The river as a living entity

In Australia, the Birrarung (Yarra River) in Melbourne has become a focal point for such a transformation. Once marked as Melbourne’s “number one drain” on government maps, the Birrarung has now, through legal innovation, speculative design, and urban revitalisation, been reimagined as a living entity - an approach that challenges conventional paradigms of governance, planning, and design.

In this abridged version of a paper presented at the 2025 IFLA Conference in Nantes, France, Kirsten Bauer, Global Design Director at ASPECT Studios, uses the Birrarung to explore the idea of the river as a living entity. Drawing on three interconnected case studies and leveraging her own experiences as a designer and advocate for the river, from its legal redefinition to speculative design work, she illustrates how legal, cultural, and design frameworks can converge to foster more inclusive, sustainable, and reconciliatory approaches to urban river landscapes.

The Yarra River Protection (Wilip-gin Birrarung murron) Act 2017 represents a landmark moment in Australian law. It is the first piece of legislation in the country to recognize a river as a “living and integrated natural entity" and one of the first in Australia to be written in an Indigenous language. This recognition is not only symbolic; it reflects a fundamental shift in how First Nations and rivers are conceptualised within Australian governance frameworks. The Act was developed in close consultation with the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung people, the Traditional Owners (custodians) of the Birrarung, and embeds their cultural values and custodianship into the legal fabric of river management (Clark & Jones, 2019).

Importantly, the Act introduces the concept of "one living entity" to describe the river, its tributaries, and the surrounding land, an idea that aligns closely with Indigenous worldviews that emphasise interconnectedness and reciprocity. It acknowledges that the Birrarung is more than the “river”, it is its waters, its banks, its land, the sky above and the land beneath, its fauna and flora.

This legal recognition of the river as a living entity resonates with global movements toward granting legal personhood to natural features, such as the Whanganui River in Aotearoa/New Zealand and the Ganges and Yamuna rivers in India. However, the Birrarung Act stops short of full legal personhood. Legal personhood allows the river to act as an individual with legal rights and obligations. Instead, the Birrarung Act creates a hybrid model in which the Birrarung is legislatively recognised but not given legal personhood, and the Act does not control the water itself. This approach has its limits, but it seeks to blend Indigenous epistemology with Western legal structures, offering a pragmatic yet culture-altering approach to environmental governance (O'Donnell & Talbot-Jones, 2018).

The Act established the Birrarung Council, an independent statutory body that includes Traditional Owner representatives alongside experts in planning, water management, landscape architecture and community engagement. The Council’s role is to provide strategic advice and ensure that the river’s health and cultural significance are prioritized in planning decisions.

The late Aunty Margaret, a respected Wurundjeri Elder and Birrarung Council member, powerfully stated, “The River needs its lands”. These words have become the underpinning statement that continues to drive the Council’s, and other organisations’, work to explore the concept of the ‘Great Birrarung Parkland’, through which all Birrarung land and water will be recognised as one connected cultural landscape from its source to the sea (Birrarung Council Annual Report to Parliament 2022).

While legislation provides a foundational framework, envisioning the future of the river requires ither imaginative and participatory approaches. The Reimagining Birrarung: Design Concepts for 2070 exhibition exemplifies how speculative design can serve as a tool for advocacy, education, and long-term planning. Curated as a public exhibition and digital platform, the project invited landscape architects to propose visionary concepts for the Birrarung’s future (Reimagining Birrarung Design Concepts for 2070. National Gallery of Victoria 2024).

The design brief was to respond to three key things. Firstly: if the river could speak, what would it say? This shifts our design process from how we can best use the river, to working with the river, to finally doing what the river needs and wants.

Secondly, to explore the idea of the Great Birrarung Parkland, and what that might be and look like in the future, being guided by the 50 Year Community Vision
(Yarra_River_50-Year_Community_Vision_2018 / Wilip-gin Birrarung murron).

And thirdly, to look for ways to increase the ecological quality of the river itself, and move from merely reducing damage and minimising impact, to fundamentally increasing net environmental benefit.

The speculative designs created revolved around themes of ecological regeneration, public access, and cultural recognition. Each design provocation explored what it might mean to treat the river not as a boundary or resource, but as a living entity with agency and rights. Examples of this include new forms of land division, in which political boundaries are formed through the rivers geography and speculating on new future forms of land management and rehabilitation using new technology and citizen management models.

Proposals ranged from rewilding urban riverbanks and restoring wetlands to rethinking of our urban infrastructure that typically aligns itself with rivers, i.e. roads and powerlines.

