Last semester I focused on creating a landscape which addressed two issues. The first being the inequality in land ownership throughout Scotland. The second being the lack of biodiversity throughout my landscape. This led me to choose the site surrounding the Drumbrae estate, as it is an area of land which the University of Edinburgh has recently bought to plant trees on, to allow themselves to be labelled as carbon neutral.It is difficult for any company or even person to be carbon neutral, but we can all do our bit to help improve our carbon footprint, which isn’t helped if local people become more detached from their surroundings. My view on becoming carbon neutral is that local land should be used to carbon offset for the local communities. The Drumbrae estate for example should be used to carbon offset the Stirling area, as this is where it is located, rather than Edinburgh using Stirling’s land to offset themselves.
This issue goes hand in hand with the land ownership problem in Scotland. With large areas of land being bought by businesses throughout the world, this detaches the local people from the landscape. With this disconnect from the landscape has knock on effects, such as a miss education and connection about the local landscape’s potentials in food production and how things are grown.This has led me to create two main design principles. The first being to create an educational centre in my landscape that allows people to gain a better understanding of their local surroundings and what can be grown and when. The second being to improve the biodiversity and habitat creation throughout my site, in the form of regenerative agriculture specifically looking at the introduction of hedgerows and crop rotations.
This site will act as a model for estates throughout Scotland, to create and educational space that allows people to reconnect with the landscape as well as boosting the environmental productivity of the site. .
