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.

The past few months have seen Australia facing enormous and rapid change. What we once thought of as “normal” has been turned on its head. As our May issue was going to print, COVID-19 social distancing restrictions were just coming into effect.

As I write this, in mid-June, businesses have closed, unemployment has shot up and we’ve been working at a distance from colleagues for almost three months. At the same time, the Black Lives Matter protests have erupted across Australian cities and around the world, even as a 46,000-year-old Aboriginal sacred site in Western Australia’s far north has been destroyed.

These events offer a stark reminder of the responsibility that comes with the design of public space and the values inseparable from it – including the right to gather freely and to engage in protest with others of common beliefs. To design public space means to design places that acknowledge and celebrate our First Nations people, reflect the vibrant diversity of our communities and embed, uphold and progress our commitment to the distribution of equitable and accessible open space.

As we begin to see signs that the pandemic is starting to abate – lock-downs lifting, social life cautiously beginning to start up again – discussions around how we might design alternative futures in a post-COVID context have been extremely animated, as citizens, practitioners and academics from all disciplines collaboratively parse the possibilities for a more resilient world.

Landscape architecture as a discipline emerged out of crises. As Catherin Bull argues in this issue [page 14], the pioneers of the field – from Frederick Law Olmsted to John Oldham –were often responding to the ravages of disease and economic ruin: “each saw what was needed in difficult times and was willing to engage in the wider world that surrounds practice, to argue for and adapt their environments and the way they were made.” How can we as a profession respond to the crises we face today?

There’s no doubt that now is the time for thinking big and thinking long-term. Now is the time for the profession to begin to examine new lines of force, to pursue fresh avenues of action and expand its expertise – to reimagine, reinvent and redefine. We look forward to exploring the myriad possibilities for engaging with these challenges – and plotting out possibilities for the “new normal” – here and in future editions.