In 2018 we completed an oral history project in Haberfield, NSW. The aim was to map, document and showcase the neighbourhood’s cultural diversity through interviews with gardeners and photographs of gardens. The gardeners were recruited through the Haberfield Association, among participants of the annual Haberfield Garden Competition, and other social networks. We approached oral history […]

Mapping Edges was invited to judge this year’s Haberfield Garden Competition. We walked with Inner West Greens Councillor Marghanita da Cruz looking at gardens in the ‘Kitchen’ and ‘Autumn’ categories.

Reason is a seed because, contrary to what modernity has insisted on believing, it is not the space of sterile contemplation, not the space of the intentional existence of forms, but the force that makes it possible for an image to exist as the specific destiny of a given individual. If we could think through […]

“Critical fabulations are ways of storytelling that rework how things that we design come into being and what they do in the world. They deconstruct design methods to open different understandings of the past that reconfigure the present, creating new opportunities for a just future” (17). In her book Critical Fabulations, Daniela K. Rosner eloquently […]

Nutmeg is everywhere in Banda, in jam, cakes, syrups, and curries.

Full disclosure: Tom Lee is my colleague down the hall at the School of Design where we work on interdisciplinary learning experiences. We have taught courses together on design thinking, design histories, and design futures. Tom is also a runner, and when I signed up for the City2Surf he was very encouraging. He has a […]

I was recently part of a special issue of M/C Journal on Walking. Of particular interest to our work is Chantelle Bayes’ article ‘The Cyborg Flâneur: Reimagining Urban Nature through the Act of Walking’. Bayes draws on the work of Debra Benita Shaw, Rob Shields and Donna Haraway to examine how the urban walking figure might be […]

We have had a busy few months of presentations. First was the 4S conference, the annual meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science, which had the theme this year of – TRANSnational STS – Mapping Edges joined the Composting Feminisms and Environmental Humanties panel with the paper ‘When plants design: multispecies entanglements in […]

We recently visited the Wayside Chapel’s Rooftop Garden in Kings Cross. With views across the parklands and the CBD, the 200 square metre garden is filled with over 50 different varieties of organic fruit, herbs and vegetables. It has rainwater tanks, solar panels, worm farms, a compost system and bee-hives. The gardens have a strong […]

Reposted from The Australian Interestingness Thank you Thomas Lee. In the introduction to James Hull and Bede Brennan’s Shit Gardens, the authors spell out an ambivalence concerning aesthetic evaluation that is core to the concept and production of the book. For the authors, ‘shit’ describes gardens which might initially appear “inexplicably bad”, then, with time, come to […]