Greening Cities: John Goldwyn of Wildfifteen Discusses Greening Cities

And in Singapore, I learned so much about how ambition for greening cities can become a reality, reality relatively easily. I think the projects that they've done there are so exemplary, so incredible, so inspirational. I think it's very difficult not to fall in love with Singapore as a city. You can say whatever you like about its governance or all sorts of things like that, but really as an urban experiment, it is the best place on the planet.

Welcome to Rethink What Matters, the podcast dedicated to aligning the economy and ecology with everyone for improved business performance, stronger families, and a greener, cooler planet. And today I'm joined by John Goldwyn, landscape architect and master planner and founder of Wild15. And we're going to be discussing greening cities. Welcome, John.

Thank you very much, Paul. It's very nice to be here.

Brilliant. So yeah, it's great to— it's great to be able to catch up with you and it's great to be able to speak with you on this podcast because we've had some The podcasts that we've done so far have been biophilic cities, and we're going to be doing biophilic design, green roofs, living walls, rain gardens, urban biodiversity, integrated solar green roofs, biomimicry— actually, that's coming— permaculture, as well as indoor vertical farming and even sustainable development. I'm thinking that on this podcast we'll be able to bring a lot of subjects together. Perhaps if we could start off though with Wild15, if you could tell us a little bit about that first.

Sure. Yeah, having worked in commercial practice for the majority of my career, I spent about the last 20 years before I set my company up working for a large international American architecture and design firm. And I really decided to go alone to try and focus on what I really care about and to try and really hone in on what's important to me as a landscape architect and planner and as a professional, that being a far greater drive towards working very closely with nature on my projects and trying to bring ecological thinking and landscape thinking into every single project that I do, be it large or small. My experience is often— has often been with resorts. And so I'm now focusing really on eco-resorts and obviously other elements of urban planning. So very focused and very, very ecologically focused now.

It can be great to talk about your projects and some of the case studies that you have in the podcast. But just having read out that list of items, there's biophilic cities and biomimicry, for example. Is urban planning and is urban planning even the right term to be using? But is urban— has urban planning really changed a lot over the last few years or decades?

Yeah, that's an excellent question because urban planning means something different to each different person who works in the field of the built environment. And with a focus on international work, which is I guess where I've been in the lot for the last 20 or 25 years, urban planning really has evolved a lot and it has changed a lot. I think there was a moment when people felt that urban planning was a snapshot of a city or of a project and creating that snapshot as a commission. Whereas now, I think there's more of an understanding that it's a manipulation of systems and understanding how landscape and the built environment are woven together. And I think that's reflected in both policy, but also the kind of projects that private companies are creating as well.

Okay. And is it a recognition that the cities that we live in affect our well-being as well?

Yeah, there's been this huge— I suppose, you know, to mention the C-word, if we're going to talk about COVID then I think that it really did give us a chance to reflect on what was important to us as we sat at home, particularly in this country, in the United Kingdom, in my city, in London, there was a sense of reflection. And I think that people realized how much they were affected by their environment, not citywide, but really locally. And so urban planning really started to understand the notion that your neighborhood, where you live, who you interact with, not only affects the way that the city around you works, but affects yourself, your own mental health, your own mental well-being. And obviously, you know, happy cities and all of these kinds of things are buzzwords that emerge from this kind of thinking. So yes, very tied in.

Right. And it seems also that cities are having to play a much larger role in sustainability, in urban cooling and in stormwater management. I mean, I'm new to the subject, but that seems to come up quite a bit.

Yes, I would, I would argue that all of these strands that you talk about are tied in together. So the health of the city and the mental health of the city and the biodiversity of the city and the cooling, you know, green spaces stop the urban heat island effect, which is what heats our inner cities. Increased biodiversity is good for air quality as well as the biodiversity. You know, we're an animal as well. It's not only the birds and the insects that we're helping. So there's also the notion of food in cities and how we grow urban orchards and urban farming. And so you can actually speak very much into the way that the city is functioning as an organism itself. And then all of these other strands from green roofs to green walls to biodiversity to reducing urban heat island effect to improving drainage in cities, all of these things are very, very tied in together through the lens of the landscape.

So are we really trying to turn the cities into the countryside?

No. I think that we need to learn from the best of the countryside and bring some of those incredible ideas. Because again, the countryside is also cultivated. It's not something, you know, it's not wilderness. We don't live surrounded by wilderness. Our countryside is highly managed, highly farmed, highly maintained. But I think that it's about understanding what we love about the countryside and what we love about the cities, and there being this beautiful blend between green space in cities and the countryside again being the way that it is. I mean, there's certain elements like the density of population that means that the countryside is a bit of anathema to cities, but there's certainly an interesting parallel, I think, that we're drawing as designers between the two.

