Renewed prospects for green infrastructure planning in the UK 1

In the early 1970s two significant books were published arguing for a strategic, indeed holistic, approach to landscape planning, one on either side of the Atlantic: in the USA, Ian McHarg’s seminal Design with Nature (1971) and in the UK, Brian Hackett’s lesser known Landscape Planning: Introduction to Theory and Practice (Hackett, 1971). Together they seemed to herald a new era of strategic landscape planning, but 30 years later, at the start of the new millennium, their central message seemed to have been largely ignored in British planning practice, with the notable exception of pioneering work in Warrington and Milton Keynes New Town developments. However, after lying dormant for so long, the essential elements of McHarg’s and Hackett’s work have emerged in the recent widespread advocacy of green infrastructure planning at regional and local levels in the UK (for example, South West Regional Assembly, 2006; www. greeninfrastructurenw.co.uk; The Landscape Partnership, 2005), elsewhere in Europe (for example, European Co-operation in the Field of Scientific and Technical Research, 2005; Sandström, 2002)—and more generally in international literature. The literature explicitly dealing with green infrastructure planning—as opposed to green infrastructure per se—is not extensive even though there has been a resurgence over the past five years or so of articles on the subject in the academic press internationally and in policyoriented documentation in the UK. It remains to be seen, however, whether green infrastructure planning will be just a fleeting fashion or whether the exciting opportunity it presents will be grasped in practice and then sustained. A pragmatic approach is taken here to defining green infrastructure, drawing on two sources, one practice-based in the UK and the other from an academic publication in the USA. The first is a definition used by both the East Midlands Green Infrastructure Scoping Study (TEP, IBIS, 2005) and the Green Infrastructure Guide for Milton Keynes and the South Midlands (Environment Agency et al., 2005):