Explain. we should make our city green not grey.
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Twenty years ago, Chattanooga was a rust-belt, basket-case city near Lake Chickamauga in Tennessee. The old railroad town had one of America's most polluted rivers and a depressed economy. Today, it is widely seen as one of the most attractive places to live in America, and as a laboratory for new urban ideas.
According to Ed McMahon, author, conservationist and authority on the greening of cities, sustainable development, whether in the US, UK or Africa, invariably starts with a green infrastructural vision. "In this case, the city authorities decided to build a 10-mile park along each side of the Tennessee river," he says. "It was very expensive for a small city, but they realised that the cost was not the most important thing. Money will always follow a good idea." It transformed the city, inspired developers, and led to more investment.
McMahon is in London this week with other urban luminaries to encourage British cities to shift urgently from grey to green thinking. Invited by the Commission for the Built Environment (Cabe) and Natural England, the government's two leading statutory ecological advisory bodies, he says communities that invest in the environment gain immeasurably.
There is a proven relationship, McMahon says, between green space and health, economic development and property values. "If we invest in green infrastructure, we can reduce public costs significantly," he says. "It pays for itself many times over."
The money is there, but needs prioritising differently. Figures published by Cabe this week show that the £10.2bn budgeted for new road building in Britain would provide 1,000 new parks - at least two for each local authority in England. The £1.28bn budget for widening the M25 would buy 3.2m new street trees.
"In my experience, success always starts with a vision, or a plan for the future," McMahon says. "It needs communities to make an assessment or an inventory of their assets and to start from there. It might move on to, say, planting street trees, green roofs, green parking, community gardens, urban farming.
We could not afford to buy ecosystem services, but we can't live without them."
McMahon gives the example of New York city, which some years ago was ordered to clean up its drinking water supplies. The cost of new filtration plants was more than $6bn (£4.2bn), but the city bought the land surrounding its reservoirs to protect them from pollution, and it ended up costing around $1bn.
American cities, he says, are learning that the environment is something not to be sidelined. "We have repositioned the idea of open space from something that is 'nice' to something that is fundamental to the way we prosper and develop," he says. "It's a necessity, not an option."
Answer:
we should make our city green means we should plant trees and flowers so out city looks green and we should not make our city grey mean the pollution,chemical etc..,