Green Roofs for Healthy Cities, fresh from its CitiesAlive 2014 conference in Nashville, has issued their 2015 Call for Papers:

Invitation to Present Living Architecture Design, Policy, or Research at CitiesAlive 2015 in New York City

Living Architecture in New York
For Resilient People, Communities and Places

Green roofs and walls have a vast, but unrealized potential to address many of the fundamental challenges facing New York City. CitiesAlive is heading to the Big Apple for the first time in October 2015. The conference will draw an anticipated 1000 delegates and will work to explore and showcase underutilized living architecture opportunities. These include:

• Maintaining and improving community well-being
• Supporting individual health and well-being
• Creating quality affordable housing
• Cleaning NYC’s waterways
• Preparing to address the ongoing threat of climate change and severe weather:
  • Rising sea levels/storm surges
  • Increasing heat waves/urban heat island
  • Extreme weather events/flooding

The walls and the roofs of New York City provide hundreds of square miles of surfaces that can be used to help address many of these pressing issues. CitiesAlive delegates will tour leading edge projects, research facilities and see some unique sites such as the High Line and Brooklyn Grange. Technical sessions are directed towards design, research and policy communities and will focus on the latest scientific research, products, and policies all of which are critical to meeting the challenge of promoting healthy and resilient people and places in New York City.

2015 Topic Areas

This Call for Papers is due no later than February 27, 2015. We are in search of academic papers, projects and policies around the following themes:

• Resilient People
  • Nature as The Model:
    • The latest in biophilic design theory
    • The impacts of biophilic design on individual mental health and well-being
    • The economic impact of biophilic design on real estate values, human productivity
  • Healthy Living on the Roof:
    • Leveraging green infrastructure for human health and well-being
    • Rooftop parks:
      • Programming, design, installation and maintenance
    • Healing gardens:
      • Programming, design, installation and maintenance
    • Working Green:
      • Policies and actions that generate green jobs

• Resilient Communities
  • Making Green Affordable:
    • Benefits associated with green infrastructure and affordable housing
  • Engagement:
    • Community based design processes
    • Green infrastructure to influence the urban form
  • Building it Green:
    • Effective policy making for rapid green infrastructure deployment
    • Community revitalization and green infrastructure
  • Payback from the Rooftop:
    • The business case for living architecture – life-cycle cost-benefit analysis
    • The economics of green wall, design installation and maintenance (cost-benefit)

• Resilient Places:
  • Keeping it Cool:
    • Urban heat island research and modeling
    • Urban heat island economics
  • Respecting the Water:
    • Stormwater volume and quality attenuation, green roofs and walls
    • Water harvesting techniques – grey and black water
  • Roof-to-Table:
    • Urban agricultural production (plants and animals)
    • Urban food production and resiliency
    • The business case for urban farming
  • Keeping it Green:
    • Maintenance and living architecture

Benefits of presenting at CitiesAlive

• Opportunity to present your groundbreaking research, innovative design case study or novel policy changes to a highly interested group of green roof and wall enthusiasts.
• Speakers are featured on www.citiesalive.org with their presentation description, photo and biography.
• Speakers will receive a reduced rate of $350 to attend as a full delegate, which includes the trade show, plenary sessions, the Awards of Excellence, networking receptions and other sessions.
• Speakers will also receive a free electronic copy of the conference proceedings (valued at $160).

The deadline to submit your abstract and short bio is February 27, 2015! These will be reviewed and scored by an expert panel and you will be notified by March 31st.

CALL FOR PAPERS APPLICATION FORM

Visit www.citiesalive.org for more information about the conference in the coming months.

I guess Haven and I had better get to it and get our abstract ready for our 2015 Top 10 List of Hot Trends in Greenroof & Greenwall Design!  For our 2014 Top 10 List we selected The Big Green Apple: New York City in our #3 position as a wonderful area of the world which has been deeply involved with living architecture for years – very appropriate!

Cities Alive in NYC will be awesome – we’ll get to see “old” friends (Wendy and Chris Wark, and Steven Cantor among just a few) and partake of the bounty that is New York City!

~ Linda V.