AIPH Green City Briefing: Seeding a sense of place in urban parks

Watch this webinar briefing to discover how plants and planting can create a sense of place in urban parks. The use and engagement of urban parks is intrinsically linked to how people feel when they are there.

Plants play an important role in showing local habitat, creating and changing with the seasons and providing a sense of identity to an area. Hear from world leading experts and AIPH partner World Urban Parks.

Watch on-demand

Programme

00:00 – Introduction by Francesca Boyd, AIPH Green City Consultant

02:34 – Welcome by MC Jayne Miller, Board Chair of World Urban Parks

04:44 – ‘Plants and Placemaking – the potential for plant species to drive the identity and character of urban spaces’ – Andrew Grant, Founder and Director of Grant Associates

25:10 – Presentation by Ton Muller, Head Landscape Designer at the Municipality of Amsterdam

40:25 – Q&A

55:29 – Closing

MC: Jayne Miller

Jayne Miller is Founder & CEO of Jayne Miller Consulting and Principal at PROS Consulting. Her consulting work focuses on advancing equity in parks and recreation and supporting urban park systems. Prior to shifting to consulting in 2020, Jayne served as the President & CEO of the Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy in Pittsburgh. Under Jayne’s leadership, the Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy (PPC) was the recipient of the National Recreation and Park Association’s 2020 Innovation in Social Equity Award and the Pennsylvania Recreation and Park Society’s 2020 Award of Excellence for the Restoring Pittsburgh Parks Initiative, and the Minneapolis Park & Recreation Board received the Minnesota Recreation and Park Association’s 2017 Award of Excellence for the 20-Year Neighborhood Park Plan. Currently, Jayne serves as Board Chair of World Urban Parks, CAPRA Commissioner, and is an American Academy of Park and Recreation Administration and Salzburg Global Seminar Fellow.

Andrew Grant

Andrew’s work is based on sustainable landscape architecture and ecological placemaking. Andrew led the multi-disciplinary design team for the Gardens by the Bay in Singapore. This 54 hectare public park has won multiple international design awards and featured in David Attenborough’s Planet Earth 2. He is a member of the UK’s National Infrastructure Commission Design Group, a member of the Bath World Heritage Site Advisory Board, co-founder of the Forest of Imagination project in Bath and Chair of the Bathscape Landscape Partnership. In 2023 he was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Letters by Bath Spa University in recognition of his outstanding work as a landscape architect and his passion and approach to nature, creativity and imagination.

Ton Muller

Ton Muller is head Landscape Designer at the Municipality of Amsterdam. His work revolves around public urban landscapes that are tuned to nature.

He is working as a landscape designer, green supervisor and a planting expert for a wide range of complex green urban projects. His work is rooted in a Dutch tradition of nature based green and planting design.

Working for the city of Amsterdam for over 25 years, Ton has experimented with different ways of creating green environments, from strategy to designing urban plantings to create more liveable spaces. He is pioneering new habitat based approaches to planting in public realm, and the build environment, to create resilient plant communities; he collaborates with urban planners, ecologists and architects.

His work brings together themes like biodiversity, climate-adaption, water management, community building, and maintenance.