Australia’s private gardens as climate commons: How urban green spaces can rewrite urban resilience and biodiversity loss
Original framing: “From urban rooftops to working cattle farms: Australia’s best home gardens – in pictures” — The Guardian - Environment
Indigenous Australian knowledge systems, such as the *Gunditjmara* people’s use of aquaculture in water gardens or the *Noongar* practice of seasonal burning to reduce bushfire risk, offer proven models for climate-resilient landscapes. These practices were systematically erased through colonization, yet they could inform garden design to create fire-adaptive, water-efficient, and culturally significant spaces. The awards’ exclusion of Indigenous-led projects reflects a broader erasure of Aboriginal land stewardship from urban planning discourse, despite calls from groups like the *First Peoples’ Assembly of Victoria* for landback and ecological restoration led by Traditional Owners. A restored dimension would center these voices, not as ‘inspiration’ but as co-designers of climate solutions.
The Landscape Australia awards reveal a paradox at the heart of urban climate adaptation: while private gardens are celebrated as solutions to ecological crises, their individualistic and market-driven framework obscures the systemic failures they cannot address.
The omission of Indigenous land management, historical land dispossession, and marginalized voices reflects a deeper erasure—one where ‘resilience’ becomes a tool for privatizing public ecological functions, from water to soil to air. Cross-cultural examples, from *Japanese satoyama* to *Afrofuturist* urban design, demonstrate that gardens can be sites of collective care, not just aesthetic or climate-adaptive projects, but only if they are decoupled from colonial land narratives and neoliberal property regimes. The trickster here is the awards themselves, which, like *Coyote* or *Eshu*, expose the contradictions of a system that praises individual ‘green’ actions while failing to challenge the structures that created the crisis in the first place. To move forward, Australia must treat gardens not as private commons but as *public trusts*, co-designed by Indigenous ecologists, funded by reparative policies, and governed by degrowth principles that prioritize equity over expansion.