Rooftops have long been objects of fascination, but starting in January, when the city’s new green roof bylaw kicks in, developers will be required to make theirs more interesting.
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Engaging the urban imagination has been mandated.
Toronto will be the world’s first municipality to require that builders mitigate the ill effects of urban growth like the “heat island” effect, sewage overflow from stormwater runoff and air pollution.
“When you have to put a green roof on [your building], it opens new opportunities for dialogue,” says Steven Peck of Green Roofs for Healthy Cities. “‘Well, we have to have this green roof -? what do you want to do? Do you want a community garden?’ In pushing the building integration envelope, architects can open those [social] opportunities as well.”
Not to mention the “hard” benefits – for example, cooling the intake of roof-?mounted air conditioners and reducing A/C costs by a minimum of 10 per cent.
But, while Peck is pleased with council’s “step in the right direction,” he says it could have gone further – “until politics intervened.”
After months of wrangling, developers are still calling the new bylaw, which requires partial green roof coverage on any new building of 2,000 square feet or greater or six storeys or more, extreme.
Environmentalists were pushing for more stringent requirements for industrial buildings, since they tend to have the largest roofs.
But they’re exempt from the bylaw until 2011, and then will only need to cover 10 per cent of their roofs.
Environmentalists are also worried about buildings under six storeys, especially in light of the city’s strategy of building satellite cores with mid-?rise development.
By focusing specifically on green roofs rather than a wider category of “eco roofs,” which can include reflective surfaces, white paint and solar generators, the city has focused on a more visible but also more expensive, and possibly less effective, route to urban sustainability.
Allowing solar panels to account for part of a developers’ coverage would have been an easy way to build local capacity for renewable power quickly, but to throw a bone to wary developers, since they can sell excess power back to the province.
So long as a perverse provincial property assessment regime means sprawling cities like Mississauga can offer lower taxes, it will be hard to keep industry in Toronto with stringent green requirements.
But were a change in the (provincial) Building Code to come in….
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