From Creeks to Communities - What Placemakers Learned When They Started with the Land
- Place Leaders Asia Pacific
- Jul 3
- 8 min read
Updated: Jul 3
Placemaking can talk big about environmental outcomes but get stuck at tree planting, rain gardens, and recycled footpaths. These three Award-winning projects showed what happens when environmental values aren’t 'tacked on'.
One is a 18,000-dwelling suburb
One is a post-disaster waterway
One is a handful of garden beds in a suburban laneway
What ties these projects together is that they’re environmental placemaking - not just environmental planning - and that distinction matters.
These projects show that placemakers can’t retrofit trust, and can’t outsource care, but can create the conditions where both occur. When that happens, people become more than 'stakeholders' in sustainability, they become its most powerful stewards - and that’s what environmental placemaking looks like.
In June’s Environmental Placemaking Community of Practice hosted by Place Leaders Asia Pacific, placemakers, designers, planners, academics, and engagement experts from Across Australia and NZ gathered virtually (some with wine, some with soup!) and enjoyed an fun and practical conversation about what it takes to build resilience into place.
As always, these weren’t PR case studies, they are Award-winning working examples of what it takes to build ecological thinking, cultural respect, and long-term stewardship into place, combined with honest 'warts-and-all' insights from the practitioners who made it happen.
Strathnairn: A suburb shaped by the land, not just built on it
We started big with Strathnairn, the first of four suburbs for Ginninderry, an 18,000-home sustainable development that crosses the ACT and NSW border.
This is Canberra’s first all-electric suburb ... and that in itself is a win. Already 2,300 residents have settled in and therre's thousands more to come. Strathnairn is sustainable by design and regenerative by intention.
Matt Frawley walked us through the project’s values-led beginnings.
“We made a decision very early on in the project that we would not develop 600 hectares of our land because of the ecological and cultural values of that land… we had to make early decisions before the numbers made sense. But in hindsight? It’s the very thing that makes people want to live here.” - Matt Frawley
Long before a house was built, 600 hectares of the 1,600-hectare site was set aside for its ecological, cultural, and recreational value. That didn’t happen because legislation required it, it happened because the project team decided that the land came first. They did it because if you’re really creating an ecological suburb, it's the right thing to do.
This corridor runs across the ACT and NSW border, requiring a management model that could operate across jurisdictions. With neither ACT nor Yass Valley Council in a position to take on its long-term care (due to complexity and cost), the Ginninderry project team established a dedicated Conservation Trust, funded through:
1% of all Ginninderry land sales
A portion of ACT rates revenue
A special rates levy applied to NSW residents within the development (Yass Valley Council area)
This model locked in environmental preservation and stewardship without relying on grant cycles or being subject to shifting policies.
“Because the land crossed the ACT-NSW border, we had to come up with a new model to manage it, one that could ensure long-term stewardship and reflect its cultural and ecological importance.” - Matt Frawley
Recycled water wetlands irrigate streets and parks, tree canopy targets were linked to active pollinator corridors, and public and active transport were built into the master plan. Streets are up to 10 degrees cooler than neighbouring suburbs due to mature tree retention, light-coloured surfaces, and water-sensitive landscaping. Also, every home is solar-ready, and community batteries are on the way.
“We looked at energy and how we could make a difference with energy use. We were the first suburb and development in the ACT to go to all electric, so no gas. In the ACT that required a change of legislation. It was about three years of negotiation to achieve that.” - Matt Frawley
Planning for Ginninderry began in 2006, and Strathnairn welcomed its first residents in 2020. To get these outcomes, the project team spent many years listening, planning, adapting, and co-designing with First Nations knowledge holders, scientists, and locals.
“Strathnairn also became the first community in the ACT and Capital Region to achieve a 6 Star Green Star Communities rating from the Green Building Council of Australia, a testament to the project's triple bottom line thinking and world-class benchmarks for liveability, ecology, and governance.” - Awards nomination
The project is delivered by the Ginninderry Joint Venture, a partnership between Riverview Projects (a private developer), and the ACT Government (via the Suburban Land Agency). The project is profitable and that profit is being achieved while redefining how large-scale sustainable communities are planned, governed, and delivered.
When you're next in the ACT, set aside an hour and walk the wetlands, visit ‘The Link’ community and information centre (or take this virtual tour), and say 'g'day' to a resident ranger.
Kedron Brook: From Flooded to Fearless
While Strathnairn’s story is one of long-term vision, Kedron Brook in Brisbane is a story of urgent repair, but just as inspiring.
Brooke Williams from Fourfold Studio shared that when Kedron Brook flooded in 2022, it eroded community confidence as much as it eroded the creekbanks - backyards collapsed, residents turned to concrete and boulder treatments in desperation, and households were quoted hundreds of thousands of dollars for private repairs.
Three key project partners - Fourfold Studio, Healthy Land & Water, and Bligh Tanner - saw a different way forward: a chance to rethink what recovery really means. Kedron Brook was a flood recovery project on paper, but what made it award-winning was that the team didn’t treat it as a straight-up engineering solution. With funding from the Commonwealth-State Disaster Recovery Funding Arrangements (DRFA), they walked the creek with residents, listened, shared stories ... and gave out gloves.
