Some (strange, wonderful) news; I’m going to be on BBC Gardeners’ World on BBC2 this Friday (26th July) at 8pm.
Last year, I wrote a blog post on Rewilding a New Garden, which someone on their research team read.
They got in touch, and suggested that it would make for a good viewer’s video. I put something together for them, and (to cut a long story short) I received an email yesterday saying it would be shown on this week’s edition.
UPDATE: Here’s the clip as it went out, and introduced by Monty Don(!!):
I talked about the rewilding and garden efforts as part of the Product of Design talk at UX London last month (video below), though the invitation to make the film was a little bit before the wildlife group we’ve set up on the estate really got going. Maybe there’s a sequel there we can do together as a community group – let’s see what happens.
As I refer to in the talk, starting with our own garden was definitely the gateway into thinking more systemically not just about gardens, estates and nature, but generally in all of our work as strategic design practice.
The Zenko Systems model, which I quickly mapped out in the presentation, helps you to think broadly and deeply about how intrinsically connected everything is, but with a sense of focus towards the lower part of the model to see how the things immediately in front of you connect to larger forces.
All of this feels like a natural conversation for The STEPS Collective of course, our group focussed on introducing people from a wide variety of backgrounds into developing understanding of what a regenerative practice could look like for themselves.
We have set up an online get together to discuss these sorts of things – and yes, we’ve called it Garden Question Time – which will be Friday 2nd August at 3pm.
Sign up here if you’re interested.
We’ll look to bring together some other perspectives on this kind of bottom-up activity, as well as looking at larger scale consultations and efforts that are working top down.
What I’d love to do at some point in the future is use this style of participative work to inform and direct how new build estates like this one are built – especially with a new government in place with some serious housebuilding and environmental ambitions. If you know of anyone we should speak to on doing that, do get in touch.
Finally, I’m grateful to all at the Ecological Citizens project, within which I’ve become fractionally entangled, for the constant inspiration and ideas in working on these topics and themes.
You must be logged in to post a comment.