Perspective

We acknowledge the Traditional Owners of Country throughout Australia and recognize their continuing connection to land, waters and culture. We pay our respects to their Elders past, present and emerging.

Editor Emily Wong introduces this issue of Landscape Architecture Australia.

This year, 2020, has been a challenging one. The world we know is changing rapidly and this new landscape is bringing new and unforeseen challenges to our industry (and our world). Bushfires, a global pandemic and climate change are making their effects felt on not simply what we work on, but increasingly how we work and even the extent to which we can work. The lightning transition, over the past month, from designing in offices to designing from home, from meeting for coffee to meeting on Zoom, has tested our abilities and capacities, as designers – but also as people – to communicate, collaborate and organize, as the frameworks that once structured our daily routines have been transformed. It has also shed new light on the significance of the design of the built environment – our parks, streets, plazas, gardens, courtyards and squares – and the need for open space in our cities.

Put together in the immediate wake of the devastating December/January bushfires, yet before the escalation of COVID-19, this issue features people, projects, programs and initiatives that are tackling, in diverse ways, the task of connecting people and place. These initiatives, it seems, are even more relevant now, as we grapple with a transformed work and life. Jock Gilbert and Daniel Roe explore how the Lurujarri Dreaming Trail near Broome can deepen our understandings of Country (page 35); Alistair Kirkpatrick offers some perspectives on how we might use planting design to work with and remediate degraded urban soils (page 41); and Amalie Wright reflects on her ongoing work as a landscape architect with the Revitalising Informal Settlements and their Environments (RISE) initiative, a research and development program that is bringing vital water infrastructure to parts of South-East Asia and the Pacific (page 44). We also speak with Thai landscape architect Kotchakorn Voraakhom about how design interventions must engage with people (page 58), and Lucy Salt profiles Mary Jeavons of Jeavons Landscape Architects who has devoted her 30-year practice to advocating for better play (page 52). The issue also presents reviews of two projects – in Sydney and Melbourne – that catalyse conversations around how the profession can progress the design of the public realm (page 18 and page 26).

Landscape architecture as a discipline, a profession and a community is resilient and adaptive. While these are indeed unsettling and unpredictable times, they also present us with opportunities to experiment with new ways of connecting and collaborating, and evolve innovative ways of working with technology, that can unfold fresh understandings of design’s agency. There is now a greater need than ever to support the public and one another, and we hope this publication will continue to offer a vibrant and animated platform for conversation, discussion and debate around future ways of working.