What happens when overlooked spaces and discarded objects are given a new purpose? At Geelong Design Week, they’re becoming places for plants to grow.

DUMPED explores how urban growth is placing increasing pressure on overlooked parts of the city to provide ecological function. By transforming discarded objects salvaged from around Geelong into living habitat, the installation reimagines how the city’s urban leftovers might help rediscover the region’s volcanic grasslands, woodlands, coastal marshes and riverine wetlands.

They invite us to take another look at places and materials we might usually pass by.

Sebastian Cocks, Landscape Architect at LatStudios, says “DUMPED is a fun way of exploring a pretty serious subject: the loss of habitat in urban areas and the resulting need for fragile ecologies to survive within the urban margins. The project tries to illustrate this plight while speculating on ways of reimagining these residual spaces – and the objects they are home to – as functional habitat. Ultimately, DUMPED wants to get people thinking about the types of space left for habitat connectivity in cities, and the kinds of landscapes that might emerge within them.“

ecoDynamics supplied plants for DUMPED alongside The GREEN Lab @ Iramoo. We love seeing plants used in a way that sparks new ideas about habitat and the space we make for nature in our cities.

Presented by Sebastian Cocks, LatStudios and Creative Geelong, DUMPED launches at Third Space Gallery, 132 Little Malop Street, on Saturday 3 October at 4 pm. You can see the installation in the gallery window until 11 October. Explore the event.