The Royal Institute of British Architects’ report on the relationship between the design of cities and public health could hardly be more timely. April will see the reopening of east London’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park: a public space that is as large as any built in Europe in the past 150 years.

It may have represented an unprecedented public investment but the park promises to have a major impact on the living conditions of the community that lives around it – one of the poorest in the country – offering both a space for recreation and a safe means of travelling across a large area of east London by foot or bicycle.

The Olympics represented a special opportunity, but there is evidence of an increasing appetite to develop green infrastructure projects across the UK. While the National Trust’s remit has been increasingly dominated by the the maintenance of country houses over recent decades, its current administration is eager to refocus its activities around its original mission of providing working people with access to open land.

The charity is actively pursuing ways of achieving that ambition in a number of Britain’s major cities. A key inspiration has been the High Line, the mile-long park that a not-for-profit organisation created on a stretch of abandoned elevated railway in New York over the past decade.

Wildly popular with residents and tourists alike, the High Line has also demonstrated that investment in green space can have a transformative effect on the price of surrounding real estate. British cities would do well to heed that lesson: if they are savvy enough to purchase land in anticipation of an upswing in value, they might just find that an investment in a green infrastructure project can very quickly pay for itself.

> via The Telegraph