The presentation slide above summarises the main points of my message to the A Place to Live conference in Wanganui, New Zealand. It is offered in response to Richard Louv's keynote address that we need to connect children with nature. 

I agree with him, but believe we need to look more widely. When we are looking at human restoration, when we are looking for our towns and cities to provide a life worth having, we need to consider salutogenic urban design. We need to ensure young and old, marginalised and engaged have equal access to nature connections in their daily lives. We need to ensure those same people can easily come together safely, and conveniently in a public space. Recently I was in Athens, presenting at the WHO"s Healthy Cities conference. Greece is broke. Its young people are unemployed in record numbers. I remarked on history and how Greece has risen and fallen several times since antiquity. The people are resilient and resourceful. They don't have a lot of public greenspace. They do have abundant, tiny, home-kitchen-sized neighbourhood cafes and pocket parks where people can come together to talk about their problems and celebrate their joy. They have strong cultural connections with each other.

If we are to create A Place to Live, if we are to create a Life Worth Having, we need to address planning issues. We need for tiny cafes to be a permissible activity within a residential neighbourhood. We need many more, attractive, accessible parks where we can feed the birds, watch the butterflies, and even help local authority's budgets and do some general maintenance.

I can hear you shrieking "WHAT?!" from here. :-) Maintain a public space?! Yes. There is overwhelming evidence that we need to interact with nature on a daily basis for our health and well-being. While it is beneficial to have a green view, it is even better for improving concentration, improving memory, reducing stress, relieving and preventing depression, reducing risk of obesity, type 2 diabetes and heart disease if we can not only see, but touch, prune, weed and harvest produce from the land. 

The good news is it is not difficult and it is not expensive to put supports in place for our people, young and old. We need first to acknowledge there is a problem. Second we need to evaluate available resources. Do we have local expertise in this area? Are governance systems supportive of health and well-being? Do local policies in schools, care homes, parks and gardens allow for the nature and social connections to take place? If not, where can we go for guidance? 

The joy of my position is that I am able to join the dots, to link people and plants, to restore humans through environmental design. If you want to know more, get in touch. Contact us info @ greenstone design .co. nz

This week I'm travelling the length of NZ with the NZIA. I and 2 other urban designers - Steve Thorne and Dr Angelique Edmonds - are presenting the 2014 urban design speaker series.

It is interesting to see who comes along. The 3 presentations all come from different perspectives but each reach the same conclusion. Urban design for health and well being is more than just an interesting topic of research , more than a soon-to-be short-lived 'new fangled idea' . Urban design for health and well being offers architects, planners and policy makers an opportunity to contribute to the liveability ratings and functional wellness of a community.

It requires big thinking and a collaborative approach. If we take responsibility for our designs we acknowledge the impact environmental design can make. Community gardens, roof top gardens, parks and pocket green space combine with the built environment to affect mental health, stress and depression. These problems occur within education, social housing and the workplace, in fact wherever there are people who are stressed by their environment. In these situations salutogenic design interventions become cost effective, achievable goals.

We are getting the message out but more people need to join the conversation. We have both a challenge and an opportunity to fundamentally make a difference to the health and well being if our client communities. Care to join us?

While a collection of trees do not an urban forest make, they do make a wonderful home for birds and beneficial bugs and a setting for sitting out, playing in the shade, playing in, eating from. These trees were retained, and some new mature specimens added, when the social housing blocks were redeveloped by Wellington City Council.

These trees transform what would otherwise be a  fairly bleak, open space

Contrast the courtyard area above with this purpose-designed care home space and you can immediately see the difference trees make to a living environment. 

Trees take an institutional setting and make it 'home'. We have been brought in to transform this space and bring it to life, both to enhance the lives of residents, and the local environment. A real win:win. 

...after the important business of the election Hurricane Sandy is now being seen not as a political event but for what it is, a symptom of climate change.  

Perhaps if more people paid more attention to sustainable design principles, and understood the importance of sustainable urban design, green space would be seen for the buffer it provides, the carbon sink, the natural urban drainage system, the free mental health prescription that comes from time spent in healing gardens and urban forests.

Life on the planet is all linked. We can not afford to act in ignorance and arrogance. "To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it." - G.K. Chesterton.

Tomorrow I'm meeting with Christchurch's city arborist. We're going to discuss the role the urban forest can play in the health & well being of a redeveloped Christchurch. In the UK GPs are already prescribing a 'green' treatment for early stage depression, whereby people are given a prescription not for expensive medication but for a walk in a forest for 20 minutes, 3 times a week.

Landscape architecture has an important role to play in the sustainable design of the city. Sensory gardens are those gardens that are designed to stimulate the senses, to do more than just look good, but to function on a human scale, providing food, shelter, habitat and employment. Urban forests can be the ultimate sensory garden, when planted with mixed natives, fruit and nut trees, and designed for year round interest, to attract native birds and invertebrates.

Urban trees represent an irreplaceable asset for cities, and unlike most municipal infrastructure a trees’ value will increase over its life span. In technical terms, an urban forest refers to the trees located within a city’s limits, whether planted or naturally occurring.

Check out the link to the Danish Architecture Centre's article on Edmonton's trees.

We've known it sub consciously but now we're being told it. In this age of science and technology we seemingly don't believe anything unless it can be proven.

So now we have proof.

Recent studies employing land-use data and satellite technology have reported that access to green space within a kilometre of one's residence is associated with improved mental health. Indeed, large population studies show that those with the least green space within one kilometre of home have a 25 per cent greater risk of depression and a 30 per cent higher risk of an anxiety disorder. 

Multiple studies from Japan show spending time in forests can lower stress, improve mental outlook, and lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol. Separate studies have shown similar cognitive-enhancing effects of short periods spent in natural settings. 

Spending just 20 minutes in vegetation-rich nature has been shown to improve vitality. Given that vitality is defined in psychological lexicon as emotional strength in the face of internal and external oppositions, and living life with enthusiasm and zest, the implications for personal and planetary health are enormous.