Orlando is an urban designer with UrbanFold, the boutique design and master planning practice working on the Gungahlin Homestead Estate. The firm came to Canberra because of what is happening here around custodianship of land. For Orlando, regenerative design is not a technique applied at the end of a process. At its heart it is about improving the health of the ecology, of Country, and of the people and places that exist on the land.
The method starts with Country. Understanding the site, its ecologies and its long history alongside First Nations people, then building outward with systems thinking. How water moves across the site. How biodiversity works. How the microclimate behaves. Housing, heritage and places for people are layered onto that foundation, rather than the other way around.
What it replaces is a habit the industry has fallen into.
"Too much of what we've done is we've said, okay, they're threatened species, let's put a fence around it. And we create a zoo."
The alternative he describes is an ecosystem where species live alongside one another with some respect between them, rather than being sectioned off into reserved pockets. It also changes what finished means. A masterplan built on this thinking is an ongoing process, one that will run for years before anybody moves in.
"An evolving place. Not a place that is finished the day you stop building."
He is candid that regenerative design at this scale is close to untested in Australia, and that the practical delivery is where the difficulty sits. It will take energy and it will take passion. But the test he sets for the work is a personal one.
"To a large extent we're designing for the place that we want to live in, that we could see ourselves ageing through our last phase of life."
Custodianship, on his account, does not stop at land, species and flora. It extends to people. A place where everyone can thrive regardless of what stage of life they have reached, and a home worth coming back to.
We acknowledge the Ngunnawal People as the Traditional Custodians of the land on which Gungahlin Homestead Estate sits, and pay our respects to Elders past and present.
