Landscape Journal Summer 2022: Planning for Beauty

Paul Lincoln Editor

‘So often, the price of ongoing and expanding modernity is the destruction...... of everything most vital and beautiful in the modern world itself. Here in the Bronx, thanks to Robert Moses the modernity of the urban boulevard was being...... blown to pieces by the modernity of the Interstate Highway.’ (1)

The clash between two versions of the modern world expressed here by American philosopher Marshall Berman is also eloquently addressed by Sabina Mohideen in her review of Straight Line Crazy, David Hare’s new play looking at the ongoing conflict between New York Parks Supervisor Robert Moses and urban campaigner Jane Jacobs [p60]. This debate on when and what to build is also at the heart of the development of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, whose 10th anniversary we celebrate this year. Stella Bland recalls the “barrage of criticism ...unleashed against the folly and vandalism of ‘corporate development’” [p23]. And yet, the result, less than a generation later is a park that is both popular and beautiful.

As the government struggles to articulate its thinking on the future of planning for beauty, we publish a series of articles on refocusing on beauty in the planning system [p31]; creating a new generation of design codes [p34]; Natural England’s GI Design Guide [p39]; Design Review in Wales [p40]; and searching for beauty in Scotland’s National Planning Framework [p41]. In searching for beauty, it is perhaps best to look at

the way in which landscape design and planning can both describe and then facilitate the implementation of a vision for a greener, more sustainable future. This approach is well illustrated by two case studies presented at the Mitigating Climate Emergencies Conference [p6] and also by a series of articles on the history of the Olympic Park and its current approach to stewardship [p13].

Beauty is much in evidence in a series of case studies: Exchange Square, Broadgate [p45], Alfred Place Gardens, Camden [p48] - both schemes moving the city decisively from grey to green. These are complemented by two schemes addressing the needs of older people which put landscape at the heart of successful development [p53].

References

1) All That Is Solid Melts into Air - the experience of modernity, Marshall Berman, 1982