Green Venture and other local organisations are keen to reduce the chances of that happening, says Casimirri. In Hamilton, flooding can cause sewage to get mixed into runoff that flows into Lake Ontario, the source of the city's drinking water. "Now there are places you might stop or have a chat. "Before, it was somewhere you would quickly try to walk through," she says. Giuliana Casimirri, executive director, explains how she, her colleagues, and volunteers have begun inserting miniature gardens replete with native trees in a run-down district in the city of Hamilton. Green Venture, an environmental non-profit in Ontario, Canada, has been inspired in part by the depaving projects in Portland. They get a safety briefing and then muck in together.
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The work is "joyous", says Rose, because it unites enthusiastic local volunteers. Her group says it has depaved more than 33,000 sq m (360,000 sq ft) of asphalt in Portland alone since 2008 – an area equivalent to nearly four and a half football pitches. It's time, some say, to start smashing up our concrete streets in a big way – to create spaces better for nature. With the climate crisis deepening, some cities and even entire regions are beginning to adopt depaving as part of their climate adaptation strategies. Injecting city streets with greenery may even improve people's mental health, too.īut if depaving is ever going to really take off, it will have to expand beyond a handful of eager environmentalists and volunteers. Native plants help wildlife cling on in urban spaces, and by planting trees you can increase shade, protecting residents from heatwaves. Proponents say depaving allows water to soak into the ground, which reduces flooding in times of heavy rain – aiding the "sponginess" of cities. It's been around since at least 2008, when the Depave group in Portland was founded. The idea of depaving, sometimes known as desealing, is a simple one – replace as much concrete, asphalt and other forms of hard landscaping as possible with plants and soil. The dream, that is, of bringing nature back into our midst. "It's envisioning and fully realising a dream that I think we all have," says Rose. "It feels like you're liberating soil," she says, recalling the summer gathering where she and around 50 volunteers removed roughly 1,670 sq m (18,000 sq ft) of concrete from the grounds of a local church. A mess of gravel and dirt that was, to Rose, just bursting with potential. Now sunlight could fall once again on the ground below. Pushing down on her metal bar, applying it like a lever, she eased the concrete covering up and away. The grubby, rectangular section of urban crust in front of her was about to move.
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Rose, communications and engagement director at Depave, a non-profit in Portland, Oregon, was sweating in the heat – but she was going to win this fight. On a hot July day, Katherine Rose picked up a sturdy metal pole and jammed it under the tempting lip of a pre-cut concrete slab.