The jumping off point for Urbis is the apparently inexorable growth of cities. If there ever was a Garden of Eden, it is now receding into our past. We are well past the halfway point in proportion of the world's population living in cities and we are heading for a point where nearly everyone does. (Incidentally the graphic at Urbis was a little hard to follow)

Urbis takes an anthropocentric view of the city: what is it like for us to live in cities? That may seem obvious and inescapable. Cities are human constructs, built for people to exclude and escape from most aspects of nature. Why should we look at them other than from a human perspective? This can be answered by looking inside and outside the city.

We do share city spaces with plants and animals. They come with or without an invitation. The less we notice them, the more opportunities they seem to find to fill the gaps in our planning of form and function. So we try to design areas that include some natural elements. Landscape architects have an array of plants among the palette of materials they use to shape our city space. Do they ever plan with or for animals?

The landscape around Urbis makes intriguing use of natural elements: stone, earthforms, trees and water. At first it seems to be a modernist treatment with its bold use of simple shapes to create an abstract impression (of a Pennine landscape perhaps). But a modernist would have insisted that form follows function and what is the function of this landscape?

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