6 minute read
Landscape and health in the public sector
In an interview with Saira Ali, whose team recently won the LI President’s Award, we learn not only the benefits of a landscape-led approach to public health in the City of Bradford, but also the significance of the public sector as client.
The Landscape Institute Awards is an annual celebration of the very best in landscape practice. Held in November last year, the winner of both the President’s Award, chosen by President-Elect Carolin Göhler, and the ‘Excellence in Public Health’ award was ‘Challenging Public Health Inequalities across Bradford District’, by the City of Bradford Metropolitan District Council Landscape Design and Conservation Team.
A hugely diverse and ambitious scheme, its overall scope is to tackle public health disparities through blue and green infrastructure. But rather than a single project or site, the scheme brings together multiple interventions at different locations across the city, with its success dependent on the crucial role that the landscape team plays in the local authority. As the President-Elect explained presenting the Award, it is ‘a landscape philosophy extending from policy to design, implementation, and beyond’.
The team is led by landscape architect Saira Ali, who says that ‘Bradford is one of the biggest, fastest growing, youngest and most diverse cities in the UK, with over half a million residents, over a fifth of whom are under the age of 15, and over 150 languages spoken in the city.’ But despite this potential, over a third of Bradford’s neighbourhoods are within the 10% most deprived in England. ‘Investment in infrastructure has not kept pace with economic and population growth’, explains Saira, ‘with the resulting car dependency in local neighbourhoods contributing to problems including pollution and ill health – particularly in children’.
Bradford is one of the biggest, fastest growing, youngest and most diverse cities in the UK, with over half a million residents, over a fifth of whom are under the age of 15, and over 150 languages spoken in the city.
With the district requiring upwards of 30,000 new homes by 2040, a key factor to successful housing growth is the need to create places that enable healthier lives and lifestyles –‘through green streets, community spaces, access to nature and opportunities for play,’ explains Saira. To this effect, the Landscape team has led on the production of a Homes and Neighbourhoods Design Guide, which promotes green streets, networks of green infrastructure, and planning policy that ensures new housing creates healthier communities.
The work for which Saira and her team won the President’s Award is a progression of this initiative, with the long-term ambition to link together landscape design interventions across the city. ‘Attock Park Community Garden and Kashmir Park are two examples that go far beyond just providing green space. They offer meeting points, bring residents closer to nature, contribute to climate resilience, provide opportunities for exercise and recreation, and contribute to public health and emotional wellbeing.’
Critical to the success of the scheme is the relationship that the landscape team holds with internal colleagues, from departments including engineering, public health, planning, neighbourhood, and highways. ‘Departments collaborate to identify common aims and opportunities to work together,’ says Saira, ‘which has in turn helped to foster close links with external partners across research, best practice, funding, community engagement, co-design, and implementation. It’s a whole systems approach.’
Saira explains that networking projects into internal and external working groups like this, as well as physically into the fabric of the city, helps to create a feedback loop which provides the opportunity to test research in practice, learn from it, and make the case for further workstreams, funding and collaborations.
‘It’s great having a lot of research, but actually you’ve got to test and learn,’ says Saira.
‘The public health and green infrastructure scheme started with about 30 projects of different scales – some of them just £10,000 in value. But we brought in active travel funding, public health funding, and turned some into £280,000 projects. Attock Park started as a play park for three year-olds but became an inclusive community space for parents and the elderly too’.
‘By prioritising thoughtful urban planning and sustainable design, a landscape-led team can enhance aesthetic appeal, functionality, and overall liveability of urban spaces,’ says Saira, explaining how the role of this public sector landscape team has had such an impact on city regeneration.
‘When I started working on schemes 15 years ago, the landscape team was often brought in after the project had been designed. Now we’re in at the business case stage and helping to shape it – not just through funding ringfenced for green space, but also pots for economic regeneration, public health, and more.’
This systems-based philosophy behind Saira’s team’s work is what gained such recognition from both the judging panel and President-Elect Carolin Göhler at the LI Awards. It’s what keeps Saira’s team ambitious and motivated for the future too: ‘What do we want the future of Bradford to look like? What do we aspire to?’ she asks, ‘These are important questions for our team, and to have successful, healthy developments, everything needs to link up and work together. Looking at how neighbourhoods work, how places work, how cities work as landscape, and taking a holistic approach; this all comes naturally to our profession’.
It’s about creating green, safe, inclusive, and distinctive neighbourhoods that create healthy communities for all. As a local authority, we need to be leading by example on this. We need to be able to say to people, ‘this is what we want’.
In Bradford, the future of public health is grounded in landscape. The proactive, strategic approach to public realm projects that the Landscape Design and Conservation Team has helped to shape starts with communities, and listening to their wants and needs, before looking for opportunities to link these local level objectives to wider strategies, programmes, and funding streams. In the context of housing, on which this edition of the Journal is focused, Saira says that the success of any masterplan is contingent on the space between the buildings. ‘It’s about creating green, safe, inclusive, and distinctive neighbourhoods that create healthy communities for all. As a local authority, we need to be leading by example on this. We need to be able to say to people, “this is what we want”.’
With this approach, Saira’s work is changing the focus of house building to encompass far more than just bricks and mortar, and extending the idea of health to people, the environment, and local economy. Brining local communities, council colleagues, partner organisations, and local politicians on this journey with her, Saira is demonstrating what a truly landscape-led approach to housing can offer.
