Gardens Flourish on Top of City Busses
Posted by Unknown in Gardening, Innovation, Urban Farming and Agriculture on Monday, 13 May 2013
Robin Plaskoff Horton
Bus Roots is
a living garden planted on the roofs of city buses. In 2011 as an
effort that rose out of New York City designer Marco Antonio Castro
Cosio’s graduate thesis at the NYU.
The project
aims to reclaim the forgotten space on the tops of city buses, while
enhancing the quality of urban life by proliferating green spaces on
these unused bus roofs. A prototype of the rolling gardens has been
installed on the roof of the BioBus, a mobile science laboratory and the
first bus with an extensive green roof system. It has been growing for
five months while travelling around New York City and as far as Ohio.
Bus Roots joins
the ranks of mobile gardens planted on trucks, trains, and other roving
sites. Cosio explains his project as an exercise in “nomadic urban
agriculture.”
Benefits
According to the bustop gardener, benefits include:
• Aesthetic Value
• Mitigation of Urban Heat Island Effect
• Acoustical and Thermal Insulation
• Storm Water Reduction and Management
• CO2 absorbtion
• Habitat Restoration
• Public Education and Recreation
• Reclaiming Forgotten Real Estate
Raising the Roots
Cosio estimates
Bus Roots can add greatly to the city’s green space. Each public
transit bus has a surface of 340 ft2., and The Metropolitan Transit
Authority has a fleet of around 4,500 buses. Do the math.
“If a garden
were planted on the roof of every one of the 4,500 buses in the city’s
bus fleet,” calculates Cosio, his busses could add 35 acres of new
rolling green space in the city.
