The balcony off my living room in Bogotá. When I arrived in Bogotá and started my search for a place to live, an essential element of any candidate apartment was a balcony with plenty of sunshine. I once lived without outdoor space in Manhattan. As much as I loved my neighborhood and apartment, with no place to recline in the sun and tend some plants I felt confined. City life by its nature separates us from the natural world, but even a small balcony or veranda can bring a substantive experience of nature back into one's life. I have covered my Bogotá balcony with flowering plants, adding color and a refuge for wildlife to a previously barren space, and to my delight it's become a regular stop for green violet-ear hummingbirds, black flowerpiercers, and rufous-collared sparrows - who are at this very moment nibbling on some seeds I left out this morning.
Balcony biodiversity is one new emphasis of urban environmentalists and it is gaining traction in some cities. The Royal Horticultural Society in the UK held a competition on balcony biodiversity last year and there are a few British bloggers who cover balcony gardening. It's not surprising that the UK leads in this (there are few countries as addicted to gardening), but what is encouraging to me is evidence of serious balcony gardening in cities all over the world - and its potential for supporting and increasing biodiversity.
Balcony biodiversity is one new emphasis of urban environmentalists and it is gaining traction in some cities. The Royal Horticultural Society in the UK held a competition on balcony biodiversity last year and there are a few British bloggers who cover balcony gardening. It's not surprising that the UK leads in this (there are few countries as addicted to gardening), but what is encouraging to me is evidence of serious balcony gardening in cities all over the world - and its potential for supporting and increasing biodiversity.
Cascading vegetation from balconies in a central Santiago neighborhood. Last Friday I returned to Bogotá from Santiago, Chile, where I'd spent 10 days on holiday. Santiago has many faces. It has a European-style city center, areas more typically Latin American, and a wealthy east that looks much like northern California. Santiago isn't as fashionable as Buenos Aires, but it does have a sense of order and functionality that makes it seem like many cities in the developed world. But what most engaged my green eyes was the remarkably verdant balconies throughout the city. The variety and exuberance of vegetation on these Santiago verandas is really unusual. In Santiago I don't see much of the highly formal planting style that is more common here in Bogotá. Instead it's a wild mish-mosh of plants that are allowed to grow and spill out over the edges with seemingly little attempt at reining it all in.
This penchant for green extends to professional buildings, as well. On the left is the business school of the prestigious Catholic University, which has flowering vines (I don't know the species) as a built-in architectural feature. Some decorative columns in the plaza in front of this building have small trees growing out of the top of them.
The city of Santiago has a green plan, Santiago Verde, which nicely complements Santiago's green balconies. The city is planting 250,000 new trees every year and designing new thematic plazas which will be named after the types of trees planted. There will be, for example, literary plazas, gastronomic plazas and medicinal plazas, each harboring on average 50 species of trees famous in literature, food and medicine, respectively. This program is part of Chile's national Proyecto Forestación Urbana, wherein 17 million trees will be planted in Chile's cities. I saw a lot of progress within the city and in Santiago's outlying areas.
The city of Santiago has a green plan, Santiago Verde, which nicely complements Santiago's green balconies. The city is planting 250,000 new trees every year and designing new thematic plazas which will be named after the types of trees planted. There will be, for example, literary plazas, gastronomic plazas and medicinal plazas, each harboring on average 50 species of trees famous in literature, food and medicine, respectively. This program is part of Chile's national Proyecto Forestación Urbana, wherein 17 million trees will be planted in Chile's cities. I saw a lot of progress within the city and in Santiago's outlying areas.
A sampling of Santiago's green balconies and verandas
Some may ask if maintaining and increasing biodiversity in cities really matters. Wouldn't it be wiser to instead focus on protecting biodiversity in natural areas, such as national parks? The answer is becoming clear. As urban areas relentlessly expand into agricultural, forest and natural areas, regional biodiversity is threatened. Threats - including extinction - to many species are accelerating globally. There is no denying the trends. Building urban environments with habitats and sources of food for wildlife helps compensate for the loss of other habitat. It can also create bridges between areas of remaining natural habitat now separated by human settlements, allowing for safe movement between populations of wildlife. And as the biggest impediment to changing our destructive environmental trajectory is a lack of awareness and understanding, an urban commitment to maintaining biodiversity helps reconnect city dwellers (the majority of humanity) to the natural world making them feel they have a stake and a role in its future.
Dog asleep at the busy entrance to a metro stop in central Santiago. As I'm writing about biodiversity I couldn't resist including a picture of one of Santiago's most unforgettable species: its street dogs. There are a large number of dogs living on the streets in Santiago, but it's not at all as you would find in a typical developing-world city. These dogs generally look very healthy and clean, are well behaved, and just seem to be equals among the human pedestrians of the city. I see this as just another sign of Santiago's civility.
Santiago is a city nearing its destiny as the first developed-world capital in Latin America. You can see it in the faces of the people, in the over one-hundred kilometers of shiny metro lines, and in the general sense of civility and calm. Santiago may not be the most glamorous or exciting city in South America, but it does offer something rather unique in the region: predictability and confidence in the future. The green balconies of Santiago announce a city that has come of age. .
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