I'd like to get your opinion with all your experience on Let's start off with biophilic cities or biophilic design.

Sure. I think that— I think I was only made aware of the term biophilia probably 6, 5 or 6 years ago. So it's something that's relatively new in my own vocabulary. But I think it's something that I've always felt for as long as I've been alive, that mankind has this inherent affinity with nature that actually boosts us when we feel it. I mean, I think that it's something that the soft shapes of nature, the sounds and the textures of nature are something that obviously people feel comfortable with. As we've only industrialized relatively recently in our history as a species, we have a lot of affinity with nature. And I think that that is absolutely relevant in cities. I think that you can feel it, our favorite spaces, in cities are often parks. I'm lucky enough to live in London. I'm surrounded by some of the best open spaces in the world, world-class parks, and the beautiful river that breathes life through the city as well. So I think that biophilia in cities is, as I said, it's something that's always— as long as, you know, we've seen, certainly since we've industrialized, it's been there. And it's also been used to raise the value of property. If you think about Regent's Park in London, that was laid out to to raise the value of adjacent property. There was a study by the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors that each street tree raises about £1 million worth of uplift on the surrounding property that are close to it. So you do see that the economics and the sort of biophilic factors can work very nicely together. And I don't think there's anything wrong with a city being based on solid economics and positive economics, and the sort of biophilia fits very strongly into that.

And can I ask you then about biomimicry?

Yeah, again, I mean, some of the best design has often taken its cue from nature. You think about everything from Fibonacci series that appear in nature through to the, you know, the hive of a bee, which is created from very strong hexagonal structures which have an incredible structural integrity, similar to the, you know, the core of bones, which have again this very, very structural system to them that architects and designers have used through different designs. To me, it's not something that should almost be pulled out as something specific. It's part of a bigger design story. And so I think that it's one of these buzzwords again, like biophilia. I think it's something, of course, it's very relevant. And of course, it's part of what we do. But again, I think in the same way as people tend to react well to soft shapes and gentle, voluptuous curves in landscapes and in nature, there's something there that it's almost beyond the words that we use to describe it. It just feels nice to us as people.

Has the role of the landscape architect changed over the years then, so that you'd be working a lot more closely now with the architect?

I think the role of the landscape architect has evolved enormously over the last few years, over the last couple of decades. There, I think, was a time that people understood that landscape architecture was garden design's big, big sister, or big brother, the idea that it was more public space than garden space, and that landscape architects worked with teams of built environment specialists to create the landscape elements. I think now, especially with looming climate catastrophe and all sorts of sort of doom-mongering around the future of humanity, the role of the landscape architect couldn't be more relevant than it is now because it's about two things. Firstly, mitigating and working with the world that we've now created for ourselves. So in terms of resilient landscapes and working to make sure that we can still exist in the present, but also planning towards making some inroads against the kind of damage that mankind has made against nature. Nature and against the climate. So I think the stakes are much higher. And I think that the, the, the industry, that the profession really is starting to see that. I think because I've been lucky enough to work globally, I managed to use my landscape architectural knowledge far more in urban planning and resort planning on a larger scale, often in the absence of architects or with architects working on specific building projects within the structure. So I don't think it's necessarily quite as in lockstep with architecture as you might think it was.

And on your website here, I'm very interested in your principles. I'd like to touch on those, if we may, just briefly. So don't worship at the altar of scale.

Again, thinking about your question about biophilia, I think biophilia is also connected to scale. People feel much more comfortable in spaces that relate to their own self and their own personal space. For example, canopies of trees bring down a space so that when you're sitting under a tree canopy, you feel naturally cooled and shaded by the trees and the transpiration that the plant gives you. But also you feel a comfort that you're almost being embraced, enveloped by the tree itself. And so I think that the architectural notion of, you know, standing next to a 150-story building and thinking that's a good thing for yourself is something that I don't agree with. I think that tall iconic buildings have a place, but certainly not in livable, comfortable cities that we want to relate to. So I think this notion of scale is very important to what I do and creating places where people feel comfortable and relaxed and creative or, you know, whatever they need to be. People sometimes just need a place to sit outside and just be. They don't need to, you know, necessarily do anything. And again, with, with, with small units that people live in, if you can have exterior space where people can extend their, their being outside, I think that really speaks to this question of scale.

And something which really hasn't been discussed in any of the any of the other podcasts, what comes up here under urban planning is having to think about the history of an area.

