The

Edition1st

British Landscapes. A change for the better?

Matt Pearson

For masterplanner Ray-mond Unwin, land-

scape was not just a

back-ground to lives lived, it was a weapon

of social change, says

David David-son, architectural

adviser at Hampstead Garden Suburb Trust. Unwin’s vision was the communal landscape, one that promoted social interaction at every turn. In creat-ing the Hampstead

Garden Suburb, he realised 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 Twentieth Century. He is also the first of our essay-ists 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 lec-ture series accompanies the Garden Museum’s From

British Land- scapes. A change for the better?

Garden City to Green City exhibition. The five speak-ers agreed to pen a series of essays for us, so, following a foreword from Christo-pher 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 hous-ing 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.

British Land- scapes. A change for the better?

Urban Planning

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 wheth-er now is the time for us to rediscover the pur-pose of our leisure landscapes.“If you leave people to live in a lousy, un-healthy, un-green and depressing environ-ment that indicates that society at large, their local authority and the government don’t care about them, then why should we be sur-prised when they act without care

them-selves?” This is Sarah Gaventa writing in the wake of August’s riots as she asks how com-munities can possibly be expected to interact 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

Urban Planning

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 ur-ban revolutions of their own? We asked Ruth Olden to get behind the images of verdant green cities and see what’s hap-pening in India, China and Mexico.With large-scale invest-ment on the backburner for the foreseeable