Serious times require transformational thinking

Paul Lincoln

Commissioning editor

In 2012, the Landscape Institute, together with the Garden Museum, ran a competition to create a High Line for London. In tune with the times, the results were a mixture of the serious and the playful. Railway lines were turned into cycle paths, a post office tunnel became a mushroom farm, and the Regent’s canal was repurposed as an 8 metre long lido.

We now live in more serious times. Our most recent competition, Transforming the Urban Landscape, stimulated 160 responses, many demonstrating incredible strengths of design and considerable thoughtfulness, but above all, a seriousness of intent. The professional winners have focused on the street where they work and used it to demonstrate ‘where an environmental revolution could take place’. The winner of the student category has taken an area of wasteland and turned it into a focus for the natural environment. Read more about it on page 66 and have a look at the exhibition that catalogues the entries online.

The 9 years that have passed since the Olympic year have shown a move towards an increased understanding of the potential impact of bringing nature into the city through food growing, new approaches to the way in which we use streets and public spaces, and an increased respect for parks in the city and in a rural setting. This edition of Landscape tackles many of these issues. The broken relationship between the rural and the urban in the production of food is the subject of Sitopia, how food can save the world [p6]. Integrating the city and food is viewed from an Indian perspective [p12]. Dirt! looks at food security and land use in Lebanon [p16] and Cofarming considers a new approach to farming the land [p19]. The future of farming is tackled in an outline of the Agriculture Act [p25] and this is complemented by reports from Exmoor and the New Forest on the likely impact of the Glover Report [p28].

We also celebrate some significant achievements: 2020 marked the decision by Historic England to add a large number of post-war designed landscapes to the register [p32] and the European Landscape Convention celebrated its 20th anniversary [p44].

We discover the relevance of a hundred-year-old garden village to our current times [p62], make the most of the urban lane [p56], and we also have an astonishing account of a project to mark the rise and fall of the whaling industry in South Georgia [p48].