Yeah, I mean, if you think about this notion of what place is, it really is just a number of layers of history over time that create associations and memories and ideas that we share. So if you think about something very specific like the Thames and the way it flows through London, the layers of history from prehistory through Roman, through industrial years, through more recent times, the river and how it relates to the city around it has kind of changed from a vital artery that fed life into the city through to now something that really is a leisure and, you know, an activity. It's a tourism generator, but it's the same river, right? It's the same geography, it's the same geology, but just with different influence of mankind on the top of that. And I think when I'm looking at a project, it's these layers of history, some of them very recent and some of them very ancient, that when synthesized can help to, to really describe what a place needs to be.

And you referred to green roofs as the fifth facade.

So often I've worked on rocky sites, fragile, delicate sites around the Mediterranean, which tend to be very steep And you kind of imagine if you're sitting in one of these structures looking out over your, you know, your Mediterranean view, often you're looking down at the roof of the building in front of you. And so this idea of creating beautiful vegetated roofs or extensive roof gardens or rain gardens or whatever on roofs, it really does start to make you think about, you know, how we can maximize the ecological footprint or minimise the destruction through development of a project through using roofs to generate exciting landscapes.

And would your role involve thinking about the animals that get attracted, you know, by the trees and the flora and the fauna and the green roofs that you're planting and the green landscape that you're creating? Would you be thinking about is going to attract certain types of birds, for example?

Absolutely, it's absolutely essential. I think, again, so many people think that landscape architects look at green fluff around interesting buildings. And I'll give you an example. I worked on a study for a historic landscape many years ago, more than 20 years ago. And one of the most fascinating elements of this project was that there were— it was the avenues in Ham. In London, close to the River Thames. And interestingly, there were some historic lime tree avenues, and the lime trees attract a lot of aphids, and the aphids attract a lot of bats. And so these historic avenues from the sort of classical landscape that it represented had these incredible commuting lines of bats because bats like to fly along above lime trees with their mouths open, essentially eating all of these aphids. So if you plant a long line of lime trees, you create these incredible commuting lines for bats. And so something that's laid out obviously as a design statement like that can have huge ecological implications, good and bad, in that situation good, for the ways that places work.

So I'm curious now, do you return to places that you've designed and implemented, you know, a few years later just to see how they're being used? And do you watch people move around the spaces that you've designed afterwards?

Yeah, definitely. That's the biggest— I think that's the biggest pleasure about working on any project is going back there and seeing people enjoying it and often seeing things that you got right or wrong and understanding and learning. You're constantly learning. It's a profession in which you, you pick up so many ideas along the way from your own work and from other people's work. And yeah, seeing, seeing how things have worked out is always fascinating.

Can you maybe tell us about one or two of the projects that you've been involved with? So on your website here, you've got the Nafsis Golf and Wellness Resort, for example.

Sure. Yeah. This is a project in, in Corfu, and on site is an existing golf course and clubhouse. And the client, who is a family, essentially a family dynasty of hoteliers, contacted us to try and get— for us to try and help them to unlock what the next chapter of their project looks like. So the golf course at the moment, it's the only one in Corfu, and it's fine. It's okay. It's well-liked and well-played. But we worked with world-class Gulf architects and a team of other consultants to actually turn this project into essentially an eco-resort, a boutique luxury eco-resort. And currently, every year, there are huge seasonal floods, huge seasonal rains, and they wash through the site, cause damage, and create lots of problems. And the idea with the new master plan is that we capture the seasonal water, create beautiful lakes lakes and water bodies, swimming lagoons, and essentially canals that can run through the project. And we sort of celebrate this water through the dry season as well. With that in mind, we can use the water for irrigation on the golf course, we can use the water as frontage for hotel rooms to create beautiful spaces with little lodges looking out over these fantastic wetlands. We can improve biodiversity by having marginal areas with plants and obviously invertebrates and all sorts of incredible things that will happen as a result of the ecology of the water. So really, by reinterpreting the story of the land, we're able to use it as a base to build a beautiful, luxurious boutique hotel and resort. And so it's breathing new life, a new chapter into this kind of illustrious place that obviously needs a bit of a reset.

And did the client give you a real, an open brief for that then, you know, or were they quite specific in what it is that they wanted and you had to work around that?

We worked very, very closely in collaboration with the client. I don't consider myself to be a sort of egotistical designer that schools clients on what they have to do. But similarly, I can't work with ego-maniac clients that tell me exactly what I have to do. I always enjoy the collaboration and the, the discourse that goes on around the project. So they had some certain ideas and we had some certain ideas. And I think that really the project is a meeting of minds.

