This book foregrounds socioecological stewardship in urban spaces. It demonstrates how activities like gardening and participating in events that spark ecological learning foster a sense of place, social connections, and lively neighbourhoods. Offering case studies from Sydney, Australia, it presents an innovative, interdisciplinary, place-based design research methodology. This approach combines ethnography to examine people-place-environment relationships […]

On Gadigal Country, south of Sydney’s Central Business District, is a small inner-city suburb called Ultimo. Considering Ultimo as the intersection of multiple trajectories, we show how particular neoliberal narratives focused on growth and creativity influence the visibility of other stories and trajectories that also constitute this place. For instance, with its complex built environment, […]

Urban wetlands in Australia are under threat, yet they provide benefits for climate change mitigation, pollution reduction, habitat provision, and socioecological connection. In what is now known as Sydney’s inner south and inner west, wetlands were significant places maintained by Aboriginal peoples for millennia (Foster). The violent colonial history that shaped Sydney unfolded along its […]

The visualization of nature in cities fundamentally impacts how we imagine the urban environment and our role in caring for it. Across Australia, the project of urban renewal imagines and designs specific typologies of urban nature. These typologies can obscure grass root forms of environmental stewardship and their connection through civic ecologies. Yet, at this […]

This chapter is published in Feminist Designer, On the Personal and the Political in Design Edited by Alison Place, The MIT Press Book Details

Published in Environmental Humanities, 2023, 15, (1), pp. 164-167, Duke University Press As a concept, edge has multiple intellectual genealogies, from ecology to business studies and cultural theory.1 In each field it has slightly different connotations, but it maintains a basic shared meaning: it signifies a transition zone between different systems. In this lexicon entry, we explore […]

The debate about place has long intersected with design studies. Our contribution to interdisciplinary design is to facilitate a dialogue between design and human geography. Grounded in Doreen Massey’s conceptualisation of place as the interrelations of diverse powers, processes and practices, this paper combines ethnographic methods and examples into a succinct place-based methodology for design […]

In cities across Australia and elsewhere, individuals and groups are experimenting with initiatives to link urban dwellers to local ecologies and strengthen the relation with and awareness of the environment. Community and street gardens, bush regeneration working bees, botanical and bird-watching expeditions in city parks and green areas are examples of this renewed interest in […]

It is January 2020. Sydney is full of smoke and full of birds. In an inner-city park, near a pond, corellas scratch the crispy grass looking for a feed. Ibis are ever present, but their number has multiplied. A tiny nature reserve only a few kms from the CBD is now home to magpies, currawongs, […]

Mapping and fitness apps, government agencies and departments, and citizen science projects provide a wealth of data on urban green spaces, charting parks, reserves, and green corridors in and around Sydney. These maps represent vegetation as surface and, as Doreen Massey in the 2005 book For Space noted about other types of Western maps, detach […]