APPROACH

While carefully preserving the integrity of existing roofs, Roofscapes’ system ensures that each building fully contributes to urban resilience by reducing direct solar exposure and overheating, cooling the air through evapotranspiration, retaining rainwater, and supporting local biodiversity anchors. The shared green spaces we create on roofs address the growing demand for direct access to the outdoors in dense cities. While the replicability of our approach ensures a smooth scalability, our system’s versatility enables adaptation to any roof geometry and architectural context.

APPROACH

CONTEXT

As climates are shifting, cities face thermal conditions that are increasingly different from the ones for which they were built. For instance, from a maximum recorded temperature of 36.5°C during the 1976 “heatwave of the century” to 42.6°C in 2021, Paris’ built fabric is showing how little equipped it is for the new climatic regime. As urban livability at large is called into question, it is urgent to develop nature-based solutions that increase climate resilience through non-invasive renovation projects, at scale. As stated recently by the French National Public Health Agency, “public health measures are no longer sufficient: the city's fabric must literally be adapted.“

CONTEXT

THE ROLE
OF ROOFS

In many European city centers, while it’s hard to find spaces at the street level for urban renaturation, roofs cover up to 38% of a city’s footprint. In Paris, as 4 out of 5 buildings have a pitched roof, most of which in zinc - a material thatparticipates in the city’s thermal vulnerability by heating up to 80°C in the summer - we have to find ways to transform what is currently part of the problem into a part of the answer.

commitments

Power to non-humans

Renaturing cities doesn't simply imply greening the backdrop in front of which human-centric urban activities are played out. Renaturing cities implies, above all, a different mindset towards non-humans: giving them back some of the power and space we've seized for ourselves, recognizing their way of life and learning to live together with each other.

Low-tech city

Climate disruption is forcing the built environment to protect its inhabitants from increasingly extreme temperatures, at a time when we have less and less energy to artificially correct such thermal discomforts. For a city to adapt and be resilient to climate change, it is urgent to make use of solutions that are passive, replicable, and low-tech.

The right to adapt

As cities now face climates that differ radically from those for which they were built, Roofscapes defends the right to adapt to climate change through passive and decarbonized strategies in order to ensure that everyone has access to livable temperatures despite a warming world.

commitments

Power to non-humans

Low-tech city

The right to adapt

Construction

Roofscapes has developed a construction strategy that can be adapted to each roof configuration by replicating certain principles throughout the city. The modularity of the system of prefabricated wooden platforms allows it to adjust to the different dimensions and spans of the roofs. The loads of these modules are transmitted vertically to the thick masonry load-bearing walls that characterize pre-war European centers; these walls are largely oversized, providing the structural capacity to support new roof surfaces.