march-2013

eco
roger east on reinvented city trails in NYC, saving snow in oslo and park life in vilnius
Park
pleasures
in vilnius
The reopening of Sereikiskes Park in Vilnius, after
a year-long refurbishment, should cheer all those
who share the traditional Lithuanian love of trees.
Sereikiskes, the green heart of the Old Town, is the
oldest of the capital’s parks. City-dwellers with a taste
for wilder woodland don’t have far to go either: nearby
Vingis Park provides a well-protected ecosystem within the capital,
with a wider ring of forest in the countryside all around.
Largely thanks to this greenery (and the absence of industry),
Vilnius boasts the best air quality of any capital in Europe. In the
European Green City Index compiled by Siemens and the
Economist Intelligence Unit, its top clean air ranking
helped it reach 13th place overall, the highest in
eastern Europe.
And that’s despite a legacy of Soviet-era buildings
that leak energy like sieves; no wonder Vilnius’s
flamboyant mayor, Arturas Zuokas, is so pro-park.
He’s keen on green transport innovations too, as
witnessed in the city-wide electronic traffic
management system and the E-Orange electric bike
scheme, introduced in 2011. What Zuokas can’t abide is
illegal parking; he once drove a tank over an offending car.
rails to
trails
in new york
What city wouldn’t love its own version
of New York’s High Line? Since it opened
in 2009 – turning a disused elevated
goods railway into a hugely popular
aerial park-cum-pathway through
Manhattan’s densely urbanised Lower
West Side – everyone seems to be
launching copycat “rails to trails” projects.
The latest New York scheme is the ‘Low Line’. Not yet off the
drawing board, the Low Line has designs on the long-abandoned
Williamsburg Bridge underground trolley terminal. Enthusiasts
envisage it as a below-pavement neighbourhood park for the
Lower East Side, complete with trees, plants, grassy spaces and
piped-down sunshine (artist’s impression pictured).
In London, a recent competition organised by the Landscape
Institute came up with some decidedly wilder ideas, such as the
‘Lido Line’ — a special lane in the Regent’s Canal so commuters
could swim to work.
The winner, ‘Pop Down’, more plausibly proposed turning the
disused Mail Rail tunnel beneath the city’s busy Oxford Street
into a cool mushroom-growing park, with sunlight brought down
by fibre optics from the street above. Work begins on the project
later this year.
saving
snow
in oslo
Thanks to an innovative new system, Oslo
airport is set to profit from a perennial
winter problem. The snow that has to be
swept off the runways to keep them clear –
about 22,000m3 of it every year – is being
stored in a specially constructed basin, the
size of an Olympic swimming pool, behind the airport’s
new terminal extension.
A covering of wood chips in the spring will keep the
snow cold until things start hotting up in the airport
extension – the first phase of which is due to open
later this year. Trickling icy water into the district
cooling system, as the snow gently melts, is a
smart low-carbon way to keep the airport
buildings cool during the summer.
It’s ingenious, but also obvious – ice houses
were used for centuries before the refrigerator
was invented. The energy saved will help
Danish engineering company COWI meet
its 21st-century target to halve the energy
consumption of the new extension compared
to that of the existing terminal.
20 march 2013
FLY TO new york JFK daily; vilnius six times weekly;
oslo twice daily. brusselsairlines.com
ALAMY: RAAD STUDIO