Planting trees to prevent vehicle-related terror attacks: Italian architect
0 Comment(s)
Print
E-mail Xinhua, August 22, 2017
ROME, Aug. 22 (Xinhua) -- A noted Italian architect has suggested trees could be used to protect citizens in public spaces from possible terror attacks such as those occurred in European cities in latest months.
Trees and plants may in fact provide a functioning alternative to concrete in order to create barriers against vehicle attacks, according to Stefano Boeri.
"Instead of distorting the most vital and open spaces in our cities, filling them with concrete barriers and modular plastic security devices, we should oppose the death instinct of such brutes with the calm presence of plants, and especially oaks," he wrote on Facebook on Sunday.
A Milan-born architect and Urban Planning professor at the Politecnico in Milan, Boeri is renowned in Italy and abroad for his commitment to environmental regeneration within urban areas.
He recently launched a sustainable residential building project called "Vertical Forest", the first of which -- a twin-block building in Milan -- now hosts over 1,000 plants and trees on its terraces.
After last week's twin terror attacks in Spain, which killed 15 people, Boeri wrote on his account that "even an oak can stop terror".
Thirteen people were killed and over 100 others injured on Thursday afternoon in the popular Las Ramblas area of Barcelona, when a white van zigzagged at high speed down the busy avenue thronged with tourists, knocking down pedestrians.
"Terrorists want us to lock ourselves at home, in the hope of forcing us to give up enjoining our collective and public spaces," the architect wrote in his post. "Besides the essential tools of prevention and control, we should respond to their desperate madness with a careful use of natural beauty and of its symbolic value."
He appealed on mayors and prefects across Italy and Europe to call "architects, creative, designers, technicians, students and artists" to design big pots, each capable of hosting a plant.
Such pots should be cylindrical, at least one meter high and three meters in diameter, and deep enough to host roots and trunk of a tree. They should be positioned at the entrance to squares and key public spaces "to protect the passage of pedestrians, and minimize the risk of mass murders".
"Unlike a New Jersey, a tree not only protects us, but it makes us shade, absorbs the urban air poison, hosts insects and birds: in a word, it welcomes and protect that life that terrorists want to annihilate," Boeri explained.
The authorities in Rome, Milan, and other Italian major cities have announced concrete barriers would be added to those already in place at the entrance to squares and sensitive public sites to avoid vehicles entering and ramming people.
Since July 2016, terrorist vehicle attacks have occurred in Nice, Berlin, Stockholm, London (three times), Levallois-Perret, and Paris. Enditem
Go to Forum >>0 Comment(s)