And the green block, Rethinking Central London High Streets. Could you tell us a little bit about that? Is that something?

Sure. Yeah. This takes me back to 2016, when we started in as a group in my, in my last company where I was previously working as we had a competition for interesting and radical innovation ideas. And one of the teams thought about a product, if you like, a sort of green construction product where the building block itself was living. So whether it be a combination of interior and exterior space. But essentially, each part of this landscape was a, was a product. But I worked with the team in the office, and we very quickly realized that the products of this ilk already exist. I'm sure you're having podcasts with people who work exclusively with green walls and green roofs and green interiors, etc., etc. So we started to almost treat it as a, as a manifesto for the city, as an ideology for the City of London, or indeed any city, whereby people can start to actually reclaim some of the land that's been taken for roads and for car parking and essentially hard spaces and turn them into something far more ecological, something far more verdant and something that lives. And so using a kit of parts of all the existing other products that exist, we came up with an ideology and some visuals which people can spot online by looking up WATG Green Block. And they can essentially see these ideas in execution, the idea being that as we have more autonomous cars in the city and more ridesharing, we need essentially less car parking in our city centres. It's controversial, but it's a fact that we are going to become less reliant on personal cars and more reliant on shared transport systems, giving us the ability to claw back some of this space. And so really, these ideas synthesize with giving kids somewhere in the center of cities green spaces to learn about nature, the places for mindfulness and relaxation and yoga in cities, places for urban farming and urban agriculture, places to reabsorb surface water. All of these ideas were then tied back into this sort of manifesto, and we used Sadiq Khan, the mayor's National Park City, making London a National Park City, as this vehicle to create all of these visuals and all of this buzz and all of this idea. And it really has permeated so much through some of my recent work as well. Now, people see these visuals and they love them and they catch on to them. They want a piece of it.

So what was the final outcome of that work?

Yeah, I mean, to be clear, it was done. It was an initiative I led because I thought it was the right thing to do. I remember one of my university lecturers always said to me, if you can't find a client for an idea, then, you know, create a great idea and then clients will, will follow you. And it really was an example of that. And we, we, we ring-fenced budget and brainstorming time for the product itself. And we used it really just as a thought leadership piece. And it's extremely powerful in marketing my understanding and my ideas for cities, and people often see it and say, we want to have some of this in our project. So it's kind of spread from being a thought leadership piece to being resident now in lots of my projects.

Can you tell us which cities inspire you the most?

Wow, that's a very good question. I would say really two places. Obviously London, where I was born and raised, never ceases to amaze me. This cellular collection of villages that we call London is brilliant, and I love to cycle through it, and I love to walk through it, and I love to follow the river. I was lucky enough to be brought up in a house that was looking at the river. So I have a connection with the river that runs through the city. So London inspires me. It's constantly changing, but not at the pace of Shanghai or Hanoi or something like that. So that's my first suggestion for that. But my second would be Singapore, where I lived. When I first graduated, there was very little work. It was quite a long time ago now in the late '90s, and there was very little work here. So I jumped on a plane and went to live in Bangkok first and then in Singapore. And in Singapore, I learned so much about how ambition for greening cities can become a reality relatively easily. I think the projects that they've done there are so exemplary, so incredible, so inspirational. I think it's very difficult not to fall in love with Singapore as a city. You can say whatever you like about its governance or all sorts of things like that. But really, as an urban experiment, it is the best place on the planet.

And what about those that inspire you least?

Well, it's got to be said, anywhere that's been designed around the automobile and hasn't really moved away from that. I have a problem with. So I do struggle a lot with a lot of North American cities. I've traveled to a lot of them. I was a board member on an American company for many, many years. And I've been to many of the iconic North American cities. And I really do struggle with the systems that are put in place when cars are in charge. Elements like parking garages straight above the street where you drive into a building and the first few stories of a building or a parking garage, that takes away everything from the public realm. And I'm not going to name any cities specifically, but there are some terrible examples of this in North America. That said, there are also some fabulous examples. I was very lucky when I was in New York many times for work to walk the High Line, which is a really great example of something that physically and quite literally lifts the citizens off the ground plane into a higher level with beautiful green spaces and views out over the Hudson and the city itself. Yeah, I'm often most in love with cities that have the medieval grain to them. So places that have a walkable street system that was laid out long before cars were on the agenda.

Are there any cities that have grown organically and have really benefited from that? I mean, I suppose London is a bit like that maybe, but I just don't know.

