The traditional approach to designing public spaces has no place in today’s reality. Parks, squares, playgrounds – developed within a linear model, much like buildings – consume enormous amounts of resources: energy for transport and construction, water, minerals, raw materials and deposits. They generate waste, plastics, and harmful substances, and later, during maintenance and upkeep, the exact same pattern continues: ongoing resource exploitation.
This is contemporary architecture and landscape architecture which, despite its “green label,” contributes to the very problems it supposedly fights against. We often like to call it “adapting cities to climate change,” though in fact it is not. What it truly represents is an anthropocentric act of environmental destruction.
Today, building a park or garden within the system we are accustomed to changes nothing, even if we brand it as “eco” or “bio.” It remains construction and degradation within a linear economy, driven by the production of consumer needs.
In reality, the true allies in the fight against climate change in cities are often not expensive, designed parks, squares or gardens, but the neglected wastelands looked down upon by people. These are precisely the spaces we destroy in order to replace them with planned, organized greenery and accompanying infrastructure.