 | RADARLANDSCAPE REINVIGORATING THE RURAL
URBAN INITIATIVES’ DIVERSE AND ONGOING WORK FOR THE CITY OF GREATER SHEPPARTON TAKES THE DAY-TO-DAY DEVELOPMENT OF THE PUBLIC DOMAIN SERIOUSLY. THE RESULT IS A HUMANE AND GENEROUS PUBLIC REALM.
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Roundabout.
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War Memorial, Civic Centre.
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Landscaping at the Eastbank Centre.
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The
central plaza, a new performing and public gathering
space, Maude Street Mall.
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Goulburn River
pedestrian and cycle bridge, by Urban Initiatives and
Sinclair Knight Merz, in Victoria Park Lake, the
municipality’s primary open space.
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Entry
garden at Victoria Park Lake.
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Detail of the new
square in Victoria Park Lake.
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Street furniture.
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Skate park in Victoria Park Lake, designed by
Aspect.
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Details of the memorial stonework.
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THERE IS A saying from the planning stages for freeways through rural areas, about
whether a town deserves an off-ramp or not. “Does it have the 3 Ps?: Can you get petrol?
Can you get a pie? Can you take a piss?” Shepparton – a city located on the floodplain of the
Goulburn River in country Victoria, with a population of 56,000 people – does have an
off-ramp, but as a rural centre it is still affected by such forces. The Melbourne landscape
architecture practice Urban Initiatives has been working on public projects for the City of
Greater Shepparton for four years. Their work has been very broad, from policy to streetscape
design to detailed design of signage, bridges, parks, memorials, malls and building context for
municipal buildings.
These projects comprise a comprehensive and systematic upgrading of the city fabric.
The programme of work is not dissimilar to that undertaken in the capital cities, in which an
infrastructure of public landscape underlies the city’s aspirations to consolidate itself as an
economic entity based around a modern quality of life for its citizens. And while rural Australia
is still recovering from a twenty-year red brick paving frenzy, much of it initiated by allegedly
heritage-sensitive landscape architects, Urban Initiatives has developed a design language for
Shepparton that is self-consciously modern, deviating strikingly from the general synthetic
heritage approach of most country towns.
The economic decline of rural Australia has been well documented. It is not simply an
issue of towns improving themselves, but a matter of their entire sense of identity. The tourism
industry has long been looked to by country towns for salvation, but there are only so many
Berrimas and Burras, so what of the rest of the towns struggling to survive? In this context,
the efficacy of design in the country is an important question, particularly for landscape
design, which has been undertaking heritage-based improvement schemes for country towns
for the last fifteen years, generally with little success or finesse. The process has, at best,
been one of amplification, of seizing upon motifs or fragments of specificity and building them
into some tangible, readable “sense of place” (although more often than not this is actually
sheer invention). Country towns now prefer to be known as “regional” rather than “rural” and,
as corporate entities, need branding help – places have become products. Like councils and
subdivisions in the city, the canvas for municipal branding is the public landscape, and so in
the regional context, the job of the landscape architect, as in the city, is the creation of
branded civic infrastructure.
The work of Urban Initiatives in Shepparton is interesting not for its design quality –
although that is consistently elegant – but rather for its ability to provide the consistency of
treatment that is required of urban infrastructure and, simultaneously, to allow for significant
difference and to deal with site eccentricity. This view of the landscape as simply another
municipal infrastructure or service is both confronting and potentially liberating. On the one
hand, such a view questions the importance of design in delivering public space, if it is simply
for quantitative functional provision. On the other hand, it gives a substance to landscape
architecture, assuring it a functional relevance that its fickle garden roots disallow.
Most designers of any persuasion, and the public in general, would agree that the
provision of public space of consistently high quality is as vital as ever. But the argument for
consistency is much more contentious in design terms. While Sydney has opted (admittedly
post-Melbourne) for a design language that allows individual urban public space projects to be
distinctly different, while maintaining a basic materials palette, Melbourne has favoured
consistency to a much more restrictive degree, to the point where the quality is now
monotonously good but rarely excellent. Urban Initiatives has been involved in much of this
work for the City of Melbourne, but the practice’s policies in Shepparton have been noticeably
freer and more adaptable.
The Shepparton work uses consistent materials and types of detailing, as well as colours
of course – a hallmark of all urban branding these days (blue and silver for Shep). But the
policies allow a usage which, although actually quite conservative, becomes radical in the
rural context. In critiquing projects that result from a policy-based system it is difficult to
separate the success or failure of the projects from a discussion of the system. The question
becomes, how has the system allowed for some design excellence while also exhibiting
uniformity? Unfortunately, the colour blue comes forward as the most consistent thing among
the Shepparton projects, as well as a particular stylization of detail, which begins to appear
almost as a caricature of itself. However, that said, the quality of design is high and restrained,
even if that restraint makes the projects seem a bit too fiddly and pretentious for what is still
fundamentally a country town.
Above all the work is humane, as if the designers of the individual projects considered
whether they should treat Shepparton any differently from the way they would the city, and
correspondingly gave Shep as good as they would a City of Melbourne project. The work is
contemporary public domain work, no better, no worse. The pertinent issue is as much to do
with what has developed into a default approach to the urban landscape, based around kits of
parts and their consistent deployment, as it is to do with a specific design solution for a place.
The strength of Urban Initiatives’ work in Shepparton is that it understands both the nature
and opportunities of these kinds of briefs in a way that values design, and then undertakes
them earnestly and humanely.
JULIAN RAXWORTHY IS A LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT AND FREE-RANGE ACADEMIC.
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