Landscape and Urbanism
The studio considered the changes within the demographics of the coalfields network and the impact that this has on the social needs of its inhabitants.
The UK is one of the most nature depleted countries in the world and despite nature struggling against the odds to survive, more than one in seven native species face extinction and more that 40% are in decline. We desperately need a new, global deal for nature that protects and restores.
The studio situated itself in the Rhubarb Triangle, an informal area of land that at its height of production stretched from Wakefield to Leeds and Bradford. It is a rich but damaged landscape; one that is dominated by a lost coal mining industry, 20th century road planning, railways – both used and forgotten.
It is a landscape of deprivation and also a place that produces a globally recognised product with Protected Designated Origin status. The resulting fragmentation of this landscape remains a hinterland between other places, left with no cohesive identity and yet recognised nationally by the moniker of ‘The Rhubarb Triangle’.
The studio explored the cultural and historical legacy of our relationship with food production. We have explored the landscape network of the Rhubarb Triangle, an area of open broken farmland and rolling hills at the centre of the cross roads between north and south, east and west.
This has led to investigations as to how we might develop synergies between landscapes and how we live and work within the modern rural ecology. The studio considered the changes within the demographics of the coalfields network and the impact that this has on the social needs of its inhabitants.
The resultant projects created briefs that are wide ranging but have a focus on the development of operative communities and how they in turn develop support networks for health and wellbeing, learning, working and living.
