DESIGN STATEMENT

Based on my previous work related to Greenhouse Gases and Greenhouse Effect in my Portfolio 3, I would like to have a further exploring on the landscape solutions for the climate problems in this semester.

 

In a metropolis like Glasgow, overgrowth of urbanization and population immigration lead to a fast development at transportation, business and residential levels, thus producing large emissions of greenhouse gases and promoting the greenhouse effect. This directly and significantly influences the human’s current living environment, for example, flooding and rising water level. And moreover, large emissions of waste gases produced by the vehicles can also contribute to some physical diseases like lung cancer and pneumonia. City’s overgrowth not only accelerate the process of greenhouse effect, but also increase the risk of mental issues, the unbalance between limited job positions and high population leads to social issues like rising unemployment, homophobia and alcoholism. 

 

Therefore, as landscape architects, we should create some new green spaces in urban to provide some public places for people’s daily exercises, engagement, and transportation, to solve the problems both of environmental and social issues. In order to solve the problems, I would like to focus on two points, the consequence and the initial reason. 

 

For the consequence, flooding especially for Glasgow City, I prefer to change the riverside landscape to create a changing landform to increase the water capacity, for example, wetland and retention pool, and also, this proposal can offer an improvement on the biodiversity aspect, for example, providing habitat for waterbirds. 

 

For the reason, the greenhouse gases, I would like to use the plants to absorb the gases like carbon dioxide through the photosynthesis, and redesign the motorway to reduce the car number on the roads, to cut down the emission of greenhouse gases. Therefore, rely on the existing road system, we can build a city scale green network. Furthermore, with the continue reducing of the car number, the parking lots and motorway will be abandoned, so we can transfer them to the designed landscape.

 

The transforming will be operated in the time order. Firstly, the riverside vacant spaces will be transformed to defend the flooding disaster. Secondly, the carparks will be redesigned to absorb the greenhouse gases. Finally, because of the extinction of cars, the motorway will be totally transferred to a city-scale landscape network.