Dutch Healthy Green Cities, By Citizen Group Contribution

Abstract

Green roofing in cities is the new development in making cities healthier and more liveable. A striking example is the case of Chicago where air pollution was reduced by creating green roofs on all municipal buildings since 2006. A contrary development is the large-scale growth of cities by which leftover open space by compaction becomes used at the expense of green surface. Cities have enormous differences on green space square meters, not only due municipality policies, citizen initiative is involved too because their choices for greening of open public space and building roofs are decisive for the square meters reached, by individual and group behaviour. Therefor research is done on action-prospects that can create a break-through in greening cities. An inventory is made of greening activities of citizen groups in the Dutch situation; their motivations included. Results from former research on sustainable citizen group participation have been used as foundation of the citizen group dynamics encountered. The conclusions are that: 1. There are more initiatives with more impact in cities then in the countryside, 2. A third of the green initiatives are food production motivated, 3. For the citizen-initiative
participants liveability in general is a more important motivator then sustainability, and 4. The square meter impact of green citizen-initiatives in cities is little. Action perspectives are: stimulate food related citizen initiatives [quantitively], and vertical faced greening [qualitatively].