In this National Geographic article, the virtues and importance of green spaces in our environment is again emphasised.

The world needs parks. Whether they’re slivers of green in a crowded city or 20,000 square miles (52,000 square kilometers) of designated wilderness, parks nourish the human spirit, help sustain the planet, and reflect the ideals of the societies that protect them. But for some of these preserves, the future is uncertain.

Nothing more true could be said about Bishopscourt Green. Thanks to Ken Mahon’s ambition to destroy this open green space by building forty four apartments, its future is uncertain. We are waiting to see whether he will appeal to An Bord Pleanala.

We hope he might take a leaf out of the book of Paris. A city even the most hardened property developer must admire.

Could this be why the citizens of Paris work so hard to reinvent dead urban space and neglected squares of hardscape as places of vibrancy and green? Consider Parc des Buttes-Chaumont in the city’s crowded 19th arrondissement. Once this patch of land held an old gallows, then a gypsum quarry, then the city dump. Now the big bucolic park of grassy slopes and grottoes is alive with bloom and birdsong and a healthy jumble of people who spill onto its hilly lawns: kickboxers, musicians, university students perusing their notes or memorizing lines for a play, lovers rolling over one another like tumblers, and old men who have settled themselves on the grass to rest.

Parisians in fact will seize just about any spot in their city for park or garden: tiny balcony, abandoned auto plant, bankrupt parking garage, derelict railway, even the giant curved facade of a new museum. They will sacrifice broad boulevards for the sake of bike paths with leafy canopies. They will argue for community gardens over apartments or media centers. They will relinquish a busy city expressway along the Seine for a temporary beach park, and will see in every shabby lot a prospective cathedral of green.

One can only imagine how horrified the Parisians would be at the thought of a developer seeking to build a park on an open space laid out in 1965. The Parisian sentiments should be remembered on this, the most French of days. Our parks and open green spaces must be protected.

The last word goes to the Parisian mayor, Bertrand Delanoë:

A modern city needs areas free from density, noise, and the frenzied urban pace. We must re-create the kinds of spaces that lend themselves to talking, walking, discovering, relaxing.

In cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, Paris, more Paris, yet more Paris the urge at the moment is to create more green space.

Previously, we blogged about Jane Power’s article on the importance of green spaces in our environment. Bishopscourt Green is more important now that it ever was. The Grounds surrounding the main building of CUH, which once included an expanse of green space and hillocks for children to run up and down on, have been given over to much needed hospital expansion and development. The former esso station next to CUH will also be developed into a high rise medical centre. Bishopscourt Green will be the only remaning green space on a main artery of the city. Bishopstown Road.

Green spaces are needed. This fact was emphasised in a study in London in 2001 which included in its list of greatest threats to open green spaces the words

pressure for development

One reason it listed for the loss of green space is

the purposeful neglect of green space in order to increase the chance of its development…… We believe that the Planning Inspectorate in its consideration of planning applications should identify the intentional neglect of green space and presume against granting development in such circumstances.

Thankfully, Bishopscourt Green has been maintained financially and physically by the residents of Bishopscourt for forty years and therefore, the Green is not in any way neglected. However, were Ken Mahon to prevent the Bishopscourt Residents from accessing and maintaing the Green, as they have done, he could then choose to purposefully neglect it. In that scenario, one could make an assumption that the intention behind purposeful neglect was in order to have a more favourable outcome in a planning application.

As the document goes on to mention

parks did not come into existence by chance, or simply survive as accidentally undeveloped ground. They were deliberately created.

Bishopscourt Green was deliberately created. Its trees are needed. Its continuing existence as a green space is needed. The importance of this fact cannot be over emphasised. Thankfully, Cork City Council agrees that Green spaces are important and should be preserved. Especially intended green spaces laid out in initial planning applications.

John McCarthy choose to sell Bishopscourt Green with the house at 1 Park Gate Villas for material gain. Ken Mahon seeks to develop the Green for material gain. There is no reason for any proposed development other than material gain. These two men have placed a threat over our green. We will fight Ken Mahon’s quest for material gain all the way.

In the Irish Times Magazine of Saturday, 4th August 2007, Jane Powers writes in Planet Matters about the importance of Green spaces in our environment.

Planet matters

Jane Powers on cooling our cities.

By next year, for the first time, more than half of the world’s population will be living in cities, according to the United Nations Population Fund. Urban dwellers will number 3.3 billion, with the most significant increases in Africa and Asia. European cities will also grow, but not at the same rate. By 2030 the world’s urban population is expected to expand to nearly five billion people, with 80 per cent living in Africa and Asia.

Cities have a profound effect on the climate and the environment. As villages develop into towns and then cities, their average temperature increases by between two and four degrees above that of the surrounding countryside.

This “urban heat island effect” is a result of buildings and paving storing and releasing heat, and also of a reduction in vegetation. Green spaces and trees help to lower the temperature when they take in water and then gradually release it to cool the air. The processes of evaporation (from soil, water and leaf surfaces) and of transpiration (where a plant exhales or perspires water from its leaves) are rather neatly combined into one word: evapotranspiration.

Lack of green space, or “surface sealing”, also prevents rainwater from entering the soil, causing rapid run-off and leading to the danger of overflowing sewers and waterways. In city centres and high-density areas about 70 per cent of the ground is covered by buildings, roads or other impermeable surfaces. As climate change brings more extreme weather, and more instances of torrential rain, flooding in urban areas becomes a greater threat.

City heat begets more heat, as air conditioners - increasingly necessary to make buildings bearable - spew warm air into the immediate atmosphere. They also consume energy and produce carbon dioxide and other emissions, exacerbating global warming and contributing to air pollution.

Clearly, the galloping urbanisation of the planet could land us in the soup if something isn’t done. But let’s not panic. Instead let’s celebrate (and pay heed to) a team at Manchester University that have come up with a simple solution. Following a research project, using Greater Manchester as their model, they have calculated that a 10 per cent increase in green space in built-up areas will reduce surface temperatures by up to four degrees. This figure, incidentally, is equivalent to the average predicted temperature rise through global warming by 2080. Hallelujah, and glory be to the boffins in Manchester.

And, just to drive a point home, let me tell you that the team also calculated that reducing green space by 10 per cent could increase surface temperatures by 8.2 degrees by 2080. Yikes.

The future health of cities is in our hands. Get them 10 per cent greener. Get them evapotranspirating.
© 2007 The Irish Times

We would like to thank Jane Powers for her permission to reproduce this article.
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