Edible Balcony Gardens for Retrofit - Vertical Garden Systems for Cities

INITIAL SITUATION: Climate change threatens urban quality of life. Cities of the future need innovativeurban greening technologies in order to maintain temperature comfort for urban residents, to reduce heat island effects and to buffer rainwater peaks during heavy rain events. Newly constructed buildings havethe least leverage effect for such measures, as most of the buildings have already been built.Therefore,it’s clear: greening measures have to be taken on existing buildings! TASK & OBJECTIVES: The ESSBAR project takes up this problem and essential objectives of the tender and aims to demonstrate an affordable, resource-saving and innovative greeningsolution with edible plants on vertical surfaces of existing buildings that focuses on people's needs for green open space. SOLUTION CONCEPT: ESSBAR (German for: Edible balcony gardensfor retrofit) offers an innovative solution concept for the greening of existing buildings by creating new outdoor spaces by retrofitting balconies to existingbuildings. In addition, innovative vertical garden systems (for vegetables, herbs etc.) are integrated into these balconies. These climate-effective and edible systems supplied with rainwater from a rainwater management system represent a completely new option when it comes to makingexisting buildingsgreener. CHALLENGES & INNOVATION CONTENT: The implementation of this concept requires a complex system integration of components for the construction ofbalconies, vertical gardeningsystems and rainwater utilization solutions. The desired high modularity of balconies and greening solutions increases the interface complexity and requires new approaches and high development costs. The residents as decision-makers and future users must be integrated into the process in the best possible way from day one. They are one of the decisive factors for the success of the project. The ESSBAR project addresses the tender focus 3: "Innovative urban greening technologies" of the 8th tender "City of the Future" and specifically the implementation of an innovative implementation project using the example of a real demo object (Karmarschgasse 59-61, 1100 Vienna) of the Vienna based company Sozialbau AG. With the planned innovative solution, climate change adaptation will be implemented in several ways: on the one hand bymeans of a cooling effect (shading, evaporation, reduction of urban heat islands, improvement of the microclimate) and on the other hand by buffering heavy rain events (water storage, rainwater management).The focus is clearly on increasing thebiodiversity of the city andquality of lifeand the well-being of city inhabitants. The vertical gardening technology used in the project specializes in edible plants and thus makes a valuable contribution to the self-sufficiency of cities and the health of their residents.