We are now entering into an unprecedented age where rapid urbanisation and the need for social cohesion and equity are at a tipping point with post carbon futures and urban liveability. There is a need to invent new forms of practice that build ethical futures where economic and cultural capital centre on social cohesion, transactions are marked by reciprocity, trust and cooperation and we produce services and landscapes not for developers’ profit margins, but for a common good.

Many notable Australian firms have done well-considered pro-bono projects for communities in need, others have become landscape entrepreneurs through self-commissioned projects, and others are advocates on the behalf of grass root community initiatives. Landscape Architects have held enduring roles in terms of public engagement and working towards harnessing ethical, cultural and social capital in our work for the public realm.

Socially engaged and activist practices are hardly new to landscape architecture, but the contexts, which we now find ourselves within present new kinds of challenges. In an era when gorilla landscapes, pop-ups, place-making and bottom-up initiatives are celebrated; we forget that many of these tactics and strategies comply with risk adverse, neoliberal agendas. And while critical discourses within landscape architecture have often featured ideologies centred on democratic notions of space as well as citizen co-design and appropriation of the public realm, we continue to grapple with how to operate ethically in the commercial realm.

The session will draw out the challenges of designing for a just and inclusive city and put forward the work of practitioners who are forging new ways of operating towards increased social inclusion. This panel will focus on how social capital and social entrepreneurship offers alternative forms of practice in the Anthropocenic future. Although principally the Anthropocene reflects the past and present effects of human impacts on the earth systems, its true significance lies in how it can shape new attitudes, choices, policies, actions, and practices that influence the future.