On the first site walk with residents after the flood …
“...we got to the bridge and it was quite a powerful moment when all of the community was sharing all of their stories ‘This is what happened. This is where I was.’ Someone was saying they had a container of golf balls had washed up in their yard and then another resident’s saying, ‘Yeah, you know that’s ours - we live up the road.’ And so all these new neighbourhood connections are happening.” - Brooke Williams
Workshops followed covering everything from weed identification to geomorphology. Residents were given site-specific maps, tools, and ongoing support. The language wasn’t technical, and the tone wasn’t patronising.
“The workshops totally changed our perspective… We had been quoted $300K. After talking with the team, we felt confident we could do the work for far less and without big machines.” - Local resident
By the second workshop, 94% of workshop participants said they felt confident to apply what they’d learned themselves on their own land. The project team created self-guided toolkits, weed ID cards, mapped backyards, and offered planting tools to take home.
Rather than forming a brand-new bushcare group or support structures, the team leveraged and strengthened existing local groups, such as:
Future Dreaming Australia (led by a local Bindal woman and cultural specialist)
Other informal, local stewardship efforts
“This wasn’t about creating a new group, it was about connecting people to the local champions and existing networks that were already there.” - Brooke Williams
This is a key in place-based approach: you don’t need to build a new organisation to build capacity, you need to build trust in the people already there. Residents stopped fearing the creek when they started understanding it, and when they had a sense of shared responsibility, they began acting as stewards.
Flood resilience is an emotional issue as much as it is an engineering and environmental issue, because when people feel they have agency, as Brooke shared with us, they respond with stewardship.
Eight Concrete Boxes: a Blueprint for Stewardship!
Whitlam Gardens was the smallest project featured in the Environmental Placemaking Community of Practice but it’s a spot-on example of what everyone in placemaking knows: the micro can be mighty!
Eight oversized concrete planters were installed behind a row of townhouses in Canberra as part of an early-stage Greenfield rollout. They sat there for a while: dry, uninspiring, not particularly loved, and mostly ignored.
Then the team from the Suburban Land Agency’s Mingle program showed up. Led by the Place Delivery and Thriving Communities groups, this microproject is an award-winning masterclass in trust-based placemaking. Sophie Peer and Tulitha (Tully) King shared how they supported residents to transform these neglected concrete planter boxes into a community-led garden space.
“Everything is about relationship, really ….We move at the speed of trust.”- Tully King
They started with curiosity and a willingness to talk to residents and to let the space grow into what the community needed.
“The ethos of Mingle is that we start with relationships. Out of those relationships, the activity is born.” Tully shared, “We just started being there. No big agenda. Just showing up. Digging. Talking. Listening.”
Workshops with horticulture experts like Ainslie Urban Farms followed. These workshops were about gardening, but really about skill-building, confidence, and ownership. Residents learned how to test soil, plant seasonally, and manage watering rosters. This grew trust between neighbours, and across cultures, languages, and generations. One resident brought in traditional planting practices from her home country, and another offered to translate workshop instructions.
“We pivoted from a working bee to a workshop,” said Sophie. “And that shift was key. People want to feel like they’re learning something, not just giving their time.”
Residents also learned how to share and manage a space respectfully, and how to handle conflict when kids nick your cucumbers!
One Housing ACT resident went from a hesitant participant to lead volunteer and now plays a key role in keeping the garden alive and welcoming new gardeners.
The success of Whitlam Gardens is now informing two new garden projects: one in Lawson (where the community will co-design the garden), and another in Kenny (where circular economy and biodiversity will be a foundational part of the project).
If you’ve worked in local government, you know that shared assets can be tricky (and sometimes fraught!), but this project showed that placemaking is about delivering a process and much as it is about delivering a product. Sophie and Tully showed us that design must follow community, not the other way around.
“We’re done designing stuff and then ‘activating’ it,” said Sophie. “We start with people, and design around them.”
What did we learn about Environmental Placemaking?
1. Lead with Land, Stay with People
Start with the land and then build systems of stewardship that centre people in its care. These Award-winning outcomes came from listening to place first. Each project treated land as a living system with memory and meaning and then matched that with a real investment in people. It’s that combination of ecology and empathy where the environmental placemaking approach makes all the difference.
2. Trust Is the Glue
Placemakers don’t rush community. They show up, shut up (sometimes), and do the ‘slow work’ (as Tully King said) of relationship-building: through presence, patience, and relationships. These projects show that lasting place outcomes follow from first building lasting relationships.
3. Design for Custodianship, Not Just Use
Maintenance plans are great, but ownership is what keeps places alive. In each of these projects, conditions were created where people feel a personal, ongoing responsibility for the place. That doesn’t happen through signage or once-off consultation.
What’s Next?
As one participant at the Environmental Placemaking Community of Practice wrote in the chat, “These examples were really handy to think outside the box - and highlight the importance of partnerships and taking the community on a journey.”
These placemakers showed us that we don’t need to wait for permission to lead with values, and that relationships matter. So when you go back to your team, your draft plans, and your procurement headaches, ask: what would his look like if we just started with the land?
Feeling Inspired?
Want to dive deeper into environmental placemaking or grow your green infrastructure skillset? Explore Place Leaders’ ‘Place Resilience’ micro-credential - developed with industry, delivered through university, and designed for practitioners like you.
And if you’re not already part of the Place Leaders Asia Pacific community, now’s the perfect time to join. Membership for 2025-26 is open. Membership gains you a complimentary ticket to the Place Leaders' Urban Leaders Summit, complimentary Awards submissions, and much more (including access to full video recordings of Community of Practice events). Let’s keep sharing, learning and building places that matter.
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