Performing Landscape: Landscape as Medium for Placemaking

Ballarat is Victoria’s largest inland city founded on the wealth of the famous Victorian gold rush and has been celebrated as the ‘birthplace’ of democracy in Australia through the story of the Eureka Rebellion. The less well-known facets of Ballarat are the city’s multicultural and Chinese layers, its deep stories of Indigenous people, and its landscape and culture—a contentious history that is articulated and hidden in Ballarat’s grand Victorian architecture and streetscapes. This visual chapter explores a landscape approach to placemaking that acknowledges the multifaceted relationship of Ballarat’s past, present, and future. It focuses on the Ballarat Botanical Gardens, a 160-year-old reserve best known for its Victorian-style gardens located on the Western shore of the man-made Lake Wendouree. It examines placemaking approaches in the context of a landscape architecture studio (Performing Landscape), where the students took part in developing a hypothetical design and a realised event-space for the gardens by responding to the local needs, histories, and landscapes, and also explores the site’s potential and inherent challenges. The chapter uses a series of images to induce placemakers to reflect and examine ‘how place performs’ through the intersections across social, cultural, and environmental conditions.