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Further Pollution Reduction

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Vehicular Air Pollution and Urban Sustainability

Part of the book series: SpringerBriefs in Geography ((BRIEFSGEOGRAPHY))

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Abstract

Urban planning has defined urban space as separate from rural land use and the countryside. Cities are covered in cement (concrete) and tarmac up to the urban-rural fringe. Greenery is typically associated with the surrounding countryside or greenbelt area, where vegetation cover encapsulates the extent of the built environment. This notion of urban land use that excludes greenery needs to change in order to promote (and achieve) a fully integrated mitigation-adaptation approach to global warming. By introducing urban greening, it is possible to employ vegetation as a soft-engineering strategy that can be naturally and cheaply deployed as a CSS. This green movement is already being stimulated in cities by recent architectural requirements and designs that include, for instance, grass roofs and rooftop gardens. In this chapter, recent findings addressing urban agriculture are presented and specifically discussed. The literature conveys a growing interest in this mitigation-adaptation approach, and recommendations are made (as possible solutions) for its adoption in developed cities. This contributes to an understanding of the contemporary role of urban vegetation and its function (as a carbon sink, and more) within urban contexts, and this is relevant for any deliberation of Oxford’s history of green walls and impacts on pollution abatement through urban greening.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Brock University, St. Catharines, ON, Canada

    Mary J. Thornbush

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  1. Mary J. Thornbush
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Correspondence to Mary J. Thornbush .

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Thornbush, M.J. (2015). Further Pollution Reduction. In: Vehicular Air Pollution and Urban Sustainability. SpringerBriefs in Geography. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20657-8_5

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