Millennial Urban Park Design in Melbourne and Wellington: How Divergent Colonial Foundations within the TransTasman Bubble Impact Landscape Practice

Despite their shared colonial origins, trans-Tasman comparisons of landscape architecture practice between Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand are rare. An oft-cited critical point of difference is the respective presence (New Zealand) and absence (Australia) of a treaty with indigenous nations of the land at the time of foundation, a scenario that we argue establishes distinct conceptualisations of urban park design during the 1990s and early 2000s. Whereas New Zealand designers are required by the Resource Management Act to respond to the obligations of the Treaty of Waitangi, the absence of decolonising legislation limits landscape architects in Australia, where government policy can easily override design aspirations for diverse conceptions of urban parks. This paper explores the implications of this difference on urban park design in the 19th-century cities of Melbourne (1835) and Wellington (1839), notably Birrarung Marr and Waitangi Park. The parks offer a critical lens to understand how each city’s foundation, along with evolving political, economic and ecological pressures, influence landscape practice from the 1990s onwards. At Birrarung Marr, we suggest the continued privileging of Melbourne’s colonial landscape aesthetic – and the transformative economic policy of the Victorian Government in the 1990s – strongly influence the spatial, ecological and programmatic attributes of this urban park. While similarly influenced by economic reform, Waitangi Park marks a divergent approach, blending cultural symbolism, active programming and performative ecology enabled through New Zealand’s decolonising policy framework. Nevertheless, in the absence of legislative change in Australia, we speculate that emerging climate scenarios have potential for impacting future counterfactual design outcomes in Melbourne, acknowledging the ongoing evolution of the city’s multi-layered cultural and ecological systems.