Placemaking - a tool for climate action as a climate tool
In celebration of World Environment Day
Each year, since 1972, millions of people from across the globe unite, engaging in the effort to protect and restore the Earth. People from more than 150 countries participate in this United Nations international day, which is being hosted in the Republic of Korea for 2025, with this year's theme #BeatPlasticPollution.
World Environment Day reminds us that bold environmental action doesn’t always begin with sweeping legislation or top-down change. Sometimes, it starts at the bus stop. Or under a motorway. Or inside a disused café, growing microgreens.
The day is a call to restore our relationship with the environments we shape every day. And placemaking, at its most effective, offers a beautifully grounded way to do just that.
We take a look at five brilliant initiatives where local people, designers, and communities are using urban space to grow food, biodiversity, and belonging, all while tackling the climate crisis one square metre at a time.
1. The Edible Bus Stop, London, UK
Once just a patch of grass on a busy street, The Edible Bus Stop studio focused on transforming abandoned spaces along London's bus network into placemaking art. Now, it transforms neglected city corners into community-run edible gardens and pollinator spaces.
It’s a small gesture that grows into a system: reclaiming grey infrastructure, reintroducing green life, and inviting residents into the climate conversation, one planter at a time.
Image by Edible Bus Stop
2. Corner Corner – Indoor Urban Farm, London, UK
In an old shop unit in south-east London, this indoor urban farm grows microgreens and community at the same time. With a café, events space, and workshops, Corner Corner in Canada Water reimagines food systems in public-facing, hyper-local ways.
It’s part of a wider regeneration plan for Canada Water by British Land, but it works beautifully on its own: as a living, edible manifesto for land use, urban ecology, and neighbourhood-scale climate action.
Image by Canada Water
3. OmVed Gardens – Highgate, London, UK
Once a derelict plot of tarmac behind a church in Highgate, OmVed Gardens is now a thriving pocket of biodiversity, food growing, and ecological art. Blending wild food meadows, permaculture beds, and a glasshouse studio, it’s both a productive garden and a cultural space.
OmVed has a wide variety of programming: seasonal workshops, food talks, biodiversity research, and public exhibitions exploring our connection to land and climate. It’s a quiet, radically restorative place, tucked within the city but deeply in tune with global environmental questions.
4. St. Pauli Bunker – Hamburg, Germany
Hamburg’s St. Pauli bunker has been radically reimagined as a beacon of urban greening and sustainability. This WWII flak tower, once a bleak concrete fortress, now wears 23,000 plants across its rooftop and façades, connected by a 560 m “mountain path” offering spectacular city views.
In March 2025, the Green Bunker earned its highest honour: the MIPIM Award for Best Conversion, recognition as one of the world’s most innovative sustainable architectural transformations.
As a placemaking model, it transcends sustainable infrastructure. It’s a cultural and ecological landmark, with educational exhibits, event spaces, nightlife venues, climbing walls, and a future memorial, bringing climate adaptation and layered meaning to the city, rooted in community and history.
Image from St Pauli Bunker
5. The Bentway, Toronto, Canada
Proof that placemaking and climate action don’t need new buildings, just new imagination. The Bentway, by partnerships with the City of Toronto, reclaims the dark, dead space under Toronto’s expressway and transforms it into a lively stretch of cultural, social, and ecological infrastructure.
With art, events, skating trails, and native planting, it invites citizens to see climate adaptation not as a limitation, but a creative opportunity.
Image by The Bentway
Why this matters on World Environment Day
Each of these initiatives shares a belief: that climate action begins not only with policy, but with place. With the physical environments we pass through every day, and how we decide to use them.
On World Environment Day, it's easy to feel overwhelmed by the scale of change needed. But placemaking reminds us of the inverse: that sometimes the smallest sites, reimagined with care and collaboration, can shift how we live, grow, and repair together.
We don’t need to wait for permission to start. The work is already happening. Let’s plant more of it.
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