We've forgotten, in our rush to densify, that homes need gardens

The urge to make cities more population dense has led to us building homes without gardens - or indeed without any private outdoor space. This process, driven by policy and the transience of housing markets dominated by rented property, denies people's expressed preferences - here's a survey from New Zealand:

Among the respondents, nearly one-half (49 percent) considered a back yard “essential,” while another 42 percent rated the back yard as “nice to have.” Only nine percent considered a back yard to be “not important.” Among first home buyers, there was an even greater larger 55 percent considered a back yard as “essential.”

If we consider our own lives, then we'll quickly appreciate just how important "private outdoor space" - garden, yard, large balcony, veranda - is to people. Even in places that have poor weather, this private outdoors provides a vital space. The garden is less formal than indoors with fewer rules - it's a fun space too the part of our world given over to play, to letting out hair down, to leaning back in a chair and watching the world pass us by.

So, if we're to have more dense cities (because the NIMBYs in the outer suburbs won't let us have new land for housing, even tatty and underused land) then we've to work out how we design private outdoor spaces into the development. Communal gardens are great but they come with the community's rules. The garden out back of your house doesn't have these rules any more than does your living room or your garage.

Even in our screen age (perhaps more so) the ability to get outside is vital and having a small piece of outside that it ours provides an escape from the cabin fever of sharing lives with family and friends, with a space to chill or party or cheer, with somewhere that keeps our connection to soil and place. The public park with its playgrounds and planting is brilliant but when it's lunchtime we can't just walk away from the toys and go indoors, we can't leave the make-believe bus made from packing cases there for us to return to later. Our own outdoors let's us do these things - from putting off cleaning the barbecue all the way through to cutting out toenails or picking our nose.

Now travel to out cities and towns where planning rules make denser development inevitable. Look at the brand new blocks of flats and ask whether they provide that essential outdoor space? I sit at Leeds station sometimes and look around at all the fancy flats built with a fine view of the locomotives. If they've got a balcony it's just about big enough to put out one chair (or more commonly a bike and a few boxes of stuff) - you couldn't have friends round for a sunny meal or a glass of wine, using the terrace would be a solo act.

I'm not picking on Leeds here, London's world of high rise living is still more devoid of outdoor space and all the worse for it. Everywhere you go flats - apartments if you're feeling grand - are built with at best a minimal nod to the need for private outdoors and, more usually, little or none of this space. Yet it's perfectly possible to build high an densely and have gardens - here's the most extreme example, Milan's 'bosco verticale':



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