The booklet, 'Grey to Green', downloadable here:
http://www.cabe.org.uk/publications/grey-to-green
is designed to fuel a debate about whether the current imbalance is smart, given the dangers of climate change and the opportunities to improve public health. It also reveals the urgent need for more people, with the right skills, to manage the living landscape of our towns and cities.
According to CABE, 'Grey to Green' provides fresh ideas and evidence, showing how we could design and manage places in radically different ways that would produce a far more pleasant living environment, as well as being more 'future-proof'. Besides the critique of our present situation, it highlights some inspiring 'greening' schemes from around the UK. It will be of interest to anyone involved in greening the built environment, but above all to the people taking decisions about where to commit public money at a local and a national level.
Nature by-pass: this sort of increasingly grey and featureless facade, to much of our supposedly 'green and pleasant' suburbia, runs counter to the kind of future for cities that the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment is calling for.
