Cities are continuously assembled and reassembled out of a diverse array of non-human materials. This paper explores the ongoing reconstitution of Melbourne with building stone, exploring issues of provenance, fluidity and value. Firstly, I look at the changing connections that continue to link the city to other places through stone supply and follow the consequences for material qualities in both site of supply and construction. Secondly, I explore the durability of these particular stony substances stone in Melbourne and how stone is subject to dynamic processes of recycling or removal through programmes of demolition. Thirdly, I investigate how these processes are invariably entangled with valuing these materialities according to changing desires and fashions, foregrounding notions of colonial and regional identities, heritage and aesthetics.

Scholarly literature about place and public space is ‘placed’, in that space(s) are typically explored through conventional scientific inquiry to develop theoretical aspects of place. This approach presents a problem of generalizability; using one or few spaces to advance a universal concept of place. Yet deeper understandings of place are as varied as the diverse people, cultures, ecologies, physical features and scales they are formed around. For landscape architecture, it is correspondingly clear that place is inexorably linked to environmental ethics, and therefore different conceptions of place are needed to progress ecologically responsible design of public places.
While there are divergent ways public places are understood, these perspectives remain overwhelmingly anthropocentric. The traditions by which public places are conceived, constructed and managed can be seen as representational of Western dualisms, limiting a human engagement with a more than human environment. Contesting the anthropocentrism that pervades landscape architectural design of public places may provide a voice in which the making of place centres the landscape designer’s role beyond balancing the needs of the human against the non-human.

The importance of local knowledge in disaster management is increasingly recognised. The sense of place and belonging and their role in the creation and function of local knowledge is evident in Mundubbera, a rural town in south-east Queensland. Local knowledge was vital in the immediate management of two recent floods and the subsequent recovery periods; people who knew the geography of the area and how it responded following heavy rain as well as the lessons learned from previous flood events, where all significant. Novel ways of communicating and distributing resources were established after the flood of 2010, and enabled a more efficient response in the recovery phase of the 2013 flood event when access and communication were limited. The importance of local knowledge and the sense of place is highly evident in this rural community where people have a strong feeling of belonging and working together. “We are ‘Dubbs’ people, this is what we do”. Local knowledge is a function of place and time and is unique to each individual; collectively this knowledge is a vital resource in the management of a disaster.

My doctoral work on decolonization is an extension of the hypothesis put forward by Cree scholar Dwayne Donald (2010) that ‘We are all colonized, regardless of what colour your skin is or where you’re from.’ In writing, and teaching, I have been exploring the historical validity of this claim, and using various techniques for enrolling others in critical engagements with diverse ways of knowing and being in the world. Provoked also by the scholarship of Val Plumwood, Deborah Bird Rose, Joanna Macy, and others, this paper argues that there is an unexplored capacity for taking direction from indigenous and traditional elders, scholars, and peoples as a directive for ‘how to live well.’ Caring for and caring with are founded in relationship, whether for each other, or for ecological well-being; however, the shift from resistance to reflexive contemplation is often a precursor to care as active practice. For decolonization to be inclusive, I hold that relational teaching, which includes methods for making visible the implicit assumptions of enculturation within westernized contexts, becomes an integral part of setting the ground for motivating active care. This paper is designed as a conversation regarding the philosophy and pedagogy involved in this process.