Plant a hundred trees in a straight line down a boulevard and you have landscaping; plant fewer trees in a pattern that lets people gather, linger, and encounter each other beneath them and you may have something closer to restoration, even though the second intervention could involve less total greenery. What restores a degraded urban site is rarely vegetation volume by itself — it is the relations that vegetation makes newly possible: shade that invites sitting, sitting that invites conversation, conversation that rebuilds a sense of a place as shared rather than merely passed through. SensibleOpening reappears here in a different register from public space: restoration succeeds at the moment greenery stops being scenery and starts opening a relation between people, or between people and a site, that the site's degraded state had foreclosed. Measuring restorative landscapes purely by canopy cover or square metres of green space mistakes the material for the mechanism it is meant to enable.
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