Being Human: Phil Henry

We speak to five landscape professionals, asking them what ‘human’ skill they best add to projects, where they see skills gaps and what they didn’t learn in their training – but now recognise as vital…

Phil Henry is an engineer and designer with over 40 years’ experience in the UK construction and manufacturing sector and a track record of providing engineers with sustainable water solutions for tall buildings and urban realm. Phil is Market Development Director at Polypipe, sits on the Constructing Excellence management board, and is Chair of the Fountain Academy, which assists next generation challenges around water engineering and use.

Polypipe works in the realm of blue/ green infrastructure – water and water resource – so, from a human point of view, we’re using water to make improvements in people’s lives.

Green infrastructure is really important and you can’t have a green roof or infrastructure solution without the blue – the rainwater and surface water. Polypipe is not just looking at an engineering solution, but the health and welfare and general betterment of people; air quality, stress relief, mental health and recreation areas – certainly within cities.

Creating a better environment using traditional engineering, and by adding nature-based solutions.

We spend a lot of time communicating the benefits of green and blue infrastructure to clients, making sure they know it exists and understand the benefits. Blue Green solutions are still not that well known from an engineering point of view – and generally we’ve used the same solution for the last 70-80 years.

I believe green and blue provides a better solution. There are early adopters out there and some cautious take-up, so we’re working with engineering graduates and have set up an independent academy around water and green infrastructure.

But there’s also a digital base to this – our research routes are cloudbased systems, monitored every 12 seconds. Big data underlines its functionality.

Virtual reality engages people: we’re working on the redevelopment of the Thamesmead Estate in south east London, which will turn it into one of the city’s most biodiverse and sustainable urban living environments. VR and AR (augmented reality) let us boil that information down into an App on your phone, so you can see what’s going on beneath the green and blue layers.

Sharing information creatively means residents take pride in ownership – involving the local community, not imposing on them. It’s alive and reactive, rather than a static design.

There are huge skills gaps in the existing professions and we need to look at skilling up alongside future skills. Many of those jobs don’t exist at the moment but, in the future, will become a career.

A blue-green roof, which has so many moving parts in it, would normally be driven by a landscape architect. The landscape architect has to work with a civil/mechanical engineer, water proofer, manufacturer and a green roof provider. This can’t be achieved without collaboration, from the design and delivery to procurement.

Networking is a much underrated – but vital – skill. We need to understand what people do and how we can collaborate. How can different groups help create a solution?

What I’d really like to see is a landscape architect and an engineer morphed into a combined role, bringing green infrastructure knowhow alongside engineering expertise. That would have a massive impact on biodiversity and its knock-on benefits for habitats and for social sciences. We need to break those silos down.