Green Infrastructure

At HASSELL, we understand how carefully planned, seamlessly integrated green infrastructure can bring balance back to our natural environments, and make our cities and regions happier, healthier and more resilient places to live.  

Our design team collaborates with leading academic researchers, specialist consultants and bio engineering experts to devise innovative nature-based infrastructure solutions that reach well beyond aesthetic aspirations. Through design moves that integrate plants in a systematic way to support full lifecycle ecologies, we can cool urban environments, improve air and water quality, relieve flooding, offset CO2 emissions, promote biodiversity and connect people to their natural environment. This is increasingly important as we all grapple with ways to manage climate change and achieve green targets. 

We work on green infrastructure projects of every scale – from designing sensitive eco-tourism landscapes that engage people with the environment, to naturalising waterways and re-establishing regional nature reserves to heal the land. We’ve integrated bio-retention lakes and street swales that cleanse and manage city water, and designed restorative urban forests, green transport corridors and living roofs and walls that provide respite and maintain urban green links. 

With more than 40 years of expertise, we have helped create many award-winning projects, including Millennium Parklands and Victoria Park in Sydney – which both rehabilitated industrial wasteland to create generous public parkland and streetscapes, setting new benchmarks for water sensitive urban design in New South Wales – and the Burnley Living Roofs, where Melbourne University conducted research for the city's first ‘Growing Green Guide’ for living architecture.

Across all of these projects, our goal is always the same: to ensure the places we design preserve the balance between the built and natural environments, so we can provide sanctuary for people and for wildlife – now and into the future.