Busan is good

Second stage of City Hall’s rooftop garden completed.

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The second stage of the rooftop garden at Busan City Hall, the ‘Haneul Madang’, was completed with the planting of a wider variety of wild flowers and herbs. Busan City also announced that it will open the rooftop garden to City Hall visitors and students for educational purposes.

 

As part of the theme project for climate change by the Ministry of Environment, the city built the rooftop garden as a way of encouraging others to build rooftop gardens on other public and private buildings in Busan, to promote the effects of rooftop gardens in the fight against climate change and to utilize it as an environmentally friendly ecological learning center.  A 2,335 square meter rooftop garden has been built on the 4^th floor roof of the City Hall building. In 2009, a 1,612㎡ rooftop garden was completed at a cost of 0.4 billion won, constituting the first stage of the project. Now, with a further investment of 0.2 billion won, the second stage of the project – a 723 ㎡ garden consisting of 4,700 trees of 36 different species and 7,000 flowers and herbs of 48 different species – has been completed.

 

The positive effects or functions of the rooftop gardening project will be as follows:

 

△ to produce oxygen, lessen pollution through green plants.
△ to create bird migration flyways by the greening of artificial ground,
△ to control humidity, mitigating the urban heat island effect 
△ to keep the City Hall cooler in summer, meaning it will require less energy for air conditioning (the garden absorbs less heat from the sun than a tarred roof). The soil will also absorb and block noise.

 

Recently, during the day, at Haneul Madang, the surface temperature of the non-green area reached 37.4℃, while the soil temperature of the green area on the same day was measured at 24.6℃ and the average temperature was about 13℃. This shows the cooling effect of the rooftop garden.

 

The City Hall rooftop garden will eventually cover the entire rooftop (a 10 thousand square meter area) by 2012, becoming the nation’s largest rooftop garden.