Yeah, I think, I think the notion of designing a city from scratch, there's plenty of really bad examples. You know, you look at the most inspiring cities and they're generally not places that have been designed from scratch. Canberra or Brasília are not the best cities of Australia or Brazil. When you have an architect that lays out big formal lines just because, I'm generally a believer that that's not the best way to go about things. Again, you look at, let's take the example of Barcelona where you have the combination of the two. You have the Eixample, which is the grid system, which is obviously architect laid out, right next to the medieval old city, which weaves through along next to the Rambla and has these kind of incredible hidden streets that disappear around corners. And when you put the two together like that, that can be pretty inspirational and pretty interesting. But yeah, most of the best places have grown organically. I mean, think about places like Istanbul, which is this incredible amalgamation of many, many years of history on two continents where Asia and Europe meet across this incredible straight of water, the Bosphorus. And I think, again, you know, the organic nature of it gives it this incredible character, this incredible cohesion that you couldn't do with a computer mouse and some bold lines with a ruler.

And do you have an opinion on Paris?

Yeah, I mean, again, Paris is very interesting in terms of what they tried to do recently with walkable communities and smaller neighborhoods to try and take some of the to try and take some of the sort of more bolder moves away from the city, which I think is very interesting. When you look at Paris next to London, Paris has these incredible nodes that connect with grand boulevards, you know, the Champs-Élysées being the most famous. And then you look at London, nothing is straight, nothing quite lines up. Everything is very ad hoc. You know, you think about the connection from Buckingham Palace down to Hyde Park Corner, and then off up you know, Constitution Hill. Nothing is in a straight line, whereas in Paris, obviously, these things are very, very deliberately laid out.

I'm just thinking about the way things are changing, the way things have changed in the last decade or so, you know, in terms of technology, in terms of materials. Is that having an impact on your work at all?

Yeah, I'm a strong believer that we have to take technology and own it and be at the center of it. So I'll use the example of of AI, of artificial intelligence. I believe that artificial intelligence puts the designer at the center of a far bigger brain. So by using AI, I'm able to layer on ideas that help me to do things far better than I could have done without the AI. So for example, if it's creating or generating a visual, I will still control the AI software, but it will do a lot of the grunt work for me. I'm getting the getting the AI to do a lot of the very repetitive work to allow me to get on with the fun stuff and the interesting stuff and the innovative stuff. And I embrace AI and automated workflows at every possible juncture. And I'm very happy to talk about that one all day, because I think that the future of humanity and the future of design within humanity lies with our understanding of this slightly difficult relationship that we have with technology. And I think if used correctly, it's going to be our savior, not our destructor.

Could you tell us a little bit about your own place, maybe a little bit where you live? I mean, do you live in a modern building? Do you live in a historic building? What sort of presses your buttons a little bit in terms of your own space?

Yeah, that's an interesting thought. I am— I live in a Victorian semi-detached house in South London that has been very, very modified. My wife is an interior designer and she used to work for a very famous London architect. So we have some interesting discussions about interior space and we, we have a very modern fit out within our Victorian house. Where I'm speaking to you from now is a small cedar-clad garden room that I built some years ago, which is my office. It's also full of plants, absolutely packed full of plants, and it has underfloor heating and large bifold doors that open out onto my garden. It's my own little piece of modern paradise. It has a sedum roof and is beautifully insulated, so the heating is actually never on. The glass faces north, so I don't get any solar gain. So it's— I live in a sort of old meets new combination in South London, in Peckham.

And if we can leave the listener with a thought about what they could do with their own space in terms of perhaps, you know, ideas for improving that space for their own well-being, or in terms of being more sustainable, do you have any sort of takeaways we could leave people with?

Yeah, have you got like an hour for that? No, I think interior plants are a huge benefit to to physical and mental health. And the ones behind me don't need any particular daylight. So choose the right plant for your interior space would be one thing. And if you have even the smallest window box or garden, plant some flowers as a place that pollinators, butterflies and bees, can touch down and drink some nectar. Flowers are also beautiful to look at and they can smell great as well. And if everyone planted just a few flowers in their back garden, then we wouldn't be facing this same collapse of habitat that we are. So we really do have the ability as a populace, regardless of what our governments and big business are doing, at the personal level, we can plant flowering plants and improve the situation for pollinators and invertebrates.

John, thanks very much for your time on this podcast in helping us to better understand what urban planning is today. Pleasure. And how it can help to bring together so many different important ideas that relate to our well-being and sustainability and looking after the planet. So thanks very much, John, really appreciate it.

Absolute pleasure. Thank you very much, Paul.