Urban Vertical Greening 2.0: Vertical greening for livable cities - co-create innovation for the breakthrough of an old concept

This project fosters transformations of cities to sustainable, resilient spaces by re-thinking, re-designing and remanaging vertical greening as progressives food-water-energy nexuses. Vertical greening is interpreted and designed as a biological-technical system in an architectural-technical context with a substantial capacity to implement multiple ecosystem services like passive cooling, flood alleviation, bioenergy and possibly food production, biodiversity, noise reduction and it could be consistently installed as a part of the built environment especially in dense city districts. In order to unfold the full potential of VG, three focal governance and management aspects will be approached for the mid-latitude partner cities (Berlin, Vienna and Ljubljana) in alliance with stakeholders: 1) integration of vertical green at building and district scales with habitat, water, heat and energy management, 2) technological innovation for maintenance and automated harvesting machinery and 3) adaptation of design strategies and governance for a secure, city-integrated cultivation and operation. Using a trans-disciplinary, stakeholder-oriented co-creation approach, we intend to re-think traditional urban greening and will combine innovations and fundamental research from urban planning and design, ecohydrology, mechanical engineering, water engineering and economy to enable decision-making using a nexus approach considering both co-benefits and trade-offs of nature-based solutions for the cities of the future.