ECLAS 2024: Regenerative Landscapes

Last month, Founding Director Jon Shinkfield travelled to Brussels to present at the ECLAS 2024 Conference. This year's topic was 'Regenerative Landscapes: Designing the Transition,' and Jon spoke about REALMstudios' project, Logan Avenue.

This patch is in Wurundjeri Country - it has always been, but the actions of colonisation over the past 200 years have degraded its endemic qualities. A design approach was taken to ground this space in close observation, manually tending and incremental moves to embrace the agency of the landscape.

Regenerating Landscape.

How might we define them?

From close observation, it was clear that the potential of the patch lay at the base of the few remaining trees. The rootzones were rich sources of preserved topsoil, subsoil structure and remnant seedbanks, while the seasonal variations in shade and sunlight between canopies provided conditions for a biodiverse response. These remnant trees (Eucalyptus polyanthemos, Eucalyptus radiata and Eucalyptus obliqua) had kept the ground intact over time, despite being devoid of supporting herbs, grasses, and shrubs.

How do they work?

Conditions of soil, moisture, light, vegetation and disturbance contribute to any landscape’s suitability and capacity to perpetuate regeneratively or to change course through intervention. The first and then ongoing step was to gently weed the ground and allow the release of the seedbank. This re-established the local microbiota, promoting other endemic species and release of the dormant seed bank.

Why do they work?

From the perspective of a mature forest, the patch is still emergent. However, its lessons in recovered biodiversity and regenerative health are substantial. These readings present the opportunity to re-establish relationships with place and process, where we become temporary custodians of ecosystems of which we are only a small part.

Process imagery show the manual weeding conducted to ensure a regeneration as well as the last image displaying, the colonised landscape prior to the project. Now, there is both a silence and loudness at Logan Avenue, to enjoy, and hopefully a method by which to communicate the power and capacity of Country.