The Humanitarian Landscape Collective

Rhys Jones

Rhys Jones is a co-founder of the Humanitarian Landscape Collective and a Consultant Landscape Architect at LUC

On 26th March, architectural critic, designer and educator Michael Sorkin died from COVID-19.

In addition to his design work and writing, one of his most famous pieces of work is “250 Things Every Architect Should Know”, a meditative list of historical, environmental, social, material and political factors we should be aware of when creating places for people. Michael lost his life to a virus that is still rampaging around the globe and in the time since its outbreak (combined with the Black Lives Matter movement) we have had a harsh light shone through the cracks in our society, and realised what we as landscape architects should know, but don’t. Here’s a few of them:

– How someone can feed their family without going to the supermarket

– Why there are so few black landscape architects

– Who really has access to high quality green space

– Who really considers it a “high quality” green space

The Humanitarian Landscape Collective are looking for answers to some of these and, in response to the food crisis brought on by COVID, we have taken a close look at food security and how it can be improved at the community level. We started by leading a social media campaign, called Food Share Initiative, to use Clap for Carers as an opportunity to rally up food bank donations amongst neighbours. It was a knee-jerk reaction to the surge in demand for food banks and saw an outpouring of participants (and photos of baked beans) from across the country. However, this was by no means a long-term solution, much as food banks generally should not be seen as a long-term solution to food poverty. Instead the answer lies in eradicating poverty and building food resilience at the community level. We’ve started to investigate the latter by partnering up with Cook to Care: a food aid organisation run by Jojo Sureh, which cooks and delivers food to vulnerable people in South London. As she is based in the kitchen of a youth centre in Brixton, we’re taking the opportunity to run a co-creation and food growing project with the young people, using the neglected garden and raised planters. We want to know what food and landscape means to them, and in return we’ll share our skills and knowledge to empower them to improve the garden and forge a closer connection with food. The idea is to weave our project in with the Centre’s own mentorship programme and offer employability skills to the youth, some of whom were gang-affiliated and grew up in some of the most dangerous neighbourhoods in the country. We’ll be sharing lessons from this project and exploring the subject with a workshop later in the year.

We’re looking into one of the many things that the profession doesn’t know, and COVID is a bleak reminder of how much they matter. With the impacts of climate change, these crises will be happening a lot more often, so it’s time that we start looking for the answers to them.