Greening Cities

The last lecture of the series Land/Escape will present the principles of transformation of greenery in cities. How to make sure the process is climate-proof, sustainable, manageable and at the same time support biodiversity and is embraced by the public? This is the topic of Ton Muller, a landscape architect who’s been the Head of Landscape Design at the Municipality of Amsterdam for 25 years. In his work he experiments with various ways of creating high-quality green urban environments. His work includes everything from strategic planning to designing urban planting. Ton will show new projects in Amsterdam, such as rain gardens, urban parks, green infrastructure schemes, new housing projects, and the transformation of streets. These projects show the important role of plants for our future cities, based upon habitat, and the essence of trees and woody plants. 

In his lecture called Across the Limits, the landscape architect Štěpán Špoula will talk about his experience with urban projects and strategies aimed at a river whose role in the city has gained more and more attention in the recent years. The projects show that understanding their situation and solution is only possible by constantly “moving across the limits” of professions, sectors, administrative boundaries, perspectives, scales, and ways of thinking… The main lead in this unknown space is the landscape itself, careful listening to natural processes and people’s lived experiences and memories of specific places.

Ton Muller is a landscape architect who oversees the planting of greenery in a wide spectrum of complex urban projects, and he also works as a teacher. His work follows the Dutch tradition of flower design and planting in public space, although he is not afraid of innovative approaches based on habitats. He works with urban landscape oriented to nature and draws on more than 25 years of experience that connect urban planners, environmentalists, and architects. His projects focus on topics such as biodiversity, urban climate, water management, health and building a community where design, realization and maintenance play a key role.

Landscape architect Štěpán Špoula is one of the authors of award-winning realizations such as Maxipes Fik Waterfront in Kadaň (2012) and Loeschner Square in Kadaň (2015). He is also the author of many landscape and urban planning projects and studies. In 2013-2021, he worked at the Prague Institute of Planning and Development (IPR) helping with conceptions and studies of public space and landscape. He was behind the first architectural competitions in the CR which were prepared as an interactive competition workshop or competition dialogue. In the long term, he’s been dealing with the development of suburban landscape and green infrastructure, and he is one of the authors of the book Města na ruby (Cities Inside Out, 2020), which is about vague terrain in cities.