Page 65 - Çevre Şehir İklim İngilizce - Sayı 2

Hayriye Eşbah Tunçay

techniques around the world. As multifunctional natural solutions are
also economic alternatives, the maintenance of public space will be less
burdensome for the city. The location of the square, climatic parameters,
open or closed spaces, and infrastructure systems will be guiding concerning
the use of these alternatives in certain combinations.

3. Transport and Service Corridors

The transportation arteries in the city are important infrastructures serving as
the most developed networks in terms of length. These long and uninterrupted
corridors are surrounded by green lines on both sides, and sometimes in the
middle. The term transportation covers road surface, roadside, the lines on
a street or highway and the median strip with vegetation. Road systems are
related to almost all areas of ecology. Conceptual foundations start with water
and water flow, followed by microclimate, wind and atmospheric effects,
vegetation and biodiversity, populations and wildlife, and finally landscape
ecology and dispersal habitat (Forman, et al, 2002). Transportation infrastructure
is an artificial culture interacting with the space around it. Particularly roads
are the physical expressions of social connections and economic and political
decisions that cause a change in land use. The emerging product affects the
sustainable transportation network in the city as well as human life quality. In
cases where transportation corridors do not provide nature-based solutions,
many environmental problems emerge. For instance, neighborhoods around
transportation corridors that haven’t been provided with a strong vegetation
texture are exposed to noise and visual pollution. In the absence of a tree
texture that will absorb exhaust and harmful gasses, the air quality of the
textures through which these corridors are placed will decrease. Solutions
developed with gray infrastructures only are not static and they fail to adapt
to new situations, which results in the flooding of transportation corridors.
This affects the city units and the quality of life around the area as well as
endangering road traffic safety. Traffic accidents happen most in rainy weather,
when the infrastructure fail to accommodate it. When the opposite happens,
the transportation corridors of extremely warm cities turn into a heat corridor
with their impermeable surfaces. This affects the environmental quality of all
structures along the corridor and urban open spaces and lowers life quality.
Cities fighting climate change should take multifunctional and ecosystem
services and water harvest into account in their transportation corridor
approach. It is impossible to consider these corridors independent from the
landscape they pass through. Transportation corridors are called synthetic
corridors in terms of urban ecology (Esbah, et al 2009). Although not as

51 Journal of Environment, Urbanization and Climate