From grey to green – by popular demand

Sacha Coles is one of the most recognised names in landscape architecture. He’s working on some very large city shaping projects. In this interview he shares his views about the drivers behind this big shift in thinking.

Sacha Coles feels privileged to be deeply excited about his work. The factors and influences that are driving and shaping landscape architecture and urban design at this time are fascinating, and have created a prosperous context for Aspect Studios, the practice he’s made flourish.

“What we’re seeing as a trend is the humanisation of and the re-culturing of cities, whether it’s through music and the arts, or landscape and biophilia,” he says.

“This is not just happening in Australia. This is happening globally. It’s definitely a trend where the value of open space and landscape is skyrocketing, or being given the respect that it should have always been given, because of the outcomes it provides.

“People are talking about the value of public space to a whole strata of different outcomes. These include wellbeing, mental health, physical health, activity, inclusiveness, cultural sensitivity, climate and cooling cities. These are all a massive part of what we do.”

ASPECT Studios – the practice

Coles has played a central role in transforming Aspect from a small landscape design studio in Sydney in 1999, into a vibrant international practice. It now has 250 staff working across nine offices in six countries, with a global team of landscape architects, urban designers, architects, wayfinding specialists, strategists, and graphic designers.

Its projects range from complex large-scale city-shaping works, to small individual spaces, both nationwide and internationally.

One example is the Circular Quay renewal, which will transform what he says is “Sydney’s most potent place” in terms of First Nations culture, identity, stories and trauma.

Another is the Greenline Project in Melbourne, which is currently one of the Victorian state government’s largest public infrastructure projects. It will link precincts on the northern bank of the Yarra River together via a series of walkways, cycling paths, open spaces and bridges. “It’s a massive vision – it might take 20 years but will change the city dramatically,” Coles says.

Overseas is the Urban Gallery in Chengdu, China. This 2.4 kilometre multi-level linear “sky park” has replaced an unused carpark, and includes an urban promenade, ”water carpet” landscape and performance gallery. It’s the type of project that can “bring a hell of a lot more greenery into an otherwise pretty grey series of cityscapes in modern cities.”

It’s a global movement

Coles believes that one of the driving forces behind these ambitious, complex, large scale landscape and urban design projects is a worldwide citizen led movement.

“There is an expectation now that people and communities globally expect more from their cities. And they understand that public projects, like open space, greenery and parks, as well as other aspects like great public transport, can transform the feeling of pride in a city.

“There are so many benefits to the thoughtful planning and delivery of public space at scale that everyone accepts now.” These include connecting suburbs and communities, inviting different people back into cities, slowing down traffic, and providing facilities like playgrounds, walking and cycling tracks, and biodiversity corridors.

Coles says that globally there’s the debate around health and climate change spurring action.

“People know this and governments realise that the imperative to act is on us, immediately. We’ve got extreme heat, El Nino, wildfires and floods. These things have massive health and societal impacts, and they are big landscape issues, big systems issues. And we need to get them right.

“So how can our cities and urban places help in terms of cooling, in terms of providing more respite and healthier places?”

We can do this at a large city transformation level by going from grey to green.

The housing crisis and other driving factors

There are other big influencing and interlinked factors driving these expansive open space projects, Coles says – among them political cycles, increasing urbanisation and density, and  the housing  crisis.

These are stresses that start to weight on political imperatives.

If you have density, you need open space you need parks

Public transport and big infrastructure have an impact housing affordability, for example.  “Every time you build a metro station, the urban thinking is to build density at that place. And if you have density, you need open space, you need parks.”

Indeed “doing density well” by facilitating “housing diversity in high amenity locations near jobs,

transport and infrastructure” is one of the key strategies in the Planning Institute of Australia’s 2023 report on housing affordability.

He also believes that, as a landscape designer, it’s important to engage with the tough projects that aren’t always at the centre of a brief. “These are often infrastructure and transport projects. If you do these well, you can have the biggest impact on cities and the way people live.”

Designing with Country

Another driving force which Coles has seen develop over the past seven years in Australia is incorporating First Nations design and Indigenous knowledge into its work.

There are now guidelines in place, such as the NSW government’s Connecting With Country framework that have  completely changed the way clients, city makers, developers, councillors and authorities think about the projects they’re doing – through the lens of Country.

“This is bloody brilliant and a radical change that I haven’t seen in my previous 20 years of practice. I don’t think we’re quite there yet, everyone’s still working out what it all means. But what it does do is push landscape, Country, and the importance of caring for systems and nature to the front of every project.

“This is giving us more licence to think sensitively and learn about landscape through the lens of a culture which has been teaching and learning about it for over 60,000 years.”

Aspect is working with a wide range of First Nations designers, architects and traditional knowledge owners to gain input into their projects nationwide. In terms of the people and communities they are collaborating with, “it actually comes down to the right people, the right stories for each particular place. It’s so specific to mob from that place,” he says.

You need patience to survive and thrive with mega projects and diversification

Largescale projects come with many complexities, including large and diverse stakeholder groups, changing government priorities and ideologies, long approval timeframes, and enormous budgets. Aspect’s approach to thriving in this environment is threefold. The first is to practise patience: “It’s like a garden, like a tree growing in our industry. It takes time,” Coles says.

The second is to diversify. This practice has built a high level of resilience by covering both a wide range of geographic locations and types of projects. As well as its portfolio of cityscale works, it undertakes smaller transformations of individual spaces, bringing nature into forecourts, squares, plazas and laneways.

Back to the office projects

For example, there is a growing market for projects to attract people back into cities and offices post-COVID, such as the Berry Square project in North Sydney, which transformed a concrete forecourt into a small urban park. “It’s full at lunch time, which is no surprise because there’s lounges and grass to lie on. People kick their shoes off. It’s a beautifully designed, high quality place.”

The third is to use innovative approaches to produce work.

“If there’s not the right project out there for us, we try to create it.”

The company’s recent Brisbane proposal, titled The River Rethink, is a conceptual work redefining Brisbane’s relationship with its main river in the lead-up to the 2032 Olympics. This Aspect initiative follows a similar proposal in Perth, and is aimed at generating discussion around improving public spaces, while bringing in bigger issues such as equity, inclusivity and climate change, and their impact on landscape.

Awards and favourite projects

Coles visited Singapore this year for the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) Annual Awards, where Aspect took out the 2023 Urban Habitat Award for the Quay Quarter Lanes project in Sydney.

In terms of a favourite project though, he insists that he doesn’t have one. “Projects are like children. You can’t have favourites, you know.

“Sometimes you go back to them and you’re just so proud of how they’ve grown, and it fills you with pride and joy, like a child. That’s exactly how I feel with my projects.”