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blocking of on-shore wind should end, fracking should cease and obviously airport expansion stopped. The IPCC report estimates achieving zero carbon by 2050 will cost 1.5/2% GDP – that seems to me to be a small price to pay for the future of life on earth. We need to embrace the thinking of Kate Raworth with her Doughnut economic model – she is rethinking economics and questioning the idea of constant growth on a finite planet. In short – we need to turbo charge our response to this existential threat. Act like our house is on fire. This where it gets personal. I was on Lambeth bridge on 18th November last year for Extinction Rebellion (XR)’s first mass event – closing 5 bridges. It was three days after the birth of my first grandchild. Such momentous events focus the mind. She will be 32 in 2050. It seemed to me the most rational thing to do in the light of government inaction and apathy. We all need to see the world through a lens of the climate/ environmental crisis. It should guide all our choices: what we eat, how we travel, how we shop – whether we stand up and speak out…. It’s not about having less of what we want but rather having more of what we need. Some interesting exemplars are: –– Powerhouse Kjorbo project in Sandvika by Snohetta, or innovative projects like the 2226 by Baumschlager Eberle –– OASIS Play building in Stockwell, by Benjamin Barfield Marks and Matt Atkins. A Walter Segal method building, disassembled from the South Bank and reconfigured in Stockwell for a children’s charity. Is this is the most sustainable building in London? –– Nest research building by Werner Sobek with Rotordc in Brussels Julia Barfield is an architect and director of Marks Barfield Architects. Barfield created the London Eye together with partner David Marks. She is chair of this year’s Stirling Prize (see page 62) and is on the steering group of Construction Declares: http://www.constructiondeclares.com 8
Hattie Hartman Landscape architecture is a profession of the future. I was both surprised and heartened to learn recently that – despite Brexit – current demand for landscape graduates outstrips supply and recent graduates are being snapped up in the job market. The challenge has never been more profound. The interdisciplinary and collaborative nature of landscape design means that you are ideally placed to tackle the climate emergency holistically and make our cities and landscapes fit for the future. Direct action by Extinction Rebellion and others has heightened awareness. Now we need exemplar projects, scalable solutions and policy change. The delicate and imprecise boundary between architecture and landscape architecture is a fertile area for addressing the critical lack of guidance on how to climate-proof our cities. This means intervening as early as possible in a project cycle and making your voice heard on individual projects, in masterplanning and at the policy level. At the project level, landscape practitioners must support architects in looking beyond a client’s brief and beyond the site’s perimeter. Ecology and other environmental impacts do not begin and end at a site’s boundary. Landscape architects have a decisive role to play in ensuring that the entire team is well-versed on fundamental ecological issues such as biodiversity corridors, prevailing winds, handling of surface water and flooding, solar access and radiation. You must dare architects to think beyond the building envelope and carefully consider buildings not as stand alone objects, but as part of the public realm. And finally, in your own specifications, rigorously assess your choices of materials and planting for their appropriateness to a particular context and for their embodied carbon. The defining role of landscape urbanism in master planning is
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increasingly recognised, but it is gaining ground much too slowly. A clear grasp of environmental issues can elucidate a site’s potential and provide the rationale for a design approach. Inherited landscape character, together with a site’s natural systems and how they relate to the larger ecosystem beyond a site’s boundary, should inform every master plan, just as architects’ in-depth understanding of building typologies should underpin plot dimensions. This requires meaningful collaboration and working across professional silos. Collaborative work both at project and masterplanning level can help unlock the seriously understudied area of urban climate form and address the glaring gap in planning guidance in this area. In the City of London, in Nine Elms south of the Thames and elsewhere, disjointed development has resulted in egregious examples of overshadowing and poor quality public realm. Lack of guidance means that urban transformation is currently developer-led often with total disregard to climate issues. Building on the momentum of new policies such the Draft London Plan’s urban greening factor and DEFRA’s biodiversity net gain, both of which
3. Extinction Rebellion poster. © Paul Lincoln
The delicate and imprecise boundary between architecture and landscape architecture is a fertile area for addressing the critical lack of guidance on how to climateproof our cities.
