Landscape PLANNING: Definitions Planning Agriculture Context theory Cycling EID Forestry Green Towns Greenways Landscape plans Minerals Parks POS Reservoirs Rivers Sustainability Transport Urbanisation Books on landscape planning Links
Statement
The Landscape Institute is concerned that although there are many fine examples of well managed parks and urban spaces, a significant number are poorly managed. They do not achieve their potential for contributing to the public good or to the development of sustainable towns and cities.
Some parks seem to be treated as more of a burden than an asset. The Landscape Institute would like to see all local authorities developing strategic management plans for their parks as part of wider Greenspace Plans. These strategies should provide for regular review, re-design and refurbishment works to cope with changing lifestyles and developing communities.
Country parks provide valuable access into the countryside but may generate more car journeys. Therefore, any new country parks should be created only where there is a clearly established local need e.g. in urban fringes and close to where people live or where they will not generate additional ‘non-sustainable’ road traffic.
Explanation
In most UK town and cities there are considerable areas of parks and open spaces, often provided a century or so ago by wealthy benefactors. Despite this rich heritage, many of the parks are in a deep crisis. They are:-
As a result, some local authorities are struggling to cope with the parks they have inherited. They find them more of a liability and a burden than an asset for public benefit.
Urban parks, both large and small, should be a vital part of the built landscape. They should:
Local authorities, as the modern patrons of parks, must have:-
In addition, local authorities must also have appropriate Planning policies that will ensure the adequate and beneficial provision and protection of parks and open spaces in new housing areas and other developments.
Country parks have been provided, enthusiastically, by many county councils, with support from the Countryside Commission and in response to a demand for wider access to the countryside. However, their long term role is uncertain. Many are becoming ‘out of town’ parks, in the countryside and dependent on large numbers of car born visitors.
Many country parks attract large numbers of visitors and many have been built on derelict or low quality land that is unsuitable for commercial farming or forestry. Local authorities and others who manage these parks must ensure that they have adequate long term management to retain the fabric of woodland or other natural features that form the basis of their attractiveness and value to the public. In addition, the management must aim to provide a different and distinct visitor experience compared with large urban parks. Plans for any new country parks should only be supported if the need is already clearly established, such as in an urban fringe or for a tourist honey pot, and the development will not create more unsustainable car traffic.
Contact: John Parker
The line between the town and country is too often determined on the basis of expediency - to contain rather than to integrate. As a result, the visual appearance from the outside the village often lacks harmony and quality. Detailed consideration of village envelopes is especially important with regard to the projected need for 4.4m additional homes.
But what should be the nature of transition between urban and rural? How should the urban, or quasi-urban, edge be determined? Should it be controlled by:
planning strategies?
road patterns?
zoning concepts?
notional groupings?
intrinsic natural criteria, such as the lie of the land?
a relationship of open to enclosed space?
landscape features, such as the position of existing trees or woodland blocks?
It should be influenced by all, but to an unequal degree. In practice natural criteria on the outside of a development are seldom given equal weight to internal considerations. Villages lack the essential balance between the view from the ‘inside’ and the view from ‘without’.
The Landscape Institute would like to see greater attention paid by local authorities and others (in particular by planning departments) to a more careful and considered treatment of Village edges.
Village (and town) edges should be seen as important transition points between urban and rural uses - as a dynamic interface which, coherently expressed, smoothes and integrates the change.
Careful appraisal of village envelopes to see where improvements could be made, for example by additional tree planting or modest re-contouring, might provide an added framework, not only for more satisfactory visual appearance, but allowing greater flexibility to enable change to be made in the future.
Village envelopes are drawn on local plans prepared by district authorities under powers given by the Town and Country Planning Act, 1990. They are generally approved on local inset maps as non-statutory documentation. They provide guidance for development purposes.
Existing village margins, either for reasons of satisfactory landform, contouring or vegetation patterns in relation to development, may already have much to commend them.
More often, village margins become straight-jackets which inhibit exploration or improvement. It is argued that alteration depends upon the availability of land and willingness of landowners to co-operate. But with an appropriate strategy, ways of achieving improvement can often be found, especially if local support is gained.
Grants and advisory assistance are available from national bodies, local authorities and parish councils. Public meetings can provide invaluable guidance, once sufficient interest has been generated. The preparation of landscape schemes, such as village planting or local improvement plans, are an important means of encouraging a more enlightened approach to village envelopes.
