Perspective

Editor Emily Wong introduces this issue of Landscape Architecture Australia.

It’s been a busy few months here at the

Landscape Architecture Australia office, with the announcements over June and

July of the winners of the state and territory landscape architecture award programs. We warmly congratulate the awarded projects and practices and look forward to the revealing of the national winners at the 2021 International Festival of Landscape Architecture in October. In other exciting news, we’ve expanded our partnership with the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects and are pleased to announce that the publication has been exclusively endorsed as AILA’s official magazine. We look forward to continuing our collaboration with the institute.

As our cities grow and evolve during a time of climate emergency, the upgrading of cycling and pedestrian infrastructure has reached new heights. In this issue, Shannon Satherley reviews Lat27’s upgrade of Kingsford

Smith Drive, which converts a narrow path beside the Brisbane River into an expansive cycling corridor that elevates the commuter experience.

Discussions around crucial infrastructure are echoed by Chris Boulton, who examines how we can improve the provision of green space in our Australian cities. Identifying some of the challenges hindering the supply of urban green space, Boulton argues for developing a more nuanced and collaborative approach. Her article provides a launching point for rethinking both formal and informal elements of our built environment at a broader scale.

Interrogating the complexities of greening cities is one thing, but what about the words we use to communicate our designs? Even though, as designers, we often present in visual modes, our relationships with the natural world are conceptualized through language. Yet English words for the Australian landscape struggle to describe the continent’s unique topographies and processes. As Jess Stewart asks in her article on language and landscape: “If we don’t have the words to describe our landscapes, how can we meaningfully design for them?”

Addressing just a few of the enormous challenges the biodiversity emergency is presenting for our profession, we feature an interview with Damien Cook, an ecologist who has worked on the restoration of grasslands in urban and regional Victoria. Other articles in the issue include a discussion with Mike Horne on Indigenous engagement and shifting landscapes within the design of Gosford Leagues Club Park on the NSW Central Coast; and a pair of interviews by Alex Breedon and Liam Mouritz exploring the philosophies of two international studios creatively designing public landscapes on small budgets. “Our design processes shouldn’t be deterministic. We must remind ourselves that we don’t know everything and must embrace a constant state of experimentation,” says Mathieu Gontier of Paris-based Wagon Landscaping.

For our latest Fieldtrip, we invited artist Matthew Stanton to contribute a photographic series exploring Queensland’s Wet Tropics region. Over the past eight years, Stanton has been documenting the unfolding dynamics of anthropogenic climate change, logging, species movement and human inhabitation that have created psychologically complex landscapes of memory, ecological entanglement and human affect.

We hope the articles featured here provide a point of ingress into deeper discussion and action around the future of our cities.

– Emily Wong, editor

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.