Trend Watch April 2025

Landscape Foundation of Australia (LFA) Announces Fund Recipients for 2025 Landscape Performance Case Studies (LPCS)

Each year, LFA provides up to $10,000 funding to academic research teams to collaborate with a landscape design practice to assess the performance of one of the practice’s projects. How and to what extent are they meeting environmental, economic, social and cultural sustainability goals?

Findings from the Landscape Performance Case Studies (LPCS) Program will also contribute to the evidence base needed for future planning, effective design and management for healthy, resilient urban landscapes in Australian cities and towns.

LFA have announced two very different projects for 2025:

REIMAGINING TARRALLA CREEK: Stage 1, Croydon, Victoria
Client: Melbourne Water Corporation
Academic Team: University of Melbourne, Dr Wendy Walls and Farshad Bahrami, PhD student
Practice/Liaison: GHD Design, Martin Coyle, Director of Landscape Architecture

In the eastern suburbs of Melbourne where ‘daylighting’ a piped stormwater system made it possible to construct a wetland system, improve biodiversity, create new wildlife habitat zones, improve water quality, and expand open space for recreation. Learn more about the project through the GHD website and the Maroondah City Council project page.

BONDI JUNCTION COMPLETE STREETS, Bondi Junction, NSW
Client: Waverley Council
Academic Team: UNSW, Dr Mike Harris and Eva Glogowska, PhD student
Practice/Liaison: Spackman Mossop Michaels; Mat Dally, Director

Located in a dense, inner-Sydney neighbourhood where re-configuring a busy shopping street has created comfortable and safe shared spaces for pedestrians and cyclists, buses with increased shade and enhanced biodiversity. Learn more about the project at SMM website.

Street Furniture Australia and LFA are committed to academic-industry research collaborations that assess performance to inform the evidence base needed for continual improvement and innovative designs for urban landscapes in Australian cities and towns. Street Furniture Australia is a founding partner of the Landscape Foundation of Australia.

Image: Reimagining Tarralla Creek by GHD Design for Melbourne Water Corporation

A Technique to Make Vital Civic Ecologies Legible, using Visual Communication

Over one and half years, researchers Sarah Jane Jones, Alexandra Crosby, and Ilaria Vanni from University of Technology, Sydney, photographed and made diagrams of Green Square in Sydney for their project titled From photo documentation to photo diagrams: a technique to make civic ecologies present and legible.

Civic ecologies include grassroots initiatives outside the scope of urban planning, such as community and home gardens, native plant regeneration projects, or footpath gardens. They are often small in scale, so can be difficult to recognise as an urban socio-ecological process. Their ‘illegibility’, means local residents may not notice or connect with these civic ecologies in their everyday lives.

Thousands of photographs recorded changes in the urban landscape. Lines and arrows on diagrams captured the changing socio-ecological process of this heavily developed area, close to Sydney’s CBD and airport.

The authors found that unlike in manicured garden beds, residents encouraged interactions among animals, wind, soil, rain and heat in laneways, on rooftops and the ‘slippery’ spaces between private and public land. On one verge, native grass seeds were scattered by birds or possums and germinated. Ferns grew alongside raised beds with culinary herbs.

Residents interacting with urban ecologies is vital, particularly in response to global warming. Visual communication can play a key role in enhancing the understanding and the accessibility of these civic ecological initiatives.

Recipe for a Photo Diagram helps visualise commonalities and connections in urban ecologies. Read more about the study here.

Image: Olive Branch Pavement, courtesy of the authors.