The winning designers from the ‘Craft Your Park’ competition have been revealed and will work with the Canberra community to transform three public parks into new nature play spaces.

Spacelab, Group GSA, CIA Landscapes and Colour, and Harris Hobbs Landscapes have been chosen by the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects (AILA) to take part in a unique co-design process with the local community which will see upgrades to parks in O’Connor, Barton and Greenway. 

Minister for Transport and City Services, Meegan Fitzharris announced the three successful teams and said she was very excited to see their local community of landscape architects explore nature play as part of the Craft Your Park competition and come up with some great ideas on how they will develop the designs with the community for unstructured play outdoors.

The parks and designers:

  • Finn Street Park, O’Connor to be designed by Spacelab, Glascott Landscape & Civil + Provincial Plants & Landscapes
  • Telopea Park, Barton to be designed by GroupGSA & CIA Landscapes and Colour, with Ric McConaghy
  • Tuggeranong Town Park in Greenway to be designed by by Harris Hobbs Landscapes + Area Design Consultants, with Brindabella Contractors, and Nicholas Bray Landscapes + Geoff Filmer

To be executed simultaneously, the three park projects will see the winning teams engage with local community members as well as add natural play components to the existing play spaces. Community consultation to deliver the co-design of these spaces is underway and members of the public are invited to participate in the process. Construction of the parks is expected to be completed by July 2017, with a public voting campaign to decide the best built outcome.

The three winners were selected by a jury consisting of Ross Dennis (ACT/NSW/QLD Regional Coordinator at the Bluearth Foundation), Fiona Robbe (Landscape Architect & Horticulturalist), and Fleur Flanery (Director, City Services at ACT Government).

Entries to the competition were assessed on their understanding of nature play and their approach to community engagement of both adults and children. Each of the three winning teams of practices and construction contractors will receive contracts with the ACT Government – TCCS,  to a total value of $100,000 for the design, consultation, superintendence/ administration and construction of the project, as well as one ticket (per winning team) to the 2017 International Festival of Landscape Architecture.

The ‘Craft Your Park’ competition is an initiative of the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects (AILA) in collaboration with the ACT Government Transport Canberra and City Services Directorate (TCCS).