For masterplanner Raymond Unwin, land-scape was not just a background to lives lived, it was a weapon of social change, says David Davidson, architectural adviser at Hampstead Garden Suburb Trust. Unwin’s vision was the communal landscape, one that promoted social interaction at every turn. In creating the Hampstead Garden Suburb, he realised the democratic land-scapes the Garden City movement espoused.Davidson was the first speaker in the Landscape Institute’s autumn lecture se-ries Urban Landscapes in the Twentieth Century. He is also the first of our essay-ists in this special edition of Landscape, which takes as its starting point the ideals of the Garden City and pits them against

the great 21st century challenge: realising the green city. Programmed by Susannah Charlton of the Twentieth Century Society, the lecture series accompanies the Garden Museum’s From Garden City to Green City exhibition. The five speakers agreed to pen a series of essays for us, so, following a fore-word from Christopher Woodward, direc-tor of the Garden Museum, we dedicate 15 pages to what we can learn from more than a century of urban landscapes. Projects adviser at the Prince’s Regeneration Trust Roland Jeffery tackles housing landscapes, and the new towns in particular. Their landscapes, he says, have still to find a com-fortable role that is somewhere in between the private garden and the public highway.

Ken Worpole, writer and senior professor at the Cities Institute, suggests that the Brit-ish still have a problem in thinking about de-signed landscapes as places of pleasure. He asks whether now is the time for us to redis-cover the purpose of our leisure landscapes.“If you leave people to live in a lousy, unhealthy, un-green and depressing environment that indicates that society at large, their local au-thority and the government don’t care about them, then why should we be surprised when they act without care themselves?” This is Sa-rah Gaventa writing in the wake of August’s riots as she asks how communities can pos-sibly be expected to interact when they have nowhere decent to commune. And finally, Landscape’s honorary editor Tim Waterman explores our relationship with food and the

urban landscape. Are taste and appetite our biggest barriers to realising sustainable design?But just how relevant are the ideas of the Garden City to those nations currently in thrall to urban revolutions of their own? We asked Ruth Olden to get behind the im-ages of verdant green cities and see what’s happening in India, China and Mexico.With large-scale investment on the backburner for the foreseeable future, the Landscape Insti-tute’s latest publication Local green infrastruc-ture: helping communities make the most of their landscape, seems particularly pertinent.The guide presents eight case stud-ies that show how local people and busi-nesses can make their towns, cities and villages more attractive, healthier,better for the environment and the wildlife.

Urban Planning

So w

hy h

ave w

e put

Stefano Boeri’s 27-storey Bosco Verticale on the cover?

Billed as the world’s first ‘vertical forest’, each apart-ment will have a balcony plant-ed with trees, creating a green forest rising above the city. It is the first element in Boeri’s proposed BioMilano, in which a green belt is created around the city. This seemingly fantas-tical concept is actually un-der con-s t r u c -t i o n

i n M i - lan and serves, perhaps, as a stark re-minder that nothing quite so green and ambit ious

seems to be going on in the built environment in the UK.Or is there? After all, there is unlikely to be one solution to the green city. Rather, the ques-tion is whether our attempts to realise it, in all its manifesta-

tions, will be resigned to the drawing board as uto-

pian ideals or will the 21st century

see them fi-nally suc-

ceed at s c a l e ?