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LONDON | DEEP-DIVE | LEAFINESS

Swain's Lane, Highgate, London. A lone c

We are drawn to tree-lined streets, we picnic in local parks, we jog along wooded trails. If the local topography permits...

"In today’s vast urbanized territories, the rural does not fully disappear, but is repositioned as an interstice in urban space. We should strengthen and perhaps expand these rural interstices." (Saskia Sassens).

 

On our Polymap and in the Gallery, you ​will have seen just one metric for "leafiness". But this measure is actually a composite of three different metrics that we have labelled "Green View", "Green Space" and "Park Access".

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Follow the links below to delve deeper into each of these metrics.

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Amongst the many lessons taught to us by 2020 was the critical need to protect (and strengthen) the rural interstices in our cities. ​The global pandemic we faced placed an enormous premium on outdoor space of all kinds: balconies, rooftop gardens, parks, urban orchards...anywhere that allowed us to commune with each other in an outdoor setting. In London, a vast cosmopolitan city of over 9 million people, access to leafiness suddenly became a critical issue for many households, for whom proximity to green spaces ceased to be a question of aesthetics (or "lifestyle") and became a much more pressing matter of health and well-being.

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