The Transplant

Astrid Haryati, 37. Greening Director, City of SF.

“Imagine this,” says SF’s new director of city greening, Astrid Haryati. “A street lined with lampposts and hanging baskets. The baskets are planted with succulents, which need less water. The water comes from a small-cylinder rain barrel nearby and is pumped up to the baskets by solar panels attached to the light bulbs. This is a closed loop—sustainable.” The vision may seem minute in the overall scheme of greening an entire city, but it’s the kind of incremental, integral change that Indonesia native Haryati, a former landscape architect, enacted in her three years as Chicago’s greening czar. There, she implemented such commonsense tactics as using urban heat mapping—existing satellite data showing the ground temperature at different points throughout the city—to identify the locations most in need of tree plantings. Her goals for SF are equally down-to-earth. “I want us to go ‘beyond beauty,’ beyond the physical greening of the landscape to the environmental performance of the systems we put in place,” she says. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither is a green city, but Haryati assures us, “The devil is in the details. We do small because we know we can do it well. A grand change is possible if we perfect the small things first.”

WEB EXCLUSIVE

Astrid Haryati, the director of city greening for San Francisco, suggests capturing rainwater wherever possible by transforming any concrete pavement on your property into permeable ground planted with drought-tolerant plants. Also, disconnect “downspouts”—those pipes that carry water directly from gutters to sewer lines, thus wasting it—and redirect your rainwater to the surrounding landscapes. Finally, help clean the air by planting trees wherever possible and volunteer in city-greening projects (for more info, or if you have any questions, call the city hotline at 311 or check the SFEnvironment website.

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