1

2

British Landscapes

-A change for the better?

Introduction

3

For masterplanner Raymond Unwin, landscape 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 communal landscape, one that promoted social interaction at every turn.

In creating the Hampstead Garden Suburb, he re-alised the democratic landscapes the Garden City movement espoused.Davidson was the first speaker in the Landscape In-stitute’s autumn lecture series Urban Landscapes in the Twentieth Century.

He is also the first of our essayists 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 greencity.

Programmed by Susannah Charlton of the Twenti-eth Century Society, the lecture series accompanies the Garden Museum’s From Garden City to Green City exhibition. The five speakers agreed to pen a series of essays 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 century 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 comfortable role that is some-where in between the private garden and the public highway.Davidson was the first speaker in the Landscape In-stitute’s autumn lecture series Urban Landscapes in the Twentieth Century.

He is also the first of our essayists in this special edi-tion of Landscape, which takes as its starting point the ideals of the Garden City and pits them against the great.Davidson was the first speaker in the Landscape In-stitute’s autumn lecture series Urban Landscapes in the Twentieth Century.

She is also the first of our essayists in this special edition of Landscape, which takes as its starting point the ideals of the Garden City and pits them against the great

Introduction

4

Central American Rainforest

Amazon Rainforest

Congo River Basin Rainforest

We are losing Earth’s greatest biological treasures just as we are beginning to appreci-ate their true value. Rainforests once covered 14% of the earth’s land surface; now they cover a mere 6% and experts estimate that the last remaining rainforests could be consumed in less than 40 years.

One and one-half acres of rainforest are lost every second with tragic consequences for both developing and industrial countries.

Rainforests are being destroyed be-cause the value of rainforest land is

perceived as only the value of its timber by short-sighted governments, multi-national logging companies, and land owners.

Nearly half of the world’s species of plants, animals and microorganisms will be destroyed or severely threatened over the next quarter century due to rainforest deforestation.

Madagascar Rainforest

South East Asian Rainforest

Most medicine men and shamans remaining in the Rainfor-ests today are 70 years old or more. Each time a rainforest medicine man dies, it is as if a library has burned down.

When a medicine man dies without passing his arts on to the next generation, the tribe and the world loses thousands of years of irreplaceable knowledge about medicinal plants.

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 whether 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 en-vironment that indicates that society at large, their local authority and the gov-ernment 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 nowhere decent to commune.And finally, Landscape’s honorary editor Tim Waterman explores our rela-tionship with food and the urban landscape. Are taste and appetite our biggest barriers to realising sus-tainable 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 cities and see what’s happening in India, China and Mexico.

3

Urban Planning

In addition to being logged for exportation,

rainforest wood stays in devel-oping countries for fuel wood and charcoal. One single steel plant in Brazil making steel for Japanese cars needs millions of tons of wood each year to produce charcoal that can be used in the manufacture of steel.The Amazon Rainforest has been described as the “Lungs of our Plan-et” because it provides the essential environmental world service of con-tinuously recycling carbon dioxide into oxygen. More than 20 percent

of the world oxygen is produced in the Amazon Rainforest.In 1950, about 15 percent of the Earth’s land surface was covered by rainforest. Today, more than half has already gone up in smoke. In fewer than fifty years, more than half of the world’s tropical rainforests have fallen victim to fire and the chain saw, and the rate of destruction is still accelerating. Unbelievably, more than 200,000 acres of rainforest are burned every day.

Thank You