A Positive Contribution: Building With Nature – Everyday

Core Values

As a tool to set out a comprehensive review of a scheme, and to help in guiding design work, it is well placed to provide a holistic overview of both the scheme’s overall benefits and the quality of integrated design. Because that’s what’s so important – to marry together well-designed places with well supported space for wildlife and ecosystem services, including health benefits and environmental considerations.

The scheme’s core standards therefore include requirements for integrated design and contextual design, as well as long term management and maintenance. All these things are what we strive to include in each project – irrespective of whether it is being formally assessed – to make the project the best it can be.

Because that’s what’s so important – to marry together well-designed places with well supported space for wildlife and ecosystem services, including health benefits and environmental considerations.

Wellbeing

The first of the three thematic sets of Building With Nature standards is Wellbeing: this could be characterised as creating communities and healthy spaces – partly though well fashioned green infrastructure and access to the outdoors. A good example of this in our work would be Bangour Village Hospital. This is a former NHS site being developed for housing, embedded in woodlands, where there are great opportunities to improve access to the landscape for recreation and healthy living, including a network of cycle and pedestrian paths through a regenerated woodland context – and all wrapped together with a public art strategy to interpret the site’s rich ecological and social history.

A different challenge was encountered with our work on the masterplan for Western General Hospital in Edinburgh – creating green infrastructure and active travel networks on and through an intensively developed urban site with low ecological value, but a wealth of potential. Whilst the implementation of the masterplan is projected over many years, the masterplan process gives a great opportunity to embed a number of guiding principles into the core values and requirements of future development.

Water

The second theme is water – Liz has an affinity to this theme since a module back in university, taught by Dr Mike Wells, introduced her to SUDS. Integrating green infrastructure, placemaking and the four pillars of good SUDS design makes a space work harder in the same footprint – a great use of space – also it’s greener, more biodiverse, mitigates downstream flooding and provides something beautiful to look at! Win-wins all round.

In our project work, we seek to integrate water management into spaces in a number of ways, all generated by site and community requirements. Whether it’s de-culverting the burn running through Papdale Park in Kirkwall to provide stormwater management, increased biodiversity and an attractive park feature; or planning for bioretention planters in a car park to clean and manage run off; or a retrofit scheme for a 1980’s retail park to mitigate flooding and add biodiversity.

Wildlife

The last theme is wildlife, which may seem obvious, but the enaction can be a complex and nuanced art, reaching well beyond bird boxes and wildflower meadows (though we employ those tools to!). Connecting with local habitat networks, use of appropriate species and design interventions, ensuring the longevity of the scheme, developing and establishing new features…these elements are in fact echoed in the Biodiversity Net Gain calculation matrix, though the matrix puts numbers on gains, and requires long term maintenance strategies. It doesn’t measure the success of the integration with design work, with wellbeing, community creation or healthy spaces – like Building With Nature does.

Over the past few years, we have as a practice received an increasing number of enquiries for BNG, natural capital and SUDs to be included in our project appointments, over and above what is currently required by NPF4 (Scotland). We have taken the opportunity in these cases to look at a design approach which uses the BWN framework to create integrated design solutions to benefit our clients, site users and nature all together and believe that in so doing we fulfil not only our obligations as designers – but also those core values we hold as a practice.