Moving media

This is the the last and third year on the BA course and I wanted to try to explore new ways of presenting my work. The project that we are currently working on is all about how the landscape changes through the cycles of growing. Based on a crop that grows on a cycle of 3 years instead of a usual agricultural circle of 1 year.

I am using the cycles of the crop to design the landscape. This is my first attempt on an animation to show this. Thought it was important to show the change in the landscape that the concept is built on and that a productive landscape can bring a an interesting and playfulness to a space.



I will now try to get it a bit interesting and show a larger part of the site and maybe try to get the leaves and the 3d dimensions of the space a bit more.

Integrated River Basin Managment

- managing land and water in integrated way

There is currently a free lecture series on at Birkbeck University hosted by the Ecology and Conservation Studies Society.

As the title of the lecture says there is a close relationship between land and water and there is a lot of pressure on both of these and their environments today.

The lecture was held by Pam Gilder from the Environment Agency. She introduced the new Water Framework Directive that has been created to held the water bodies of the UK to improve.

The lecture was quite technical but still interesting. For me as a Landscape Architecture student I am very interested in improving my knowledge about the natural environment both in rural and urban areas. This to help me to combine and introduce natural processes in design and to see people interact with them.

The main thing talked about in the lecture was the importance that land use has on the adjacent water bodies and how we can create a good relationship between landuse and water. And of course the importance that management has in this. What can be positive landuse management solutions?

20% of UK's rivers are today in good ecological status according to the new document. Some of the main issues are:

- Nutrients
- Ammonia
- Abstraction (irrigation)
- Chemicals
- Morphological change
- Alien species
- Sediments

All of these are related to landuse.

Some of the big scale solutions to these are: paid landuse change, advice, farm assurance, licenses and registrations, water protection zones, NVZ areas.

The future shortage of water was also talked about. How we are going to have periods of very heavy rainfall and then periods of very dry weather and how these will not balance. How we in the UK have a very high use / capita of water. How we have maniputaled our water bodies a lot. The problem with water resevoirs - which stops water going into the groundwater. What are the solutions to this?

The answer to that is obviously not easy and at the moment I think we need to start by just consider these facts in our everyday life as well as in our designs.

On our current project I am trying to propose something that might have a positive effect - even on just a small scale.

LI conference

The subject of the conference this year was 'housing, land use and community'. It was a lot of talk about the role of a Landscape Architect and the recognition of the role of the Landscape Architect. Or the lack of recognition of the Landscape Architect. How small amount of landscape architects are involved in housing and street design. Partly down to the developer - but also down to Landscape Architecture. Housing is not a good interesting project for a lot Landscape Architects.

For me personally I am not bothered about recognition for the Landscape Architect, as long as what we do affects people and places in a positive way. I do agree with the fact that we need new innovative landscape around housing in this country and landscape that works with housing and not against it.

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Good housing that has been around for while - The Lane, Blackheath.

Swedish cool housing in Stockholm - Hammarby Sjostad (Go Sweden - it has been around for years!)

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(Below is list of challenges and questions that came up in the conference or things that I think might relate to it.)

Challenges and Questions to consider

Can good landscape help the life time costs of estates?

Promoting trees in urban landscape - see them as an asset and not a liability

Community spirit linked to good proud landscape

Density - Intensity and landscape

Space before architecture and landscape

Giving residents confidence in managing / taking charge of their space - challenges of jealousy, increase of costs?

Gated developments - good or bad?

Pushing the boundary of the estate

View onto the landscape from the buildings instead of looking in - can create a new angle of landscape

Managing a housing landscape - increase in costs, giving tenants a share - promoting a proudness in the surroundings

Food growing - allotments - keeping chickens etc.

Importance of infrastructure relating to landscape

Importance of landforms and natural environment to be considered more in landscape

The importance of playing fields for kids to play

Opportunities to promote and teach kids about local biodiversity in the landscape

The importance of bringing the natural environment back into peoples life

Housing and the natural environment

Natural estates??

Link between an increase in green space and a decrease in vandalism and violence

Active - Natural - Interacting Landscapes

Crown estate

As part of the LI conference I went on a site visit to the Crown Estate allotments by Regents Park. In terms of estates it was quite a posh one (if there are posh estates?). The allotments were sunken down in the middle of of a courtyard with apartment blocks on the sides. It was fenced off, but still looked ok on a sunny, bright autumn day. Underneath the allotments is a disused basin and it also has got an underground river running below it.

The allotments have been there since 1940's and are very well established. There are no problems with vandalism on the allotments (there are minor problems on the estate landscape).

It was interesting to hear that the allotments are managed by the RHS - the land given over by the housing association. Since management is something that I think a lot of housing associations are concerned about when starting to consider allotments and urban food growing on their estates. Basically the RHS rents out the allotments and a few RHS members with allotments on the estate manages it for free. This is an option more housing association could consider.

There is no water collecting on the site and no promotion of Eco friendly running of the allotments - this is something that should be promoted.

I thought the allotments were great - but this was on an estate that is well managed and secure. With relatively good landscaping. It is more interesting to see how allotments and good landscaping can provide a sense of community on a run down estate? Then the challenge would be on.

