AN EVER CHANGING LANDSCAPE

British Landscapes

British Landscapes

A change for the better?A change for the better?

For masterplanner Raymond Unwin, landscape was not just a back-ground to lives lived, it was a weapon of social change, says Da-vid Davidson, architectural ad-viser at Hampstead Garden Suburb Trust. Unwin’s vision was the com-munal landscape, one that promoted social interaction at every turn. In creating the Hampstead Garden Suburb, he realised the democratic landscapes the Garden City move-ment espoused. Davidson was the first speaker in the Landscape Institute’s autumn lecture series Urban Landscapes in the Twenti-eth 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, 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 foreword from Christopher Woodward, director 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 comfortable role that is

Ken Worpole, writer and senior professor at the Cities Institute, suggests 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 pur-pose 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, ship with food and the urban landscape. their local authority and the government don’t care about them, then why should we be surprised when they act without care them-selves?” This is Sarah Gaventa writing in the wake of August’s riots as she asks how communities can possibly be expected to in-teract when they have no-where decent to commune.And finally, Landscape’s honor-ary editor Tim Waterman ex-plores our relation

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 images 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 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 lo-cal people and businesses can make their towns, cities and villages more attractive, healthier and better for wild-life.