HOW GREEN IS YOUR CITY? (Not as green as Kharkov)
In the new urbanism drive for green, well vegetated cities - Planners, Architects and Landscape Architects seek exemplars to pad their reports. However, I have yet to see a KHARKOV (Kharkiv) in many reports.
This is a city that is so well vegetated its Google earth is almost green at every scale. And we are not talking a small town. Kharkov, at 1.5 million people is Ukraine’s second biggest city.
There is little in the way of images or descriptions that celebrate the treed streets. Is it that this is not on designers’ radars- stranded in the former Soviet block between the design capitals of Western Europe and East Asia; or is it the streets do not gain additional urban function from the green. The city has its share of Soviet style architecture, but even a lot of this is set amidst the green (for an outsider, talk about cognitive dissidence).