Water… wet moist cold rain drinking cloud large flat tap wave float strong intricate beautiful scary white black storm fish public common mirror dock canal navigate drop...

"You could write the story of [wo]man's growth in terms of his epic concerns with water." Bernard Frank.

Looking out across the water from the edge of a city one loses a sense of scale, of density, of sound and atmosphere. One is drawn to the edge and ones eye follows it to find the end of the water but as Albert Camus predicts “there is no end to the sky and the water.”

Water is the basis of life and, when clean and fresh, it sustains us and keeps us healthy. But in our urban environments water exists in other forms and for other purposes; it exists in our infrastructural elements as storm-water, sewage and reticulated water; it forms major bulk transport routes; it defines our early city forms that are inherited by our cities today; it is utilised to ‘enhance’ our new developments; and in some cases creates our public spaces and it is these spaces, designed in, around and on water that have distinct qualities – qualities of fluid public space.

Project article in development, based on the outcomes of the spring/summer landscape architectural studio with the Graduate Diploma and Master students of Landscape Architecture and Landscape and Urbanism at Kingston University, School of Architecture and Landscape.