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HillSo why have we put Stefano Boeri’s 27-sto-rey Bosco Verticale on the cover? Billed as the world’s first ‘vertical forest’, each apart-ment will have a balcony planted with trees, creating a green forest rising above the city. It is the first element in Boeri’s proposed BioMilano, in which a green belt is created around the city. This seemingly fantasti-cal concept is actually under construction in Milan and serves, perhaps, as a stark reminder that nothing quite so green and ambitious seems to be going on in the built environment in the UK.

Harold-Hill

For masterplanner Raymond Unwin, landscape was not just a background to lives lived, it was a weapon of social change, says David Davidson, archi-tectural adviser at Hampstead Garden Suburb Trust. Unwin’s vision was the communal landscape, one that promot-ed social interaction at every turn. In creating the Hampstead Garden Suburb, he realised the democratic landscapes the Garden City movement espoused.

Davidson was the first speaker in the Landscape Institute’s autumn lecture series Urban Landscapes in the Twentieth Century. He is also the first of our essayists in this spe-cial edition of Landscape, which takes as its starting point the ideals of the Garden City and pits them against the great 21st century chal-lenge: realising the green city.

Programmed by Susannah Charlton of the Twentieth Century Society, the lecture series accompanies the Garden Museum’s From Garden City to Green City exhibition. The five speakers agreed to pen a series of essays for us, so, following a foreword from Christo-pher Woodward, director of the Garden Museum, we dedicate 15 pages to what we can learn from more than a century of urban landscapes.

Projects adviser at the Prince’s Regeneration Trust Roland Jeffery tackles housing landscapes, and the new towns in particular. Their landscapes, he says, have still to find a comfortable role that is somewhere in between the private garden and the public highway.

And finally, Landscape’s honorary editor Tim Wa-terman explores our relationship with food and the urban landscape. Are taste and appetite our biggest barriers to realising sustainable design?But just how relevant are the ideas of the Garden City to those nations currently in thrall to urban revolutions of their own? We asked Ruth Olden to get behind the images of verdant green cities and see what’s happening in India, China and Mexico.

“If you leave people to live in a purpose of our leisure landscapes.lousy, unhealthy, un-green and depressing environment that indicates that society at large, their local authority and the government don’t care about them, then why should we be surprised when they act without care themselves?” This is Sarah Gaventa writ-ing in the wake of August’s riots as she asks how communities can possibly be expected to interact when they have nowhere decent to commune.

With large-scale investment on the backburner for the foreseeable future, the Landscape Institute’s latest publication Local green in-frastructure: helping communities make the most of their landscape, seems particularly pertinent.

With large-scale invest-ment on the backburner for the foreseeable future, the Landscape Institute’s latest publication Local green infra-structure: helping communi-ties make the most of their landscape, seems particularly pertinent.

Or is there? After all, there is unlikely to be one solu-tion to the green city. Rather, the question is whether our attempts to realise it, in all its manifestations, will be re-signed to the drawing board as utopian ideals or will the 21st century see them finally succeed at scale?