A 'road trip' introduction to the adventures of Josh Zeunert

Few pursuits in landscape architecture occur at a scale that can provoke a whole continent of questions about land use and sustainability, and amongst those Dr Joshua Zeunert's passion project centred around food landscapes in Australia is a remarkable example that will deservedly gain wider exposure at the NZILA Firth Wānanga 2025 in Heretaunga Hasting on 22-23 May.

A recipient of an Australian Institute of Landscape Architects' Future Leaders Scholarship as far back as 2009, Josh became a full-time academic more than a decade ago after working in award-winning landscape architecture and urban design offices, along with casual teaching and supporting fellow members at AILA branches in South Australia and New South Wales (where he was President in 2019-20).

Speaking to LAA before arriving in New Zealand Josh said he was originally drawn to landscape architecture by the wide-open breadth of interdisciplinary rigour and spatial literacy it delivers.

This will be his first visit back to Aotearoa since cycling around Te Waipounamu in 2005. He will be putting in more pedalling around Te Ika-a-Māui this time around and it will be fascinating to pick up on his observations of the landscapes he encounters

Josh completed his PhD studies into multidimensional sustainability, landscape and food and public urban agriculture at Deakin University in 2018, and not being one to sit on his laurels made his first application to the Australia Research Council for a Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) just a year later.

It was a successful application and Josh now holds the prestige of being the first landscape architect to receive a DECRA. This has been followed by being the first landscape architect at UNSW to be admitted into its high performance Scientia Program (2020-24) and then winning an inaugural Distinguished Creative Researcher Award from the Australian Council of Deans and Directors of Creative Arts in 2024.

The aim of Josh's DECRA project has been to forecast scenarios of what Australian agriculture might look like and entail in 2050 with a view to ensuring Australia's food supply landscapes and systems remain sustainable.

At the time this kicked off he noted there were various narratives around what the next three decades might hold for the agricultural community in Australia, adding this telling assessment:

It's quite alarming how different these stories are – and it's not very common within areas of study for there to be such polarised views on what the future might entail. My goal is to understand these narratives and to forecast, test and illustrate them as potential scenarios to help inform stakeholders, politicians and decision-makers. The government’s existing narrative is that Australia feeds 60 million people and thus, because we produce a lot more food than we need ourselves, our food security isn’t seen as a concern. But there's certainly literature out there challenging that as we look ahead. (Sourced from the UNSW Newsroom at Australian agriculture in 2050: what will it look like? )

To synthesise the wide array of existing information, this research set out to use a conceptual framework derived from established and overlapping processes – sieve mapping, GIS (geographic information systems) and geodesign - to enable an extraction of key indicators into a rare combination of spatial datasets and overlays.

*LAA recommends taking time to explore this website - and don’t forget to turn the sound on.*

Which brings us to the stunning interactive spinoff at Foodlandscapes.com.au that Josh created as a labour of love, platformed by the wizardry of James Hargrave at Abstract8. This is no ordinary website, in fact when you unearth it fully it's an absolutely extraordinary exhibition of Josh's single-handed feat of photography and videography spanning the whole continent of Australia and 38,000 kilometres.

With inspiration from influential figures such as photographers Edward Burtynsky, Richard Woldendorp and George Steinmetz (of Feed the Planet fame), Josh's own tour de force includes a collection of clips from 360-degree drone footage that floats above as many as 880 food landscapes, coupled with captions totalling more than 25,000 educative words and much, much more.

Hargrave describes this immersive experience as "a virtual journey through Australia's agricultural heartland". It can't be taken in with one bite and to make it as realistically digestible as possible viewers are encouraged to enhance what they're seeing through pairing it with a meal of choice.

Given this work is not intended as a critique of individual farmers, Josh has taken pains to accord the locations of the footage a "high-level anonymity".

“I’m not a farmer-hater,” he repeats. Rather the intention is to "challenge the constraints imposed on Australian farmers by corporate-influenced and neoliberal government-constructed agri-food systems".

This points to a commodification of our landscape for the commercial production of commodities, and although dominant to an extreme that anyone taking any kind of road trip in Australia or New Zealand can confirm it's a dominance that is also a strange, barely confronted blindspot that lacks sufficient cautionary warnings.

Josh: "Part of my overarching message is that Australia's agribusiness systems are committing the 'slow violence' of prioritising profit over the planet and people. The question I'm raising with my work on Food Landscapes is how long can this approach be sustained? Can we be brave enough to apply a lens that goes beyond a romanticised, bucolic sense of 'farming' and do more to acknowledge the inherent distortions we are buying into and the damage being caused?"

Josh's most recent revisiting of this particular project is a book chapter titled Visual Essay: States of Australia’s agri-environment: visual extractions from degraded landscapes - as published in Aerial Visibilities: New Thoughts and Further Possibilities (Taylor & Francis, 2025). In the sense of this being an onion with many layers another piece he has written to add further understanding is titled An Australian agri-industrial landscape sublime, also well worth reading. A third piece will examine the role of captions in assisting people to interpret the implications of environmental change over time and to promote better understandings about the scale of harm and industrialisation.

As already surfaced here on LAA Josh will be sharing the stage at the NZILA Firth Wānanga 2025 with the equally prolific and prestigious Tim Waterman.

Their session on global perspectives for landscape architecture will benefit from the input of local provocations from Lincoln University School of Landscape Architecture academic Shannon Davis who in addition to specialising in urban agriculture, food landscapes and landscape planning and assessment leads the research theme of Future Foodscapes for Health as part of the Centre for Exellence: Future Productive Landscapes.

Despite thinking 'never again' after every book project, a new book co-authored by Josh with Dr Alys Daroy will be hot off the press within the next month!

Pitched by publisher Springer / Palgrave Macmillan as the first book to bring Sydney’s disparate post-colonial food histories together in one volume, Sydney’s Food Landscapes: Agriculture, Planning, Sustainability is a highly illustrated book that tells the story of Sydney’s metropolitan food landscapes as one of dramatic transformations of First Nations land amidst jostles for power and wealth.

Furthermore it traverses the city’s diverse cultural influences, from Indigenous land management to British pastoralism, Chinese cultivation of Sydney’s “backyard vegetable garden” and southern European farming spawning billion-dollar empires. Great topics for Josh given his family lineage includes being the great-great-grandson of a German immigrant to Australia who was a market gardener in the Barossa region near Adelaide.

During the conversation for this article Josh made this aside in regard to his admiration of photographer George Steinmetz: "(George) has lived a life I would have loved to lead".

Well Josh, we're sure there are many current and future landscape architects who will be looking at your career in landscape architecture and thinking the same.