Life in landscape: designing for impact

Date: Jul 24, 2024

Category: Insights

A career in landscape architecture and urban design involves more than making aesthetic choices – it involves thinking deeply about how cities work, and how to make life in them better. In this abridged version of a lecture given to students at the University of Sydney, Global Design Director and Sydney studio founder Sacha Coles explains that, for those working at ASPECT Studios in Sydney, the fundamentals of public realm design are about responding to big problems.

Our purpose at ASPECT Studios lies in understanding our connection to the world and its natural systems and trying to make that connection a more positive one. As designers, landscape architects and urbanists, we use design to deliver that purpose.

With that in mind, it’s worth thinking about what landscape architecture involves as a profession, and how the outcomes can be enormously consequential.

Bondi to Bronte Coastal Walk

Love for place

ASPECT works across Australia, Asia, the Middle East, and further afield. That global presence is important to what we do, because it allows us to pool expertise and resources. But ultimately, we take a place-based approach to our work. This means that our team in Sydney is passionate about Sydney, and when we work in this city, we create places that reflect the stories and qualities of Sydney and Gadigal Country, designed by and in collaboration with people who understand it. In that sense, landscape architecture and urban design is a calling for people who love the specificities and idiosyncrasies of Sydney, and who want those things to be central to the creation of new places.

Darling Square in Sydney transforms a previously isolated space into a place of integrated public life. This project was the product of keen and energetic collaboration by government, Traditional Owners, and designers.

Part of honouring place means engaging in a genuine way with First Nations designers and knowledge holders. The past few years have been magnificent in terms of deeper engagement by industry, and an increasing emphasis being placed on the same by government when it comes to major projects. The outcome are landscapes and urban places that speak to and reveal Indigenous narratives – creating something more authentic and reconciliatory, which everyone benefits from.

We can think of landscape architecture as a method of both revealing the hidden qualities of a place, and of protecting its special qualities through design.

Landscape as critical infrastructure

While we do not solely work on urban projects, they are an area where ASPECT Studios excels. Cities are complicated things, and part of the attraction to us is that landscape design can have an outsized effect on the way that they function. Recent events, like the March floods in Dubai, have demonstrated that landscape architecture, architecture, and urban design should be seen as critical infrastructure. The way we design the environments can mitigate the effects of climate change, and ameliorate the damage caused by intense climactic events.

Central Park in Bradfield is being built in anticipation of a new city near Western Sydney Aiport. A "caring for water" ethos will be expressed in natural creeks and ponds.

Ground-up urbanism

We’re lucky to work in the field of design that is most concerned with the experience of the person on the ground. For us, this means expanding our field of work from a particular object or corner (although details are important!) to consider all the systems that make urban life possible. These systems can be harnessed and reworked to produce synergies that benefit all the residents of the city, in ways both large and small.

While small in size, Quay Quarter Lanes in Sydney brims with small details that work together create something distinct and enlivening.

While this thinking is wide in scope, the application of it is not limited to large-scale projects. The smallest sites can benefit in often surprising ways from design that begins with an exploration of the way the city functions, so that its place in it can be refined.

In practicing this kind of urbanism, designers at ASPECT Studios are working in a wider dimension than just landscape design. Our work is inflected with thinking about economics, construction, ecology, history, culture, transport planning and human behaviour.

13 Caulfield to Dandenong Level Crossing Removal Project Peter Bennetts

The Caulfield to Dandenong Level Crossing Removal Project in Melbourne set new standards in designing places that can have a positive effect on life in a city as a whole.

From our perspective, it seems as if there is a shift of attention to landscape, urban systems and public space at the expense of the modernist paradigm of building-led urbanism. The Greenline and the redevelopment of Circular Quay, for instance, will make Melbourne and Sydney more accessible, distinct, greener, and liveable places. We’ve long known that landscape design is the most effective way to make those improvements happen, and there has never been a better time to take up landscape architecture as a vocation to make change happen.

The Greenline, Melbourne

Circular Quay Renewal, Sydney

Sacha Coles is a Global Design Director of ASPECT Studios and founder of our Sydney studio. He has been recognised as one of the top 30 Landscape Architects operating globally. As a global design influencer, Sacha’s record of excellence in leading projects of transformational change spans placemaking, infrastructure, play space, academic, civic institutions, and green infrastructure.

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