At a moment when another “inanimate natural entity”, the Taranaki Maunga, a mountain in New Zealand, is granted personhood, The National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) in Melbourne, Australia, is holding an exhibition, Reimagining Birrarung, Design Concepts for 2070, on the future of Yarra River, it’s catchment area and people, envisioned by landscape architects. The exhibition is open until the 3rd of February, accompanied by events supporting The Yarra River Protection Act, and its human and non-human communities.

What is increasingly recognized and the focus of a wider community is the importance of “disposable” natural resources being life-supporting systems in a context far more complex than single-handed approaches humans usually attain to deal with. A mountain or a river receives the status of a subject as a “vessel entity” with space allowed for processes to unravel, upheld by human-created technologies and raised awareness of sensitivities. 

The exhibition asks eight landscape architecture studios from Australia to envision the River’s catchment area future. The approaches landscape architects take are inventive and produce diverse results—some plunge into more plausible scenarios, while others dwell in speculative futures—all resulting beyond classic landscape architecture design products. It is refreshing to see mature landscape architecture practitioners delve into risky territories unbound by legislative barriers, open to personal imaginations and statements.

We had a chance to ask REALMstudios, TCL, and Bush Projects about their future speculations.

Bio-Zone by Bush Projects

Upper Yarra by Bush Projects focuses on establishing a Bio-zone to restate the private land as public and ecological habitats, in guardianship by guides.

Sara Hicks, the Design Director from Bush Projects, talks about the background idea and the problem of private ownership over common resources:

Our freshwater ecosystems occupy a public role as a shared resource that human and multi-species life depends on.

Both the approach of the commons and local Indigenous practice of ‘caring of country’ are two culturally different models that are centred on protecting, managing, and sharing landscape resources for all within a community, and both offer future possibilities of effectively managing our water systems.

Within agricultural practice in Australia our freshwater ecosystems support food production on which we all depend; however, some systems are now on the brink of ecological collapse while select private companies gain significant profit.

Our proposal considers how we might respond to the future evolution of the environmental crisis and the opportunities created by the transformation of our agricultural systems (including the emerging synthetic production of dairy and meat), leading to a significant upscale of public ecological regeneration.

The Birrarung Biozone proposes returning the land area to the river as floodplain, returning seasonal inundation and forming a multi-species common, featuring a gradient of public access through to inaccessible conversation zones, creating safe zones against site pressures of urbanisation, human disturbance and invasive species (including feral cats, foxes and deer).

The re-introduction of the river’s seasonal water flow cycles accelerates landscape regeneration: as seasonal water flows spread across the floodplain, riparian ecosystems are gradually reformed, and the flows disperse and activate the seedbank within the process of ecological restoration.

Sarah Hicks explains what new connections are created by establishing Bio-zone and who are the Birrarung Bio-zone guides as characters they developed.

The issues identified are a paradox problem – human impacts are degrading the environment however humans require experiences of connection and engagement with the environment to form a basis of understanding and care. The proposal makes an inquiry into how connections can be formed in the landscape, both socially, culturally as well as ecologically. The Bio-zone forms a network that links vestiges of existing within farmland and areas of urban growth.

The Birrarung Bio-zone Guide is both a caretaker and host, conceived in acknowledgement of the significant role the local community plays within ecological restoration and how learning about the landscape shapes public perception, understanding and engagement.

The garment imagines a future practice of landscape management, it is designed to support the amphibious and sensory experience of traversing swamps, enable the physical labour of monitoring, weeding, and harvesting and the cultural display in celebration of these practices.

“To the Core” by TCL

TCL team tells us a story based on collected soil samples in 5-year successions, taking us through a course of future-past, pinned with imaginative major events, based on current trajectories with a chance of producing positive shifts.

Lisa J Howard, Director at TCL, tells us about what materials and composites we might find.

The materials we find change, and evolve as time passes. At first we see a continued decline—we find more waste products and chemical runoff in the soil.

The materials we find between 2030 and 2035 include the impacts of significant drought and fire.

As time begins to progress into the future, we start to acknowledge and accept the climate crisis and the impact this has on the land. Beyond that, we start to see the effects of regenerative farming and a positive change in the way we deal with land and natural systems. We begin to find an abundance of grains, more organic material and matter, and seeds buried within the ground, ready to regenerate.

