Today, eight out of every ten urban residents in Peru live in apartments. That figure, which would have sounded exaggerated twenty years ago, is simply the reality of how our cities grow: upward, not outward. And with that shift came a question more and more clients are asking us: if I no longer have my own garden, where does the green space in my life go? Increasingly, the answer lies on the rooftop and the terrace.
Landscaping Has Moved Upward
For a long time, we thought of landscaping as something that happens at ground level: a front garden, a backyard, a front yard. The verticalization of housing has completely changed that logic. Today, a building's greenery is concentrated in shared rooftops, private terraces, and balconies, and this shift in scale isn't a poor substitute for the traditional garden — it's its own discipline, with its own technical challenges and its own design opportunities.
Balconies with hanging planters on the railings, trellis structures supporting climbing vines, entire rooftops transformed into living spaces with vegetation: these are solutions that, when properly executed, give apartment dwellers back something many families miss from when they used to live in a house with a garden of their own.
Benefits That Go Beyond the Aesthetic
A green rooftop isn't just a lovely social space with a view of the city. It serves concrete environmental functions: it filters pollutants, helps capture CO2, and above all, reduces the heat island effect that characterizes densely urbanized areas, where concrete and asphalt accumulate heat during the day and release it slowly at night. What's more, a well-installed vegetative cover extends the useful life of the slab by protecting it from direct solar radiation, and helps manage rainwater — something relevant even in a city with scarce rainfall like Lima, where heavy rain events, though infrequent, do cause drainage problems when they occur.
In short, it's one of those design decisions that pays off on multiple fronts at once: the wellbeing of those who live there, the value of the property, and a concrete response to the shortage of green areas affecting much of the city.
A well-executed green rooftop isn't a miniature garden resigned to living at height: it's a piece of infrastructure that works for the building while looking good.
What Needs to Be Resolved Before Planting the First Plant
Here's the point that gets overlooked most often, and as an architect I insist on making it clear: a green rooftop or terrace can't be improvised on just any slab. Proper waterproofing is needed to prevent leaks, a drainage layer that allows water to circulate without pooling or saturating the substrate, and in the case of full rooftops, a structural load calculation confirming that the slab can bear the added weight of soil, plants, and water once saturated.
For apartments or buildings where reinforcing the slab isn't feasible, there are prefabricated, modular systems — lightweight green roof panels — that achieve the same goal with much less weight and without compromising the existing structure. This is often the most practical solution for bringing greenery to a rooftop that wasn't originally designed for that use.
How to Approach It in Your Own Project
If you're considering adding a green terrace or rooftop, the first question isn't which plants you want — it's what your slab can support and how the water will be managed. Only after resolving that does it make sense to think about design: which combination of planters, vines, and furniture works best for how you plan to use the space, whether it's a family living area, an outdoor work corner, or simply a green breather amid the density of the city. When properly resolved from an engineering standpoint, vertical landscaping isn't a scaled-down version of the garden you no longer have — it's a different, and perfectly valid, way of still having one.
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