Urban Rooftops are generally overlooked and underutilized despite the significant capacity they have to provide valuable space for producing food, clean energy, and for capturing rainwater.
Technological options that already exist or being under development can help cities, especially overcrowded ones, to become self-sustaining in terms of energy, develop circular economy conditions, and turn rainwater from liability (e.g. storm water) to asset by capturing it and reusing it.
Different studies and exercises have proven the benefits of transforming urban roof tops to valuable asset of cities' well-being. The most recent one is analyzing the technical feasibility and environmental impacts of renewable-energy, crop-production and rainwater-harvesting systems on city rooftops. The innovation of this study, that is worth looking at, is based on the fact that for the first time a study explores the impact of consider multiple systems across multiple roofs in a relatively large area, such as a neighborhood. This ‘Roof Mosaic’, as they call it, is a resource-production arrangement, whose integration could bring synergies within the ‘food–energy–water nexus’.
The benefits are quite impressive. The environmental assessment’s results indicated that such configurations could each meet 23% of local demand for water for laundry and irrigation, 7–10% of energy and 34–50% of hot water (provided via energy systems). In addition, they could avoid between 109 and 157 tons of CO2-equivalent emissions per year, per inhabitant, compared with conventional sourcing of these resources.
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