The Designing with Country Paradox
Country may be impossible to reach from where we stand. The pathway to Country from here may render the destination ever more remote, each step taking us further away from the authenticity of Country. Notwithstanding any sincerity of intent, it may be a design pathway leading somewhere else.
Is it possible to ‘design with Country’ within the structure of modern rationalism, which was the very instrument of colonial repression and the foundation of our contemporary system of land development? Is this not a systemic contradiction that is inevitably self-defeating?
This rationalised system of development, driven by commercial markets and government regulation, and founded on time efficiency and critical path programming, marginalises or excludes meaningful cultural expression, atonement, and reconciliation.
How is it possible, within such an inherently exploitative system, to avoid the reduction of any ‘designing with Country’ to a box-ticking exercise or, worse, the systematic absorption of Country as a mere marketable commodity or brand?
Will Country avoid being twice lost, first through the rational instrumental processes of colonial oppression and now through the reductive commercial appropriation and commodification of culture and place?
Embrace
In Australia, there has been a recent turn from denial and neglect to an acknowledgment, embrace and public celebration of First Nations cultures.
More recently, policy directions and institutional objectives for designing with Country have emerged in the form of government guidelines and expectations. While these initiatives reflect changing community aspirations and expectations, they also carry risks embedded in the reductive, systemic nature of this embrace.
The development and construction industry has been shaped to a fine edge through the productivity- and efficiency-driven processes of modern materialism. An edge continuously sharpened through market-driven critical path management, stakeholder management and regulatory reporting.
Is there any room for Country within such a time-focused, competitive and box-ticking system? Can Country survive integration into these regulatory, commercial, time-, and cost-driven processes, or will it simply be absorbed, reduced, regulated, and reduced to shallow, efficient, decorative surface treatments?
Reducing authentic cultural practices of Country to a series of regulated box-ticking processes, cosmetic surface treatments, and aesthetic product ranges is surely tragic. An embrace, but only in terms antithetical to its nature and essence, and that is ultimately asphyxiating.
Pause
Rather than rushing to tick boxes, decorate and brand, there surely needs to be a pause. An acknowledgment in more than words that so much damage has been and is still being done.
The first step in any healing is surely to stop making more wounds and find a space where repair, reconciliation, and atonement can begin. A pause. Begin a project not with an action, but with a pause, a pause for Country to breathe again.
The deeper challenge in the making of a project may not be to find Country in its design expression and patterns, but to ensure that the project itself does not do further harm to Country; this may well be the more difficult and profound challenge.
Process
What is needed most for the space of Country is time, which the relentless efficiency-driven system will never deliver. Our industry's outcome-driven empiricism, which we all accept as essential, is the wrong instrument. It knows only time limits, the critical path, and the race of competitive processes, all of which are surely antithetical to finding a place for Country.
How then, within the processes of this ubiquitous instrument, can there be a pause, a holding of regret, a commitment to doing no more harm and a restraint from ends?
Decolonisation
Decolonisation is the process of change to the entrenched socioeconomic and institutional structures that subtly, and not so subtly, continue to discriminate, exclude, coerce and oppress First Nations Peoples.
Many of these are so deeply ingrained, insidious and socially accepted that great commitment, effort and restraint are needed in equal measure.
Importantly, decolonisation is not primarily an action of First Nations Peoples, although they have a central and essential role. It is primarily an action of the empowered: Public institutions, schools and universities, politicians and lawmakers, professionals, corporations, and community representatives.
As architects, we must acknowledge that architecture has been an integral instrument of colonisation and modernisation. Uncovering the nature and depth of such design instrumentalisation is not simple, easy, or quick. It requires adjusting and opening up entrenched spatial structures and subtle forms of oppression and representation.
Euclidean geometries should be questioned: the enclosed rectangles of school classrooms, the spatial rigidity of libraries, the singular focus of auditoriums and lecture theatres, the relentless boxes and the continual and indifferent grid form of cities and land partition.
What is required of architecture is no less than a progressive transformation of the constructed relationship with the natural world. A transformation that will not only make architecture more inclusive, accepting and open to cultures that have suffered the enforced and alienating processes of occupation and modernisation, but also more accessible and meaningful for us all.
The entrenched inhibitors to decolonisation and the design potential for Country will be the authoritarian tendencies of the state and the exploitative tendencies of private sector development.
Pathway
If there is a way to escape the paradoxical nature of contemporary ‘design for Country’, it probably begins with recognition of the scope and depth of the challenge.
It may require stepping back rather than rushing forward.
An acknowledgement in more than words of the deep nature of embedded coercion in architectural form, space and the process of design and production.
A consequential first step could be a commitment to architectural decolonisation, an action of the empowered institutions and professionals. This work must lay the foundation and open up a space for the possibility of an authentic design with Country.
But the most essential element will be the least likely to be granted: time.