Symbiosis by webstersletter

Thanks for your contribution! Here are some thoughts for you as you finish out the proposal; 1) Identify a specific group that will need to take this action 2) Be as specific as possible with the plant selection and their benefits - Check out the work of Kamal Meattle as a starting point - http://www.ted.com/talks/kamal_meattle_on_how_to_grow_your_own_fresh_air 3) Be sure to completely fill out all of the required fields so the judges get a full understanding of your idea. Thanks again, and good luck!

Thanks for the proposal. The idea of planting trees and creating urban resilience has been tried by many cities and countries. One point I would like to make is there are two approaches required: a) There is huge building stock and areas already developed. How do you increase tree cover, other open area available within the buildings and around buildings. Also how these activities will impact the structural aspects. There are concepts of roof-top farming. These can be looked and evaluated in greater details. b) New buildings and areas to be developed. There is tremendous opportunity here. You need to see how these aspects can be integrated in the projects from day 0. There has to be multi-displinary team looking at this element and projects should maximise the usage of plants/tree to build resilient assets and cities You can give one each example and propose costing and resource requirements for these interventions. I suggest you work with a developer to bring more realistic paramters of decision making which will help the proposal to be read by the reviewer team.

Agree with the above comments. You need to provide a clear pathway how to materialize this novel idea into action. Good luck!

Great start to a proposal! I suggest to flesh it out in more ecological detail. It's important to understand and consider the ecology of a system before we start arranging or re-arranging how we manage it. Invasive species like Kudzu are problematic because they can aggressively take over and dominate a system, turning it into a monocrop. Diversity in our natural systems is key to long-term resiliency of that system. Restoring the health and functionality of at least portions of the natural systems that occurred in a particular urban center will ultimately yield more robust benefits. Non-native species sometimes must be used as well, due to the nature of the challenging conditions of urban areas (compacted soil, heat stress, etc.), but a balance is desirable. The co-benefits of these diverse systems is that they provide habitat for many birds, mammals, insects etc., which a monocrop of Kudzu, or any other invasive species, often do not. Hope this is helpful, and that you can incorporate more of the ecology premise into the proposal. Best of luck and I look forward to reading your final proposal!

Hi, you chose to put the proposition in the field of urban resilience, so it takes a reference to urban! council to look better policies on green-infrastructures and also to those of urban ecosystem services and why not? but maybe you know more than us .. the urban agriculture viewpoint, and the rural-urban fringe report. Even the green-roofs are an idea to develop and to include perhaps in this project.Whishes!