‘When I show people this, they think it’s Mordor’: the architect viewing the West Midlands as a national park

Prof Kathryn Moore, the president of the International Federation of Landscape Architects, says it is an approach ‘to the way we think about development and change and transformation’. Photograph: John Robertson/The Guardian

“When I show people this, they think it’s Mordor,” says landscape architecture professor Kathryn Moore with a smile.

She is pointing at a map of the West Midlands. But instead of buildings, roads and a sprawling canal network, this map shows the natural hills and undulations that lie below the human-made architecture.