“Humans and Nature: the creative tensions that exist between an urban environment and the natural world’

We are all connected.

It is human nature to look to one another for support connection, and friendship.

We are all connected to our world, reliant as we are upon it for food, shelter, light and comfort.

As human beings we have a remarkable capacity to nurture and love one another, but we can also turn on each other, dividing and separating, causing damage to the environment through the things that we do, and the structures that we build.

Mother nature too has the capacity to provide us with everything we need, food, shelter, joy and delight in nature. She too can cause disruption and destruction protecting herself, if she needs to.

Life in all its forms is a balance. A delicate balance of many different varying factors and it works best when this balance is harmonious. When we as human beings come together to strive for the best of ourselves, when we can work with nature to curate the wondrousness that the natural world can offer us, that harmonious balance can be something to wonder at.

This balance, this tension, between the natural world and the built environment is more prevalent in city centres and dense urban areas, places like Camden. What we seek to achieve with the Highline project will play right to the heart of how we can ease that tension for a more balanced future city.

Our vision is to create a Linear Landscape Laboratory. A place where over time we can seek to understand, and scientifically measure, the benefits that the nature can bring the communities of Camden; from the smallest moments to the slow but significant seasonal shift; from physical health to mental health and well-being.

It is our shared desire to undertake this research and deliver truly evidence-based design, taking a scientific approach to measuring the quality and benefit of landscape, and analysing those results to shape the future phases of work tying in directly with project phases:

Phase 1 – initially led by the professional design team with the intent to use part of our time, to engage the local community and identify potential apprenticeships, young and old, local people who wish to play a role over the lifetime of the project.

Phase 2 – will explore how the apprentices we have identified and are in training during Phase 1 can start to take a lead. It will be about digesting the research and implementing findings through an updated design approach.

Phase 3 – the intention by this point is that the original design team will take more of a peripatetic role overseeing and guiding, but not directing, the work - allowing the new team of apprentices to take a lead.

Over the five years since we started the project our first apprentices will have graduated, and the cycle can start again.

A truly community focussed, evidence-based design approach.

We are after all, only the curators, or the propagators this project. Once we have planted the seed, it will grow and take on a life of its own.