https://jamiecurle.com/posts/trees-3-30-300
Northumberland, UK.
The middle one seems a lot harder to me than the other two.
Maybe if we buried the power lines and turned the utility easements into open space.
Espoo is much more spread out, and the areas between them are all full of trees and greenery. So I very much agree with you, I've visited Espoo a few times but without a car I wouldn't want to live there.
I agree that the public transport is not particularly great if you don’t live on the metro or train line. It’s usually faster to drive and even with one person cheaper even when paying for gasoline and parking. Public transport is ridiculously overpriced in Finland.
Even Helsinki leaves much to be desired on that front, the coverage is okay but the ticket prices are ridiculous. It’s not feasible to drive in the center though, takes forever to get anywhere.
Yes, it's pretty green here.
Now, if we could ban street parking like Japan did [0], and perhaps take some more inspiration from Dutch traffic planning..
[0] Ideally we'd get the Gahmen out of the car parking business completely.
In other climates, like European ones, this becomes much more complex. Germany struggles even to keep its forests alive with long stretches of missing rain, higher temperatures, and new pests. Single trees in cities constantly die. Spain is in large parts a desert etc.
I really hope we find a solution/adapted plants to keep cities from heating up so much.
Ailanthus[0] is invasive as heck and Paulownia[1] grows everywhere too.
Eh, have a look at other tropical cities like Johor Bahru or Jakarta or Kuala Lumpur and you can see that it's very much possible to have way less greenery than Singapore.
The recent trouble with the Borkenkäfer was just a consequence of monoculture. Germany doesn't struggle with keeping forests alive: it's normal at any one time for individual trees in forests to die. Decaying dead wood is important for the ecosystems.
79% of all German trees are sick. Monocultures and beetles play a role but the problem is much bigger than that: https://www.bmleh.de/DE/themen/wald/wald-in-deutschland/wald...
Even worse. It was monoculture of trees that aren't even native to the climate zone. The trees were imported from Scandinavia for their superior lumber quality, and were on edge even without the added stress from droughts and heat waves.
Big cities in Europe are usually surrounded by more rural areas in most of Europe for historical reasons (surrounding farmlands used to feed the city), lessening the need for city parks and greenery since the countryside was surrounding the city. If the city IS the country and even isolated on an island, that's of course not an option.
Another factor is also rooted in history. Like most cities in Europe, Singapore is old, though most of its growth happened in the past 60 years with proper urban planning. Europe's cities on the other hand grew over centuries without any kind of modern urban planning and the pressure of rebuilding quickly after the many devastating wars didn't help either.
Finally there's the issue of money - being one of the richest countries/cities on Earth helps tremendously with building a nice, liveable urban environment compared to some cities struggling to keep basic infrastructure running.