How Green Is Your City?
A greener city is more enjoyable for us and more beneficial for the environment. Through the evolution of intersectional technologies we now have a greater understanding of how we interact with the built and natural environment. A recent innovation from MIT’s Senseable City Lab, is one such innovation – it measures the density of greenery in cities across the globe but at a human eye-level.
Named Treepedia, the program assesses street-level urban greenery using Google Street View and the Green View Index. It measures the obstruction of greenery in Google’s street-level visualisation maps and classifies the images accordingly.
By considering the green density at street level, rather than by satellite view, Treepedia and other intersectional technologies, allow us to understand the human experience of each city. They play a very important role in informing our sustainable house design decisions and the evolution of our built environment.
Increasing green canopy cover was highlighted as one of the top ten urban initiatives by the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on the Future of Cities. Green space improves city environments by filtering pollutants and dust from the air, they provide shade and lower urban temperatures, increasing water evaporation, and among other things, simply creating better urban microclimates.
Many global cities have been analysed with more in the pipeline. See how Australian cities compare to the rest of the world here.