For masterplanner Ray- mond Unwin, landscape was not just a background to lives lived, it was a weapon of social change, says David Davidson, architectural adviser at Hampstead

Garden Suburb Trust. Un- win’s vision was the communal landscape, one that promoted social interaction at every turn. In creating the Hampstead Garden Suburb, he realised

the democratic landscapes the Garden City movement espoused.

Davidson was the first speak- er in the Landscape Institute’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 green city.

Programmed by Susannah Charlton of the Twentieth 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 Mu- seum, we dedicate 15 pages to what we

can learn from more than a century of urban landscapes.

Projects adviser at the Prince’s Re- generation Trust Roland Jeffery tackles housing landscapes, and the new towns in particular. Their land- scapes, he says, have still to find a com- fortable role that is somewhere in between the private garden and the public highway.

Urban PlanningKen 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, 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 communities can possibly be expected to interact when they have nowhere decent to commune.

And finally, Land-scape’s honorary

editor Tim Waterman explores our relation-

ship....

Urban PlanningKen 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, 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 communities can possibly be expected to interact when they have nowhere decent to commune.

And finally, Land-scape’s honorary

editor Tim Waterman explores our relation-

ship....

...with food and the urban land-scape. Are taste and appetite

our biggest barriers to realis-ing 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 happening

in India, China and Mexico.With large-scale investment on the backburner for the foreseeable future, the Landscape Institute’s latest publication Local green infrastructure: helping communi-ties make the most of their landscape,

seems particularly pertinent.

The guide presents eight case studies

that show how local people and businesses

can make their towns, cities and villages more

attractive, healthier and better for wildlife.

URBAN PLANNING

So why have we put Stefano Bo-eri’s 27-storey Bosco Verticale on

the cover? Billed as the world’s first ‘vertical forest’, each

apartment will have a balco-ny planted with trees, cre-

ating a green forest rising above the city. It is the first element in Boeri’s proposed BioMilano, in which a green belt is created around the city. This seem-ingly fantastical concept is actually under construc-tion in Milan and serves, per-haps, as a stark reminder that nothing quite so green and ambi-tious seems to be going on in the built environ-ment in the UK.Or is there? After

all, there is unlikely to be one solution

to the green city. Rather, the ques-

tion is whether our attempts to realise it,

in all its manifestations, will be resigned to the

drawing board as utopian ideals or will the 21st cen-

tury see them finally succeed at scale?