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Saving the planet through landscape architecture

18th April 2007

This is the text of a speech given by Landscape Institute Director General Marion Bowman at the External Works exhibition in Birmingham on 17 April.

When I was invited to speak at External Works I was given the option to talk on a number of subjects. One of them was on the broad theme of skills shortages. I thought about it for a bit and decided to tackle this under the title of

How Young People Can Become Landscape Architects and Save the Planet

The Landscape Institute commissioned some research last year taking stock of the profession of landscape architecture. One of the things that came through loud and clear, especially from the external partner organisations we interviewed, was that landscape architects are nice people to do business with. Mild-mannered was a frequent epithet. Good people who want to make the world a better place, people who have a broad view as well as technical strengths, people who work with space and transformation as the tools of their trade.

I think you can probably guess the direction I’m going in here – yes, landscape architects were beginning to sound like superheroes, so saving the planet should come easily to them.

In all seriousness, it is true to say that landscape architects are in general highly motivated by a strong social conscience to work with communities to improve their social, economic and cultural conditions and the very varied skills they bring to bear on those processes are highly relevant.

One of the London papers has a regular feature on dream jobs. Last month the subject was Kate Digney who works with Whitelaw Turkington. Kate is 26 and she was interviewed at length about her job. She said:

‘At the heart of it you have to be quite creative and you need to be interested in the world around you. It’s almost like a form of social work, we create spaces for people to live, work and play in and that has a huge impact on communities’.

We are talking nowadays about a very diverse and specialised profession which draws together technical, human and natural systems.

Unfortunately that very diversity means that it is not well understood and the roles which landscape architects play these days in strategic planning, in transport infrastructure, in regeneration are sometimes overlooked by policy makers and decision makers.

On the other hand there are high profile projects which ARE demonstrating the critical lead to be given by landscape architects – the 2012 Olympic site is the prime example, where Jason Prior of EDAW is lead consultant, where landscape as place-making and the legacy for the site are the central concerns for how the Olympic Park is created rather than the individual iconic sports venues for the three weeks of the event itself.

Landscape architecture as a concept was coined in 1828 and it developed out of the work of designers like Capability Brown in the great estates of the landed gentry. Historically, the other side of the coin was a romantic notion of landscape as a wild, natural place, usually something to be viewed from a safe distance rather than experienced.

In the 20th century, landscape architecture became part of major national projects – new towns,
post war planning and reconstruction, the national parks and forests - much of it sponsored by public bodies particularly local government and the nationalised industries and agencies.

The purpose and practice of landscape architecture is still evolving and is currently experiencing a remarkable renaissance, although it is still too often thought of very narrowly and wrongly as just being about putting the green finishing touches to schemes.

The organising principle now of the professional landscape architect’s work is that landscapes on whatever scale don’t just happen.

In city or countryside, landscapes look and work the way they do because someone somewhere has made decisions about initial interventions into the land and ongoing management.

And the skills with which they do that can make all the difference to whether a place is life-enhancing or not. It is as much about experience as the view these days and experience at everything from the intimate to the mass scale – from pocket parks and housing developments to city centre re-designs and regional spatial planning.

While aesthetics matter greatly, social concerns and bigger economic pictures loom increasingly large and so landscape architects are just as likely to work with economists and transport engineers as with architects, arboriculturalists and artists.

Two weeks ago, our President, Nigel Thorne, wrote in the Times that Landscape is no longer the space between buildings but ‘the starting point for the world we want to create and for corrections to the world we have created. Landscape is the context within which all physical and cultural development happens.’

So what is going on in our world these days and what transformations do we need to make?

The big one is of course climate change. The connections between climate and landscape are obvious but wherever you look the public policy agenda throws up connections to landscape.

Obesity, crime, civility or lack of it, social inclusion, poverty, sustainability, regeneration, these and so many more public policy areas can be seen squarely in the context of their landscapes.

Walking to school safely, running around in the park, the generations co-existing in harmony, with kids playing and their elders venerated for their wisdom, local economies getting onto an upward rather than downward spiral, carbon neutrality, all of these greatly desired outcomes can be achieved all the more easily if the landscapes created as their setting and as a central part of their dynamic help rather than hinder the process.

Landscape is the quintessential area where joined up policy is needed and which lends itself easily to joined up policy and practice.

It is a message that is beginning to be understood and the evidence marshalled, aided greatly by organisations that we work with which are close to government like CABE and the Academy for Sustainable Communities. But too often the holistic contribution of landscape architecture is missed out and public policy is all the weaker for that.

A recent example was the draft climate change supplement to Planning Policy Statement 1 – it would be hard to think of a policy area more closely linked to landscape considerations than climate change.

The profession’s skills are at the heart of the issues here – bringing a holistic approach embracing technology, design and the natural world all related to social and economic as well as environmental considerations. If engineers found their historical hey day in the Victorian period and the planners found theirs in the post war period, then the profession for the 21st century must surely be that of landscape architect.

