Green areas along rivers’ frontline. Case studies Budapest, Prague and Warsaw

This article reviews the existing situation of the riverbanks development in three Eastern European capital cities. The aim of the work is to compare the riverbank management in Warsaw, Budapest and Prague and describe the main features of greenery system along the rivers. The material taken to the analyses was gathered by European Environment Agency and published in GIS format under the project Urban Atlas. The delimitation of the research area covers 500m from each site of the river beds. The research has shown that Warsaw has the biggest rate of the green area, especially along the Vistula right bank. It is still a great potential of land to develop for the city. Danube’s greenery in Budapest is concentrated mostly on the Margaret Island, whereas the Vltava greenery in Prague consists in majority of the pocket parks along the river. The low amount of green area at the rivers in the last two case studies and their patchwork location makes those systems too small to think about green riverbanks as a big scale and coherent linear project. Current trends of waterfront management are slowly entering those three cities mostly in a form of small social participation initiatives. It seems that the waterfronts will change their face soon in all analysed cities commenced by the urban acupuncture initiatives

Znaczenie czynników środowiska naturalnego w projektowaniu przestrzeni miejskich

The article presents the problems of bioclimatic architecture that derives its traditions from the distant past. Urban settlements aligned with the landscape often benefitted from natural environmental factors pragmatically and symbolically. Nowadays, practice of using solar or wind energy and water in building development becomes more common. The paper presents examples of urban solutions, which use natural environmental factors e.g. to optimize the energy consumption or drinking water in particular urban areas. They fit into the mainstream of Ecological Urbanism, which in the era of climate change in the world has the opportunity to provide for the development of future-oriented architecture environment

Rozwiązania krajobrazowe w małej retencji

The article presents landscape solutions for natural water retention named in Poland ‘small water retention’. The paper covers examples of neighbourhood scale interventions, which use natural environmental factors to optimize the stormwater storage capacity. They fit into the mainstream of natural ecosystem and landscape-oriented ways that influence and change microclimate of a particular area