Green wedges: origins and development in Britain

Abstract

#.U KCWBBYXNZU Green Wedges: Origins and Development in Britain Introduction The origins of park system planning in the second half of the nineteenth century and its subsequent development have been widely debated within the literature. Dal Co 1 pointed out that since their inception park systems were essential instruments of planning and Dümpelmann 2 elaborated on how they soon became central to planning debates across the Western world. Out of the myriad of types of green spaces emerging then, the greenbelt has received abundant attention. But while its importance has been thoroughly examined, 3 a review of the literature shows that relatively little is known about the 'green wedge'-even though planners widely discussed the idea in the first half of the twentieth century. Aiming at contributing to fill this gap, this paper focuses on the history of the green wedge in Britain. Central to our argument is the fact that the green wedge played a fundamental role as a new element of park system proposals, since it emerged from the idea of radial parks, in the late 1900s, to gain widespread recognition as a valid alternative or complement to the greenbelt in interwar Britain. Green wedges were proposed as ducts of green space from the countryside right into the centre of a city or town. The wedge form would funnel air, sunlight and greenery inside the urban fabric regardless of urban sprawl, as the wedge could likewise expand. If the greenbelt was physically a peripheral element around a town thought, among other things, to control urban growth and to separate urban and rural areas, the green wedge aimed to provide salubrious intra-urban green space and a through connection to the countryside. The paper sets out to contextualise the precedents of the green wedge idea in relation to the history of park systems and their integration with traffic systems. Secondly, it focuses on how the concept became recognised as a distinct typology of radial green space in Britain in the first decade of the twentieth century. It emphasises the role of the 1910 RIBA Town Planning Conference in the dissemination of the concept and its immediate reception. Subsequently, the paper considers how green wedges permeated British planning debates up to the Second World War, including how individual actors-such as T. H. Mawson, H. V. Lanchester, P. Abercrombie and R. Unwin-attempted to implement them. The paper considers both texts and plans, and focuses on early twentieth-century proposals for London. Origins of the green wedges idea According to Giedion, 4 the task of bringing air, sunlight and greenery to the urban environment was a priority for the first modern planners. Overcrowding, poor housing, urban sprawl, pollution, unsanitary conditions, lack of green spaces and congestion were common aspects of industrial cities, particularly across England and Germany. 5

Green Infrastructure Development for a Sustainable Urban Environment in Chittagong city, Bangladesh

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“…Drawn from-Frey (2000),Åkerlund (2011);Caspersen & Olafsson (2010); Lemes deOliveira (2014);Xiu (2017);Thatcher (2015); DeOliveira (2019); Melbourne(2030( Thatcher, A. (2019; Detailed Area Plan…”

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“…A belt is, however, not the sole way for a strong green infrastructure vision. Green wedges, green hearts, green corridors, etc., have been implemented successfully with similar strong spatial vision, and plans for the second green belt in Beijing also consider other spatial models [63,64]. The impact on social justice in relation to housing affordability and public accessibility to green space should be considered when making policies, which can be improved in the Beijing case.…”