{"id":10439,"date":"2014-03-05T18:20:11","date_gmt":"2014-03-05T18:20:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gardenvisit.com\/blog\/?p=10439"},"modified":"2014-03-05T18:20:11","modified_gmt":"2014-03-05T18:20:11","slug":"london-can-become-a-roof-garden-city-but-it-needs-imaginative-design-as-well-as-town-planning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.gardenvisit.com\/blog\/london-can-become-a-roof-garden-city-but-it-needs-imaginative-design-as-well-as-town-planning\/","title":{"rendered":"London can become a Roof Garden City &#8211; but it needs imaginative design as well as town planning"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"775\" height=\"570\" src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/PzgmQp-7QuY\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.gardenvisit.com\/landscape_architecture\/urban_design\/garden_city_landscape_urbanism_howard\">Ebenezer Howard proposed garden cities<\/a> outside London. That&#8217;s fine but Central London should adopt the landscape policy of becoming a <em>Roof <\/em>Garden City. Property developers should be rewarded for providing green roof gardens and punished on those few occasions when they find reasons for not providing roof gardens and sustainable green roofs on new buildings. Visually, this is the single most important policy for making London a Green Roof City. As everyone knows, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gardenvisit.com\/blog\/2013\/03\/01\/garden-tourism-is-london-the-worlds-gardening-capital\/\">London is already the world&#8217;s Garden Capital<\/a>. Now it should become the world&#8217;s Roof Garden Capital.<br \/>\nBut I doubt if it will. British town planners are far too unimaginative &#8211; and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gardenvisit.com\/blog\/2014\/03\/02\/roof-skypark-garden-landscape-on-marina-bay-sands-hotel-in-singapore\/\">Singapore&#8217;s planners<\/a> are way out in front. As I ride my bike around London I often think &#8216;Why does the RTPI exist? What, in heaven&#8217;s name, do town planners DO? Why not dissolve the Royal Town Planning Institute?&#8217; The answer, I think, is that most of their effort goes into a sometimes-useful attempt to stop landowners doing what they want to do. UK planners seem to have no positive achievements &#8211; except, perhaps, in helping developers evade planning restrictions dreamed up by their professional colleagues.<br \/>\nThomas Mawson published an attractive book on <em>Civic Art<\/em> in 1911 and became a founder member of what is now the Royal Town Planning Institute in 1914. Then, in 1929, he became first president of what is now the Landscape Institute. Perhaps we need an agreed division of labour between the two professional institutes: the RTPI can stop developers from doing bad things and the Landscape Institute can encourage them to do good things. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ebenezer Howard proposed garden cities outside London. That&#8217;s fine but Central London should adopt the landscape policy of becoming a Roof Garden City. Property developers should be rewarded for providing green roof gardens and punished on those few occasions when they find reasons for not providing roof gardens and sustainable green roofs on new buildings. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,18,25,28],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gardenvisit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10439"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gardenvisit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gardenvisit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardenvisit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardenvisit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10439"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardenvisit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10439\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gardenvisit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10439"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardenvisit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10439"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardenvisit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10439"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}