Comment by paulmooreparks
14 hours ago
Singapore here, checking all the boxes. 200m from a neighborhood park with many trees, and ~700m from a GARGANTUAN park, Jurong Lake Gardens, over 4 km in length with many times that in pathways through gardens and around a lake.
I can't see any trees from my window right now. But that's just because I'm in the groundfloor of a shophouse (in Singapore).
Yes, it's pretty green here.
Now, if we could ban street parking like Japan did [0], and perhaps take some more inspiration from Dutch traffic planning..
[0] Ideally we'd get the Gahmen out of the car parking business completely.
London here: can see 12 trees within 30m from the back, 10 from the front; 50m from a neighbourhood park, 300m from Burgess Park (140 acres), probably 700m from Southwark Park (60 acres) (all of these are well tree-d)
Yes, Singapore is great for that. But to be fair with the other cities, it’s very hard _not_ to have abundant vegetation in tropical rainforest climate. Everything grows rapidly and stops at nothing in its way.
In other climates, like European ones, this becomes much more complex. Germany struggles even to keep its forests alive with long stretches of missing rain, higher temperatures, and new pests. Single trees in cities constantly die. Spain is in large parts a desert etc.
I really hope we find a solution/adapted plants to keep cities from heating up so much.
FWIW, some fast growing non-native trees now grow trivially in central Europe too.
Ailanthus[0] is invasive as heck and Paulownia[1] grows everywhere too.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ailanthus_altissima
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paulownia_tomentosa
> Yes, Singapore is great for that. But to be fair with the other cities, it’s very hard _not_ to have abundant vegetation in tropical rainforest climate. Everything grows rapidly and stops at nothing in its way.
Eh, have a look at other tropical cities like Johor Bahru or Jakarta or Kuala Lumpur and you can see that it's very much possible to have way less greenery than Singapore.
The recent trouble with the Borkenkäfer was just a consequence of monoculture. Germany doesn't struggle with keeping forests alive: it's normal at any one time for individual trees in forests to die. Decaying dead wood is important for the ecosystems.
Less than Singapore for sure. Less than European cities, I’m not so sure. I don’t have the numbers but if you do an image search of Jakarta (probably one of the worst vegetation-wise and boasting a population of a quarter of Germany) it still has trees in every picture and many more than let’s say Frankfurt or Madrid. The latter has many photos without a single tree.
79% of all German trees are sick. Monocultures and beetles play a role but the problem is much bigger than that: https://www.bmleh.de/DE/themen/wald/wald-in-deutschland/wald...
> The recent trouble with the Borkenkäfer was just a consequence of monoculture.
Even worse. It was monoculture of trees that aren't even native to the climate zone. The trees were imported from Scandinavia for their superior lumber quality, and were on edge even without the added stress from droughts and heat waves.
It's much much more complex than that. Climate is only one factor and by far not the most important one. Prosperity and structure of the city plays a much more important role. Singapore is an outlier because it's a rich country on an island the size of a city.
Big cities in Europe are usually surrounded by more rural areas in most of Europe for historical reasons (surrounding farmlands used to feed the city), lessening the need for city parks and greenery since the countryside was surrounding the city. If the city IS the country and even isolated on an island, that's of course not an option.
Another factor is also rooted in history. Like most cities in Europe, Singapore is old, though most of its growth happened in the past 60 years with proper urban planning. Europe's cities on the other hand grew over centuries without any kind of modern urban planning and the pressure of rebuilding quickly after the many devastating wars didn't help either.
Finally there's the issue of money - being one of the richest countries/cities on Earth helps tremendously with building a nice, liveable urban environment compared to some cities struggling to keep basic infrastructure running.