Key to the work of Green9 is the belief that sustainable solutions only result through a holistic approach to design, therefore even the smallest projects are seen as an opportunity to explore macro philosophy at a micro scale.
No project is too big or too small.
From garden cities to gardens, we see the total environment as the project, where landscape and architectural disciplines merge through necessity to ensure a holistic approach to the design challenge, to ensure that a truly sustainable solution is achieved, maximizing the social, economic, and environmental benefits for the maximum number of people for the maximum period of time for the minimum cost.
Green9 bring the same philosophy to each project namely to look at the wider context, questioning the complex network of connections and inter-relationships, site boundaries, ownership, the “sphere of the influence”, potential research opportunities or funding streams, such that a collective vision is achieved.
Green9 work from an important understanding, namely that human species can and must coexist with the natural world. The fact that human habitats are by desire and necessity, more likely to be urban, does not mean that the natural world exists only in the countryside, wilderness and rural areas. On the contrary it is critical to our survival that we see cities as public gardens, forests, woodland, and farmland. We must farm our cities, literally growing our food locally, conserve our fresh water supplies and exploit all opportunities for renewable energy sources. Empowering local communities to engage, participate, plan, manage and maintain their local environment is critical to making change possible on a global scale. Teaching others to do the same is also a critical necessity if a wave of enlightened architecture, an agrarian revolution, is to flourish and be sustained.
Celebrating the individual within the collective
Green9 believe that the global depletion of natural resources (as we head towards a projected world population of 9 Billion people by 2050) requires a complete change in lifestyle habits and practices across the globe.
Fundamental to this is the need for urgent action at all levels of society, cutting across cultural, climatic, political, economic, religious or physical boundaries.
Our basic resources of survival, Food, Water and Energy must be local, renewable, planned holistically and connected to communities empowered to take control of their local situation.
Within this simple ideal we believe there is great scope for individual expression and recognition of individual creativity, craft and endeavor.
Green9 projects consider these issues in two different scenarios
1 Internal urban farming (retrofit or new build) (hydroponics / aquaponics) community operated, linked to educational agendas of health and wellbeing, air purity, food poverty, obesity, zero waste, zero carbon, cradle to cradle philosophy.
2 External land based vertical farms or water based floating urban farms, community operated, linked (where appropriate) to eco tourism, educational agendas of health and wellbeing, food poverty, obesity, zero waste, zero carbon, cradle to cradle philosophy.