Contact R G Patterson
Statement
The Landscape Institute is concerned by the continuing loss of fine landscape, by impacts during mineral working and by the quality of long-term restoration schemes; these issues are of greater significance in designated areas of high landscape value. It is vital that landscape architects are involved throughout the planning and design process so that the proposed landform and land after-uses are sympathetic to their surroundings. Good initial landscape planning and design minimises the need for mitigation measures which are often intrusive in themselves. The late Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe began this tradition of full involvement in the 1940’s at the cement works and quarries in the Hope Valley.
Explanation
The Landscape Institute supports the following policies:
At present, the plan-led Town and Country Planning system is forcing extraction into areas which, while they seem to be environmentally acceptable, are poor locations from visual impact and long-term restoration points of view. Local Authorities, and members of the public, pay great attention to short term visual impacts and planting. But the final landform is often of greater importance in the medium and long term. ‘Landscaping’, in the form of unsympathetic planting and mitigation proposals, is no substitute for a well-conceived Landscape Plan dealing with site selection, phasing, mitigation, after-care and after-use. This requires the involvement of landscape architects, scientists and managers.
Contact: David Jarvis
Statement
Limestone Pavements are rare natural features They make a significant contribution to the landscape and provide an important habitat for a wide range of flora. Limestone Pavements are characterised by a pattern of clints (blocks) and grykes (fissures), formed by the action of glaciation and water. It is an irreplaceable resource that is threatened by a growing domestic demand for decorative and rockery stone.
Whilst they are largely protected in England by Limestone Pavement Orders, these may be overridden by existing planning permissions for extraction. It may also be imported from sources abroad, notably Ireland, the High Alps and the former Yugoslavia.
The Landscape Institute is concerned at this threat to the natural landscape and fully supports the aims of The National Limestone Pavement Campaign. It therefore recommends that Institute members should avoid specifying the use of water worn limestone.
Contact: Ian Phillips (?)
Statement
Colour Planning, in towns and in the countryside, will enable us, not only to co-ordinate the new with the old, but to use colour creatively as an active, expressive medium.
Explanation
Colour, being light, may seem difficult to plan. It can be considered, for planning purposes, as either active or passive. ‘Active colour’ refers to paint, colour-wash, ceramics, plastics and other applied finishes. ‘Passive colour’ refers to their context, in the form of the built or landscape background. Since active colour tends to be dynamic and expressive, it should be used with care and precision. We can learn from nature: the brightest colours are usually the most restricted in size or duration.
Planning and Conservation regulations deal more or less effectively with passive or contextual colour. They are ill-suited to dealin with the problems of applied colour, which are rapidly becoming chaotic. This is due in part to availability (the number of dye and paint colours having increased from a few hundred in the 1960’s to some 3 million by the 1980’s, of which 9000 had been marketed), in part to commercialisation and the growth of advertising, and in part to the greater freedoms which lead people to consider colour purely as a matter of personal choice. Colour chaos is apparent in shopping streets and industrial areas.
Where colour planning is practised in Britain it is generally restrictive, stipulating the use of muted colours to reduce the impact of large building complexes, such as power stations and military installations in conserved landscapes. This had led to a few outstanding examples in rural areas drawing upon the lessons of camouflage. The need for urban colour planning is hardly acknowledged.
Some significant examples of urban Colour Planning exist in the countries of mainland Europe, where colour design and planning offices have been established for some time. Among them, the colour restoration of the city of Turin is remarkable both for its breadth and its duration. This was based on a scheme developed over the first half of the nineteenth century using more than eighty colours. They were co-ordinated to enhance the city and emphasise the main processional routes. The restoration of these colours has been in progress for nearly 20 years. Similar historical approaches have been adopted for villages, towns and cities in most other European countries.
Although based largely on precedents, existing (historical) colours, materials and contexts, Colour Planning need not be prescriptive. The aim should be to provide guidelines in the form of colours that would be acceptable in relation to one another and to those existing. Such guidelines shouold be based on detailed colour surveys, analysis of the effects, and predictions of changes and future developments.
