The Green Dip

At the Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam on Thursday, The Why Factory – the think tank and research institute led by Winy Maas at the Delft University of Technology – launched its latest publication, The Green Dip. Based on the work of students at TU Delft as well as contributions from the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC) and Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP), the book serves as a manifesto for a radical greening of our cities, turning urban areas into inhabited forests.

Forests, encompassing 30 percent of Earth’s land, play a fundamental role in supporting life. Yet persistent deforestation threatens this balance. Simultaneously, while urbanised areas occupy only 1 to 3 percent of the planet’s land, they depend on intensive agriculture, extensive goods transportation, urban sprawl, and excessive land use – all contributing to environmental degradation. The Green Dip explores how transforming cities into forests might enhance water waste treatment, improve air quality, mitigate heat island effects and noise pollution, or bolster biodiversity.

Divided into three parts, the book first offers a critical reflection on the benefits and challenges of implementing this urban greenery. Interviews and essays with experts examine urban greenery from the perspective of biology, ecology, and landscape design, discussing issues as wide-ranging as politics, carbon emissions, and maintenance. In the second section, the book goes on to lay the groundwork for an urban greening toolkit, proposing a new software, the Green-Maker. Finally, the final section visualises and attempts to quantify the
global impact of a worldwide urban forest covering all cities around the planet.

“As far back as the 1960s and ‘70s, forward-thinking authors such as Ian McHarg and organisations such as the Club of Rome paved the way for an urbanism that was more in tune with the natural world”, says Winy Maas. “Yet over 50 years later, the status quo of our societies is still predicated on endless growth and the neglect of the natural world. With this status quo, we have pushed our planet to the brink. It’s time to act. It’s time to accelerate. The Green Dip is an ambitious endeavour, but for the sake of our planet, it’s one worth
pursuing.”

Crucially, while existing attempts to green cities tend towards a standardisation of urban species, The Green Dip investigates an approach based on global biomes, placing greater emphasis on native and climatically adapted species to encourage plants to thrive. In the heart of the book, the Green-Maker shows how a comprehensive library of plant species – cataloguing the biomes in which they succeed, their size, appearance, light and water needs, growth speed, and many other characteristics – could be developed to green cities in a way that is unique to their location.

The Green Dip is the fourteenth book produced in The Why Factory’s Future Cities series; it is also the first in a trilogy of interrelated publications focused on integrating nature and the city. It will be succeeded by BiodiverCity, which examines the integration of fauna in the built environment, and subsequently Biotopia, dedicated to designing entirely with nature.