Blog

The Swamposium Reading Group’s first meeting was a wonderful space for discussing wetland research in Sydney, with a diverse group of academics, historians, artists, geographers, curators, and more joining us. Discussing Monty Hancock’s ‘Swamp City’ alongside Leah Gibbs’ ‘Water Places: Cultural, Social and More-Than-Human Geographies of Nature’, the discussion spanned water worlds, Sydney’s swampy infrastructure, ways of communicating complex ideas, and potential collaborations in future.

Don’t forget, if you’d like to be involved with the Reading Group, follow the links here to be included on our email chains and receive links to our readings.

Alexandra Crosby, Sarah Jane Jones, and Holly O’Neil, from the Surfacing Urban Wetlands, team will be travelling to Edinburgh to present their paper ‘Surfacing Wetlands Through Design Ethnography and Critical Visualisation’ at the DRS 2026 Conference.

We are excited to present this paper, connect with other design researchers, and listen to the other presentations at the DRS 2026.

We’re excited to be rejoining the Open Field Agency at their Field Rooms home to run a walkshop inspired by our discussions at Swamposium 2025.

Join us on the 8th of March 2026 for a walkshop to explore the watery connections between urban renewal at Waterloo and the Cooks River catchment. This will be a part of our continued effot to visualise and care for our watery city through empowering, just, creative and open participation.

Join the swamposium here!  

Urban Wetlands PhD researcher Holly O’Neil presented her paper ‘Disobedient Ecology: A productive and troublesome reframing of Sydney’s wetland entanglements’ at the 2025 ACAUDS conference.

We’re thrilled to celebrate Bangawarra‘s 10 year anniversary this year. Bangawarra is the embodiment of a unique partnership led by D’harawal eora Knowledge Keeper Dr Shannon Foster and Wugulora academic Jo Paterson Kinniburgh. The Bangawarra team is the bridge between the wisdom of Ancestral knowledge and contemporary design practices, committed to the sustainable stewardship of Country.

Bangawarra are uniquely positioned to consult on how to visualise and realise a connecting with Country approach for the three urban renewal sites.

Bangawarra provides advice on place-based design research on Country through Indigenous Research Methods, such as ‘walking up Country’ (Foster and Kinniburgh 2019) and yarning.

The OPA began in 2017 by artist Heidi Axelsen and architect Hugo Moline (MAPA). The OFA reframes public art as an ongoing, community-based project, working closely within the complex processes of urban redevelopment. This approach was conceived of for the Dank Street South Precinct after many discussions with locals and community organisations about how to maintain social and spatial openness of a place which is undergoing rapid transformation. In their discussions with the local community about the Dank Street South Precinct MAPA were faced with a series of questions:

• How can this place become and remain truly public?
• How can we bring together the voices of new and old communities and in process enrich a public space where all feel welcome?
• How can we harness the power of redevelopment to resist exclusive gentrification and make space for existing communities of First Nations, working class people and creatives in the city?
• How can we embed ongoing creation of culture here, now and into the future?

The event has led to the creative of the Swamposium Reading Group, and has paved the way for a series of walks in early 2026.

The urban wetlands team have worked with UTS’ ‘Creative Places’ grant to test out some of our research methodology and wayfinding design in place. Locating Ultimo’s long-gone Blackwattle Swamp, the team worked on a series of walks, AR activations, and place-based storytelling to resurface the creek that flowed (and still flows through the drains) to Wentworth Park.

We joined a unique event hosted by the NSW Branch of the Australian Marine Sciences Association (AMSA) on the Hawkesbury. It brought together researchers, councils, government, and community organisations with a shared interest in estuaries.

Over a delightful 2 hour river cruise down the Hawkesbury, attendees heard talks by researchers and industry leaders (including us), nibbled on snacks, and received a tour of river landmarks – all while networking and fostering a sense of community. We shared our work on urban wetlands and explained how better visualisation of wetlands and waterways could contribute to better care of these important ecosystems.

Huge thanks to the Hawkesbury Estuary Coastal Management Program councils for supporting the event, our AMSA NSW organiser and C-SERC colleague Carla Sbrocchi, for inviting us.

This years Institute of Australian Geographers conference explored how ’emergent geographies’ acknowledges the ways challenges arise out of complex interactions and behaviours that require greater emphasis on interdisciplinary thinking and approaches.

James Goodman and Ilaria Vanni, from the Surfacing Urban Wetlands team, presented at the conference. Goodman presented his paper, ‘Urban social movements and climate change: new ‘rights to the city’?’, and Vanni presented ‘Neighbourhood Ecologies. Design research for urban environments’ and ‘Capital, water, cities’.

Alexandra Crosby, Sarah Jane Jones and Holly O’Neil, from the Surfacing Urban Wetlands team, hosted their interactive workshop ‘Surfacing Urban Water’ at the AusSTS ‘Signals and Noise’ conference 2025 in Melbourne.

The workshop, reflected on how the visualisation of wetlands and waterways in cities fundamentally impacts how we imagine the urban environment and our role in caring for it. The team used the workshop to showcase their protocol to empower participants to ‘read’ their local ecologies and better connect to them through photodiagrams – a protocol based on ethnographic and visual communication methods. In the workshop, participants learnt how to make and use photodiagrams to read, analyse, document, and share watery urban ecologies.

