Many world cities are now re-weaving their built fabric with intense greenery as part of wider urban agendas alongside transformations in our mobility technologies. Perhaps most prominent in the city strategies of Barcelona’s ‘Superblocks’ and Paris's ’15-minute City’, removing cars and other motor vehicles from streets wherever possible provides space not just for conviviality, commerce, culture and community but also for the reintroduction of a baseload of biodiversity. The courtyard blocks of cities like these or the narrower alleys and side-streets of Amsterdam and Tokyo lend themselves to this form of retrofit. Yet these moves are replicable, indicating how excising the problem also creates the opportunity to begin to actively repair the environment.

British cities tend to have rows of streets rather than grids of courtyard blocks, so the emphasis here must be on the street itself, and in transforming that into gardens or parks.

Learning from Paris's '15-minute city' strategy, we might shift emphasis to the "one-minute city", the city immediately outside the front door. This is also a space for 'park' to occur, threading the condition of biodiversity and healthy social environments more thoroughly through our urban spaces. Michael Sorkin wonders, in his written meanderings across Manhattan rooftops, whether we can "imagine that the city enacted legislation requiring that the equivalent of 100 per cent of the surface area of New York were to be green … If such aerial parkland were linked by bridges or by more continuous building form, an entirely new kind of public space would be created."

The mass littering in Britain's parks, albeit overplayed by the media no doubt, indicates the issue with making the care of parks 'somebody else's problem'. Parks have often had this sensibility; the comics of my childhood often featured the angry 'Parkie' character, a form of municipal stormtrooper figure with a sharpened stick for snaring litter–or children. That kind of park had a sister in ‘The Rec’ in 1970s/80s Britain, short for ‘recreational grounds’. These were often liminal spaces in the city, where edgy, often dangerous things happened. Such spaces are actually crucial in a culturally-healthy city, yet due to the separated park-like condition (‘over there’) they were spaces to awkwardly control and contest, rather than embody any more complex model of shared ownership.

Carefully avoiding an outcome of extending unpaid labour even further, the true value of encountering and nurturing biodiversity could be best achieved, and broadly shared, by ensuring that the street itself – its residents and primary users – is maintaining much of its green and blue spaces. This means not only seeing the city and the park differently – understanding that vacant lots, parking spaces, back-alleys and wastelands can effectively be park – but also shifting models of ownership and governance. Often, the insertion of greenery into the street, by people directly, is seen as illegal or contested. It’s a good contest to watch and learn from. The Dutch ‘de stoep’ model – concerning the first few seconds of this one-minute city, in the form of the stoop directly outside the front door – tends to afford a rich plantation in only a few square centimetres.

In Japanese cities the tiny pockets of space in-between front door and street witness hugely inventive ‘parks’ at the scale of 50 centimetres. (As there is no on-street parking in Japan, this buffer is delightfully human, or green, despite its size.) Those small trees and plants feel like simple offerings to the street itself, and the community it implies, rather than private possessions and spaces trapped behind hedges or white picket fences or behind municipal gates. How might we encourage this further, enabling greater invention and care, and in places with patchier social fabric to that of Japan?