Rus in Urbe

The launch of a resource website by HTA Design points to the consolidation of a new approach to tackling the biodiversity and climate emergency crises.

James Lord

HTA Design

This summer saw the launch of a new HTA Design website and information hub, Bringing Nature Home (https://bringing-naturehome.htadesign.co.uk) We want to sow the seeds of a resource that could become the go-to place for anyone with information needs or knowledge to share about the crisis of our collapsing biosphere, equipping us all better to reverse the decline before it is too late.

We welcome contributions from anyone willing to share practical tips, key contact information, campaigns, volunteer activity or inspiring examples of success in creating or enriching biodiversity. To kick things off, we will be reporting with a diverse range of blog posts, videos, and advertising for events for and from professionals, policy makers, and the public.

Great placemaking relies on the integration of knowledge and skills about how to design the spaces between buildings. This requires a profound understanding of human behaviour in relation to our context, the ability to integrate a rich natural environment with hard-wearing public realm that encourages people to interact with each other and with the natural world. As Jan Gehl, the celebrated urbanist, has famously said, “First life, then spaces, then buildings – the other way around never works.”

Our landscape team have come a very long way since I joined the practice twenty years ago. We have developed an approach that has made demands on our clients to think of their contribution as more than a decorative afterthought at the end of the design process, intended only for the purposes of approval. We have been on a journey with clients which began with a fundamental misunderstanding that our role was to provide planting in beds outlined by architects on application drawings.

Now, the success we enjoy derives from a shared understanding that landscape-led masterplanning is about creating a template for development, connecting a network of green infrastructure, reducing natural resources inputs, sustaining human wellbeing conserving natural resources and enhancing biodiversity. It’s therefore the starting point, not the finishing flourish. Around this green armature can be placed built form, one of the functions of which is to enhance amenable microclimate for people and nature – sheltering from the wind and trapping sunlight.

We have been open with clients about our objective to influence design of places to allow people and nature to live side by side and to make places that are more resilient to the effects of climate change and biodiversity loss. We have found, typically, that we are pushing against an open door. Informed clients understand the need to act in the interest of the planet and that it makes financial sense too; they are also increasingly compelled to do so by their investors and by their customers, many of whom are reappraising their appetite for traditional ie grey, urban living in favour of places with access to ‘natural’ greenspace. Latterly local and national planning policy has reinforced the need for green and biodiverse spaces and places but it’s something we have seen long in the making, a shift in perception that like so many things the pandemic has accelerated and made more mainstream.

Website

HTA Design LLP

Never has this approach been more important than in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic – a time when we have come to understand just how important our relationship to nature is for both our physical and mental health. When the pandemic is eventually behind us, the even greater challenge of restoring the damage we have done to the biosphere remains. 2020 was the year when human artefacts on our planet outweighed for the first time the biomass clinging to its surface, the former increasing as we exploit the world’s natural resources and the latter collapsing as we destroy natural habitats. The World Wildlife Fund 2020 ‘Living Planet’ report found that global populations of mammals, birds, fish, amphibians and reptiles has plummeted by almost 70% since 1970. A catastrophe awaits unless we all change our approach to development, regeneration and renovation of the built environment.

Moreover, we were reminded that for many, access to greenspace is still a luxury, reserved for those with private outdoor space or who live within walking distance of public parks. Conversations have shifted to how we design not only our future housing stock but also urban spaces, so that nature and greenspace can be made more readily available. Landscape-led development is a solution to outdoor provision and biodiversity gains whilst uniting communities.

In response to this, our landscape designs have become less formal and more biodiverse. The improved environment this creates makes walking and cycling more enjoyable – as a result, people do these things more, and are therefore healthier. It’s biophilia. We all seek connections with nature and other forms of life. Perhaps an even greater satisfaction yet than receiving the President’s Award is that Cator Park also won the Sir David Attenborough Award for Enhancing Biodiversity. To have done so with a scheme adding commercial value at the heart of a Berkeley Homes development may, I hope, encourage us all to believe that we have something to offer in this time of environmental crisis.

As Sir David Attenborough has warned the leaders of the G7 nations of the need to step up in the fight for nature and against poisoning and wasting the natural environment, and as we build up to COP26 in Glasgow this November, we hope you will join us in creating a network that can play a part in transforming our work in designing, building and maintaining the built environment, and the neighbourhoods in which we live, so that we can restore the damage done to nature before it is too late.

James Lord is head of landscape architecture and Partner at HTA Design.