Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder by Louv, Richard (the two towers ebook .txt) 📕

indeterminacy and change over the static certainty of architecture. It recalls nature’s restorative cycles and tries to put them back to work in the city.

Another, more popular term gaining cachet is green urbanism, an approach that goes beyond the current American vogue of the “new urbanism”—which has, until recently, focused less on urban ecology than on building somewhat better suburbs—even beyond the sustainable-cities movement, which is focused more on energy concerns. In fact, a green urbanism movement is growing quickly, particularly in Western Europe.

Green Urbanism: The Western European Example

Huck Finn has left the territories and gone to the Netherlands. That must be him in the photograph, that boy on a wooden raft, poling his way down a stream-like canal with banks of reeds and willows in Morra Park, an ecovillage in the city of Drachten.

You won’t often see that kind of scene in today’s America. Here, people still “tend to think that true nature can only be found on the pristine, remote extremities of civilization and that these places have little to do with the everyday human world,” writes William McDonough, a visionary architect from Charlottesville, Virginia, and a leading American proponent of sustainable, regenerative community design. Oddly, such thinking raises hives on both the thick hide of mass developers and the prickly skin of some environmentalists. Mass developers want to give us one option and call it choice. Some environmentalists grump: Why, if people start thinking they can regenerate nature in cities, they’ll use that as an excuse for suburban sprawl. That may be a legitimate concern but, as McDonough puts it, dominant urban/suburban design is “so impermeable to nature [that] it is all too easy to leave our reverence in the parking lots of national parks.”

By contrast, cities and suburbs in parts of Western Europe are becoming more livable and loveable by protecting regenerating nature. There’s Huck, happily on the water, in Morra Park, as evidenced in Timothy Beatley’s book Green Urbanism: Learning from European Cities, cited earlier. In Morra Park’s closed-loop canal system, storm-water runoff is moved by the power of an on-site windmill, and circulated through a manufactured wetlands where reeds and other vegetation filter the water naturally—making it clean enough for residents to swim in.

A similar Dutch development called Het Groene Dak (The Green Roof) incorporates a communal inner garden, “a wild, green, car-free area for children to play and residents to socialize,” writes Beatley. At a similar suburban ecovillage in Sweden, “large amounts of woodland and natural area have been left untouched.” To minimize impact on nature, homes are built on pillars and designed “to look as though they had been lowered out of thin air.”

He describes an astonishing array of European green-city designs: cities with half the land areas devoted to forest, green space, and agriculture; cities that have not only preserved nearby nature, but reclaimed some inner-city areas for woods, meadows, and streams. These neighborhoods are both denser and more livable than our own. Nature, even a suggestion of wildness, is within walking distance of most residences. In contrast to “the historic opposition of things urban and natural,” he writes, green cities “are fundamentally embedded in a natural environment. They can, moreover, be re-envisioned to operate and function in natural ways—they can be restorative, renourishing and replenishing of nature.”

“Greenroofs” are increasingly common. Covered by vegetation—native grass or even trees—such roofs provide protection from UV rays, clean the air, control storm-water runoff, aid birds and butterflies, and cool homes in summer and insulate them in winter. The higher initial cost of such a roof is outweighed by its longevity. From above, the green looks like an expanse of fields. Increasingly, architects incorporate construction requirements for “greenwalls” of ivy and other plants, which naturalize a building and prevent graffiti.

Designers are creating “often quite wild and untamed” green spaces, says Beatley, while increasing human population densities. This is promoted not only by architects, but also at the urban-planning level. In Helsinki, Finland, for example, an extensive system of green space extends in a mostly unbroken wedge from the center of the city to an area of old-growth forest north of the city.

About one-quarter of the land area in Zurich, Switzerland, is in forests. Granted, much of this space was grandfathered into these cities by the conversion of old royal estates to public use, but green urban activists didn’t stop there. Many cities are restoring streams and creeks previously tamed by concrete or routed underground. Zurich’s goal is to uncover and restore forty kilometers of urban streams and line them with native trees and vegetation.

A web of bikeways and lanes connects all neighborhoods and major destinations in the city of Delft, Netherlands. One plan in the Netherlands calls for capping a two-kilometer stretch of highway with an eco-roof for pedestrian, bicycle, and wildlife connections.

Another trend is the creation or purchase of urban farms. The city of Göteborg, Sweden, owns sixty farms at its fringes, some open to the public—including pick-your-own berry and vegetable farms, a visiting or petting farm for children, and another offering a riding stable for people with disabilities. Small areas of pasture, livestock, and farm buildings are even being sited at the core of new housing clusters.

Schools, too, are being transformed. Zurich is redesigning its schools, breaking up concrete surfaces around the buildings and planting trees and grass. Through a system using mirrors, students in the classrooms of one school can see and monitor the solar voltaic system and the life of the greenroof. Proponents say such design goes beyond aesthetics; children and adults in these more natural settings concentrate better and are more productive.

In his campaign to encourage such green urbanism in the United States, Timothy Beatley is increasingly interested in its impact on children. During the years he and his wife lived in the Netherlands, they were struck by how free the children were—how they were less endangered by traffic, how they could ride public bikes and public trams, and get around on their own. They were impressed by the