5 minute read
Jellicoe Lecture
The audience at the Jellicoe Lecture gathered professionals from across the built environment industry. © Nick Harrison FLI
The Landscape Institute’s recent Jellicoe Lecture was on ‘Making places fit for living’ and focused on the importance of landscape and nature-based solutions in delivering high-quality, sustainable housing. Here, three of our guest speakers share their thoughts on the event.
The Institute’s Jellicoe Lecture on ‘Making places fit for living’ attracted a capacity audience, reflecting the potential for landscape professionals to engage with the government’s ambitious agenda for housing growth. The role of the planning system in promoting and delivering good landscape design and management was emphasised by the speakers in their presentations and in the ensuing panel question session.
Given the government’s prioritisation of growth and its proposals to reform the planning system to enable this, it is vital that landscape treatment is presented as a key part of the solution, rather than being perceived as adding optional and costly constraints. The government is well aware of the tensions between its emphasis on growth and its commitments on environment and climate and is seeking ways of resolving these.
There is therefore an opportunity window for landscape professionals to market their skills in delivering sustainable, nature-based and cost-effective contributions to new housing and infrastructure projects. To support this, national and local planning policies need to embrace a landscape-led approach, as exemplified in the South Downs
National Park Local Plan. And the Institute and all its members need to get the message to diverse audiences that well-planned, designed and managed landscape brings real and valuable paybacks for people, place and nature.
Ian Phillips CMLI is Chair of the LI Policy & Public Affairs Committee
In response to the government’s emphasis on housing growth and review of the planning system, we were asked to reflect and give a personal view on how landscape and nature-based solutions could ensure delivery of high-quality, sustainable living places. The three speakers looked at how the legislative and guidance tools help to deliver this across varying scales, from regional planning to masterplanning. I discussed how as a profession we approach the detail of landscape-led design to create truly sustainable new housing developments.
I looked at a brief history and the place of landscape within housing over the past 200 years, from speculative Georgian streets and squares up to the massive housing boom in 1960s and 70s when millions of new homes were built. By the later decades of the 20th century, play and trees were often delivered on larger housing estates. But little thought was given to how open spaces and public realm was used by residents and how it contributed environmental benefits.
I then presented two of my practice, BBUK Studio’s projects, including Abode in Cambridge and Old Malling Farm in Sussex, which has recently achieved planning permission.
We concluded that landscape-led developments must have homes with landscape and the site’s context embedded; open spaces (particularly play, often overlooked) to encourage passive surveillance; priority for pedestrians and cyclists, not cars on the streets. This approach gives opportunities for social capital and social cohesion for all generations, and for local wildlife and ecology to thrive.
Harriet Bourne FLI is a Director at BBUK Studio
Jellicoe recognised the role of artists in seeing the world afresh, leading me to begin my talk with a favourite painting of mine, Georges Seurat’s Bathers at Asnieres. Seurat depicts working people on the banks of the Seine. Behind them is smoke from industry, places where these men may work in difficult, even dangerous, conditions. But on this hot, breathless day, they are at leisure and absorbed in their thoughts.
It seems to me that Seurat is saying something important about the conditions for wellbeing in a period of immense change.
Today, we have a new government pushing for 1.5 million homes to be built. In this drive, it’s vital that quality is as important as quantity. Not only because of climate and biodiversity, but also because of growing inequalities. As masterplanners and landscape architects, inclusive wellbeing should be our all-consuming focus.
When places are designed for wellbeing, they have the characteristics that we feel in Seurat’s Bathers. They are close to nature, with a sense of community.
To achieve this, we need new national policy. Wales has a Wellbeing of Future Generations Act, which guides development. England needs its own overarching law, requiring we always act in the best interests of people.
This shift in focus can drive the change we need to see, and all of us, including the Landscape Institute, should be campaigning on this.
Frazer Ozment CMLI is Chair of LDA Design
