Toronto was the first North American city to pass a green roof law, in 2009, requiring new buildings or additions that are greater than 21,000 square feet to cover between 20 and 60 percent of their buildings with vegetation. 

Meanwhile, the U.S. government’s General Services Administration has over 80 buildings with green roofs, spanning approximately 2.2 million square feet, which is about 48 football fields of green roofs. This includes what is believed to be the second largest green roof in the world: the U.S. Coast Guard Headquarters in Washington, DC, about as large as 10 football fields.

Today in the US, there is more than 17.5 million square feet of planted roof surfaces, which is music to the ears of my guest, Alan Burchell.

Alan launched his company Urbanstrong in 2014 to promote rooftop development strategies that integrate nature back into cities. Based in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Urbanstrong provides finance, engineering, design, and construction services for green roofs and to date has installed hundreds of thousands of square feet of green roof and wall projects throughout the northeast, on schools, offices, restaurants, apartment buildings, and brownstones.

Alan is an engineer by training, with an MBA and a masters in sustainability management from Columbia University. He previously worked for the wind energy company Siemens Gamesa and is cofounder of the New York Agriculture Collective.

In this episode, Alan joins me to discuss the state of green roof installations in the US and abroad, the challenges as well as the most promising strategies to a greener rooftop future.

In our last three-person episode, we explored the future of work in the post-pandemic, climate age, about office space and commuting patterns. These changes are happening in real time, before our very eyes.

The same can be said about the future of cities writ large, not just office buildings and commutes, but cities as a whole: housing, transportation, retail space, parks, institutions. All seem to be in a state of flux, at best, crisis at worse.

Are we in a transitory part of the cycle or the beginning of a bigger transition, an evolutionary leap in urbanism and patterns of human settlement? And what does that mean for cities of different sizes and cultures, coastal, heartland, red, blue, and so on. Where do politics fit in? And what about the so-called “Urban Doom Loop?” Is it hype or reality?

In this episode, we talk about these things, about the cities we think will thrive going forward and those that might struggle, the sink or swim of our urban future.

In his at once inspiring and dispiriting piece in the New York Times Magazine from November 2022 entitled “What Does Sustainable Living Look Like? Maybe Like Uruguay,” Noah Gallagher Shannon writes: 

“This is the paradox at the heart of climate change: We’ve burned far too many fossil fuels to go on living as we have, but we’ve also never learned to live well without them. . . . [T]he problem of the future is how to create a 19th-century carbon footprint without backsliding into a 19th-century standard of living. No model exists for creating such a world, which is partly why paralysis has set in at so many levels. The greatest crisis in human history may require imagining ways of living — not just of energy production but of daily habit — that we have never seen before. How do we begin to imagine such a household?”

Noah explores this pivotal question and more in this episode of the Sustainable City podcast. What’s the leap in imagination, if not logic, required from the Uruguay example of sustainable living to the US? And are we kidding ourselves as Americans to think that we could ever live with a carbon footprint less than our current generation enjoys, about 25 tons per capita, which would be a first and, to some, the beginning of the end of the American Dream, where more is better and most is best, especially our freedom to choose how we want to live, consume, travel. Don’t tread on me, or my 6000 pound SUV, seems to be our latest American credo.

Noah Gallagher Shannon is a reporter and writer based in Colorado. His work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Oxford American and elsewhere. Noah’s stories have been cited for awards by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Association of Science Writers and others, and he’s appeared on The Daily, BBC and NBC Nightly News. Noah’s reported widely throughout the US, Latin America and Africa, and written about skateboarding, violent thunderstorms, cinematography, corporate private security and other subjects.

He's currently at work on a book for Random House about track and field, 1970s West Texas and a group of young athletes from East Africa who changed the sports world.