Design and Landscape for People: New Approaches to Renewal

In a complex world trying to build in a sustainable framework can be overwhelming, this book has a wonderful range of challenging projects that bring the process to life. Communities are not trampled upon nor are they disenfranchised, instead each project shows how they were participants in the creative endeavours of a design team (of many genres), enabling people and landscape in the long term to flourish. A very positive, helpful book.

interesting

This is by far the most substantial overview yet of an emerging but already potent field of practice, that of people from a vast array of disciplines working in experimental, inclusive, and assertive ways to change our physical environment. As the book's title makes clear, people are at the heart of this process, and the text, I think, gives bold and often directly applicable lessons about why and how this is so.The physical nature of the book sets it apart from more obviously academic studies of multidisciplinary practice, but it is far from simply another collection of glossy projects and glossy prose. The authors go into detail about the process and learnable lessons of each project, and this is accompanied by often fabulous sets of photographs which prove that while the lessons may be serious, the results can be beautiful. It's rare, especially in the field of architecture and regeneration, that a book expresses both sides of this story.If I had a gripe it would be that some of the factual and drawn data at the back of the book, along with some of the references, could have been included within the body of each case study, making the whole thing feel like more of a gazetteer. Also, some of the projects discussed in the various introductory essays are ones which I would have liked to understand more of - such as Public Works' project around the Serpentine Gallery in London - but I suppose the international scope of the book limited what could be included.A few people in the broader world of `regeneration' are out there doing the kind of stuff that Cumberlidge and Musgrave describe in this book. Many many more are scrambling to understand and engage with it. I think that the tools they need are lucidly presented here.