sydney
Footpath planter gardens turn dull Waterloo space into colourful and productive place
March 25, 2012 | Russ Grayson
IT COMBINED ELEMENTS of learning and doing, social benefit and placemaking. And it would go on the footpath in Waterloo.
Something new and edible is coming to Woolloomooloo
March 24, 2012 | Russ Grayson
IT’S ALWAYS SOMETHING OF AN ADVENTURE working with a new community garden group on their first project. You never know what to expect—so it’s best to expect nothing at all and that way you will be pleasantly surprised when things go well.
Green Square Growers get going at The Tote
March 24, 2012 | Russ Grayson
THESE URBAN FOOD ENTHUSIASTS call themselves Green Square Growers, and they’re a new group living adjacent to the brownfields that will soon house an additional 20,000 people in what s going to be a major urban renewal. Some live in Victoria Park, a large cluster of medium density apartments that offers a foretaste of what will appear in Green Square.
Entrepreneurship the means to get good things done, says Ernesto Sirolli
November 28, 2011 | Russ Grayson
I’M FILLED WITH INSPIRATION as I write these words after spending two hours with about 60 others at Town Hall House in the presence of Ernesto Sirolli.
A sign signifies tensions over population density
November 5, 2011 | Russ Grayson
CHANGE BRINGS CHALLENGE and I saw a big hint of this when walking down the street to The Spot.
The farm comes to Sydney Saturday mornings in Darlinghurst
October 10, 2011 | Russ Grayson 1
Taylor Square Market
A FARMERS’ MARKET, the Transition Towns movement and Sydney’s emerging collaborative economy come together with live music, good food and the smell of freshly brewed coffee on Saturday mornings at Taylor Square in Darlinghurst. This is Sydney Sustainable Markets. It’s small but diverse. The market is hard to miss as it occupies the plaza on the northern side of Taylor Square where Oxford Street’s traffic diverges to the Eastern Suburbs or continues towards Bondi Junction and on to Bondi Beach. This is a busy crossroads for both traffic and pedestrians and it’s a prime location for a market. a
Celebration marks end of year one for the James Street garden
October 10, 2011 | Russ Grayson
IT WAS ON A SUNNY SATURDAY MORNING a little over a year ago that City of Sydney Lord Mayor, Clover Moore, opened the James Street Reserve Community Garden in what had been a poorly used pocket park in Redfern.
Guerrilla composters and fruity gardens… a walk along Redfern’s back lanes
October 10, 2011 | Russ Grayson
IT’S ONE OF THOSE streetscapes dominated by the presence of the past. I’m speaking architecturally, about the late nineteenth and early twentieth century once-were-working-class houses and occasional commercial buildings. It is in this way, through the built environment, that the past remains the present in this part of Redfern near where, across Cleveland Street, the urban continuity becomes Surry Hills.
A controversy over the future of date palms highlights tensions around trees
October 9, 2011 | Russ Grayson
LOCALS IN ANNANDALE have saved their feral Canary Island palms from council contractors who intended to fell them. That’s either good or bad news depending on where you stand regarding feral exotics and urban amenity.
Drawing lessons from National Tree Day
September 10, 2011 | Russ Grayson
A GOOD EVENT it turned out to be, National Tree Day 2010, with fine, sunny and warm Winter weather bringing out hundreds who planted 4000 ground covers, shrubs and trees. Activities for kids, a wildlife show that included a black head python and a lizard that changed colour were brought along by the wildlife display and City of Sydney waste educator, Sarah van Erp, an Eastern Suburbs Compost Revolution veteran, and Katie Oxenham, the City’s urban ecologist, were there.
