Patchwork Plains investigates ways to reconnect the remnant patches of native grassland in Melbourne’s western suburbs.
Despite the Victorian Volcanic Plain being one of only 15 biodiversity hotspots in Australia, the natural temperate grasslands that once dominated the plain have been reduced to less than 1 percent of their pre-1788 area. This ecological decimation occurred due to Western agricultural practices and the short-sighted urbanization that followed European arrival. The result is a sprawling city, Melbourne, that has little connection to, or acknowledgement of, the specific landscape conditions of its underlying site.
This project proposes the reintegration of the native grasslands into the city – reconnecting remnant patches by developing ecological corridors. A large-scale network of connections across Melbourne’s western suburbs is informed by a detailed corridor design proposal for the Jones Creek Grassland Circuit in St Albans. This network attempts to reconcile the eco-socialist need to restore the site’s grassland ecology with the eco-modernist reality that Melbourne’s development has changed the site irrevocably. Increasing the prevalence of the grasslands in the suburbs has the potential to initiate a new suburban identity by increasing human empathy for the ecology, which could in turn generate a more ecologically and aesthetically diverse suburban fabric.
The project approaches grassland reconnection through three lenses: the emotional, the temporal and the spatial. Emotional connection addresses the connection of grasslands to and through their surrounding human community and is explored through the creation of educational opportunities, increased human-grassland interactions and new visual identities. Temporality is exposed by tactically embedding grassland genetic stock into the suburban environment. Both inform the transformation of the spatial landscape, involving the conversion of existing anthropocentric suburban spaces into new networked spaces of reconnected grassland. The resulting patchwork plain aims to holistically integrate a suppressed ecology into our modern suburban framework, increasing the connection between the city – its people and form – and its landscape site.
