The Square and the Park

The creative directors of the 2019 International Festival of Landscape Architecture, Jillian Walliss, Cassandra Chilton and Kirsten Bauer, introduce this issue’s theme.

Curating a festival takes the better part of a year – a lot of work for only a three-day event. In taking on the 2019 International Festival of Landscape Architecture, we folded a legacy component into our program with the aim of enabling our discussions and the festival impact to extend beyond the immediate event audience. As the 2019 festival directors, we wanted the festival’s explorations of how we conceive, design, fund, construct and manage urban open space to engage with a wider audience including government, the community and other design disciplines. This February edition of Landscape Architecture Australia forms an important part of this ambition, offering a record of some of the major discussions and ideas that emerged around the typologies of

The Square and the Park.

This edition begins with the outcomes of the Future Park International Design Ideas Competition. Run by the University of Melbourne in partnership with the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects, this competition challenged professional and emerging landscape architects, urban designers, architects and planners to speculate on new park possibilities for a future Melbourne. The competition’s jury chair, Lincoln University professor Jacky Bowring offers a succinct review of themes emerging from the shortlisted entries, along with a critique of the three winning schemes. As she highlights, this diverse collection of ideas offers a wealth of strategies and inspiration for the City of Melbourne, as it responds to the pressing issues of climate change, increasing urban density and the potentials of Reconciliation.

The State of the Nation session emerged as a surprisingly popular segment from the festival. We invited a mix of academics and practitioners to reflect on significant parks or squares constructed between 1990 to 1999 in the major state capitals of Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Canberra and Hobart. What eventuated were precise and insightful reflections on landscape innovations and achievements which have occurred under our own noses. Too often, we default to international precedents for guidance in design practice. In this edition, we offer these succinct reflections as valuable record for the canon of Australian landscape architecture.

On the topic of international practice, we present three reviews. Adrian Marshall looks at recently completed parks in North America that engage with ecology and resilience; Julian Raxworthy reflects on the contribution of acclaimed Swiss designer Günther Vogt (a keynote speaker at the festival) and Jillian Walliss looks at

Zaryadye Park, Moscow’s first new park in fifty years. We also feature a reflection from Tania Davidge on Federation Square’s future as a civic space, now that the proposal for the Apple flagship store has been abandoned. The festival explored this idea through a hypothetical future for Federation Square, imagined after its unfortunate loss due to fire. In her piece, Davidge takes on questions of civic-ness and public ownership through a discussion of the significance of the town square in contemporary Melbourne. And finally, Linda Corkery offers a review of the

2019 International Festival of Landscape Architecture program from the perspective of the audience.

As we enter 2020, we haven’t yet finished with the agendas arising around The Square and the Park. One of the greatest surprises arising from the festival was the extensive media interest (across print, television and radio) in the future of open space. The need for quality open space in Australian cities clearly hit a nerve. This year we will continue to work with the competition entries to agitate for bigger ambitions for open space in Melbourne. Ideally, the true legacy of the festival is actual change.