The potential role of greenways in landscape and urban develpoment

Based on an overview of the history of the concept of greenways in architectural design

Abstract

THE CONCEPT OF GREENWAYS
The concept of greenways first appeared during the period of the creation and first expansion of ígth century cities. It was the era in which the development of urban architecture was fundamentally determined by the garden city movement based on the notions of Ebenezer Howard, while the design- work of Frederick Law Olmsted lay the foundation of landscape architecture as a new specialisation. Motivated by Howard’s ideas, Raymond Unwin developed the concept and design principles of the ‘green beit’ using London as the example. One of the significant achievements of Olmsted’s activities was the establishment of the ‘parkway’ concept, which has gained recognition as an efficient tool for improving the quality of city environments in America. In the second half of the 20th century, a new concept was forged by merging ‘parkway’ and ‘green belt’: the notion of a ‘greenway’ was introduced by William Whyte, the American urban architect and architecture writer. This notion, which has come to gain wide-ranging recognition by the beginning of the 21st century, has varied content when used in relation to American and Asian metropolises, the environs of European cities or smaller regions undergoing urbanisation. The shared core of those increasingly complex interpretations could be characterised as follows: greenways are linear elements of green networks with a set of functions that includes a recreational and/or ecological role, and which, in the optimál case, appears within urban development as an independent design category.