Study of the Role of Green Roofs as a Strategy to Improve Urban Environmental Quality from the Sustainable

Green roof is one of the new approaches of the architecture and urban planning and derived from the concepts of sustainable development which can be used to increase the green space per capita, environmental quality and urban sustainable development. Applied usage of roofs could be considered as an optimized utilization of urban lands. The main objective of this paper is to study the role of green roofs as a strategy to improve urban environmental quality from the sustainable architecture perspective.
Initially, a questionnaire was designed on the base of experts’ opinions, including 22 questions. Then 30 experts in the field of urban planning and architecture were selected as the study sample. Considering architectural issues and urban sustainable development, questions were categorized according to three main scopes: 1. The effects of green roofs on the ecological, continental, environmental, and economic-cultural aspects, 2. The differences between intensive and extensive green roofs, and 3. The differences between the green roofs and common roofs. The Alpha method was used for the evaluation of the reliability, and 3 hypotheses were presented for analyzing the questionnaire.
The alpha factor was gained to be 0.727, showing that the questionnaire had a proper reliability. After analyzing the hypotheses, they were confirmed. This implied the great effect of green roofs on improvement of urban environmental quality from the sustainable architecture perspective. The results showed that totally 70-80% of experts declared that the green roofs had high importance in the improving the environmental quality and sustainable urban development. Indeed, green roofs are our connector with nature in designing and planning and can reduce the negative effects of buildings in local ecosystem and consequently reduce the energy consumption. Moreover, green roofs can have a determinative role in fluctuation of energy circulation in buildings and may play an aesthetical role for the residents of cities.