Urban Green Spaces

Project Overview

Urban Green Spaces is a long-running collaboration with the Community Initiative to convert underused hard surfacing into planted, permeable public space. Twenty-three sites are complete and the programme runs to 2027.

The brief was framed around stormwater and heat rather than amenity, which is what unlocked the drainage budget — but every site was designed as somewhere people would want to sit, because a space nobody uses is not maintained.

Design Principles

Each site removes impermeable surface, plants at least sixty per cent native species, and provides shade over the seating it adds. Those three requirements settled most of the design arguments before they started.

Stormwater performance

Instrumented sites are retaining between 40 and 70 per cent of a typical storm on site, with the variation explained almost entirely by soil depth. That finding has changed the specification for every subsequent phase.

Heat

Surface temperature at the completed sites runs 8 to 12 degrees below the adjacent street on a summer afternoon. The effect is measurable at the pavement edge and negligible more than about fifteen metres away, which argues for many small sites rather than a few large ones.

Maintenance

Every site has a named local steward group and a five-year maintenance budget agreed before construction begins. The two sites that were built without one are the two that have needed replanting.