Developments and Public Realm
An EcoShield is engineered planting that absorbs the pressure wave from a bomb blast, so less of it reaches the people on the other side. In a square it stands among the people using the space, splitting a crowd into smaller groups, and it is drawn into the landscape package like any other planting.
What an EcoShield does in a public space
A counter-terrorism requirement usually arrives late: from a designing-out-crime officer or a local authority condition, once the masterplan is settled, and against the public realm budget rather than a security one.
An EcoShield answers it as landscape. It stands where people gather, takes blast energy into dense living material instead of passing it on, and reduces the overpressure reaching the people around it. It is specified, drawn and maintained as part of the planting, so the square stays open and keeps doing the job it was built for.
Where it goes in a square or on a high street
It stands inside the space people use: through a market, across a busy square, and around the seating and the spots where a crowd stops for an event. The planted sections are short and separate, with gaps on every line people walk, so a crowd is broken into smaller groups and nothing is enclosed. Vehicle mitigation stays at the kerb doing its own job. Levels, drainage, root zones, buried services and whatever the highway authority will adopt are inputs to the design. Because it is planting it also does what planting does on a street: shade and cooling at ground level, and habitat.
Protection beyond the kerb, where people gather
Your bollards at the kerb stop a vehicle entering the square, and the square stays open to everyone who walks in. The people gathered at the market stalls, around the seating and at events are inside that line, in open ground. An EcoShield gives the busiest parts of the square physical protection of their own.
It is a planted barrier with an engineered structure inside, designed for the threat of a bomb carried in by a person. It absorbs blast energy, so less of the pressure wave reaches the people behind it. It is designed alongside the rest of the landscaping, so the square works exactly as it does now. The same planting answers the counter-terrorism requirement on the development and adds to its greening.
Visitors see planting. The square stays somewhere people choose to meet, sit and linger, without a hint that anyone is expecting trouble.
Where it sits alongside what you have
Vehicle mitigation on the carriageway stays. Lighting, cameras and stewarding go on as they are. Conventional hardening suits the service yard and the loading bay. An EcoShield takes the open ground in the middle, where people stand and gather.
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Thirty minutes against your own site: what you are protecting, what the ground allows, who signs it off, and whether anything is forcing a decision. No deck and no obligation.