Country-Centred Design Puts Projects on World Stage

History, traditions and the culture of a place can help position developments on a world stage to the benefit of developers.

But often it can be difficult to know where to begin with incorporating the cultural history and traditions of the country where a project is. 

Sometimes the assumption might be that there isn’t a tradition or history associated with the site but Greenaway Architects director and Wailwan/Gamilaraay man Jefa Greenaway refutes that.

“This island continent is not devoid of meaning,” he told a The Urban Developer’s Urbanity conference on Thursday.

“Every part, every square millimetre of this land has meaning.

“There’s nothing we cannot explore on this land in terms of an opportunity for design.”

Greenaway noted that there had been a lot of work done to provide a method for country-centred design with the creation of an International Indigenous Design Charter.

The charter lays out 10 key principles: that design be Indigenous-led, self-determined, community specific, use deep listening, consider the impact of design, include both Indigenous knowledge and shared knowledge, develop cultural competency, implement a charter and be legal and moral in scope. 

“It is now a best practice document for the International Council of Design and as a co-author we spent a decade with First Nations people around the world,” Greenaway said.

Those principles were used when designing part of the New Student Precinct for the University of Melbourne at Parkville, which was completed in 2022. 

The site was designed by a consortium of architects including Greenaway with five buildings, landscape and urban design part of the remit.

“What we started with was this understanding of those layers of history of this particular place,” Greenaway said.

▲ Jeff Greenaway speaking at The Urban Developer's flagship conference Urbanity 2024.

Greenaway said that they spoke to Indigenous people, elders and students, and collected stories and traditions about the site and its surroundings. 

In doing so, they found out that current existing stormwater pipes underground were once waterways used by eels to migrate downstream. 

This was used in the design—a pathway through the precinct buildings was created to follow the waterways and an amphitheatre was built using local materials to allow a gathering space for the different peoples of the Kulin Nation. 

“We created new desire lines in terms of new pathways through the buildings and started to create an amphitheatre, a place of gathering,” Greenaway said.

The entire precinct with its different projects and architects went on to be finalist at the World Architecture Festival in 2023 and swept the Australian Institute of Architects’ National Architecture Awards in 2023, winning the Walter Burley Griffin Award for Urban Design, the National Award for Heritage Architecture, the Victorian Architecture Medal, the Henry Bastow Award for Educational Architecture, the Joseph Reed Award for Urban Design, and the Heritage Architecture Award for Creative Adaptation.

Greenaway said that the project gaining national and global attention gave them an opportunity to change a narrative of what a city’s identity is.

“It’s not about the accolades; it’s about what it does for the city,” Greenaway said.

“It starts to tell new stories, stories that are otherwise not typically told and it becomes a really important capacity building opportunity to unashamedly tell our stories.”

But above all that it allows a way forward for tapping into Indigenous knowledge systems, addressing one of Greenaway’s key points.

“Whether its infrastructure projects, cultural projects, residential projects, they are all centred and geolocated on country,” Greenaway said. 

“And so whether we are in a major metropolis like Sydney, Melbourne or Brisbane, we are always on country.

“And so to that end we need to acknowledge that we are building on Indigenous lands.”