Research Overview

Taylor Coyne is a researcher and lecturer in Landscape Architecture at the School of Built Environment at UNSW Sydney. His research moves across environmental history, urban political ecology, landscape studies and the environmental humanities to examine the relationship between cities and water.

His doctoral research investigated the historical and political geographies of Sydney’s stormwater infrastructures. It traced how drainage, channelisation and other attempts to govern urban wetness have transformed waterways, wetlands and ecologies while materially embedding particular colonial ideas about land, water, and urban life. Approaching infrastructure as both material system and cultural archive, his research asks what histories become visible when pipes, drains, channels, swamps and buried waterways are treated as landscapes rather than simply technical objects.

A central concern of this work is the relationship between environmental history and contemporary practices of urban and landscape design. Taylor examines how inherited infrastructures continue to shape urban ecologies, environmental risk and possibilities for living with water, and how practices including urban design, landscape architecture and water-sensitive urban design engage with these histories. His research is particularly concerned with the politics of restoration and adaptation: what is remembered or forgotten when water is returned to urban landscapes, whose relationships to place are recognised, and what forms of ecological life are designed for.

Across his research, teaching and professional collaborations, Taylor works at the intersection of geography, environmental history and design research. His work is informed by Indigenous scholarship and sovereignty, environmental justice and more-than-human approaches to landscape, alongside sustained attention to the responsibilities of non-Indigenous researchers working within settler-colonial places.

Research Interests

Taylor’s broader research programme, Planet Swamp, examines swamps, wetlands, drains, waterways and other unruly waters as political, cultural and ecological archives.

Rather than treating wetness as residual, dysfunctional or simply awaiting management, Planet Swamp asks what wet landscapes can reveal about the making of cities. It traces histories of drainage, reclamation, sanitation, infrastructure and urban development alongside contemporary practices of wetland restoration, water-sensitive urban design and climate adaptation. Through these transformations, Taylor examines the recurring desire to control water and the ecological, cultural and political consequences of doing so.

His research interests include hydrosocial histories; urban political ecology; wetlands and stormwater; environmental and landscape history; settler-colonial urbanism; landscape and urban design; environmental justice; multispecies geographies; and creative and sensory geographical methods.

Methodologically, Taylor combines archival and historical research with walking, field observation, photography, drawing, listening and sound recording. These practices allow him to move between the documentary archive and the material city, following water across visible and invisible landscapes from wetlands and creeks to concrete channels, drains and subterranean waterways.

Across these concerns runs a larger question: how might cities learn to live with water rather than continually attempting to contain, erase or control it?

Background

Taylor has submitted his PhD in Human Geography at UNSW Sydney and is currently awaiting conferral.

He previously completed a Master of Environmental Management at UNSW, where his research examined public understandings of stormwater and water-sensitive urban design in Sydney’s Georges River catchment. Working across geography, urban water management and environmental humanities, the project explored how culturally inclusive approaches might expand the ways urban water infrastructures are understood and designed.

An important strand of this research concerned listening as environmental method. Rather than understanding waterways solely as objects to be measured or managed, Taylor explored how listening might make other dimensions of urban environments perceptible including the presence of water itself and the more-than-human worlds assembled around it. This work subsequently developed into research on subterranean urban landscapes, sound and what he describes as the city’s quiet geographies: places, histories and ecological relations that conventional forms of urban knowledge can make difficult to perceive.

Taylor also holds a Bachelor of Arts in Indigenous Studies and Development Studies and a Bachelor of Science in Geography, graduating with First Class Honours. Between 2017 and 2020 he participated in research in northern Uganda concerning land tenure, charcoal production, electricity access and small-scale aquaculture, alongside research in Sweden on geoethics and geosystem services. His honours research used political ecology and environmental history to investigate fish farming as a post-conflict livelihood strategy in northern Uganda.

This interdisciplinary trajectory from political ecology and development geography through urban water research, environmental history and landscape studies now informs Taylor’s approach to the city. Building on earlier training in visual arts, he incorporates sound recording, photography, drawing and field-based practices into geographical research, particularly when investigating marginal, subterranean and difficult-to-document landscapes.

Across this work, Taylor is interested not simply in recovering overlooked environmental histories but in questioning how environmental knowledge itself is produced: what counts as an archive, what counts as evidence, whose histories become legible, and what different futures become imaginable when we learn to encounter landscapes differently.

Peer-reviewed journal articles

Coyne, T. (2024). ‘Reimaging urban design of stormwater infrastructure in settler-colonial Sydney’. Geographical Research. https://doi.org/10.1111/1745-5871.12645

N’Arwee’t C. Briggs, Buckley, J., Chesworth, D., Coyne, T., Farr, A., Harper, L., Ho, X., Heyns, A. L., Leber, S., Melo Zurita, M. de L., & Raby, O. (2023). ‘Listen – Look up! Listen – Look down! Experiencing the counter-city through a sonic and augmented reality experience of urban undergrounds in southeast Melbourne’. Cities, 142, 104513. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2023.104513

Naserisafavi, N., Coyne, T., Melo Zurita, M., Zhang, K., & Prodanovic, V. (2022). ‘Community values on governing urban water nature-based solutions in Sydney, Australia’. Journal of Environmental Management, 322, 116063. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvman.2022.116063

Coyne, T., et al. (2020). ‘Culturally inclusive water urban design: A critical history of hydrosocial infrastructures in Southern Sydney, Australia’. Blue-Green Systems, 2(1), 364–382. https://doi.org/10.2166/bgs.2020.017

Essays and creative scholarship

Coyne, T. (2023). ‘Listen deep to subterranean kinfrastructures’. Swamphen: A Journal of Cultural Ecology, 9.

Coyne, T. (2022). ‘Queering the swamp’. Succession, 2: Queering the Environment. Network in Canadian History & Environment / Nouvelle initiative Canadienne en histoire de l’environnement.

Reviews and public scholarship

Coyne, T. (2023). Review of Emily O’Gorman, Wetlands in a Dry Land: More-than-Human Histories of Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin. Journal of Australian, Canadian, and Aotearoa New Zealand Studies, 3, 187–188. https://doi.org/10.52230/OULV3524

Coyne, T. (2021). ‘Book review: Country is an urgent call to learn from Indigenous knowledges to care for the land’. The Conversation. Review of Country: Future Fire, Future Farming, by Bill Gammage and Bruce Pascoe, edited by Margo Neale.