Creating the hospitable landscape

Paul Lincoln Editor

Landscape architects are ideally placed to create a welcoming environment for everyone, from tourist, refugee and visitor to pedestrian or cyclist. The welcome may be developed through signage systems, cartography, planting, or a hard landscape with materials that carefully offer a route and a navigation through the city. The creation of maps and signpost schemes, like Legible London and Legible Bristol, are interesting examples that offer a form of welfare, an embrace of the visitor that says, you are welcome in this place.

This edition of Landscape considers what it means to create a hospitable environment. Considering a childhood experience of learning to cycle in North London and a UNESCOsupported child-friendly landscape in Ilford, we also showcase the way in which the early work on Legible Bristol and Legible London schemes has further evolved from New York to Toronto, Brick Lane and Bankside. We explore plans for dramatic improvements in Newhaven and celebrate the unsettling life of the City of London bollard.

Our interview with the creators of Elephant Springs traces the development of a landscape made from porphyry stone as it is carved and tested and then transported from its quarry to create a childfriendly environment in Elephant Park. Our book extract explores how skateboarding has improved the hospitality of Malmö, and our university briefings update on an innovative collaboration in Bangladesh and a student-led consultation in Hackney, East London.

The research section highlights thermal comfort as an essential area of landscape expertise and demonstrates how co-design has become an essential area of expertise across all of the built environment professions.

And finally, LI chief executive Sue Morgan examines the ground we stand on to ask how much of it provides a truly hospitable landscape.