Research Overview:

Taylor Coyne is a PhD Candidate in Human Geography in the Environment and Society Group at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. His research sits at the intersection of urban political ecology, hydrosocial history, environmental humanities, and landscape and urban design, with a particular focus on stormwater infrastructure as a cultural, political, and ecological archive.

His doctoral project examines the historical and political geographies of Sydney’s stormwater systems, asking how colonial drainage regimes have shaped the city’s waterscapes, ecologies, and uneven distributions of risk and care. Rather than treating stormwater infrastructure as purely technical or functional, Taylor approaches it as a designed landscape shaped by governance, dispossession, and environmental imagination. His work is concerned with how design decisions, standards, and spatial practices have encoded particular values into urban water systems, while rendering other stories, knowledges, and relationships to water invisible or expendable.

Across his academic and professional practice, he engages closely with landscape architecture, urban design, and water-sensitive urban design as sites of political and cultural intervention. He is committed to culturally inclusive, community-centred approaches that foreground Indigenous sovereignty, multispecies relationships, and environmental justice. Alongside his PhD, Taylor teaches across human geography and environmental humanities and contributes to collaborative research and design projects in Sydney, Melbourne, and Europe.

Interests:

Taylor’s research is organised around Planet Swamp, a programme that examines swamps, wetlands, and stormwater infrastructures as political, cultural, and ecological archives in settler-colonial cities. His work challenges the treatment of wetness as marginal or dysfunctional, tracing how it has been governed, suppressed, and selectively reintroduced through urban design and water management.

Focusing on waterscapes across different cities, Taylor investigates how drainage regimes and climate adaptation strategies shape urban risk and inequality, often reproducing colonial logics of control. Methodologically, he combines archival research with walking, listening, and sound recording to engage surface and subterranean waterscapes. Across this work, he centres Indigenous knowledges, marginalised histories, and more-than-human perspectives to imagine more just ways of living with water.

Background:

Taylor completed a Master of Environmental Management at UNSW, where he worked on a research project examining public understandings of stormwater and water-sensitive urban design assets in the Georges River catchment. The project aimed to support local governments in developing culturally inclusive WSUD practices. Central to this work was an exploration of listening as a method, including attention to the river itself as an active participant in knowledge-making, and a way of extending environmental design beyond exclusively human perspectives.

Prior to this, Taylor completed a Bachelor of Arts in Indigenous Studies and Development Studies and a Bachelor of Science in Geography, graduating with First Class Honours. During 2017-2020, he was involved in multiple research projects in northern Uganda, investigating land tenure, sustainable charcoal production, urban electricity access, and small-scale aquaculture, as well as work in Sweden on Geo-ethics and Geosystems Services. His honours research used political ecology to examine the emergence of fish farming as a post-conflict livelihood strategy, producing a situated environmental history attentive to local narratives, supply chains, and practices of listening. 

Taylor’s current work draws on this interdisciplinary foundation, integrating creative and sensory methods into environmental research. Building on earlier training in visual arts, he works with sound recording, photography, and drawing to explore the sensorial dimensions of waterscapes, particularly in subterranean and marginal urban spaces. This focus has enabled him to attend to what he describes as the quiet geographies of the city, where environmental and social injustices often remain unheard. Through this creative research practice, Taylor seeks to expand the scope of environmental history, rethinking what counts as evidence, whose voices matter, and how research might contribute more meaningfully to justice-oriented urban futures.

Publications:

- T Coyne, 2024, ‘Reimaging Urban Design of Stormwater Infrastructure in Settler-Colonial Sydney’, Geographical Research, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/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.d.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, Vol. 142, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2023.104513.

- T Coyne, 2023, ‘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 (September 2023): 187-188, https://doi.org/10.52230/OULV3524

- T Coyne, 2023, 'Listen Deep to Subterranean Kinfrastructures', Swamphen: Journal of Cultural Ecology Vol.9 https://openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/index.php/Swamphen 

- N Naserisafavi, 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, Vol.322, No.15, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvman.2022.116063

- T Coyne 2022, 'Queering the Swamp', Succession Vol.2 Queering the Environment, Network in Canadian History & Environment (Nouvelle initiative Canadienne en histoire de l'environnement) 

- T Coyne, 2021, review of Country by Bruce Pascoe and Bill Gamage, ed. Margo Neale, The Conversation  https://theconversation.com/book-review-country-is-an-urgent-call-to-learn-from-indigenous-knowledges-to-care-for-the-land-172142

- Coyne et al. 2020, 'Culturally inclusive water urban design: a critical history of hydrosocial infrastructures in Southern Sydney, Australia', Blue-Green Systems, Vol.2, No.1, https://doi.org/10.2166/bgs.2020.017 

Professional Affiliations:

- Member - Institute of Australian Geographers

- Member - Geographical Society of New South Wales (Postgraduate Councillor 2022, ongoing) 

- Member - Association for the Study of Literature, Environment and Culture (ANZ) 

- Member - Royal Geographical Society

- Member - American Association of Geographers 

- Member - Australian and Aotearoa New Zealand Environmental History Network (HDR Representative 2022, ongoing)