Bradfield Central Park Design Competition | Arcadia Landscape Architecture

Winner of Honourable Mention for the 2025 WLA Awards – Concept – Public Space category

Designing a concept for Bradfield’s Central Park was an invitation to explore the potential for Australia’s newest city. The concept seamlessly blends the beauty and wonder of the natural world with cutting-edge innovation and technology to create an awe‑inspiring, immersive experience that captures the spirit of Country and inspires the next generation of Australia.

Only once in a generation does a city deliver something so remarkable as Nancy Bird Walton Airport. Not only will this open Sydney’s west to international travel, it will also create Bradfield, a third city for Sydney, meticulously master planned to sit within ancient grassland Country, with Central Park as its centrepiece, where the natural systems sit paramount to human urbanisation.

To design with this ethos fully and respectfully at the forefront, it was essential for the design team to seek the catalyst of this landscape’s evolution in the pre-Triassic period and follow the progress of this tiny microcosm of Australia’s landscape. Together, the team developed an understanding of the significance of the beautifully complex set of cultural and natural systems that form this unique, environmentally rich, and ancient land.

In developing the concept for Central Park, the team drew on extensive research, collaboration, and shared knowledge to imagine it as a regeneration of ancient Freshwater Country, set within the ultramodern built environment of Bradfield City Centre.

In the heart of one of Australia’s most highly populated and multicultural regions, Central Park celebrates the Indigenous cultures that precede all of these, as well as providing the foundation for a range of events and activations that will make Central Park a celebrated Cultural destination. Whether it’s food, art, music or innovation, the park provides amenity and typology for 18-hour activation so people can experience the best that Indigenous and other cultures have to offer through multi-sensory journeys and experiences, forged through dynamic and evolving expressions of Country, community, technology and ecology.

The concept for Bradfield Central Park goes beyond the ancient, using art and placemaking to connect park users with contemporary local Aboriginal Peoples and their stories and cultures. This unique cultural landscape will showcase the diversity of Australia’s largest community of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, who are from all over this sacred country but now located in Western Sydney.

Designed to deliver the beauty and benefits of a connected Country environment to everyday users – the daytime workers, international and Australian visitors, and local residents – Central Park will draw people into recreated Country environments, connected by a network of elevated, immersive walkways. An immersive, multi-level play experience, based on the Grandmother Tree topped by an Eagle’s Nest, will attract families and children.

As well as delivering a network of active open spaces, Central Park is designed as a place of respite from pace and density, a place where users feel a deep connection to the natural environment, in the heart of Australia’s newest city, with every element of the design of Central Park considering its link to Country.

Bradfield Central Park Design Competition

Location: Sydney, Australia

Client: Western Parkland City Authority

Designer Credit: Arcadia Landscape Architecture
Collaborators/Other Consultants:
Architect: Supermanoeuvre
Design and Connecting with Country Consultant: Bangawarra
First Nations Arborist: Muru Mittigar
Place Visioning / Placemaking:  Hoyne
Sustainability Consultant: Civille
Public Art Consultant: Studio ESEM
Site Activation: PAM,
Landskip Lab

Image Credits: Arcadia; Doug and Wolf;

Shortlisted entry in the Bradfield Central Park Design Competition