacks across the US - so much wasted on front lawns that would be better spent on the same space in the backyard.
I mean, this is great. But speaking for the UK it wont work. You add more green space, you add more maintenance, and with most of the countries councils being incapable of mowing the lawns even before most of them were bordering on bankrupcy it does beg the question - who's paying for it.
I'm sure everyone would love to see that in their post box. "We decided to add some new bushes in town, that'll be a 10% increase in council tax please."
usually these kinds of initiatives also involve planting local plants, and specifically not manicured lawns for this purpose. Lawn grass isn't even native to North America, and a lot of the examples are North American.
This is usually meant to retain enough water to prevent building lots of grey infrastructure. The Thames Tideway tunnel to lower the amount of sewage outflow in London is 4.3B pounds. In that context, building a lot of mini-retention ponds for tens of thousands of pounds is a lot cheaper. and this isn't the only strategy; a lot of modern parks, for example, are built with facilities like courts for sports below the ground level of the park, so that during flood times they turn into bathtub holding ponds as well.
In Pittsburgh, as with many older US cities, we have a combined storm water / sewer system. Stormwater runoff from impervious surfaces joins the sewer system; under normal conditions, this means we have to pay to clean it, and under high flow conditions, it means the sewers go into the overflow system, dumping feces into the river.
This isn't a universal problem, but it means there's a pretty big benefit to reducing runoff, and the city has been pursuing it aggressively for the last 20 years or so, to good effect.
(The runoff also leads to localized road flooding, which is again both dangerous to road traffic and expensive to mitigate.)
In England the water companies routinely dump raw sewage into waterways, to the point where it isn’t safe to swim or even go near the water in many places and there are massively deleterious effects on ecosystems. It’s a huge scandal at the moment because the formerly public and now privatised water companies are doing this dumping while continuing to pay huge dividends to shareholders and the toothless regulator is doing nothing about it.
Mown, manicured lawns are not much better than concrete. As long as they put something more sensible in, maintenance can be minimal. And fortunately ornamental lawns are starting to be heavily frowned on in the arid west.
Not only that, green space helps reduce the heat island effect and manage/capture storm run off. Both saving a lot of money and resources.
That wouldn't work so well as a cost savings measure. You end up with the shrubs and trees growing out into places they shouldn't and then have to be trimmed and cut back, which costs money.
They figured it out in the us at least. Tax break to landscape the yard to a certain standard. Fine the landowner for lack of tree maintenance on the public easement they are responsible for.
Or they do what US towns do and fine the owners for lack of sufficient landscaping. Overgrown fields in cities are rat nests not as good as legit landscaping.
It might net neutral or net benefit. Now the lack of maintenance and underinvestment is visible, but you're taking strain off the (mostly invisible and no doubt underinvested in) storm water system by swapping impermeable surfaces for permeable ones. (This is a good way to save money on storm water systems in general).
That said, my cynical side would still somehow expect my local council to screw it up anyway.
The biggest loss of green space in the UK has been the covering of (private house) gardens with hard surfaces or decking.
I do not know what the impact on maintenance costs of greening public spaces is though - hard surfaces need less frequent maintenance, but it is more expensive when needed.
The former is the central business district and surrounding area, the one with 33,000 open air car parks of which the local academic they interviewed appears to be proposing 11,000 be replaced by greenery. It is a nice thought, but the City of Melbourne (think Westminster or City of London in a London context) is notoriously reliant on revenue from those car parks and isn’t about kill that goose yet. Their policy [0] is to “support the conversion of car parking spaces to be used for another function where there is a strategic need to do so” - and the list of functions doesn’t include greenery for its own sake. In fairness, there are already a lot of parks within the municipality.
The latter is the metro area of 5 million people 100km across, and most of it has plenty of green space. For example, most residential streets have a wide grassed verge with street trees. There is definitely a problem with gardens disappearing under apartments and McMansions, but it’s mostly not car parking that’s driving habitat loss.
[0] https://www.melbourne.vic.gov.au/SiteCollectionDocuments/par...