Reimagining Birrarung: Design Concepts for 2070
Looking fifty years into the future, Reimagining Birrarung: Design Concepts for 2070 presented a series of design provocations for the lands and waters of the Birrarung (Yarra River).
- YEAR Aug 2024 - Feb 2025
The National Gallery of Victoria asked participants what it means to acknowledge a river as a living and integrated natural entity, and to speculate on what the Birrarung might be in 2070, as a means to awaken the public consciousness to possible futures.
Eight landscape architecture and design studios—ASPECT Studios, Bush Projects, McGregor Coxall, Office, Openwork, Realmstudios, SBLA and TCL—were invited to speculate through design, on the future of the Birrarung in 2070.
The teams responded by focusing on in their project’s Traditional Owner acknowledgement and “caring of country” principles, ecological regeneration, public access and connectivity across the catchment.
Ewan McEoin, Senior Curator of Contemporary Art, Design and Architecture at the NGV, said, “This exhibition is about using design as a tool for speculation. Striving towards systemic change, the designers presenting each achieve their goals through a mix of design research, reflection, experimentation and visioning. The intention is to awaken the public consciousness to important contemporary issues and to remind us that over time, with the right intention and commitment, nearly anything is possible.”
For the practice of landscape architecture, Reimagining Birrarung models a potential avenue for large-scale collaboration around devising long-term, coherent, sustainable and actionable plans for the design and management of significant natural bodies—where the health of our rivers, lakes, grasslands and wetlands and other natural entities is understood as a paramount factor in securing good urban city outcomes. In other words, only when the river is healthy can people be healthy.
ASPECT’s contribution comprised a proposition for repairing and repurposing the river in six acts, with the overall goal of making use of the river’s parklands as large-scale shared spaces for a denser, more populous city in 2070.
Among the proposed acts are the partial or complete removal of the South Eastern Freeway, a new north-south connective parkland, and the reconstruction of lost wetlands and billabongs.
