A
News from Nowhere
Name
Sophia Marie Brummendorf
Education degree
Kandidat
Fagfelt
Architecture
Institute
Architecture, Urbanism and Landscape
Program
Urbanism and Societal Change
Year
2025
News from Nowhere: Unearthing lost landscapes in London's Green Belt
Rather than a pure figure of green countryside, the Green Belt is a complex space of extraction, exclusion and neglect. This project rejects the idea that the Green Belt can be ‘saved’ or reverted to a former or future more natural state. Instead, it embraces the possibilities and contradictions it holds as a third landscape - the remnants existing between pristine nature and the anthropogenic landscapes of the urbanised world. Made up of extractive scars, sprawling industries, tangled mobility networks and fragmented natural and public spaces - there is still opportunity for a reimagination of this territory. Using the River Colne as a site, the landscape is situated between the material and pictoral, within which the river zone is reconfigured as common territory. Through a reading of the landscape, the project incrementally connects, makes accessible and frames punctual moments along the river, in lieu of acting as a masterplan, in which the nuances and specificity of sites can be lost. Here, the entanglement of a plurality of spaces and actors is unfolded through negotiation, co-existence and parasitic grafting. By choreographing experiences of wonder, surprise and contradiction, the story of this complex landscape is retold. Not as a memorialization of relics frozen in time, but instead as an anthropocentric ruin landscape which marks its past,- whilst also transitioning from a space of extraction, exclusion and neglect, into a space of seeding, inclusion and care. This project takes you on a journey through a riverscape in transition.
The Green Belt - An institutional and territorial boundary
Green Belts in the UK are post-war institutional and territorial boundaries introduced to act as buffer zones around rapidly growing cities. They are large swathes of land with London’s green belt making up 4854km2 of land. From inception the green belt has been associated with the idyllic countryside, an image which is still prevalent in discourse today, with London’s mayor Sadiq Khan describing it as an 'important habitat for wildlife and providing space for recreation and relaxation for Londoners' and is therefore an institution he has vowed to protect.
As an idea the green belt has evolved, initially imagined as a public and connective park like landscape, the post-war Patrick Abercrombie plan introduced other functions into the green belt term - establishing it as a multifunctional zone. Whilst green belt land has increased – this openness has facilitated an unregulated sprawl of industrial and infrastructural spaces – in which public spaces can hardly identified within the landscape.
The Green Belt today
The Green Belt and London's Housing Crisis
Today, the green belt is at the center of public debate, as the Labour party has promised to deliver 1.5 million homes within the next 5 years – a task they hope to achieve by building on green belt land which they have named ‘grey-belt,’ as a means to devalue its alternative natural or public potentials. Keir Starmer has stated that at this time ‘housing must take priority over nature.’ Indeed the impacts of the current housing crisis are severe - in a climate where councils are spending £4 million pounds a day on temporary accommodation, London specifically needs to build 88,000 homes a year at an annual cost of £2.2 bn pounds. However, whilst this needs to be urgently addressed the necessity of building on the green belt is still in question. London currently has 3,500 ha of brownfield sites – enough to build 400,000 new homes. Should that not indicate that measures of infill, densification, renovation and transformation should be implemented before green belt protected land is released?
Given that the Green Belt has been significantly altered by its own industrialization, it is difficult to imagine an alternative identity of this space. One which does not exist only in service of the city - but rather has a spatial potential in itself.
Spatial organisation of the Green Belt today.
Can alternate cartographies reveal latent potentials of this space?
The forgotten layers
How can existing spatial hierarchies within the Green Belt be subverted so it can once again be considered a public asset as it was originally intended?
This project follows the notion that:
An alternative logic for future green belt planning
Site of Investigation: River Colne
A littered landscape
A contaminated landscape of extraction, exclusion and neglect.
How can the riverscape be reclaimed?
Colne River Common Land Network
Colne River Common Land Network
A journey along the Colne River Way
The Royal Danish Academy supports the Sustainable Development Goals
Since 2017 the Royal Danish Academy has worked with the Sustainable Development Goals. This is reflected in our research, our teaching and in our students’ projects. This project relates to the following UN goal(-s)
