Landscape architect Peter Veenstra on the importance of bringing nature into our cities

“Nature is a vital thing for people to have in their daily surroundings,” says landscape architect Peter Veenstra during Design Indaba earlier this year.He added that nature gives people a sense of a bigger territory and space and it is there where one can have unusual encounters.
Examples of this included recent projects in Israel where LOLA Landscape, the company he co-founded, is involved in a project to turn a dry quarry into a secret garden and an area for people in the city to relax.
Veenstra is all about turning landscapes that desparately need landscaping into useful nature-filled spaces. But sometimes his work takes him further, like finding a way to make the forest sing.
He shared his work on an installation he workedon where they helped to make 24 trees sing. Veenstra and his team have worked on big projects including the landscape design of the Adidas complex in Denmark.
It was then when he revealed his plans with Design Indaba for a Dome of Plants that will be situated in Luthuli Plaza, which is an area in front of the Cape Town Civic Centre that is now completely covered in concrete. 
Veenstra envisions the dome bringing some much-needed greenery to the CBD and could, in fact, be the start of the city’s own highline connecting the Artscape Theatre Complex to the Grand Parade.
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