Make has added its name to an open letter to the Minister for Housing and Planning, urging the Government to explicitly recognise living walls and vertical greening as qualifying green infrastructure in UK national planning policy.
The letter, spearheaded by living wall specialists Viritopia and signed by Make’s Stuart Fraser, has been signed by a coalition of architects, green infrastructure providers, academics and landscape professionals. Together, the signatories have delivered hundreds of projects across the UK and internationally that use building facades to clean the air, cool urban spaces, support biodiversity and improve quality of life for surrounding communities.
The letter welcomes the Government’s ambition to reform the planning system and the revised National Planning Policy Framework but identifies a critical gap: living walls and vertical greening systems are not currently recognised as qualifying green infrastructure.
Recognition would give local planning authorities a consistent basis for considering vertical greening, unlock building facades as productive green space, and close the coherence gap between the Government’s environmental ambitions and the tools available to planners and developers to deliver them.
Read the letter in full and find out more here.
Make and Viritopia have most recently worked together on Eden (pictured), a 12-storey office building in Salford that features a 3,300m2 living wall.
