EXPANDING THE RESIDENTIAL AGENDA
What role do residential landscapes play in the context of the climate emergency, population growth and the housing affordability crisis? And how are landscape architects pushing boundaries in their design approaches, for both traditional and emerging residential typologies?
As Melbourne’s population booms, the city’s residential landscape continues to expand and transform through processes of infill and sprawl. Melbourne has become the fourth least affordable housing market globally – behind Sydney at third – and, in the context of the climate crisis, resourceintensive landscape conventions such as lawns and green walls come into question.
How is our profession responding to these changing contexts? Here, four Melbourne designers explore new design approaches for the city’s varied residential landscapes: private gardens, landscapes for social housing communities, multi-residential infill landscapes and landscape-driven urban precincts.
ALISTAIR KIRKPATRICK / ANTHONY SHARPLES (AKAS)
Jen Lynch — Could you give an overview of a project you’ve been working on recently?
Anthony Sharples — We’re currently working on a project in Brunswick East, which is a classic residential project. The client wanted a landscape that felt wild and almost like a forest. The whole idea with the project is that there are no edges – it questions the notion of edges between different elements. The design, for instance, involves an indigenous lawn, which doesn’t have an edge; we’re allowing the client to dictate the shape of that lawn. We’ve also chosen not to have any hard surfaces – we’re using gravel as a mulch and strategic concrete sleepers, which jut through the garden and take you on a journey. All of these elements blend together.
All the species we’ve selected for the garden, once established, are resilient and can cope with Melbourne’s rainfall, and a lot of the species are non-hybridized, meaning that they can produce viable seed. These species allow
