The countermeasures taken during the COVID-19 pandemic opened discussions regarding their status as temporal or ephemeral as they designated the positive environmental effects of the COVID-19 anthropause. The necessity to think about city transformation in times of environmental and health crises has revealed a number of digital tools and greening practices that might shape new policy and planning models to affront global challenges. Among these tools, a number of ‘urban acupuncture' activities have revealed the role of greening and gardening in urban spaces and how they assist in tackling challenges of environmental sustainability and city resilience. The authors investigate the contribution of vertical gardening (VG) as urban health enhancer and its prospects within smart city. They select and assess two case studies that integrate synergies between VG and machine learning (ML) approaches in an effort to showcase the tools' combined effect in realizing environmental control. These experiments imply hints for potential future research and implementation to broaden environments.
TopIntroduction
The ferocity of the ongoing events that follow the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus Pandemic, combined with the incontrovertible, exigent realities of climate change and extreme urbanization, have brought cities to the forefront of a decisive international conjuncture. On the need to build strong interdisciplinary collaborations, solidarity and clear strategies as a means to ensure healthier conditions for cities, decision-makers have been in the search of new, innovative ideas that unlock urban planning and ensure immediate results. In fact, questions on how to enhance cleanliness, how to ensure adequate quantity and distribution of public - green spaces around the city among others, and how to manage better and in healthier ways daily life are on the top of all political agendas affirming a new quest: the right to city health.
City Health describes the health of the city’s population through health city profiles. These bring together key pieces of information on health and its determinants in the city (WHO, 2005), as well as all elements that can influence health and disease in the urban context (Geropanta, Karagianni, Mavroudi & Parthenios 2021). It is a term that correlates mental and physical health with the urban environment (Evans, 2003) stressing as main causes imbalances between environmental demands and human response capabilities, poor urban living conditions, inadequate access to nature, lack of greening activities among others (Geropanta et. al., 2021).
Many tools, concepts and on the ground experiences are now mixed creatively as a means to contribute to targets for urban health. For example, technologies that offer reasonable environmental control, brought to light new possibilities for improving city performance through better informed decision making based on data collection. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its disciplines like Machine Learning (ML) and Big Data, that were already widely used in the economics, environmental disciplines, medical technology, supply chains etc., optimizing them and further promoting multidiscipline discourses (Allam, 2020), are now used by urban planners in computing and analyzing urban data. Similar case is the use of small-scale nature-based interventions in the urban grid, which offer better quality of life while consequently enhance resilience and sustainability within the urban conurbations. In other words, it seems that the previously strong boundaries among the disciplines are now being dissolved, and in the search for solutions that will help holistically to achieve goals of health, well-being and prosperity, the work about the city celebrated this year a conjuncture of forces that span around the different city scales, multidisciplinary thoughts and experiments.
Following these observations, the specific research delves into a city greening technique (Vertical Gardening from the Nature-based Solutions family) with targets for achieving healthier, climate balanced environments to see its potential in urban planning when assisted by machine learning (ML) technologies. ML helps to process and extract hidden information from vast data accumulated that can hardly be analyzed by human efforts (Salamone, Barozzi, Danza, Ghellere & Meroni, 2020). Vertical Gardening, incorporating contemporary technological tools and actualizing environmental monitoring, emerges as a promising tool offering tangible testament not only in urban health but also in climate change mitigation. Policies for healthier cities as examined and studied through urban planning, complete and respond to more holistic goals for sustainable futures, and bridge small-scale experiments with joint global work against global challenges.
To realize such an endeavor, the specific research suggests empirical analysis combined with critical overview on a wide body of literature as complemented by thorough examination on specific case studies. It therefore sets as an objective to answer the following question: How can ML, incorporated in projects of vertical gardening, be a critical tool to assist cities in achieving healthier and climate-balanced environments for their citizens?