For masterplanner Ray-mond Unwin, land-scape was not just a background to lives lived, it was a weapon of social change, says David Davidson, ar-chitectural adviser at Hampstead Garden Suburb Trust. Unwin’s vision was the com-munal landscape, one that promoted social in-teraction at every turn. In creating the Hamp-stead Garden Suburb, he realised the demo-cratic landscapes the Garden City movement

espoused.

Davidson was the first speaker in the Land-scape Institute’s au-tumn lecture series Ur-ban Landscapes in the Twentieth Century. He is also the first of our essayists in this special edition of Landscape, which takes as its start-ing point the ideals of the Garden City and pits them against the great 21st century chal-lenge: realising the

green city.

Programmed by Susannah Charlton of the Twentieth Century Society, the lec-ture series accompanies the Garden Museum’s From Gar-den City to Green City ex-hibition. The five speakers agreed to pen a series of es-says 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 cen-tury of urban landscapes.Projects adviser at the Prince’s Regeneration Trust Roland Jeffery tackles housing landscapes, and the new towns in particular. Their landscapes, he says, have still to find a comfort-able role that is somewhere in between the private gar-den and the public highway.

Ken Worpole, writer and sen-ior professor at the Cities Institute, suggests that the British still have a prob-lem in thinking about de-signed landscapes as places of pleasure. He asks wheth-er 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 communities can possibly be expected to interact when they have no-where decent to commune.

And finally, Landscape’s hon-orary editor Tim Waterman explores our relationship with food and the urban land-scape. Are taste and appetite our biggest barriers to re-alising sustainable 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 cit-ies and see what’s happen-ing in India, China and Mexico.With large-scale investment on the backburner for the foreseeable future, the Land-scape Institute’s latest publi-cation Local green infrastruc-ture: helping communities make the most of their landscape, seems particularly pertinent. The guide presents eight case studies that show how local people and businesses can make