Implementing green architecture in cities large and small has a great deal of positive outcomes; even though each city has different needs and various ways of satisfying them, the overall effects remain the same. When people are indifferent and blasé about the environments that they live in, ecological problems will continue to be rampant, but if they feel personally attached to where they live, they will feel encouraged to promote change and make their cities more sustainable for all inhabitants, humans, animals, and plants alike. Thus, green cities can be psychologically beneficial; Huseynov stats that by increasing the number of public spaces, this “increases social interaction and cohesion between citizens” (536). While education is the most powerful force to invoke change, simply being exposed to nature in the form of public parks can lead to increased productivity, efficiency, and cooperation. Besides physical and mental health, economies can also prosper from green cities; using cleaner forms of transportation, heat, and electricity can reduce utility costs in the short-term, and carbon footprints and the effects of the urban heat island in the long-term.
Baku, Azerbaijan, which is the main focus of the article, is surrounded by the Caspian Sea to the east and the Caucasus Mountains to the west, and is almost 100 feet below sea level. Also the structure of the metropolitan area is described as the following, that throughout the twentieth century, “notable development began to take place in a concentric direction…with the Core City at the center, and seven metropolitan rings surrounding it” (536). Given that it has about two million people, Baku is in a very unlucky location meteorologically and geographically, and so it is in desperate need of green architecture, arguably even more so than we do in New York.
While green architecture may be expensive and involve great changes aesthetically and physically to the landscape, whether in the form of solar panels, green roofs, or even wind turbines, Huseynov correctly mentions that “instead of introducing external forms and transforming the site to accommodates those forms, these are ‘found’ and evolved out of systems already there” (540) and should “explore how systems have evolved and performed over time, questioning how and why the landscape arrived at its present state, in addition to registering what is already there” (540). Cities are all unique in terms of their history, climate, and demographics, and so there is no umbrella solution. Also, to reiterate, tearing everything down just to implement new architecture, green or not, will be costly and questionable in its effect. We have personally seen this in how the Dinosaur State Park was built around the dinosaur tracks rather than having them excavated and brought to some other museum far away, which was a very smart thing to do, but the same cannot be said for seaside developments around high-risk locations in the Jersey Shore. Nevertheless, taking small steps to increase green architecture will eventually add up in the end. If this has worked in Baku, there should be no reason why it cannot work in larger cities like New York or even greater metropolises like Shanghai or Tokyo; if one city does it, others will take the initiative and hundreds of millions of people will be able to lead more fulfilling lifestyles in more sustainable cities.
