Living Walls

Green infrastructure is such an essential part of sustainable urbanism, reducing CO2 levels, improving air quality, providing locally-sourced foods and improving physical and psychological wellbeing. But green roofs are not the only possibility for providing green infrastructure in urban environments, more and more we see green appearing on the walls of our buildings. Not only this, but green infrastructure does not need to exist exclusively in our external environments - we spend almost all our time inside so indoor plants present far greater potential for reducing internal carbon dioxide levels, increasing productivity at work, and the close proximity allows us to touch and smell  and feel more connected to nature when indoors, promoting good health and positive feelings. 

That is why this product which appeared on my newsfeed this week was a particularly exciting find.

Source: Verde Vertical 2015, Plug & Plant, accessed 8 May, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmOVa5Mq9Z8>.

This new design by Vertical Green combines living walls with smart technology to deliver an extremely simple indoor planting system that can be used by anyone anywhere. Not only is the system incredibly easy to install at whatever scale is desired by the user, but requires minimal maintenance which is one of the biggest issues for green walls today both limiting successful outcomes and causing significant financial costs. This system monitors moisture, light levels and temperature and using a smart data collection and sharing technology, sends this information to an application on the user's smartphone so they can monitor levels and ensure conditions are appropriate for the plants. This not only enables users with next to no understanding of growing plants to grow their own indoor plants (on walls, saving space no less!) but also reminds the user to take care of the plants as required ensuring successful growth. One of the later images shown in the video of a woman picking a sprig of herbs direct from her vertical green to add straight to her cooking really sums up for me the brilliant possibilities of this system. Imagine people who live in apartments being able to pick ingredients as local as they come without even having to leave the kitchen - this is the future of sustainable urban environments.