Green roof

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the 30th Sustainable Futures Podcast, Designing Green Communities and Buildings.

I am your host, Stephen Peck, the founder and president of Green Roofs for Healthy Cities, a nonprofit industry association working to develop the green roof and wall industry in Canada and the United States.

Green Roofs for Healthy Cities is also a founding member of the World Green Infrastructure Network, which is an international organization that promotes the development of green roofs, walls, and other forms of green infrastructure around the world.

Our guest today is none other than Timothy Beatley, an American urban planner, professor and author renowned for advancing concepts in sustainable communities, biophilic urban design and city resilience.

As the Theresa Hines Professor of Sustainable Communities in the Department of Urban and Environmental Planning at the University of Virginia School of Architecture, where he has taught for over 25 years, Tim directs the undergraduate program in urban and environmental planning and emphasizes practical strategies for cities to minimize ecological footprints while improving equity and livability.

There's that kind of, Just that friendly competition

is part of it.

And then, you know, Chicago, you could take that further and say, you know, Mayor Daley, when he, he came back and he was traveling around Europe and saw the green roofs there.

I had to decide what to do for the master thesis, that it should be an insect topic.

I just learned that there's not much knowledge, at least at this time, about wild bees on green roofs.

And yeah, during the master thesis, I learned to identify bees and it was so much fun.

Yeah, it's like riddles all the time.

I want to really dive into your work now that you've talked about tracking.

And so your work in urban environments and wild bees.

So what was the angle of your research? What were you really trying to find out about the wild bees and the green roofs? The focus was on this study was

really about what species do we have there? and what properties of green roofs benefit high diversity, high abundance.

I get to be your host on a multitude of topics around the project to help uncover the work that was done over years, and in some cases, even decades.

Today, we're really diving deep into the living roof on the project.

There are so many aspects to the roof that people may experience and recognize firsthand, but there's also aspects to the roof that require a little bit more insight to fully understand.

If you go out to Medora today and you were to stand at the very peak of the roof, you could look out off to the north and see the very location that Theodore Roosevelt exited the train when he came from New York out to the west.