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September 2016
Cities function on many levels, and those functions are often easy to see. From the obvious effects of needing to move people and goods through the city, to the economics of employment and housing. But what about the more intangible effects? Why do some cities make us feel good? Is this something that we can plan? As a landscape architect, the first places I would go to in a city would be its parks and urban green spaces.
The evidence for urban green spaces offering physical well-being is not clear. This is partly down to lack of research in what is a very complex issue. What is clearer is the effect on our mental well-being. Parks and other green spaces really do make us happier, less anxious, and help strengthen our social networks. They are the places where we go to meet people, and be people, rather than workers, commuters, pedestrians, or any other of the types of city dweller we find ourselves pigeon-holed into.
So how do we create more urban green spaces? Real estate within cities is expensive. All of the obvious spaces have been developed. Landscape architects are looking at other more under used spaces to convert into urban green spaces. The space taken up by roads is now being looked at as potential, especially as cities realise that the balance has to change from the car being king. Recently Seoul demolished a major highway running through the centre of the city and rescued a small river that was buried beneath. The Cheonggyecheon Restoration Project has been a huge success with millions of visitors annually.
The Place de la Republique in Paris has recently been transformed from a large, and busy intersection, into a bustling city park. In a city well stocked with parks the Place de la Republique has become the biggest public place in the city. It has long served as a meeting place for events and now has been revitalised as a major public area.
In Australia, the City of Yarra’s Converting Roads to Parks program has been running since 2009. In their long term city planning strategy they identified a need for more parks. The most practical way they saw of achieving this was to convert roads into parks, with the principle focus on parking lots (a bane of most cities, surface parking lots are often known as parking craters).
These three examples show how the focus of landscape architects and planners is looking towards taking roads and parking spaces out of our cities and creating urban green spaces that can improve our moods, allow us to meet with others, and improve our well being.
Putting people at the heart of what we do is our core mission at Node. We are highly experienced in designing landscapes and masterplanning new development which prioritises the human experience. Please see our portfolio pages for more information.
