There's an immense expanse of completely unused space in my city, the roof tops. My dreamy mind imagines them converted into gardens.
There are, of course, issues that need to be managed. Most of our roofs aren't strong enough to support gardens, quite possibly. Structure needs to be inserted into the houses? This maybe be more or less true. What is clearly true is that the roofs themselves are not designed to support active use. Their water shedding capacity will be almost instantly degraded. The solution is to cover them with catwalks?
I seem to be proposing a level of intricacy that is not found in conventional architecture. We can discuss whether that is in any way practical. The first step would be building the proposed structures out of information. The relevant technology is called CAD, and it seems to me CAD is woefully underdeveloped. I'm struggling, though, to do anything about it.
There's another major problem which I'm sure no one is thinking about. A person working on a roof is conspicuous. How can rooftop gardens be made private?
Free CAD software?