Colour Planning should be practised at the different scales of development. The first scale is the single unit - for example, the house. The second scale is the street. The third scale is the district or community. The fourth scale is the town, city or landscape. The scales are inter-related. Houses have an impact on the neighbouring houses, and on the street as a whole; street colours have an impact adjoining streets and upon the area as a whole, which itself affects the landscape. While an understanding of the effects of colour at all levels is vitally important, responsibility for implementation increases from that of the individual to that of extended community by progressive stages which must be the subject of professional consultations.
The Landscape Institute recommends the preparation of Colour Plans as supplementary guidance notes to local plans.
Contact: Michael Lancaster
Statement
Landscape design, understood as the design of outdoor space, is a vital aspect of urban design. It needs to be combined with the arts of architecture, planning and engineering. Co-operation between the professions created Europe’s great historical cities, and could do so in the future.
Explanation
While the practice of architecture is unequivocally concerned with the creation of buildings, landscape and urban design share a common focus on external space: its organisation, uses, and management. This presents a number of difficulties of definition, both in the eyes of professionals and the public in general, which can best be solved by reference to original meanings.
The earliest clustering of dwellings into settlements (housing communities) implied conditions relating to boundaries and rights of usage, access, light and view. These were formulated, in Classical Greece, into principles of planning and urban design. Plato proposed that the ideal city should have a population of no more that 10,000, and Hippodamus of Miletus (f.450 BC) is credited with introducing wide straight streets with provision for the proper grouping of dwelling houses and public buildings harmoniously related. These principles formed the basis of town planning. They guided and informed the creation of towns, which are often considered to be man’s greatest collective achievement.
The fact that the achievement cannot be measured in terms of planning alone is a major difficulty in the appreciation of urban landscape design. Towns resulted from the interaction of people, including planners, builders, artists and other designers, over long periods for the common good. The Old German word Landschaft, included dwelling, outbuildings, cultivated land, common grazing, surrounding forest, animals, people, and their mutual obligation. Although the conditions of life have changed irreversibly, the sense of obligation persists in the will to provide acceptable living conditions for all. Leonardo da Vinci responded to the growth of Milan by suggesting ten ‘satellite’ towns, each with 5000 houses accommodating 25,000 inhabitants; and he made proposals for irrigated private gardens, and for the segregation of pedestrian and (horse-drawn) traffic: all familiar themes for planners.
The great contribution of the Renaissance designers was their interest in space: in the use of geometry to organise space in the context of buildings and landscape. Mumford called it ‘the ideology of power’. The disadvantage was its portrayal through fixed-point perspective which has indoctrinated western societies with an overriding sense of the pictorial.
The realisation that perception is a dynamic process involving all the senses responding to all elements of the environment began to emerge in the 1950’s, principally through the work of Gordon Cullen. Serial vision described the process of moving through urban space which could be recorded sequentially by means of drawings and photographs. More importantly, it revealed the complex ‘organic’ qualities of certain places, which we have begun to describe as ‘of townscape value’. Cullen called it ‘the art of relationship’ - between buildings, trees, nature(sic), water, traffic, advertisements and so on’. He called it Townscape: we might call it Urban Design. The current term ‘Urban Village’ - imprecise and misunderstood as it is, brings us nearer to that original conception of the fabric, inhabitants and functioning of communities defined in the original conception of landscape.
Contact: Michael Lancaster
Statement
The Landscape Institute calls for practical action on sustainability. Landscape architects can play a significant and central role in achieving greater sustainability. There is a fundamental need to use the land wisely, to keep it in good biological health, and work with the natural processes of growth and decay. There is a particular need to take greater account of the long term and long distance impact of our local actions, as their unforeseen environmental effects become ever more complex. Landscape architects are trained to ‘design with nature’.
Explanation
At the United Nations’ first Earth Summit, in Rio de Janeiro, in 1989, the world’s political leaders made a collective commitment to "Sustainable Development" - to using the Earth’s resources wisely, fairly, and without compromising future generations. This was confirmed at the second Earth Summit in 1997.
Each one of us depends for our survival, on the Earth’s natural life support systems. Nature provides the food we eat, purifies the water we drink, and processes the air we breathe.
The landscape is fundamental to sustainability, and the way we manipulate and manage it requires the greatest of care. All over the world, the loss of protective vegetation is causing soil to erode far more rapidly that it can be restored. This is unsustainable. Poisonous chemicals pouring down the streams and rivers of the world are polluting the oceans and overloading their natural capacity to process our waste, or maintain the rich biodiversity of marine life. That is unsustainable! The air within our towns and cities is increasingly hazardous to human health, thanks to the intensive burning of non-renewable fossil fuels. That is unsustainable too!
