Our cities have never been denser, taller, or busier than they are now, and with that, comes the constant battle for land. But if we look at aerial images of any city center, we can quickly spot plenty of unused space — the rooftops.
So what can we use this precious resource for? In a growing number of high-density cities, some of it is dedicated to recreation — everything from bars and pools, to soccer pitches and running tracks can now be found atop skyscrapers. But when a rooftop offers access to sunlight, there are two more obvious candidates for its use - agriculture and solar power.
Green roofs have been growing in popularity for more than a decade, and in some cases, growing in scale too. Green roofs can provide a habitat for birds and insects in an otherwise hostile environment.
Cities can be several degrees warmer than the surrounding countryside. Green roofs come with the added benefit of mitigating the dreaded urban heat island effect. Trees and green spaces can absorb shortwave radiation, and use it to evaporate water from their leaves — a kind of 'double cooling' effect.
With food security and urban nutrition ever-higher on the agenda for the United Nations, there's also a worldwide movement of using green roofs for hyper-local food production. In regions with suitable climates, hundreds of different vegetables, fruits, and salad leaves can be grown on rooftops.
But what about solar power? With so many cities now stopping using fossil fuels, and the costs of solar panels dropping dramatically, PV systems have become the 'go to' option for generating distributed power in built-up areas. And, even with standard commercial panels, the energy gains are dramatic. It is estimated that rooftop PV systems could generate almost 40% of electricity demands nationwide.
There's no doubt that in both cases, a network of 'productive rooftops' could benefit the local community by supplying a portion of a necessary resource — either food or electricity — while also reducing their environmental burden. But is one better than the other?
This was the question posed by researchers from MIT and the University of Lisbon in a recent paper in the journal Cities. Focusing on the rooftops of a mixed-use neighborhood in Lisbon, they carried out a Cost-Benefit Analysis. Starting with existing data on everything from installation costs and resources used, to carbon footprint and yield, they modelled the impact that each installation would have on the local community over a period of 50 years.
And by looking at it that way, they concluded that for Lisbon, the use of rooftops for food production could yield significantly higher local value than solar PV energy generation. Of course,this is very site-specific. There is no one-size-fits-all solution to make cities more sustainable, and anyone who tells you otherwise is massively over-simplifying a complex issue. Now, all I hope is that some of those decision makers start using it.
