British Landscapes

-A change for the better?

Introduction

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For masterplanner Raymond Unwin, landscape was not just a background to lives lived, it was a weapon of so-cial change, says David Davidson, architectural adviser at Hampstead Garden Suburb Trust. Unwin’s vi-sion was the communal landscape, one that promoted social interac-tion at every turn. In creating the Hampstead Garden Suburb, he real-ised the democratic landscapes the Garden City movement espoused.Davidson was the first speaker in the Landscape Institute’s autumn lecture series Urban Landscapes in the Twen-tieth 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 cen-

tury challenge: realising the greencity.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, 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 Re-generation Trust Roland Jeffery tack-les housing 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.

Introduction

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Ken Worpole, writer and senior profes-sor at the Cities Institute, suggests that the British still have a problem in think-ing about designed landscapes as places of pleasure. He asks whether now is the time for us to rediscover 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 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 writing in the wake of August’s riots as she asks how commu-nities can possibly be expected to inter-act 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 big-gest barri-

Urban Planning

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 purpose of our leisure landscapes.“If you leave people to live in a lousy, unhealthy, un-green and depressing en-vironment that indicates that society at large, their local authority and the gov-ernment don’t care about them, then why should we be surprised when they act without care themselves?” This is Sarah Gaventa writing 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.And finally, Landscape’s honorary editor Tim Waterman explores our rela-tionship with food and the urban landscape. Are taste and appetite our biggest barriers to realising sus-tainable 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 Mexico.

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Urban Planning