One of the most compelling aspects of the exhibition was its emphasis on temporal depth. By projecting our thinking fifty years into the future, the designs encouraged long-term thinking and challenged the short-termism that often characterises urban development. This temporal framing also allowed for the integration of climate adaptation strategies, such as flood resilience, habitat restoration, and carbon sequestration.

By visualising alternative futures, the project made complex ecological and cultural ideas accessible to a broader public, thereby fostering a sense of collective ownership and responsibility.

The speculative nature of the exhibition also created space for critical reflection. It asked difficult questions: What does it mean to co-design with the natural landscape and First Nations community? How can we reconcile competing land uses with the needs of a living river? What governance structures are required to support such a vision? In doing so, it positioned design not merely as a technical exercise but as a form of cultural and political engagement.

The Greenline Project represents the materialisation of many of the ideas explored in the previous two case studies. It is a four-kilometre urban revitalisation initiative along the Birrarung in the centre of Melbourne, aiming to transform the north bank riverfront into a connected, vibrant, and ecologically resilient public space that reflects the values of the Birrarung as a living entity.

At its core, the Greenline Project is a response to decades of fragmented planning and underutilised riverfront spaces. It seeks to stitch together a series of promenades, parks, and cultural sites into a cohesive landscape that prioritizes ecological health, public access, and cultural storytelling. The master plan integrates Traditional Owner knowledge and aspirations, ensuring that Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung values are embedded in both the design process and the built environment (City of Melbourne, 2022). A cultural narrative is being developed with the Traditional Owners and the City of Melbourne, which will form the cultural heartbeat of the project, identifying which stories are told, how and where they are told physically and ensuring “truth telling” is a key part of the design. We are only at the start of this journey and seeing how this might manifest.

Ecological repair is a central pillar of the Greenline project. This includes the restoration of riparian vegetation, the creation of habitat corridors, and the implementation of water-sensitive urban design (WSUD) principles. These interventions not only enhance biodiversity but also improve water quality and climate resilience. Importantly, they are framed not as technical fixes but as acts of care and reciprocity toward the river.

These three case studies illustrate a paradigm shift in how urban rivers are understood and managed in Melbourne and Australia. By utilising the idea of the river as a living entity, they challenge anthropocentric and extractive models of development and instead promote relational, regenerative, and reconciliatory approaches.

The overall cultural story of the Birrarung is to shift the political and cultural agenda from just seeing rivers as resources and recreational and open space entities, to a place that is central to our sense of ourselves and the city. Melbourne as a community is not yet reconciled with its natural landscape nor its First Nations. This is becoming more important as the state of Victoria, of which Melbourne is the capital, is undertaking “Treaty” with its First Nations people.

From a governance perspective, this shift requires new institutional arrangements that recognise Indigenous sovereignty, support cross-sector collaboration, and prioritize ecological integrity. The Birrarung Council is a promising model in this regard, offering a platform for diverse voices to shape river management.

From a planning perspective, it calls for long-term, adaptive strategies that are grounded in both scientific and indigenous knowledge. The Reimagining Birrarung exhibition demonstrates how speculative design can facilitate such strategies by making future scenarios visible and debatable.

From a design perspective, it demands a rethinking of aesthetics, functionality, and authorship. Projects like the Greenline show how design can be a tool for the healing of landscapes, communities, and relationships with Country.

It requires us to ask: What kind of relationships do we want to have with the natural world? Whose knowledge counts? What does justice look like in the context of environmental change?

And more specifically it provides a position for landscape architectural design to embrace and to be part of the solutions.

All three of these projects recognise that, if we want to listen to the river, and bring back nature and repair the native landscape, then we must respond to the lack of representation of the precolonial landscape in the Melbourne area. Part of that response has been to develop ways of graphically representing the Birrarung and her lands over time. So far this has taken the form of an animation of the river over 20,000 years and the illustration of the landscape pre1800s. This has allowed the broader community in particular to grasp for the first time what the landscape looked like. These images have now been published in multiple reports and media articles and books (Buckrich, 2024).

The Birrarung offers a powerful case study in how rivers can be reimagined as living entities through the integration of Indigenous knowledge, legal innovation, speculative design and urban revitalisation. This approach not only enhances ecological and cultural outcomes but also fosters a deeper sense of connection and responsibility among urban populations.

As cities around the world grapple with the triple challenges of climate change, biodiversity decline and social inequality, the lessons from the Birrarung are both timely and transformative. They remind us that rivers are not just physical features but living systems that sustain life, carry memory, and embody the possibility of a more just and sustainable future, a regenerative future.