Landscape Architecture Award of Excellence for Research, Policy and Communications
AILA VIC Landscape Architecture Awards 2025
postcards from the future: reimagining birrarung
Postcards from the Future is a provocation: live conversations sent back to us from the year 2070 where characters from a reframed Melbourne speak of the ever present, regenerated Birrarung on the lands of the Wurundjeri Woy Wurrung People.
They explore an ecosystem of First Nations intelligence/decolonisation brought into focus through an AI lens: a future territory, where unreachable territories of regenerative potential collectively forge a pathway of repair.
The unsung hero of the postcards is the Birrabot, a future piece of tech kit that is both terrestrial and aquatic, monitoring and moderating those environments to maximise river health. The Birrabots act as agents, recognising and removing weed species, toxins and invaders, overcoming topographic challenges and the insurmountable cost of human resource. They work in a feedback loop with First Nations (Wurundjeri) knowledge and direction to aid in the regeneration and management of this vast and complex system. Birrabots are the eyes, ears and environmental agitators of the First Nations People.
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‘Reimagining Birrarung’ demonstrates the role of landscape architects in contributing to civic discourse. How? By recognising and responding to the central role of the Birrarung as a living entity that shapes the city. The exhibition invited the public into a plurality of ideas across a range of practices. The collective work argues for the value of design, of speculation and of rethinking our relationships to Country. This project embodies a deeply considered approach, where Indigenous knowledge and process are seamlessly woven into a landscaped experience. It shifts perception, allowing one to understand Country in a deeper, more intuitive way. What makes it particularly compelling as a set of visions is its delicate balance. This project is an exploration of the nuanced relationship between culture, Country and land — revealing the intricate layers that shape the place and its meaning.
This is a techno-biological, post-humanist, post-colonial moment facilitated by AI, reimagining a reoccupation/reduction of the urban footprint, a re-expansion of the Birrarung. We are engaging with AI to reframe and recast past and present histories into reimagined futures, antithetical to common contemporary urbanist dialogue.
These reflective conversations are about regenerative systems, expansionist in preference to ‘landscape’ that reads as a ‘design’. It is through the removal, rather than the addition of, that opens the opportunity for expansion of the river system, clawing back territories that are critical to Birrarung health.
Q: What would it take to have an apex creature living as part of our urban system? What adjustments (spatially, materially, culturally, spiritually) would need to be made for that level of non-human occupation? And what are the baby steps needed to move toward that place? If we were to propose that emus should once again be present in the Birrarung catchment, what would it take to get them there?
We don’t know how the future will read.
There are glitches in our transfers and translations.
Postcards from the Future was exhibited at the National Gallery of Victoria as part of the Birrarung 2070 exhibit.
Country
Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung
Client
NGV
Year
2024