Reimagining Hellbourne

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You have to love the fake left. Even as its policies annihilate Australian living standards, the delusional onanism rises:

The NGV’s first landscape architecture exhibition has invited eight visionaries to picture the future of different sites along Birrarung – the Yarra River

In half a century, should Melbourne’s golf courses be flooded and transformed into wetlands? Could the city’s freeways be replaced with public parks? Will underwater robotic drones have a part to play in ridding our waterways of invasive species?

These are some of the questions explored at the National Gallery of Victoria’s Reimagining Birrarung: Design Concepts for 2070, a thought-provoking, optimistic and occasionally uncomfortable exhibition that presents speculative visions for the Birrarung (Yarra River) from eight of Australia’s leading landscape architecture studios. These practices were invited by the NGV’s curators, in association with the Birrarung Council and with guidance from Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung elders, to imagine what various sites along the Birrarung might look like in 46 years. And the results are varied.

Sure, all these could happen.

But they won’t.

Instead, at current immigration rates, Melbourne’s population will bulge to 10.5m:

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And it will take on the hellscape of Asian megacity overcrowding:

There won’t be a Yarra River or Birrarung or landscape architects, replaced by AI.

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About the author
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal. He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.