But the draft supplement missed some critical opportunities to grasp the value of a much more imaginative and progressive take on things like the creation of micro climates through specific references to layout, external works, open space and the provision of sophisticated drainage measures and renewable energy sources.

You would also think that the carbon sink value of trees would by now be a central plank of regional strategic objectives and Local Development Frameworks but too often the picture is patchy when it comes to the detail of policy and guidance despite the growing buzz around concepts like green infrastructure.

It is important that government begins to understand that many of their public policy objectives will not be achieved without giving a central role to landscape considerations.

And the follow up to that is that those objectives will not be achieved without greater concern for the development of the nation’s supply of landscape skills.

I heard David Miliband the Secretary of State for Environment speak at a meeting organised by the CPRE last month and when he took questions from the floor, it was quite clear that his interrogators almost unanimously oriented their concerns about key government policies like climate change or the housing market around their impact on the landscape.

The British care deeply about landscape, particularly in the countryside obviously, but townscapes are increasingly being recognised as landscapes too and are central to quality of life debates.

The politics of land use are going to get very interesting as bio fuel production, drought conditions, transport needs, changing agricultural practices, increased house building all bite harder with intense contests for prioritisation.

The likely landscape impacts, how we ensure the best possible solutions and allow development without the proliferation of bad design, poor maintenance, detrimental social, environmental and economic consequences, will be critical to the unfolding of a new politics of land use.

But even the recent Barker Review from the Treasury failed to promote a coherent policy stance on landscape.

So there is a lot of saving of the planet to be done and not enough landscape architects to do it.

The Landscape Institute is doing a number of things to help solve this conundrum.

It does seem perverse at a time when employers simply can’t recruit enough staff to meet the demand for their work that universities all too often struggle to get applicants onto their courses.

We’re doing a number of things to get to the bottom of the shortages we know exist.

Some of it goes back to changes in local government in the 1980s and the recession of the early 90s which led to an exodus of people from the profession and critically from the public sector. There was a lost generation who should have been the senior managers and aspiring directors and leaders of today.

Some gaps are being filled by talented practitioners from overseas and it’s helpful that a great many landscape architects are career changers – people finding the profession in their late 20s and early thirties after earlier career choices which didn’t fulfil them.

But the most important thing is to get the profession on the map with young people.

The Institute accredits a growing number of undergraduate and post graduate courses and we are working increasingly closely with our accredited schools.

We all need all the help we can get to grab young people’s attention and importantly that of their parents. Tuition fees and the arrival of market forces in Higher Education are making it tough to persuade people to follow a career choice that can take around seven years in total to become fully chartered.

So we have developed a careers marketing strategy that revolves around three principles – aspiration, inspiration and vocation.

Our aspirational message to young people is that landscape architecture fits in with their lifestyle values – the urban, good-looking street culture of modern cities mixed in with the leisure interests that take them out into the country.

Our inspirational message is that landscape architecture answers their hopes for making their world a better place – saving the planet - by making environmental concerns mainstream, often supported by smart technology, in a very practical, achievable way;

The vocational message is that of the bottom line – there are jobs in this sector, lots of them and increasingly well paid.

We get our messages across by attending UCAS events and careers fairs – we’ll be at Glastonbury this year at the ASC’s careers pavilion.

We target careers advisers and teachers of key subjects like geography, biology and art.

We do direct mailing through pre applicant data from UCAS, and there are the usual techniques of our careers publications and media work and our website.

Happily we are also getting support through new collaborations with key partners. CABE Space has commissioned research from Derby University on perceptions of landscape architecture amongst school students and we’re working with the Academy for Sustainable Communities on other skills audits and surveys to get a more robust picture of what actual skills are in short supply. We are undertaking a survey of our registered practices later in the spring to pinpoint the specifics of current shortages.

We strongly believe that there is real potential for influencing many, many more young people to choose this as their career option.

Those who are already studying are critical as student advocates and we have a fantastically energetic student landscape institute council to contribute enormously in this respect.

Our current President, Nigel Thorne, firmly believes that the best advocates are landscape architects themselves and he has challenged our members to be much less mild mannered than they are reputed to be and to get out into schools to give careers talks and work experience opportunities to Year 10 kids.

We’re developing a lesson plan for primary schools to get them even younger, bringing everything from ecology to technology into the picture.

The solution to getting more young people into landscape architecture is not simple but doggedly promoting the profession by various means pays off.

In 2005 applications to UCAS’s K3 category, landscape design, were up 18%. Current figures from UCAS show a 14% increase on last year’s applications so that trend is upwards.

The post grad area is also buoyant. But any revival will remain vulnerable until there is much wider and deeper awareness of the profession amongst teachers and parents in particular and there is peer group influence at work amongst school pupils.

Many of you in this room will be parents of school children – I imagine you worry like me about what kind of world our children will grow up into and how they will earn a living and be decent citizens, keep themselves busy, out of debt and out of trouble.

The answer of course is for them to become landscape architects – they will never be short of work and they can save the planet to boot, the perfect combination for the hedonistic, pragmatic idealists we have to hand the world over to.

Thanks for listening.

Source:LI