DESIGNING FOR REPAIR
Landscape architecture and architecture both manipulate land. Landscape architects usually do it in a way that is reparative to the natural environment – it goes with the materials at hand. However, the issues are shared ones: in Australia, we will inevitably work on or next to remnant bushland, polluted and degraded land, we will affect waterways and we will always be working on top of the land of the First Nations peoples. All these conditions exist in all the iterations of our “built environment” and “nature.”
Both professions can make decisions that enable vegetated space or not, seal the ground or not, join or isolate open space, work with stormwater and overland flow, and so on. These fundamental decisions are (or could be) at the core of a built environment’s framework and its effect on microorganisms, local ecologies and by extension larger natural systems. In this way, every project can make a difference, even though at times it
