News on Park Power

The following blog post is part of an original interview published on the NLA website and available here .

Having worked for a big firm of architects for several years, I knew that there had only really been a loose collaboration between people or bigger multi-disciplinaries and they have bigger overheads and need to cross-sell services. So I wanted to create a more structured network for people, and particularly the specialists who do things like social impact, modern methods of construction, zero carbon and so on, working alongside architects and engineers, graphic designers and others. That is one of the reasons why I've decided to create the London Collective.

The #ParkPower idea was born after a conversation with one of our members, Commonplace, the UK’s leading community engagement platform. I've been talking to the CEO, Mike Saunders, bout how to really demonstrate the power of this tool in a broader way and thinking about cities and issues rather than a particular project by a particular developer or turning to the planning process.

We thought the London Festival of Architecture would be a great platform to do that with because it often galvanises people to do things that they wouldn’t do in the normal course of events. We started thinking about the public realm and how we could find out what people love about their parks and their green spaces in order to help create a vision for what parks could be like in the future.

That actually predated, in many ways, the current crisis. But what's happened since is that there's a lot more pressure on parks but people have also recognised that they are critical pieces of infrastructure. There was some research recently that showed they make something like a £34 billion contribution to the economy in terms of wellbeing, but also save the NHS a huge amount of money – £111million, or something along those lines.

We felt like it would be good to really understand better how we can solve some of the problems that parks are facing at the moment in terms of densities of people wanting to use them in different ways, but also come up with creative ideas around planning and design.

I think London is incredible in the amount of green space we have, and that's partly why it has now become the world's first National Park City. Almost half of it is green space, and I think it's what makes London very special. It's got these green lungs and this tapestry – different types of green spaces. I think everyone loves parks – they are universally loved. But they are also underinvested-in. So hopefully that will be one of the outcomes.