Bus Top Gardening

Are there any urban objects left that do not have an urban garden on their roof? I thought about the city buses before I stumbled upon this 2010 project. New York-based designer Marco Antonio Castro Cosio came up with a graduation project at the NYU, that claims to increase the amount of green spaces in the city. Bus Roots is a living garden on top of New York City buses. The idea is to greenify the city by taking advantage of unused spaces on the roofs of city buses. According to Wake Up World, a pilot project was installed on the so-called BioBus.

“A prototype of the rolling gardens has been installed on the roof of the BioBus, a mobile science laboratory and the first bus with an extensive green roof system. It has been growing for five months while traveling around New York City and as far as Ohio.”

With a sense for poetry, Castro Cosio calls his project an exercise in “nomadic urban agriculture”. His initiative is comparable to other efforts to create moving gardens to improve the city. What about this garden on a truck, or this train garden? If each of the 4,500 buses of New Yorks’s MTA will have a green micro park on their roof, 35 acres of new green space will be added to the city, says Castro Cosio. The city will look greener from above — something that’ll work in New York with so many people living and working high in the sky. In addition, the Bus Roots project will be beneficial from the perspective of mitigation of the urban heat island effect, acoustical and thermal insulation, storm water reduction, co2 absorption, habitat restoration and public education.