Landscape architects mend flaws in urban fabric with installation The Abseilers

A "wounded" Canberra CBD pavement is stitched up by Jennie Curtis, as part of the Mending the Urban Fabric display.

Look at our picture of two intrepid abseilers tackling a hair-raising cliff face. Can you guess where in the ACT this challenging precipice is? A giant quarry somewhere? A rock face in the wuthering heights of Namadgi National Park?

No. It is in Canberra's CBD. On Tuesday evening landscape architects Renae Palmer and Carma Sweet were reconnoitring the areas that they and others planned to use for Mending the Urban Fabric installations. They came across the little urban blemish of a missing tile and it suggested to them a mini-rock face. They went to work to create this exquisite little installation they've called The Abseilers.

The Mending the Urban Fabric project ispart of the Design Canberra Festival running from November 20 to 23. The organisers explain: "The fabric of our garden city rips and bulges in places where it is stressed, forming cracks and holes in our roads and footpaths. Landscape architects of the Canberra region will mend the urban fabric by creating small, temporary interventions in cracks and pot holes around the city, filling and reinterpreting them using ephemeral materials."

The Abseilers, an urban installation by Renae Palmer and Carma Sweet.

Most of the head-turning "temporary interventions" - all done by members of the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects - are along Lonsdale Street in Braddon, at nearby Genge Street in the city and in a Civic laneway next to Gus's cafe.

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Surgical "interventions" - and after this the cracks we see in pavements will never seem quite the same again - include (our picture) Jennie Curtis's colourful suturing of a nasty wound in the CBD's fabric/flesh.

In other mendings and improvements of the fabric, Barbara Payne looked for and found cracks, holes and blemishes into which she has introduced beautiful native grasses. She explains that they are all species (such as wallaby grass and lemon beauty heads) that once upholstered these very spots - before a city replaced the grassy plain.

This use of today's built-up Canberra places of local native grasses reminds me of an essay I once wrote, with the help of many natural history experts, about what would become of Canberra if humans abandoned it. At the time, abandoned Chernobyl was being vigorously recolonised by its region's fauna and flora. One day we may have a similar disaster here. Or perhaps, admitting our awful mistake in not building the federal capital city at Dalgety, we may abandon Canberra and begin again at that dream site beside the Snowy River.

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Landscape architects mend flaws in urban fabric with installation The Abseilers