The workshop took place at the National Communication Museum. The resulting photodiagrams were exhibited for the duration of the conference.

Read more about the conference here.

Holly O’Neil, our research assistant, shows off some of the results from our recent Sydney Park workshops as part of DrawSpace Gallery’s ‘Walk With Me’ exhibition. Showing layers of story, habitat, and history, the workshops invited participants to interact with the wetlands through drawing and noticing.

When is a tree not just a tree? and a drain not just a drain? When it’s a rain garden! Thanks to everyone who joined our Climate Action Week workshop on visualising urban ecologies. Climate Action comes in many different forms- the way we visualise nature in cities shapes how we see our role in caring for the urban environment, especially at this time of climate-driven environmental change, our engagement with urban ecologies is crucial.

In this workshop, participants learnt to use “photodiagrams” — a creative tool for reading, analysing, and sharing your local ecology. Explore the impact of climate change and uncover hidden stewardship practices in your neighbourhood.

Participants were asked to bring a photo and follow a series of steps to better understand and engage with urban ecologies!

To get your ticket, head to: https://events.humanitix.com/lightning-talks-creative-solutions-for-sustainable-futures-with-uts-visualisation-institute

From the 10^th to the 19^th of February 2025, team members Dr. Sarah Jane Jones and Holly O’Neil travelled to Melbourne for the annual Posthuman Summer Lab. The interdisciplinary laboratory explores the intersections between posthuman methods and First Peoples knowledges, in consultation with Boonwurrung elder N’arweet Professor Carolyn Briggs AM, and Professor Rosi Braidotti.

The lab itself was led by Dr Fiona Hillary (RMIT School of ARt) and Dr Troy Innocent (RMIT School of Design/ future play lab) and was a Planetary Civics Initiative. Over the lab, we developed place-based, collaborative projects to expand posthuman methods, to be published in a second book under the laboratory’s output. 

Participants are asked to bring to the workshop a photograph of an aspect of the environment in their own work or home neighbourhood.

11th of March at 11am, UTS Foyer.

The list of speakers included the Hon. Courtney Houssos; Senator Andrew Bragg; Prof. the Hon. Bob Carr; Trudi Mares ,the Deputy Secretary of Planning, Integration and Passenger, Transport for NSW; former Australian Ambassador to the USA, Arthur Sinodinos; the Hon. Paul Scully, MP and NSW Minister for Planning and Public Spaces; Grace Vegesana, National Director for the Australian Youth Climate Coalition; Estelle Grech, Planning Policy Manager at Committee for Sydney; and many more.

Crosby, A. L., Vanni, I. ., Jones, S. J., & O’Neil, H. (2024). Visually Communicating Artificial Urban Wetlands. M/C Journal, 27(6). https://doi.org/10.5204/mcj.3113

Urban wetlands in Australia are under threat, yet they provide benefits for climate change mitigation, pollution reduction, habitat provision, and socioecological connection. In what is now known as Sydney’s inner south and inner west, wetlands were significant places maintained by Aboriginal peoples for millennia (Foster). The violent colonial history that shaped Sydney unfolded along its extensive and dynamic wetlands and connecting waterways. Water was enclosed, drained, dammed, and channelled underground to service the city’s growth. “Unproductive swamps” were filled in for factories and housing.

Today, in an era of unprecedented urban growth, wetlands are making a comeback, with urban renewal projects incorporating artificial systems into water-sensitive urban design with shallow, densely planted ponds that help filter water through physical and biological processes. Artificial wetlands in densely populated areas are increasingly recognised for their effectiveness in reducing the runoff volume and the level of pollutants before stormwater enters urban creeks, rivers and oceans. They are “a key technology in the design of water-sensitive urban centres” (Fitzgerald 171).

Although some Sydney wetlands are revered and protected without question, such as the Ramsar-listed Towra Point Nature Reserve, others are undervalued as urban ecologies. Green infrastructure such as wildlife corridors, verges, rain gardens, pocket parks, and artificial wetlands are not well understood as being both on Country and connected to infrastructure (pipes and drains), ecosystems (critters, plants, and groundwater) and leisure activities (pets, sports, walking, running, and being together). It has been pointed out that focussing on wetlands only as habitat for waterbirds or iconic species “creates an exclusionary environmental protection practice that can have adverse consequences for an ecosystem intrinsically connected to its surroundings, as wetlands are” (McDonald and Gillespie 3).

In this article, we examine an artificial wetland at Sydney Park, adjacent to the Green Square urban renewal site. Through a visualisation method we call “photo diagramming” (Jones et al.), we ask the question: how might visual communication play a role in helping to make artificial wetlands more legible as socioecological systems?

First, we offer a brief history of Sydney Park, also describing how the artificial wetlands were designed. Then, we introduce our photo diagram, which shows how artificial wetlands operate as contact zones between the human-centred and more-than-human needs of cities, generating the edges necessary for recombinant ecologies to thrive (Crosby et al.). Finally, we explore what we can learn from a visual appreciation of artificial wetlands in urban Countries that might translate to other artificial yet beneficial aspects of urban environments.