Landscape Institute’s 2022 Building with Nature National Award Nominations
Malls Mire Park, Landscape Institute Building with Nature National Award 2022 finalist
Building with Nature are proud to have sponsored the Landscape Institute Annual Awards for the last three years. The Building with Nature category within the Awards is a key platform for us to amplify the messages at the heart of our approach, as the Award celebrates projects that lead the way in delivering the very best in high-quality green infrastructure, showcasing placemaking that works for people and wildlife.
With a return to an in-person ceremony this year, after two fantastic years online, it looks as if this year’s Awards will be bigger than ever. With over 200 entries in total, including 53 from international entrants, the Awards pull focus on the work of landscape professionals - from innovation and research, through to design and masterplanning, from new build to regeneration, from planning to long-term stewardship and aftercare – the LI Awards marks a key date in the year to champion the range of knowledge and skills on display across this multi-disciplinary sector. As LI’s CEO Sue Morgan states:
“The LI Awards are all about celebrating people, place and nature, and the myriad ways that landscape projects can connect them. It celebrates spaces that people can be truly proud of.
In February 2022 the government published its long-awaited Levelling Up White Paper, outlining its mission to ‘level up’ the country. The paper reflects the fact that placemaking, green spaces and the built environment will be instrumental to this agenda. We know that landscape professionals across the globe are already implementing this holistic vision and the awards will celebrate their exceptional contributions.
‘Landscape professionals can implement this holistic vision, delivering nature-based solutions, giving local communities a voice, and designing spaces that people can be truly proud of.”
The Building with Nature Category
The Building with Nature National Award recognises the design, delivery, and management of great places for people and wildlife. By demonstrating exemplar approaches to green infrastructure in development, the Building with Nature National Award is helping to show how industry can positively respond to the climate, ecological, and public health emergencies, by putting landscape at the heart of decision making.
It is free to enter and is open to recipients of a Building with Nature Accreditation for their residential, commercial, or community infrastructure scheme. This year the judges decided to shortlist three projects for the Building with Nature Award:
Malls Mire Park, Glasgow
This 16-hectare, urban retrofit scheme in the City of Glasgow is an exemplar for how green infrastructure can be improved for the benefit of the local community and wildlife using the Building with Nature approach. North Toryglen is an area experiencing multiple deprivation and health inequalities, and this case study clearly demonstrates how the BwN Assessment process can be used in this context, improving the scheme’s design for high quality multifunctional green infrastructure on the site, particularly in relation to water management, habitat improvements and connectivity.
Read more: Clyde Gateway ‘Malls Mire Park’ case study Nature Scot ‘Malls Mire Park’ case study
Oakfield, Swindon
The masterplan for this scheme has been developed with the ‘15-minute neighbourhood’ concept in mind, to try and provide amenities that residents would need close by, without dependency on car usage. The scheme provides 239 intergenerational homes with a mixture of tenures, for people at every stage of their life. The project team involved a Building with Nature Assessor to guide the design proposals from an early stage, to ensure high-quality green infrastructure and active travel solutions were integrated into the scheme.
Read more: The Landmark Practice ‘Oakfield’ case study
World of Water, Hampshire
A redevelopment of a former aquarium and pond supplies business to return it to a natural and interactive state. The entire site includes 1.82 hectares of land adjacent to Fishlake Meadows Nature Reserve along the River Test, which is a designated SINC site, and the River Test an SSSI. The scheme will include a new visitor centre, café and a flexible community space. Interactive features will incorporate bird hides and wetland walks throughout new wetland and meadow habitat, showcasing the importance of nature reserves to the wider community.
Read more: Hampshire Isle of Wight Wildlife Trust ‘World of Water’ case study
ep projects
The judges highlighted the quality of good industry practice on display across the entries this year and were impressed with the diversity of approaches demonstrating creativity and innovation to meet the compliance requirements for a Building with Nature Award. Although there were contrasting strengths across the entries, with small-scale and large-scale projects, residential-led and commercial projects, being directly compared, the commitment to embedding the characteristics of high-quality green infrastructure as defined by the Building with Nature Standards was evident in all entries – making the judges task difficult but rewarding!
Dr Gemma Jerome, FLI who acted as a judge again this year said:
“More than anything, what speaks to me in all of the shortlisted entries this year is a fundamental recognition that green infrastructure is critical infrastructure – nature working as a design approach, and a design palette, which is I think an intuitive approach for landscape professionals. Another theme present across all three shortlisted entries is the importance of collaboration and multi-stakeholder investment in green infrastructure.
In World of Water, the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Wildlife Trust worked directly with industry to secure a nature-led masterplan, which with nature at its heart is intrinsically low-carbon and provides new, high-quality habitat; in the case of Oakfield, Nationwide adopted a design vision that puts people and nature on a level footing, creating a range of spaces that encourage everyone to have an active, daily relationship with nature for optimal wellbeing benefits; and Malls Mire Park is the result of an impressive partnership between a team of community-based stakeholders including local organisation Urban Roots and government agency for nature and climate, NatureScot.”
We hope you can join us on 24th November 2022 – either in person or online – whether you’re a longstanding friend of Building with Nature Assessor, or new to the network, the LI Awards 2022 is set to be an informative, inspiring and idea-provoking collection of industry good practice; proving that landscape-led approaches, holistic design that focuses on quality as well as the bottom line, and projects that foreground nature-based solutions as the most sustainable and future-proof interventions to support business transition to Net Zero.
Building with Nature – and building with nature - not only create places that are good for people, acknowledging that placemaking is at the heart of the Levelling Up agenda, but also creates places that work for nature, supporting policy ambitions for all development to deliver biodiversity gains. Landscape professionals are well-placed to lead on all of the current agendas, and the projects on display at the LI Awards – both shortlisted and winners – may prove to set the bar for years to come.