I enjoyed reading this article because it provided some new insight that we’ve never really talked about in class. I liked the opening statements of the article, particularly how green spaces “serve as a place of identity, memory and belonging”. When I first read over that sentence, I thought that it wasn’t really true because New York City does have green spaces (all the parks, etc.) but I’ve never felt them serving as a function of the above quoted text. However, as I continued reading the article, I began to understand how it does serve those functions. Furthermore, I liked how the article pointed out that the value of a city depends on the city’s ability to incorporate other environments (office buildings, other public buildings) into the green spaces, not the other way around. We always talk about adding green spaces into our current environments, but never thought about doing so the other way around. I think that provided a strong point advocating green architecture.
The article then shifted to talking about Baku, examining how this Azerbaijanian city does just that. It is able to build and expand itself around the green spaces instead of tearing everything down and then having to worry about adding greenery. Although this isn’t something that’s feasible for established metropolitan areas such as Manhattan, I think that there is still something that can be done to the outer boroughs that have not yet been occupied with skyscrapers and buildings that are essentially one top of the other. I think something that we can take from Baku’s green architecture is their environmental policy / environmental auditing, as they call it. New York makes effort to become more “green” but I think that there’s more than can be done. Currently, Battery Park has an urban farm that I have seen been tended to by volunteers throughout the summer (I would walk through the park to get to work), and that’s great on one hand. On the other hand, there is so much air pollution from cars in that area that I, for example, wouldn’t want to consume that vegetation (I digress; this raises a different problem, relating to air pollution). The article mentions how Baku has people who regularly check the waters and sand, and I think that’s something we can do here. We discuss how disgusting the Hudson is, or some of the beaches are always in not so pleasant conditions, why don’t we do something like this? I think this is something that the government is responsible for implementing and enforcing, and then the goal should be to spread and notify the people.
