Repairing Memory & Place

An Indigenous-led approach to urban water design.

Photo: Brian Martin, The Agency of Bunggabi (trees), 2021

This project is funded by the Australian Research Council (Linkage project, PURE ID: 325428015).  We aim to integrate Indigenous ways of knowing with urban water management by pioneering an interdisciplinary approach that enmeshes Indigenous practice with mainstream water management techniques. It expects to generate new knowledge in urban water management by using Indigenous-led methodologies and design. Expected outcomes include new tools for urban water management and a framework for engaging Indigenous water-management expertise. This should provide significant benefits by enabling the repair of ecological and cultural memory of place and enabling government agencies to apply Indigenous practices to everyday urban water management towards a more sustainable water future.

Australian cities are Indigenous places. Indigenous ways of knowing, however, are largely absent in Australian urban policies and practices. Australian cities were founded on the unceded lands and waters of Indigenous Peoples. The city’s built environment has been uncritically centred on planning, architecture and engineering practices that displace Indigenous memory and materiality The notion of ‘the urban’ is a legacy of colonial propositions about place. In recent years, along with the fight for recognition of Indigenous groups and their sovereignty, the need for Indigenous Urbanism and Indigenous urban design to think with and about the city have emerged. Indigenous Urbanism is about the ‘unsettling’ of the city by creating opportunities for Indigenous peoples for them to be recognised as place owners and makers. This type of active and inclusive urban design is a project to claim, reclaim and revitalise urban spaces as sustainable, resilient, and decolonised.. Indigenous practitioners and scholars have put forward an approach to design practices centred on the relationship to Country: the Australian Indigenous Design Charter, establishing a framework for respectful and ethical collaboration with Indigenous people and place. This project builds on The Charter to explore new modes of integrating Indigenous ways of knowing in urban design and planning, specifically the water spaces. Water in this project is conceptualised as a social and natural presence in the city with legacies of past water bodies and inflows that remain in memory, in stories and archives and that have also left material traces of their paths. The focus of this project on Indigenous water urban design responds to the urgent need to better manage water events such as flooding, water pollution and water scarcity and to better protect water ecologies and cultural water sites and their memories.

This project will elevate Indigenous urban water design as an approach for reconceptualising and better using urban space in Australian cities. In collaboration with our partners Melbourne Water and Museums Victoria, the project focuses on two main areas within Melbourne: City of Port Phillip and City of Bayside. The project will directly benefit Melbourne’s urban environment by developing more sustainable water management systems able to cope with continued changes in water conditions, with findings indirectly benefiting other Australian cities. By producing an integrated water management model – premised on the importance of Country and embodying the interconnected, above and below-ground flows of water – this project will have environmental benefits for biodiversity and water ecologies, economic benefits from a better understanding of flood conditions in the city, and socio-cultural benefits through better protection of culturally significant sites and systems.