Do we need artificial biotope in urban area? Landscape Design and children’s participation in a primary school for 7 years in Japan (CES)
- When?
- Thursday 10 June 2010, 13:00
- Where?
- 45B AZ 04
- Open to:
- Public, Staff, Students
- Speaker:
- Keitaro Ito, Kyushu Institute of Technology, Japan
There has been a rapid decrease in the amount of open or natural space in Japan in recent years, in particular in urban areas due to the development of housing. Preserving these areas as wildlife habitats and spaces where children can play is a very important issue nowadays.
This project to design a garden in the grounds of a primary school in Fukuoka City in the south of Japan started in 2002. This project started by creating a school garden for children to play in help restore nature to a small part of Fukuoka City in the south of Japan. The aim of this project is to create an area for children's play and ecological education that can simultaneously form part of an ecological network in an urban area. Additionally, we would like to discuss how to plan and manage the existing open spaces from a landscape planner’s point of view focusing on the methods used to plan it; the planning process as a whole and how the schoolchildren participated in this process.
Process Planning (Isozaki, 1970) was used to plan the school garden given the length of time the process was expected to take. Although we knew in which direction we wanted the project to proceed, it was difficult to predict what kind of flora and fauna would be established there in the future so we needed to choose a flexible planning method for this project. MFLP, Multi- Functional Landscape Planning (Ito et al., 2010) was used to plan the school garden for space scale planning. In other words, this is a method to think about how to manage the space for various ways. According to this method, the space is divided into a number of layers (layers of vegetation, water, playground and ecological learning), which overlap each other. The aim of this project is to create an area for children's play and ecological education that can simultaneously form part of an ecological network in an urban area. As a result of this project, 52 kinds of plants have started to grow in the garden and several kinds of birds and insects regularly visit it. In addition, research has shown that there are over 180 different ways in which the children play in the garden. Furthermore, they have learned about the existence of various ecosystems through playing there and their participation in 80 workshops related to the garden. They have also actively participated in the development of an accessible environment and have proposed their own ideas for the management of it.
A PDF of the presentation is available: