URBAN OASIS: 

Negotiating the built environment to restore Scotland’s fragile landscape 

 

“To keep an ecosystem in a state of arrested development, to preserve it as if it were a jar of pickles, is to protect something that bears little relationship to the natural world” (Monbiot, G. 2013).

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The research revealed that the area of designated landscape in Scotland is on the rise, as is the case throughout Europe (TWB, 2016). Furthermore, this trend is predicted to continue over the coming decades as greater emphasis is placed on the fortification of biodiversity (Moilanen et al. 2014). However, the governments method of safeguarding our natural heritage has provoked concern. Preservationists efforts to ‘conserve’ and ‘maintain’ our landscapes from human influence has resulted in the counterproductive “pickling” of many natural habitats (Monbiot, G. 2013). Today’s landscape is the product of historical influences, and it is in its nature to evolve not remain static.

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The Outer Hebrides and the town of Paisley have been selected to act as platforms for investigation. The Western Isles for the reason that over 84% of the archipelagos landmass safeguarded by legislative frameworks (SNH, 2016). Likewise, Paisley has been selected as it is home to the second highest concentration of listed buildings in Scotland (I, Jack. 2015). By comparing policies developed for protecting the built and natural environment and by investigating both the past and present conditions of Scotland’s landscape this thesis aims to reassess our relationship with nature. It regards the landscapes fragility as an opportunity to develop alternative design strategies. 

 

Therefore, this thesis envisions an alternative scenario to the present-day standoff. Contesting traditional methods of landscape conservation this project explores the role of the built environment in protecting the fragile landscape. Negotiating the boundary of human and natural systems it looks towards an architecture that has the potential to minimise the limitations inflicted on our surrounding natural environment. Typologies that have the capacity to remove the boundaries enforced on nature as a result of placing restrictions back on the built environment.

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The primary objective is to restore and re-establish the fragmented and vulnerable natural networks as well as protect and enhance biodiversity. The applied strategies include utilising the existing railway infrastructure that scars Scotland’s countryside to reinstate and distribute natural habitats across the country. The proposal develops an archipelago of green areas opposed to the current strategy that manages protected landscapes in isolation as islands. This is achieved through the integration of woodland, grassland, wetland, scrubland, heaths and moore land on the redundant spaces that border the railway infrastructure.

 

Subsequently, in the context of the town of Paisley, this thesis challenges the low density residential typology - the largest consumer of Scotland’s natural landscape. It proposes an elevated architecture that negotiates the land. This is achieved by removing the human notion, the property boundary and the barriers that manifest as a result. 

 

In contrast to current approaches in landscape conservation the complexity of an elevated architecture has the potential to evolve into diversity in its surrounding environment. An elevated architecture is not the sole solution. However, the concept applied appropriately, might be one of a number of measures in reducing the constraints inflicted on the fragile landscape.

 

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