Imagining the Mossy Cities of the Future

As promising as these findings are, the reality is more complex than a green coating that simply cools whatever it covers. According to the Dutch researchers, the cooling effect only lasts as long as the moss is hydrated. Crucially, they found that dry moss exposed to direct sun can actually become warmer than bare mortar. So the question changes: Can cities engineer walls and roofs with moss that stays moist when cities most need cooling?

Several startups are betting that the solution lies in redesigning the surfaces themselves. In London, Alive Labs produces moss-covered panels to turn city walls into living infrastructure. Founder and architect Nicky Naidu wants to change how the construction industry thinks about moss, which is often treated as a sign of neglect. “Moss gets a bad rep. But moss has intrinsic beauty, and we want to bring that beauty to cities,” Naidu told Reuters. “It’s carbon negative, bioreceptive, cost-effective and fire-safe. Everything that the industry needs and requires.”

The company’s panels are made of a base material Naidu describes as bioreceptive concrete designed to support the growth of moss. The living wall systems incorporate controlled irrigation, delivering moisture directly rather than relying on rainfall or conventional surface spraying. Naidu argues that the moss walls are easier to maintain than conventional green walls because moss needs no soil to flourish. 

In the Netherlands, Respyre has developed a similar concept with “Mosscrete,” a bioreceptive concrete that can be seeded with moss and also features an “integrated, automated irrigation system that keeps the moss sufficiently hydrated, particularly during warmer and drier periods.” Both companies have moved from the prototype stage to making their panels commercially available.

In Berlin, Green City Solutions built the world’s first vertical moss farm on 1,200 square meters to grow moss for sustainable air filters. 

The next step for the industry is to measure results in real life under varying temperatures and conditions, to determine where moss performs well enough to justify the investment.

Not every experiment requires new materials or elaborate infrastructure. In Santiago de Compostela, Spain, a chance observation during the pandemic led city officials and university researchers to reconsider the vegetation growing between the city’s paving stones, including moss. After thermal cameras showed that stone surfaces with these small patches of greenery measured up to 25° Celsius cooler than bare paving, the city opted to leave the “urban microgreen” in place as a low-cost way to mitigate heat. 

Philip Wallisfurth keeps experimenting with the greenery, too. For a temporary installation, he transformed an entire living room in Berlin into an otherworldly moss-covered landscape. Again, he noticed people’s positive reaction. “The smell simply calmed people down,” he observed. “If you had a living moss wall in an office that was regularly watered, it would create an incredibly pleasant working climate. Plus, it filters the air and absorbs noise — it’s actually dreamlike.”

Wallisfurth learned that most conventional moss art one finds in rooms is made from moss that has been dried and preserved with chemicals, eliminating the need to water it but also killing most of its environmental benefits. “It’s dead,” he says. 

His own bio-art has limits. Without preservation, the moss typically dries and dies within three to six months, depending on the surrounding dryness and acidity. “Like street art,” Wallisfurth notes, “it’s impermanent, too.”

But learning more about moss also made him reconsider where his material comes from. His sister, a nature guide, calls moss the “lungs of the forest” and told him it was wrong to take moss from forests and public spaces. He now sources his moss from an abandoned army training ground that is likely to soon be a construction site.

His desire to create sustainable moss installations sometimes clashes with his clients’ expectations. Several big corporations approached him about creating moss pieces, he says, only to dismiss his concerns about sustainable sourcing. “They told me: ‘We don’t care. It just needs to look green in the pictures.’” He shakes his head. “That was a downer. It showed that most people only look at it as a means to an end.”

The exchange captures a broader risk in the rush to make cities greener: The living material can become a visual shorthand for sustainability, even when its environmental value has not been proven. It might look green but actually be greenwashing.

In addition to making his own moss art, Wallisfurth enjoys running moss workshops for kids at schools. Children love to experiment with the soft, tactile material, he says. 

Growing up in a rural part of the Eifel in Germany, he remembers walking barefoot across moss, and nature was his refuge when his own childhood was marked by loss. His parents died of cancer when he was young, and his brother was killed when Wallisfurth was only 14. He trained as a foreign-language correspondent and hotel manager before moving to Berlin and pursuing art. He turned to art explicitly as a means to brighten places up and turn rooms into positive spaces. “That’s what drives me,” he says. “Positivity is simply a much better way to deal with things. Of course, not everything is positive, but I have to try to stay positive.” His favorite projects begin with dark, inhospitable places and turn them into areas where people like to spend time. “That’s my goal as an artist.”

Wait, you’re not a member yet?

Join the Reasons to be Cheerful community by supporting our nonprofit publication and giving what you can.

Join
Cancel anytime

He believes he wouldn’t be an artist without his biography. And he sees a similar resilience in the plants: “A specialist once told me I could put moss in the oven at 270° Celsius, and if I water it afterward, it will come back to life.”

In that way, he says, “Maybe I’m a little like moss. You can destroy it, but it simply grows again. It’s a fighter.”

The post Imagining the Mossy Cities of the Future appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful.

Source link