Big ambitions to improve Sydney and Melbourne sites of significance

And, as Kirsten Bauer, global design director with ASPECT, the landscape studio that with other design consortiums is involved in both schemes, points out, Sydney Cove and the higher bank of the Yarra above a rock ledge that once separated fresh from saline water, “were both source points for Indigenous people and for our colonial settlement”.

“We’re returning now to resolve these places that both have a connection to water”.

The announcements that the two projects will proceed and which creative agencies they will involve are just the starting gun. 

The Melbourne “Greenline” that couples two powerhouse landscape firms, ASPECT and TCL, as the lead design team, aims to unveil the master plan for a corridor promenade running from the Birrarung Marr parkland to the Docklands at Victoria Harbour by next year. 

“That will be a nitty-gritty of the engineering and planning of how we’re going to deliver it”, says Bauer. “The project will take a few years after that [to realise]”.

The $216 million Circular Quay Renewal – that will, in the long term, result in new ferry wharves, elevated public viewing platforms to “celebrate Sydney’s postcard views”, a more elegant station and improved retail and dining opportunities – brings together the admirable Tzannes architects, urban design architects Weston Williamson and Partners, and ASPECT for a collaboration that Transport for NSW says will result in a “landmark urban renewal project”. 

The Sydney and Melbourne projects will be advised by and will overtly acknowledge Indigenous use and connections to the deeper history of these places.

Although a staggered linkage along the CBD side of the Yarra River has been there for years, Perry Lethlean, managing director of TCL, says that “you are not invited along it”. Refreshing it as “a beautiful, varied and exciting – even surprising linear – edge will become an extension of Melbourne’s [existing] parks and gardens.

“That’s what we’re known for, those incredible public realm assets, and the Northbank has to be more of an immersive garden and botanical experience”.

As such an elongated project and traversing nodes with differing stories and atmospheres, experientially, the Greenline will be very different to the 80s-style urban promenade of Southbank. Says Kirstin Bauer, Greenline will be “more of a natural world reconnection with our actual environment. A celebration of bringing nature back into the city in a very palpable way and of repairing our connections.

“The biodiversity will mean we’ll be able to see and feel and interact with water, plants and wildlife … and the river. It will be a series of promenades with many different ways to experience them.” While the walkway will be continuous, “it will be a woven series of pathways. There will be places to inhabit and dwell and delight in being within the spaces”.

“It will be a great river promenade.”

Perry Lethlean, whose practice was involved 20 years ago in the making of Birrarung Marr, says “these projects don’t come along very often in terms of their impact on the city. It will make a profound point of difference to Melbourne. It is a transformative gift for the city and its river”.

As wonderful as a four-kilometre walk right through the heart of Melbourne will be, Lethlean muses that in future, an even longer Greenline could be feasible.

“It could extend through and around Docklands and link in a part of Melbourne that is not yet connected into the Melbourne story.”