Designing with Country and community, with Danièle Hromek
Danièle is a spatial designer, speculative designer and public artist, and a Saltwater woman of the Budawang clan of the Yuin nation, with French and Czech heritage. Her work is grounded in her cultural and experiential heritage, and often considers the urban Aboriginal condition, the Indigenous experience of Country, and contemporary Indigenous identities. Danièle also works as a researcher considering how to Indigenise the built environment by creating spaces to substantially affect Indigenous rights and culture within an institution.
What do you love about cities?
I love to see how cities come together, and to unpack them and to see how they've grown. Often they've grown from a place where Country was already really important. There may have been a history of ceremonies held there or people came together there because it was a meeting place. I think a place draws people there and probably always has, and cities are a reflection of that. I love to see how they grow from that.
Tell us about projects you’ve worked on that have been most important to you?
Projects that are important to me allow me to give somebody a chance to say something that they've never had a chance to say. Bringing in the other side of the story and other voices makes a project meaningful for me personally. I’m working with three elders on what is effectively an integrated artwork… giving voice to people who haven't been heard before. Giving them a place to express, to work closely and see their eyes light up when we talk about or show them certain outcomes, is really special. Through another project I am able to make a big difference in a place where big decisions are made. It’s huge to be able to bring a different way of seeing the place and understanding to my colleagues and those who work there every day.
How did these projects shape your professional practice?
I've got a process that I've been developing probably my whole life. It’s what my grandmother and my family taught me, just in a different way… which is to read country. And essentially, that is to understand and know and see everything around you in a different way. But it's also to feel it, and it's to have intuition about it, and to have a sense of it. Those often don't get allowed into projects because they're too touchy feely – but they need to be, because this is part of Country. Country's alive, it's sentient, it communicates, and that process for me is about hearing what Country's saying.
What has to change or be amplified in our system to make these things a priority?
I think we need to redirect the questions that we start every project with. I start projects with “how can we live here in this place forever”? I think that's what my ancestors were asking and answering too. It's a different question than we ask at the moment. It's more than sustainability, it's more than just conservation. It's about what does it look like to have an ongoing care of this country? What's custodianship? What's next beyond sustainability? How are we going to live here in this place forever? To me, that's a different type of sustainability. It's a longer vision and a different responsibility that we have as built environment professionals – in the decisions we make, in the processes we undertake, and our choices to continue how we have done things or to change.
“I think we need to redirect the questions that we start every project with. I start projects with “how can we live here in this place forever”? ”
What's one piece of advice you would give to emerging urban leaders?
I do have some advice – start with the physical. Start walking. Take your shoes off, put your feet on the ground. There’s benefit in walking barefoot; in being in nature. Aboriginal people have always walked Country. We've always moved around and understood Country through movement. So go for a walk. Ignore your phone. Notice everything. Notice all of the sensations you feel. If you can, of course, be guided by Aboriginal knowledge holders. Walk country with them, because you'll access different worldviews, and the stories, and deeper histories that come with that, and the knowledge that they bring with them about place that can only come from having lived there over many generations.