To deliver sustainability on the scale required by "Rio", there is a need to take global environmental pressures far more seriously, and to deliver remedies at a local level. In the UK we have one of the least sustainable lifestyles in the world. Of all the people on the Earth today, one in every hundred lives in the British Isles, and we maintain our comfortable way of life, largely by exploiting much more than our fair share of the Earth’s resources. The Rio Convention set a challenge to use physical resources wisely, but it also made a commitment to "fair shares" for all the people of the world. Human Equity must therefore be an integral part of any policy on Sustainable Development.
Pesticides from British parks and gardens are now being carried beyond the Arctic Circle, by ocean currents and migrating wildlife. Mature street trees are being fatally damaged by service trenching, salt spraying and traffic vibration.They cannot be regrown within our lifetime.
The materials we use in changing the landscape all have both a past history and a future. There is a need to take account of the "cradle-to-grave" credentials of everything we use. Where were the aggregates quarried, and how were they transported? How much energy was involved in firing the bricks, or spinning the plastic pipe? Will the plant containers be recycled or re-used, or can they biodegrade, and was the compost extracted from a precious peat bog, or manufactured from organic vegetable waste? If the timber in seats, or footbridges is reported to come from sustainably managed forests, how can we be sure, and what does that mean anyway? What were the working conditions of the people who manufactured the fertiliser, or quarried the paving blocks?
There is a need to ask a great many more searching questions, if we are to be sure of sustainbility.
Landscape architects have one other critical role to play. They have the skills to shape our surroundings in such a way that we are all made more aware of the need for sustainability. For most people, the landscapes where they live and work are their prime source of environmental awareness and inspiration. Those landscapes should be constantly changing to reflect our temperate climate and the changing seasons. They should display the subtlety and the vulnerability of nature, and they should stimulate the sensitive, conscientious side of the human condition.
In an urban society such as ours, it is easy to push nature "out of sight and out of mind", and to create surroundings which are brutalising. With care, instead we can have local landscape which inspire the wish to strive for sustainability, and which demonstrate its principles in the way that they are shaped and managed.
Contact: Prof. Chris Baines
Statement
The Landscape Institute wants to see positive action, by everyone concerned with the land, to carry out planting which will benefit the atmosphere and world’s climate. Land owners, developers, farmers and the millions who enjoy the landscape, should work to increase the numbers of native trees planted and to ensure their future management. Only by creating sustainable woodlands in urban as well as rural areas, can we hope to re-establish a tree cover which fits the characteristics of our climate and protects the diversity of our landscapes.
Explanation
Britain has carried out successful plantation forestry, leading to significant climatic improvement by absorption of greenhouse gases. This contributes to shelter from cold winds and a regular supply of rain for our homes, farms and workplaces. It secures our water supply and enhances the quality of our lives. Tree planting allows the UK to reduce timber imports and slows the destruction of the tropical hardwood forests.
Plants depend on the climate and, paradoxically, the climate is to a large measure dependent on them. There is now ample evidence from the International Panel on Climate Change that the human race is making an increasingly negative impact on the natural processes of climatic change. There must be a change from the present cut-and-run philosophy of land use, accepted as the developmental norm in most ‘advanced’ nations. Unsustainable logging of tropical trees reduces the world’s capacity to absorb excess greenhouse gases. Forest soils soon erode in tropical rain. The loss of reflective cloud cover which follows is one of the causes of global warming. Post-war adoption of American farming practices in East Anglia led to mass hedgerow destruction and consequent wind and water erosion of precious top soil. Micro-climate and species diversity were badly affected by ill-considered MAFF grants. The community lost out. Members of the Landscape Institute therefore aim: "To achieve environmental stability in every region". We have a common responsibility to restore appropriate land use and land cover. Landscape architects, scientists and managers have a role in climate amelioration at every scale, from the regional to the smallest microclimate. They have opportunities to incorporate more sustainable tree planting, consistent with land use activities, the need for daylight, and for sheltered space. There are opportunities to incorporate policies in local plans. New buildings should be set in the context of a holistic balance between landscape and architecture.
Contact: Jeremy Dodd
