
Foresterhill Campus
The Foresterhill project will transform the campus and demonstrate best practice in green infrastructure, delivering a range of outcomes through co-ordinated landscape interventions.
The Foresterhill project will transform the campus and demonstrate best practice in green infrastructure, delivering a range of outcomes through co-ordinated landscape interventions.
The Foresterhill campus is the site of Aberdeen’s main hospitals alongside the medical school and medical science departments of the University of Aberdeen. The Aberdeen Royal Infirmary was built in the early twentieth century on the edge of the urban area of Aberdeen. Through the course of the 20th century the site has been developed incrementally in an uncoordinated manner, resulting in a campus that is illegible to pedestrians, dominated by vehicular circulation and infrastructure and lacking usable or accessible greenspace. The campus includes extensive areas of impermeable surfacing, with large scale parking areas that accelerate surface water runoff and contribute to significant downstream flooding in central Aberdeen. The Foresterhill project will transform the campus and demonstrate best practice in green infrastructure, delivering a range of outcomes through co-ordinated landscape interventions. The aims of the campus-wide green infrastructure strategy are:
The benefits of the campus-wide strategy and phase 1 works will be:
The Phase 1 works, that are the focus of this application, include a significant proportion of the green infrastructure interventions in the western portion of the campus.
The project originated in a review of the Foresterhill campus led by the Green Exercise Partnership and NHS Grampian. NHS Grampian subsequently commissioned the further development of a green infrastructure strategy for the campus.
The Foresterhill campus has a very wide reach and catchment area in terms of communities using the site. Early opinion surveys were undertaken on site and users of the site have been consulted on the developing proposals.
A campus-wide green infrastructure strategy has been developed that seeks to transform the Foresterhill campus. The phase 1 works form a key first step in realising this ambitious project.
The Foresterhill campus is the largest hospital complex in Europe. The delivery of a comprehensive green infrastructure strategy on a hospital campus of this scale would have a significant impact on the urban environment in this part of Aberdeen.