The large-scale concerns of energy production and transportation fuels are set aside by the editors in favor of less visible paths for cultivating healthier cities.  One approach that’s entirely invisible from the street level involves plantings on rooftops.  As the book makes clear, plant-covered green roofs are gaining popularity everywhere from Olympic Village in Vancouver to the Omotesandō section of Tokyo in a range of inspiring schemes.  Against the skyline of Midtown Manhattan, rows of salad ingredients grow from the rooftop soil tended by Brooklyn Grange, a business supplying locally harvested produce to the neighborhood below – local harvesting beyond the imaginations of many city locavores.  Who knows, satellite images of cities like New York may one day show giant swaths of green where today they are almost uniformly gray.
      Similarly, community gardens are being planted in reclaimed vacant lots and abandoned industrial sites around the world.  Non-profit groups, such as Berlin’s Nomadisch Grün, are proving that no surface is beyond hope for being reinvented and beautified.  And San Francisco’s initiative “Victory Gardens 2008 +” is aiming to demonstrate that healthier eating habits among city dwellers can be another payoff from tilling neglected soil and planting organic crops.
      Meanwhile, vertical gardens are being grown on the facades of some city buildings.  Photographs of Paris’s Musee Du Quai Branly and of the Ann Demeulemeester Shop in Seoul (pictured here) reveal how spectacularly architects are able to incorporate botanical elements into their designs.   What masonry and glass have meant to the construction styles of past eras, perhaps dirt and chlorophyll will signify for the next commonplace blueprints yet to come.