Addressing the Climate Emergency: Hattie Hartman

We ask landscape practitioners and commentators what the profession should do next to address the climate emergency

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.

Extinction Rebellion poster

© Paul Lincoln

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 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 draw heavily on landscape expertise, the moment is ripe for landscape professionals to proactively seize the initiative and help shape the emerging conversation about urban climate ‘rules’ and guidelines. An overhaul of planning guidance and increased enforcement in this area is both essential and urgent and landscape architects are poised to lead the way.

Hattie Hartman is the sustainability editor of the Architects Journal.