President’s word

The Spine Route using soil stabilisation techniques (Landscape Journal Oct 2006) within the Coton Country Reserve, to the west of Cambridge, provides access for pedestrians, disabled persons, cyclists as well as diverse farm machinery. It also provides herbal native countryside mix for the verges, also rich in clovers bridging nectar droughts in high summer. © Carolin Göhler

Transport plays a hugely significant role in our everyday, human, community lives. Not just through the direct encounters we have with different transport modes while getting ourselves from A to B, but also through the indirect way that transport shapes the places and world around us.

Incorporating walking, wheeling and cycling as much as road and rail, and nationally significant infrastructure projects as much as local neighbourhood street design, transport poses important questions about landscape, mobility, scale, and the relationship between the environment and society more generally.

From individual decisions on whether to drive, cycle, or catch a bus, to local decisions on where and how to build new infrastructure, and national decisions on planning and land use strategy, transport cannot be untangled from the landscapes that surround it, nor the people that make them: How will we get there? How much is it going to cost (and how are we measuring cost)? What are the benefits? What impact will it have on the local economy? On local communities? On the environment? What lessons can we draw from history? How can we help to heal the wounds of the past?

These are decisions made by people, and places change, or don’t, as a result. No decision is made in a vacuum, and the places they are grounded in have in turn been shaped by the impact that transport has had on them over time – from the railway, to the motorcar, to the pedestrianised street. With this understanding, not only do we gain a perspective on our future, and the essential need to deliver transport infrastructure today that enables the cleaner, greener, more sustainable and climate-resilient world we strive for, but that it is people at the heart of this change. We must start then, by understanding the people who live in any given place, and what a better future means for them.

Moving towards a more outcomes-based, landscape-led approach, in which transport infrastructure can be leveraged to benefit people, place and nature both within and between our towns and cities, is a transition dependent on effective landscape planning, design and management. Landscape has huge potential as an agent of change, putting local communities at the heart of the process to enable broader, more holistic perspectives on the outcomes that transport can offer, but early engagement of landscape professionals in the project life cycle is vital for realising them.

From strategy and planning to delivery and management, a landscape approach to transport considers how new infrastructure can positively enhance not only the health and wellbeing of local communities, but ecology and biodiversity, climate resilience, local heritage and sense of place. Landscape professionals are essential not only for articulating this vision, but also for making it happen.