Jane Findlay: When We Damage Nature We Damage Our Own Health

Did you know that….?

Your life expectancy improves, if you live within 10 or 15 minutes walk of a green space, it’s as stark as that.

If we want to continue to have a healthy lifestyle, we have to be more considerate about our environment, and how we build, how we plan, how we restore nature.

And we have to accept nature coming into our cities, and we’re going to have to make you know, we’re going to have to make some sacrifices to allow nature into our cities.

About Jane Findlay

Jane founded Fira with Sue Radley in 1997, having both previously worked together for PTP Landscape. She is the immediate past President of the Landscape Institute, having been on the Board of Trustees since 2019.

She is an experienced master planner and designer of the public realm and has completed a number of high-profile schemes across the UK and overseas. Key projects have included the International Convention Centre and Brindley Place in Birmingham, Salford Quays, and Cardiff Bay.

I think people are beginning to realize just how important our survival is and how dependent our survival is on nature. And anything we do to damage nature actually damages our own health.

She is passionate about promoting the psychological and physical benefits that quality landscape design plays in all aspects of the public realm.

Jane is a member of the Healthy Buildings Focus Group, part of the Business Council for Sustainable Development and Architects for Health.

Placemaking is at the centre ofh her work, using the public realm to define the character of a new development or to redefine the character of an existing urban area.

Jane has led the Fira team on large and complex commercial and public sector projects, creating sustainable civic spaces that are designed to promote enjoyment and a feeling of well-being in the people who use them.

We continue to build these multi storey developments, right bang in the city centre with no space around them for green.

It just saddens me that in the striving to create homes, for people we’re not thinking about how the spaces around them, the places that we’re creating for those people.

I just wonder whether we’re building the problems in the slums of the future.