Patron's Spring Lecture 2026: Nature and the Next Generation
Landscape architect Johanna Gibbons delivers the RSA Patron's Lecture on reconnecting urban children with nature through thoughtful design.
Why we picked this
Nature deprivation among children in disadvantaged urban areas is a design failure as much as a policy one. Gibbons makes the case that landscape architecture is one of the places where this actually gets fixed.
Landscape architect Johanna Gibbons delivers the RSA’s annual Patron’s Lecture, one of the institution’s most prominent public events. Her subject is the growing disconnection between urban children, particularly those in disadvantaged areas of the UK, and the natural world, and what design can do about it.
Gibbons brings a practitioner’s perspective to a problem that tends to attract broad rhetoric but little technical specificity. Her work focuses on how the built environment can be redesigned to make meaningful contact with nature available in places where it is currently scarce. The lecture will be opened by HRH The Princess Royal and chaired by designer Dinah Casson.
The event is free and takes place at RSA House, 8 John Adam Street, London.