We start to find traces of animal life from species previously thought extinct – this is around the year 2055 – the year we call ‘Birrarung’s Voice Returns’.

Once we progress into 2060, we start to see incredible networks of mycelia binding the soil together creating new life and enabling both soil and the river to thrive. In our final core sample – Reciprocal Technology – we find that we are starting to use micro and nano technologies to benefit the climate and environment.

Their vision is supported by a successive chain of events that change in conjunction with our understanding of “stewardship” of the land.

Lisa J Howard tells us about the end result and a positive future.

The proposition acknowledges the hard work it will take to achieve this future and plots a series of significant environmental, economic and societal shifts reflected through seemingly small changes in the soil. Shifts in agriculture, farming, water consumption, attitudes toward flood, fire, and drought, and enabling the river system to expand and contract on its own terms within the land. The enablement of near-extinct species to thrive and live in abundance – acknowledging that the values of our future have been here for 60,000 years.

The end result is a hopeful future where technology, humans and the environment work together create a better world for our natural systems – our Birrarung, and coexist in balance.

Each soil profile tells a reassuring story, that despite the unstable climatic conditions we may face in the future, the river and its lands can be healed and endure. The health of the river is measured by environmental complexity beyond our vision, beneath its surface.

Postcards from the Future by REALMstudios

REALMstudios created Postcards from the Future, echoing multiple narratives that tell us about change of perspective towards working with the river, putting emphasis on political decisions influenced by First Nations as driving force for the needed change. 

Jon Shinkfield, the Founding Director at REALMstudios outlined the characters they developed for the future.

The primary character is the Birrabot, a future piece of tech kit that is both terrestrial and aquatic, essentially monitoring and moderating the environments to maximise river health. The Birrabots recognise and remove weed species, toxins and invaders in a way that humans can never invest themselves because of the topographic challenges, and lack of person power. They are in effect working in a feedback loop with First Nations (Wurundjeri) knowledge and direction to be able to regenerate and manage this vast and complex system. The Birrabots are the eyes, ears and environmental agitators of the First Nations people.

While their visuals seem gloomy-techno-biological, REALMstudios flip the hierarchy between people, machines and environment, merging them into a post-humanist-natural-mesh-agglomerate.

We are looking at a reoccupation and reduction of the urban footprint and an expansion of the Birrarung (from where it is today). To date this has been running in the opposite direction – reduction of the Birrarung footprint and expansion of the urban. So in this sense we are reoccupying and recasting histories and spent structures. The 2070 reflective narrative that goes with the reclaimed freeway image is:

– The motorway viaducts are part of a massive network connecting the City with its surrounding plains.

– While ideal for commuters, they were only for vehicle movement; they also separated natural and human communities living on either side.

– Now that the private car is no longer viable, we’ve remade these highways into wild-ways. We cracked the concrete, plants crept in, then animals came back – kangaroos, wallabies, even emus. They’re the commuters now between Country and City, no speed limits.

– De-engineering, we call it.

– Sometimes, at dusk, the kids go out out and race the animals – I don’t know who wins.

To a question about how is landscape architecture instrumental in this endeavour, Jon Shinkfield replied:

The conversation here is about regenerative systems that are expansionist in preference to ‘landscape’ that reads as a ‘design’. It is through the removal, rather than the addition of, that opens the opportunity for expansion of the river systems, clawing back territories that are critical to Birrarung health. The big question for us in our cities is ‘what would it take to have an apex creature living as part of our urban systems’? What adjustments, spatially, materially culturally and spiritually would need to be made for that level of non-human occupation. And then, what are the baby steps that we can take to move toward that place? If I were to propose that emus should once again be present in the Birrarung catchment, what would it take to get them there?

Images were intentionally pixelated to leave an open-ended future with space for glitches in transfers and translations. 

Among projects exhibited, we find works by Openwork, McGregor Coxall, SBLA, Aspect Studios and OFFICE.

The merge of landscape architecture practice and art setting forth the change in future that is not immediate, creates a spectrum of scenarios liberated from tomorrow’s reality which makes them all more interesting. 

Exhibition View