The project will create 100 metres of hedge for the important tasks of providing food and shelter for wildlife, addressing carbon emissions, air quality and biodiversity loss.
Date: 15 October 2020
The Department of Architecture at London Met is set to plant 420 trees at Mudchute City Farm, using saplings acquired as part of the Woodland Trust’s Free Trees for Schools and Communities scheme.
All students from the School of Art, Architecture and Design are welcome to join the socially distanced planting event, which will take place on 25 November 2020, with first-year Architecture students particularly encouraged. As Siân Moxon, senior lecturer in Architecture, says, “We want every first-year student to plant a tree at the start of their studies, as part of acknowledging and taking responsibility for their own ecological footprint, before learning to influence others’ lifestyles through sustainable design of buildings.”
The project will create 100 metres of hedge with a mixture of tree species including hawthorn, rowan, blackthorn, silver birch, hazel and common oak, for the important tasks of providing food and shelter for wildlife, addressing carbon emissions, air quality and biodiversity loss.
This comes as part of the University’s commitment to addressing the environmental challenges facing the capital city through the London Met Lab, as well as the work of the School to ‘rewild’ urban areas through its Cities research group.
The School has a proud history of delivering proactive environmental initiatives, such as the announcement of Architecture Education Declares (AED) in 2019, which its students helped to launch. The AED manifesto builds environmentalism into the School’s education practice, stating that solutions to the ecological crisis we face are rooted in good architecture and design.
It introduces the idea of what it means to be a responsible designer early, by asking students to produce a personal ecological diary at the beginning of their studies. Between foundation and fifth year, and on into postgraduate research, students are encouraged to use various tools to measure environmental impact, both in precedents and their own designs, with increasing depth and independence. Thus, they are encouraged to develop an ideological position in relation to the impact of social, political and technological conditions on environmental design.
The tree-planting event builds on the University’s ongoing relationship with Mudchute City Farm, where the School holds an annual technology workshop for its Architecture students.
