Alice has been a resident of Alexandria since 2020. She speaks mainly Italian at home. She has a strong sense of community, believing that belonging is about the small things: people who are interested in their neighbours, the local coffee place where they pronounce her Italian name correctly, and being one of the many local […]

Maria Fernanda Cardoso is a Sydney-based Colombian artist and gardener. In 2018, she created While I Live I Grow, a project referencing the former wetlands in Green Square that sustained the first industry in the area. The artwork, which is located at multiple sites around Green Square, is a living installation of Australian native bottle […]

Climate scientist Maquel Brandimarti has lived in a cottage on Belmont Street for the past 10 years. An avid gardener, Maquel recently completed a PhD on kangaroo ecologies at the University of Sydney. In her back garden there are chickens in a coop and a resident ringtail possum. The garden is shaded by a big […]

One of the most unexpected green spaces in Rosebery is the verge along Princess Avenue. Here, native trees and grasses mix with flowers, edible herbs and succulents, and front gardens vary from the abundant to the minimalist and the manicured to the whimsy. But it wasn’t always this way. David bought his warehouse in the […]

Rosebery Honey is a home honey business run by Rosebery residents Fiona and Michael. It’s a small operation – the couple have beehives in their backyard and sell their honey from a stand out the front of their house. The business was born when a swarm of bees took up residence in their possum box, […]

Garnet, Tony and Mary are part of Green Square Growers (GSG), a community gardening group that cultivates beds at Joynton Avenue and Tote Park. According to Tony, Green Square is home to a very mixed demographic that includes busy full-time workers and their unemployed or retired counterparts, which means residents have varying amounts of time […]

Jennifer is the Culture and Pathways Manager at 107 Green Square, which is located at Joynton Avenue Creative Centre. She describes Green Square as an evolving and transitional place. ‘Green Square is really forming its community and the connections between what is here, what is happening and what is to come,’ she says. When Jennifer […]

This is an experiment we did with our colleague Sydney Newtown from the School of Built Environment at UTS. Syd is interested in how people experience the city and uses digital tech to monitor and record how people respond physiologically and behaviourally to experiences of the built environment. We went for a guided walk of […]

Gardens, verges and parks are sites where individuals can become involved in forms of ‘civic ecology’. We borrow this concept from Krasny and Tidball (2012, 2015a, 2015b), who in their book Civic ecology: Adaptation and transformation from the ground up concentrate on ‘hands-on stewardship practices that integrate civic and environmental values’ (2015a xviii). This definition is […]

Launching a walking map of Green Square. The map signposts civic ecologies so that residents can use it when they walk around their 5kms radius.