Going Green

For masterplanner Raymond Unwin, landscape was not just a background to lives lived, it was a weapon of so-cial change, says David Da-vidson, architectural adviser at Hampstead Garden Suburb Trust. Unwin’s vision was the communal landscape, one that promoted social interac-tion at every turn. In creat-ing the Hampstead Garden Suburb, he realised the demo-cratic landscapes the Garden.

Davidson was the first speaker in the Landscape Institute’s autumn lecture series Urban Landscapes in the Twentieth Century. He is also the first of our essayists 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.

RuralLife

Changing for the better

Green space

With large-scale investment on the backburner for the foreseeable future, the Landscape Institute’s lat-est publication Local green infrastructure: helping communities make the most of their landscape, seems particularly pertinent.The guide presents eight case studies that show how local people and businesses can make their towns, cities and villages more attractive, healthier and bet-ter for wildlife. So why have we put Stefano Boeri’s 27-storey Bosco Verticale on the cover? Billed as the world’s first ‘vertical forest’, each apartment will have a balcony planted 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. green city.

Eco-freindlyWith large-scale investment on the backburner for the foreseeable future, the Landscape Institute’s latest publication Local green infrastructure: helping communities make the most of their landscape, seems particularly pertinent.The guide presents eight case studies that show how local people and businesses can make their towns, cities and villages more attractive, healthier and better for wildlife. So why have we put Stefano Boeri’s 27-storey Bosco Verticale on the cover? Billed as the world’s first ‘vertical forest’, each apartment will have a balcony planted 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.

Programmed by Susannah Charlton of the Twentieth Century Society, the lecture series accompanies the Gar-den Museum’s From Garden City to Green City exhibition. The five speak-ers agreed to pen a series of essays for us, so, following a foreword from Christopher Woodward, di-rector of the Garden Museum, we dedicate 15 pages to what we can learn from more than a century of urban landscapes. Projects ad-viser at the Prince’s Regeneration Trust Roland Jeffery tackles hous-ing landscapes, and the new towns in particular. Their landscapes, he says, have still to find a comfortable role that is somewhere in between the private garden and the public highway.

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Planning

Ken Worpole, writer and senior pro-fessor at the Cities Institute, suggests that the British still have a problem

in thinking about designed land-scapes as places of pleasure. He asks whether now is the time for us to rediscover the purpose of our lei-sure landscapes. “If you leave peo-ple to live in a lousy, unhealthy, un-green and depressing envi-ronment that indicates that soci-ety at large, their local authority and the government don’t care about them, then why should we be surprised when they act with-out care themselves?” This is Sa-

rah Gaventa writing in the wake of August’s riots as she asks how com-

munities can possibly be expected.

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Planning