Greenways as Indigenous Cultural Pathways: Healing Landscape and Peoples One Step at a Time in the South West of Western Australia

The South West of Western Australia (SWWA) is widely known as one of the world’s most biodiverse regions and a recognised biodiversity hotspot. However, since European colonisation approximately 200 years ago, this landscape has been cleared, fragmented and degraded at large and small scales, a problem magnified by being one of the planet’s most vulnerable locations to climate change. This region also hosts one of the world’s longest continuous cultures, the Nyungar people, who have lived in the SWWA for at least 38,000 years. However following colonisation Nyungar land management practices – that once connected the region’s Traditional Owners with place, including firestick farming and seasonal movement – have been mostly lost with consequences not only for the biological makeup and diversity of the region but also for their culture. Fortunately, a range of contemporary projects, policies and plans have emerged that endeavour to address both the region’s environmental challenges – including ecological fragmentation and species extinction – as well as aiming to reconnect the Nyungar peoples and traditional landscape practices with place. These projects provide a holistic vision to the challenge of improving landscape health and central to this practice is the continued maintenance of walking linkages across the landscape, through vegetated corridors or pathways, sometimes referred to as ‘songlines’. This research will introduce three SWWA project examples that at varying scales explore the intersection of Indigenous knowledge, culture and practice with green infrastructure planning across challenging, complex and contested urban and regional environments. This range of Greenways promote the experience of traversing landscapes on foot as a critical step toward the simultaneous healing of self, culture, community and landscape - embracing both ecological restoration as well as cultural and spiritual health. These emerging projects thereby propose an expanded and diverse spectrum of mutual benefits, offer greater buy-in from broad sectors of community and offer an additional tool toward implementation. While this research could appear specific to this part of the world, it offers contemporary examples for how to plan, design and visualise Greenways in order to deliver the widest diversity of benefits across landscapes in question; as well as a potential novel contribution to the Greenway typology, highlighting a new chapter in the ever-expanding and rich greenway (and green infrastructure) narrative

Group Work in Graduate Social Work Education: Where Are We Now?

This paper presents the preliminary results of a national survey assessing the extent of group work offerings within masters level social work programs in the United States. The study replicates and expands upon a 1994 investigation by Birnbaum and Auerbach. Findings are compared with the earlier study to identify changes and trends in group work education

Evolution and Evaluation of Contemporary Greenways and Green Infrastructure in Sydney, Australia

Greenways are as diverse in their contemporary forms as the geographical regions they sample. Within an Australian urban context this paper will outline how greenways have added to their culturally focussed intentions of recreation and active transport (Little, 1995; Walmsley, 1995) and could now be described as ‘green infrastructure’. Described by Benedict & McMahon (2006) as essential and life-supporting, Australian green infrastructure follows Europe’s lead (Jongman, Külvik, & Kristiansen, 2004) expanding the greenway remit to include vital hydrological functions (Ahern, 2007), the provision of valuable ecosystem services (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005) and a range of essential ecological benefits for urban regions across multiple scales. This paper begins by reviewing Sydney’s open space and greenway history, policy and planning and culminates with a detailed study of its most recent greenway proposal, the Sydney Green Grid (Schaffer, 2015). As a multi-functional green infrastructure this city-wide framework aims to create a strategic open space network; to reinforce sense of place between citizens and landscape; and to promote multifunctional environmental, health, social and economic benefits. A series of drawings then explored one strand of this network, the Mountains to the Sea greenway where the shift from large (city) to small (neighbourhood) scale was explored in detail, revealing a potential green infrastructure that offered a spectrum of critical ecological, hydrological, cultural and transportation benefits. However, it also revealed the existing complexities in implementing such a scheme in the contemporary city. This paper argues that it is both timely and relevant that greenways be considered and reframed as essential ‘green infrastructure’, however that such networks must also be interrogated through mapping and design methods such as those demonstrated herein in order to facilitate their implementation and adoption

Identifying and Classifying, Quantifying and Visualizing Green Infrastructure via Urban Transects in Rome, Italy and Sydney, Australia

Green Infrastructure is increasingly recognised as an approach to deliver a wide-ranging set of ecosystem services in cities and to operationalize concepts of urban resilience through the better delivery of urban planning, water sensitive urban design and a broad diversity of open space types. This paper argues that the first step in the delivery of effective Green Infrastructure planning and hence ecosystem services is the identification, visualisation and calculus of the full spectrum of existing open space types within urban contexts. To test this idea two case study cities – Rome and Sydney – were selected for their differing geographical origins and planning history. In each city an analysis of the urban fabric through a novel transect mapping process revealed a range of Green Infrastructure types including a diversity of open space, public parks and plazas, streetscapes, greenways and terrain vague. This began by analysing and comparing identified land-uses with existing planning rules, strategies and mechanisms within each city. Through this process we found that for each city significant differences were evident between the formally recognised urban open space and a range of potential additional Green Infrastructure candidates were identified. We then considered the potential recognition and activation of these spaces as critical pieces of overlooked Green Infrastructure into the metrics of a sustainable future city. Comparing these two cities against each other also confirmed the richness of Green Infrastructure types globally across both expanding and contracting cities and highlights differences in data precision, land policy, governance, nomenclature and urban conditions. This research posits that in the absence of the holistic and multi-faceted understanding, metrification and the visualisation of the diversity and distribution of green infrastructure in all its forms then progress towards implementation of robust and resilient cities and their urban ecosystem services will be limited

Synergistic Design: Detailing the Benefits of a Green Infrastructure Approach in a Western Australian Landscape

The National Green Network (NGN) (Kilbane 2013) is a continental-scale Green Infrastructure (GI) research project that spans the Australian continent (Fig. 1). The research intent is to create an ecologically robust and interconnected protected area network design to enhance the resilience of the nation’s landscape, biota and peoples. It prescribes a framework of ecological corridors and vegetated linkages as a structure for ecological connectivity and to meet protected area policy targets defined by the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD, United Nations Environment Program 2010) and the National Reserve System (NRS, Commonwealth of Australia & National Reserve System Task Group 2009). The NGN was conceived through a design based approach which included ecological modelling, ground truthing and detailed design stages. The ground-truth stage conducted within a 25 x 25km study area at York in south-western Australia. This location was chosen as an exemplar of the complexity needed to be addressed to create a robust system and to test the pragmatics of implementing the design. This led to confirmation of the NGN as an over-arching framework that was then broadly adjusted by participants through a design charrette workshop. The creation of a final detailed NGN design is the focus of this paper. While the research method thus far created a flexible and ground-truthed design, to ensure accurate, measurable and visualised outcomes further work was required. Three different final design options were considered in terms of relative costs and benefits. The final preferred design outcome represents a ‘middle ground’, a synergistic design outcome that offers multiple ecological benefits and an array of ecosystem services

Mudscape microcosm: the past, present, and future mud islands of Nairm

Mudscape microcosm: the past, present, and future mud islands of Nair