Tree Lecture

We are just about to start to work on open spaces around Waterloo and I thought as a preparation for my site which is a street and will almost certainly involve trees it would be good to try to learn more about what you need to consider when designing with trees.
Trees are the new black

Went to one of the breakfast talks at the NLA. The subject was trees and held by Martin Kelly from Lovejoy and Jim Smith from the Forestry commission. Both are involved in the Trees and Design Action Group TDAG. The main points they emphasized were:

Trees need space and need to be managed right.

Right Tree Right Location - to ensure future tree planting in London is appropriate, sustainable, considered and permits the long term survival of those trees planted so that they fulfill their growth potential and make the maximum contribution possible without causing many of the problems traditionally associated with planting trees in urban areas.

The importance of putting an actual value to a tree, to make other professions understand their value

Promoting an understanding of trees

The cost of manging the tree in relation to the value of the tree. A high value tree might cost more to maintain, but there are solutions to avoid and help management issues for the future.

At the moment there are more trees being planted in London than ever before. The problem is that it is not always the right kind of trees and the way and space where they are planted are not right.

Trees are identified as playing a major part in the climate change scenario. Trees can help to decrease the Urban heat island effect. They are also important to health and wellbeing. They provide shade, but you also need to consider where trees are planted in relation to buildings, not to shade too much sun, that is valuable for the building to absorb heat from the sun to heat the buildings. But at the same time you would want the tree to provide shade in the summer to keep the building from getting too hot.

Trees also absorb CO2 from the atmosphere (but CO2 are also released during deforestation). There is also research supporting trees role in absorbing NO2 from the atmosphere to reduce pollution.

The average value of a tree in London is £8000 - £10 000. The total value of all street trees in London are £2.9 billion. And that is not including the parks. The value of a tree is done by the CAVAT system which can be read more about on the London tree officer website.

For me this has left me with a lot of reading and a better understanding of trees and some of the things that you need to consider when consider planting trees in designs especially in an urban site. I think it will be really important to provide management plans for trees in your designs, so that councils know how to look after the trees and to avoid future problems that the trees could occur. But also trying to sort out existing problems and provide solutions, for example root pruning and extension of existing tree grills. Even though you will probably work with a tree officer on your schemes in the real world I think a good understanding of the basics is very important.

Also promoting new developments to include trees in their schemes and to work with architects to change the building foundations to work with trees.

At another level there is also the opportunities of promoting fruit tree orchards to come to the UK, since a lot have disappeared over past years. I would love to have the opportunity to promote an urban orchard to highlight the issue of the future importance of local food production.

Climate change lecture - The Royal Society

Went to the Royal Society on Monday evening to listen to a public lecture. The title was Climate Change on Living Earth by Professor James Lovelock. I remember hearing about James Lovelock in the Sustainability lectures and about he created the Gaia concept. He also created the theory of thinking about Earth as living system and how this should be the way you see earth to research and respond to climate change.

He started the lecture about talking about he has an apocalyptic view of the future and how we are already running out of time to respond to the increasing problem of climate change. We are not acting fast enough at the moment. He also said that implementing the Kyoto protocol is not going to be enough. I guess these are things we might have already known or started to realise. He went on to say that the most important thing at the moment is to find ways to extend the time we have to act to climate change. This could be by finding technological solutions to help slowing up climate change.

He spoke of the division in the scientific field and how this has a negative effect on research. He discussed the IPPC report which has just come out and called it conservative. He doesn't think it has a realistic view on climate change and that the targets are not enough.

The next thing which can up was the concept of global dimming and how this actually cools the earth and the fact that if reduction of CO2 in the atmosphere goes too fast this might raise the temperature of the earth instead. If this is done to quickly the temperature might increase by that crucial 2 - 3 degrees which would wipe out big parts of wildlife and ecosystems. James Lovelock said: 'We are damned if we keep burning fossil fuels and damned if we stop too fast'.

Other things mentioned were the fact that most climate change models only account for atmospheric changes and not on the living earth system and the fact that even if the level of CO2 goes down, it might already be too late.

So, what is James Lovelock's solution to this? He talked about what has already been mentioned the importance of thinking of earth as a living system. About stimulating the earth to cure itself and restoring the balance in nature. About reducing emissions and protecting natural forest (instead of planting new).

But the real thing that he said was the world needs a climate catastrophe to wake up. (I thought that there already have been a lot of them over the past years.) He mentioned climate refugees and mass migration and that the northern countries need to start to prepare for this and said that a similar response as in wartime is needed. Human rights require human obligations.

I learned a few new things in the lecture, but what mostly surprised me was how kind of negative James Lovelock's view of the future and the climate change is. It was good to hear in a way, cause it does seem realistic at this point, changes are not coming fast enough, even though climate change will affect all of us in our daily lives. You need to be prepared for big changes and be prepared to commit to them . Starting with increasing with what you might already be doing. And it is a fact that no one really knows what the effects of climate change will have on our lives, but I think everyone will admit that it is happening and you can't ignore research, even though it might be a lot more negative and scary even than you would like. So, I agree we need to wake up. Not just Europe but the whole world. Climate changes is a global issue.