BL.British Landscapes

Are British Landscapes Changing Around Us?

For master planner Raymond Unwind, landscape was not just a background to lives lived, it was a weapon of so-cial change, says David Davidson, ar-chitectural adviser at Hampstead Gar-den Suburb Trust. Unwinds vision was the communal landscape, one that promoted social interaction at every turn. In creating the Hampstead Gar-den Suburb, he realized the demo-cratic landscapes the Garden City movement espoused. For master planner Raymond Unwind, landscape was not just a background to lives lived, it a w e a p -on of

“Urban Planning”Ken Worpole, writer and senior pro-

fessor at the Cities Institute, sug-

gests that the British still have

a problem in thinking about

designed landscapes as

places of pleasure. He

asks whether now is the time for us

to rediscover the purpose of our

leisure land-scapes.

“If you leave people to live in a lousy, unhealthy, un-green and depressing environment that indicates that society at large, their local

authority and the government don’t

care about them, then why should we be

surprised when they act

without care themselves?”

This is Sarah Gaventa writ-

ing in the wake of August’s riots

as

she asks how communities can possibly be expected to

interact when they have nowhere decent to commune.

A nd finally, Land-scape’s honorary editor Tim Water-man explores our relationship with food and the urban landscape. Are taste and appetite our biggest barri-ers to realising sustainable design?

But just how relevant are the ideas of the Garden City to those nations currently in thrall to urban revolu-tions of their own? We asked Ruth Olden to get behind the images of verdant green cities and see what’s happening in India, China and Mex-ico. With large-scale investment on

the backburner for the foreseeable future, the Landscape Institute’s latest publication Local green infrastructure: helping communi-ties make the most of their landscape, seems particularly pertinent.

BL.British Landscapes