Category Archives: landscape planning

Urban parks, POS and landscape architecture

The Skateboard park on London's South Bank is a specialised POS, created by and for its users - in defiance of the authorities. It involved no capital cost and nor is there any maintenance cost.

Too many park managers have a horticultural training. To few park managers are trained in landscape architecture, garden design, event management, community leadership, economics, public accountancy or social entrepreneurship. The consequence of the imbalance is that too much public open space is managed as ‘parkland’: ‘green deserts with lollipops’, shrubberies, flowerbeds and a few facilities for young mums, sporty youths and old age pensioners. We have too much generalized public open space and too little specialized public open space.

NIMBY Urbanism and Landscape Urbanism

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Hundertwasser's design for Spa Blumeau increases the urban area while allowing a vegetated landscape to develop

The most popular urban design policy is NIMBY Not In My Back Yard: lets keep on building but lets do it somewhere else. This may change when we all come to see the Earth as our Back Yard. Meanwhile, how can we make urbanization more popular? There are about three times as many humans on earth today as on the day I was born. If this trend continues, as is projected, we need a lot of space for urban sprawl or we need to intensify the use of each square meter which is already urbanized. How can either policy be popular? My suggestion is asking landscape architects to study plots of land and find ways of simultaneously (1) creating more indoor space (2) creating more greenspace which is both useful and accessible to the public. This can be done in lots of ways and one of the best examples comes from the work of the Austrian artist-designer Friedensreich Hundertwasser. At Spa Blumeau, illustrated above, he took some tired farmland and made a popular spa with, I guess, more wildlife and vegetation than before the development took place.

See the Landscape Urbanism Blog and Wiki on Landscape Urbanism Landscape Urbanism is a theory of urbanism which argues that landscape, rather than architecture, is more capable of organizing the city and enhancing the urban experience.

Urban forestry and landscape architecture

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In addition to being beautiful, the trees and gravel in the Place des Vosges are good for microclimate, wildlife and hydrology.

All good foresters know that tree planting must serve multiple objectives: beauty, timber production, habitat creation, water management, public recreation, carbon cycle re-balancing etc. Urban landscape architects, on the whole, are less enlightened. Too often, they think of tree planting as decorative activity akin to the placement of public art in cities. Urban foresters should broaden their horizons, as rural foresters claim to have done.

Image of Place des Vosges courtesy of cripics

Acoustic noise barriers and sustainable landscape architecture

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Would residents and drivers rather have the acoustic noise or the visual noise?

Flickr has a good slection of photographs of noise barriers – but not many of them are structures one would want to have at the foot of one’s garden, except perhaps for the purpose of reducing noise nuisance. The Wiki entry on noise barriers states simply that: “A noise barrier (also called a soundwall, sound berm, sound barrier, or acoustical barrier) is an exterior structure designed to protect sensitive land uses from noise pollution.” It’s not enough. Noise barriers should also contribute to other objectives and help make ‘new landscapes for our new lives’ (Nan Fairbrother) which are beautiful, sustainable, microclimat, ecological etc. If sustainable landscape architecture is to have the glorious future it deserves, the results must be beautiful as well as useful. For more information on the landscape treatment of noise barriers see: Environmental Noise Barriers by Benz Kotzen Colin English.

Image of North Laurel – MD216 approaching Leishear Rd courtesy of thisisboss.

SUDS LID WSUD Urban Drainage Systems and landscape architecture

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The bioretention facility at LID feature at Harrison Crossing Shopping Center in Spotsylvania County, Virginia.

SUDS Sustainable Urban Drainage is a UK term, equivalent to LID Low Impact Development is the US and WSUD Water Sensitive Urban Design in Australia.

SUDS, LID, WSUD have come a long way since I first came across the idea, about 20 years ago (see Chapter 9 River engineering, channelization and floods). But it is a pity that it remains dominated by engineering concepts. Of course the engineering is important, but the idea also has poetic and visual aspects which are rarely explored, except by Herbert Dreiseitl’s Waterscapes practice. Have a look at the Flickr groups on Sustainable Urban Drainage Systems and SUDS. The designs are very worthy but, except for the traditional ‘craft’ examples, they lack design inspiration. Most of the ideas hover between wartime economy furniture and a boy scout aesthetic. Then look at the CIRIA website’s treatment of SUDS. Only a whiff of wildlife saves the ugly concrete detailing from prison architecture. The illustrations from America’s Low Impact Development Center are better without coming anywhere near the Dreiseitl standard. If sustainable landscape architecture is to have the glorious future it deserves, it must be beautiful as well as useful.

(Image of The bioretention facility at LID feature at Harrison Crossing Shopping Center in Spotsylvania County, Virginia courtesy fredericksburg)

Context: Skyrise, highrise and surprise

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Increasingly there is a trend towards the design of skyrise buildings in the inevitable push skywards which is the fascination of architects [and city fathers] worldwide: why? Because we can.

Beyond the temptations of exploiting the limits of technological possibility are a number of very real concerns about context which architects should be mindful of.

Each building contributes to the visual amenity and character of the urban fabric….and in the case of cities, located as Surfers Paradise, is on the edge of a spectacular coastline….to the landscape setting and ecology.

Each building’s context is unique. So there are no hard and fast principles applicable in all circumstances. [Truly great designers delight in confounding principles…so with some risk I say] Some general principles do apply in relation to the general impact of the height of a building on its context.

For example, a generous open landscape setting such as is present on the Gold Coast in Australia, visually permits a correspondingly generous height of built form. And a predominantly vertical city fabric is little impacted by an additional vertical built form – even if it breaks the previous skyline limits. However, this is only to say something of the visual impact of such developments. And of course there are many other considerations, not least being the impact of shadows etc on the useability of both the surrounding buildings and the surrounding streetscape and landscape.

Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/benderish/127955038/in/photostream/

Garden Design and Landscape Architecture

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