Urban landscape

The urban landscape is not the place where landscape stops. Cities are made of ground, water, air, planting and weather as much as of buildings, and they are shaped by the same processes of use, neglect, investment and repair that shape any other terrain.

Research in this theme treats settlements as landscape systems: parks and streets, post-industrial ground and drainage, allotments and canal edges, and the public spaces in which a city conducts its arguments about itself. It attends to how urban green space is distributed and who can reach it, how former industrial land is remade and for whom, and how climate adaptation is being built into dense places. Work here often begins at a single site, a clay pit, a canal, a reopened park, and reads the wider city from it.