Putting landscape first in the planning journey
April 21, 2020
Landscape Officer Ruth Childs gives her take on an event that saw planners, designers and architects come together to discuss the benefits of landscape-led design.
The South Downs National Park was honoured to host the annual joint RTPI (Royal Town Planning Institute) – LI (Landscape Institute) evening event. Attended by architects, landscape architects, urban designers and planners, the event focused on the ‘Landscape-led Approach to Design’.
This approach is the golden thread that is at the heart of the new design policies in the recently adopted South Downs Local Plan. It turns landscape on its head as it challenges applicants to respond to the landscape first, instead of at the end of a planning application. Typically landscape architects have been brought into a team last, at the end of the design process – often to design the spaces left around buildings and areas of hardstanding and planting. The Authority now requires landscape evidence to be used to directly influence the layout and design of a scheme.
The benefits of forming a thorough understanding of a place subject to potential development are numerous and often far reaching, improving obvious things such as aesthetic quality to the more nuanced, such as maximising the benefits we get from the environment (reducing flood risk for example) or improving well-being (through enhancing dark skies or access to nature). The main result is it provides applicants with the means to design out any negative effects of development and helps create new places which contribute positively to local landscape character, sense of place and the Purposes of the National Park. By considering opportunities early on, applicants can really maximise them, improving the benefits for people and wildlife the development of a new site can bring.
Attendees heard two presentations, the first setting the landscape context, describing how landscape character can be understood, in a way that easily translates into urban design principles. Following on from this a series of case studies were presented by our Design Officer to illustrate how successfully and unsuccessfully the approach could be applied. A series of thought-provoking Q and A’s followed the presentations – a great way to round off a really fulfilling event. The evening turned out to be one of the best ever attended and both professional bodies received some very positive feedback.