Looking fifty years into the future, Reimagining Birrarung: Design Concepts for 2070 presents a series of provocations for the lands and waters of the Birrarung (Yarra River). Focusing on ecological regeneration, public access and connectivity across the catchment, this exhibition asks what it means to acknowledge a river as a living and integrated natural entity.
Urban rivers are being rethought internationally, mindsets shifting from a time when they were seen as systems to be re-engineered to our liking – lands and waters for development, resource extraction and waste disposal. In Melbourne there is an increasing understanding that we should think of the Birrarung not as a disposable resource, but as a complex and diverse, interconnected ecosystem that nurtures our health and is essential to communities both human and non-human.
Through the lens of landscape architecture, Reimagining Birrarung presents research, data, mapping and speculative design ideas for sites along the river corridor, from the city to the upper catchment. Together the projects reveal how the Birrarung has been altered and diminished over time, from a dynamic and abundant ecology to a system in need of healing and care.
Reimagining Birrarung invites you to free your minds from the constraints and assumptions of today and to consider, together, the future of the Birrarung, but also what the river might want for itself.
