Design Objective 1

Create a sustainable, stimulating and meaningful network of natural environments through Biophilic design.

 

Why

Midsummer Boulevard East despite being a car dominated environment full of carparking is quite a green environment, unfortunately much of this greenery is superficial, purely decorative and very similar, the London Plane tree is a good example, being used for ornamentation tolerant of pollution and everywhere.

 

Designing Milton Keynes to have a more stimulating, diverse and robust network of green-spaces and greenery will not only create numerous  interesting and pleasant open spaces for people to walk around in and stay but will also help enhance sensory richness enormously with bird song, smells of flowers and trees and so on.

 

Relating to biophilia there is also the innumerable opportunities to allow people to physically interact with nature, to touch it, to observe dozens of new native species and to learn about them, giving us the genuine interaction with nature that humans need on a daily basis.

 

How

DA 1.0: As part of creating comfortable  microclimates throughout the site, and offering more enclosure for wider parts of the street, a considerable number of trees of varying species native to the UK have been planted on site, they also serve as habitats to encourage native species to live in the area.

 

DA 1.1: Green walls and rooftops have been spread around the site, to further increase the amount of natural form present in the area, the rooftops also serve to makeup for the lack of private garden space for residents, with green rooftop gardens on various rooftops throughout the site. These are a mix of communal gardens, and private gardens.

 

DA 1.2: To increase  a users interaction with nature, and to allow greater food resilience, various opportunities for urban agriculture have been created throughout the site, many species of trees and planting for example are edible when in season, a community garden/allotment has been added into the site for local residents to grow local produce and function as a semi-public park for visitors, similar to Allmende-Kontor in Berlin.

 

DA 1.3: The central tree-lined boulevard that runs along Midsummer Boulevard East has been retrofitted considerably, now instead of a line of trees, it has been turned into a linear park with a footpath meandering through it to disrupt sightlines from being to long, functioning in a similar way to the Promenade plantee in Paris or the High Line in New York.

A much more diverse range of trees, bushes, shrubs, and general small planting ( which forms an undergrowth, instead of bare dirt)  have been added to the site for a variety of reasons, including resilience from disease (currently the majority of trees are London Plane, a tree infection could severely harm them all), to enhance sensory experience, as it would create a far greater amount of visual variety in colour, heights and smells than before and finally biodiversity, it would encourage a more diverse range of species of various wildlife for the variety of new tree species

 

Plentiful places to sit have been provided with the ledges separating the planting and footpath wide enough to sit on, meaning the user can be right next to and touch nature rather than sitting on a fixed bench viewing from a distance.