Could we design a skyscraper & sewer system with the intent of creating ecological niches all through the building? Some of the work with green roofs touches on this... can your building handle rain like a forest, not produce fast run-off? Maybe even act as a water sink for less well designed nearby areas. You collect the runoff and get all the moss and plants your parking garage neighbor can't be bothered with.
Don't be mad about the bugs in the walls, design walls that attract the best bugs.
This is much harder than I'm making it sound. You'd need to pull on all that people have learned about naturally integrated buildings from human history and then recognize that the building would need to be refined and revised until all the systems were balanced.
I get that it's hard, but I don't get why we aren't more focused on going in this direction. Just getting a layer of turf on the roof is like pulling teeth.
@futurebird An apparently common problem, from what I've heard, is that architects do in fact try to design such buildings, but they then get 'negotiated down' to something completely ineffective during the cost analysis phase
