On a worldwide scale, 55% of the population live in cities. The concentration of people in urban habitats highlights the need to look after green spaces and the environment, since the lives of their inhabitants depend on their quality.
Cities are built on landscapes, and in certain cases do not have a solid advance planning that guides their development.
In Argentina in particular, some propelled interventions over public spaces fall short of an integral glimpse that captures the complexity of the system in which they are found. One of the reasons that explains this phenomenon is the people in charge’s lack of specialisation in its implementation and the lack of structuring amongst actors.
We speak with Inés Mac Keón and Josefina Bastanchuri, two of the six co-founders of Habitar, a landscape planning studio that works on the analysis of problems and potential of public and private spaces from a social and environmental impact standpoint.
In other words, the intervention proposals they carry out are intended to be environmentally responsible and socially inclusive. The projects focus on creating or conditioning relaxation spaces for public use and enjoyment, or better yet, they advise and/or implement actions for the conservation or restoration of nature. All the green, free public access areas (if everyone is not included – including people with disabilities- it is not truly public).
Examples of these spaces are plazas, parks, roadways, and natural areas. The city’s green public spaces make up a network called “green infrastructure”.
This green infrastructure network is key as it offers a series of services of a social kind (interaction and recreation spaces, improvements in the neighbourhood aesthetic, strengthening residents’ the sense of belonging), ecological (habitat preservation for local flora and fauna, alleviation of floods and soil protection), and economic (local development, investment attraction, -for example, bringing in tourism-, among others). At Habitar they work in an articulated way with civil servants committed to positive change, offering support and technical guidance in order to tap into the spaces in an inclusive way while respecting the environment. The specialists consulted recommend taking the following aspects into account:
First, precisely understand the social and environmental components of the place where the intervention will take place.
In order to implement this, it is important to carry out preliminary investigative work (through inquests, surveys in situ, interviews, aerial photography analysis) that allows us to respond to the following questions:
What environment will the project be inserted into? What challenges and potentialities appear from a social, economic and ecological point of view?, how will it affect the locals?, what can each actor involved contribute? Time? Knowledge? Distribution?
On the other hand, it is important to put together a team that includes different professional views, and different views of the locals. To work as a team means going the long way around but it is more secure.
At the same time, listening to the residents’ needs at the project’s design stage is recommended. For example, before proposing activities for a park, it is advisable to formulate the following questions:
- What ecological role does the space fulfil in the general landscape it is found in?
- What is the place’s history? Do the initiatives guarantee respect for the people and their roots?
- What makes the people special or unique (city, zone, or region)? Is it their landscape, their music, their art and/or their history? How can you take local identitiy into account?
- How can you optimise resources? Is it possible to reuse materials that already exist there?
- Do the locals already use the area for an activity: walking, playing football or a fair? Is there a social necesety surounding the space?
- Is it possible to contract local workers or providers? How can you take advantage of the intervention to generate local economic activity?
- How can you include and commit to the largest quantity of inhabitants possible? How can you assure local ownership – subsequent use and care of the space?
In short, creating public private alliances between communities and specialised consultants, adopting a long-term view crossed with sustainability and regeneration, actively involving the local community, using materials available creatively, are all good practices when creating and/or reconditioning green spaces, places of upmost importance in order to have cities and towns where you can breathe pure, fresh air, authentically worthy of human life.
