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INSIGHTS
A landscape-led approach puts multifunctional green and blue infrastructure at the heart of regeneration
but able to show younger new starts around their new school. Most recently the community orchard and allotments are nearly complete and I’m looking forward to returning to see the fi rst crops.
Kingsgrove, Wantage
HOW CAN A LANDSCAPE-LED APPROACH DELIVER LONG-TERM SOCIAL VALUE AND COMMUNITY OWNERSHIP IN MAJOR REGENERATION AND NEW SETTLEMENTS? A landscape-led approach puts multifunctional green and blue infrastructure at the heart of regeneration and new settlements, supporting health, activity, social connection and everyday contact with nature, rather than simply providing sprawl and leftover open space. Long-term social value comes from inclusive, accessible places and from giving communities real opportunities to shape and care for them, such as through community gardens and shared spaces that build a sense of pride and belonging. At Auldcathie District Park in
Winchburgh, fl exibility in the design allowed residents’ ambition to shape the park, leading to a community-led cricket club, a popular parkrun route and a community garden, demonstrating how landscape can enable social infrastructure to grow organically.
HOW INFORMED ARE CLIENTS ON THE BENEFITS OF LANDSCAPE-LED DESIGN? Clients are increasingly aware of the value of a landscape-led approach and more willing to involve specialist consultants, including ecologists, early. This allows landscape architects to contribute strategically rather than reactively, as architects and engineers alone cannot resolve the environmental and placemaking challenges of large schemes. Taking a multidisciplinary approach from the outset produces more robust outcomes. Early engagement is key to applying the mitigation hierarchy for biodiversity risks.
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Knowing what exists on a site and what must be protected allows development to work with the assets, ensuring biodiversity requirements are met and meaningful uplift achieved. Delaying this makes delivering biodiversity net gain very diffi cult. Policy has increased awareness, and while biodiversity net gain has had some unintended consequences, it has encouraged more careful consideration of landscape and ecology, including retention and integration of signifi cant trees and habitats. While some clients still focus more on built form and marketing, understanding is growing that successful development is about more than clearing a site and starting afresh.
WHAT IS YOUR FAVOURITE PROJECT YOU’VE BEEN INVOLVED IN?
One of my earliest projects was in a junior role designing the landscape around the Washington Monument in the US capital, which remains the highest profi le project of my career. However, my favourite project is the masterplan and delivery of the new settlement of Kingsgrove on the edge of Wantage for St Modwen. It’s a project that I have been involved with since 2012, helping to secure an initial allocation, outline consent and then subsequent design coding and reserved matters applications for delivery.
Regularly walking the site over the years, I’ve been able to see our designs come to life, creating a place with generous public open spaces, new woodland and parks and civic spaces for the emerging community to adopt and make their own. I’ve witnessed the new primary school grow by a new class year by year, with the fi rst class of pupils always being the oldest in the school
DO YOU BELIEVE NATIONAL HOUSEBUILDING TARGETS ARE WRONG-HEADED? We have been underdelivering on building homes for so long that I believe we must continue to set goals, if only to reinforce and remind people of the scale of the housing need. Although the goals might seem daunting, and some say impossible, that need isn’t going away and as a society we need to recognise and prioritise delivery. Without goals, we have nothing to aim for and it would be too easy to become complacent and lose momentum.
HOW DO YOU SEE ARCHITECTS’ ROLES EVOLVING IN THE NEXT FEW YEARS? We are in a period of massive disruption and change that is driven in part by two related threads that will directly affect the roles of architects in the next few years. The fi rst is climate change and the critical need to always design with environmental impact, carbon and energy in mind. There is a lot of noise about the adoption of ‘regenerative’ processes but frankly these are rarely to do with built form and more about processes, systems and the natural environment and best led by disciplines other than architecture. I think the result will be landscape architects and other environmental disciplines will lead projects more frequently rather than architects, as has often been the case. The second is the infl uence of AI on every aspect of our lives. Too few people are critically thinking about how AI will change things and that includes architects, who will be directly affected by AI tools as they evolve and improve, making whole processes obsolete while simultaneously making human review and oversight even more important. Architects will have to embrace these tools and a new way of working or face becoming sidelined by more nimble professions that can become more infl uential.
ADF JUNE 2026
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