Innovative or unrealistic: reflections on the use of landscape architecture visualisations in climate change planning

Coastal managers and planners face significant challenges in planning for climate change, including the need to act now while developing and implementing adaptively robust plans. A key first stage of such planning involves working with stakeholders to envisage multiple possible futures, even though it can be challenging for people to envisage futures that are markedly different to the present. Landscape architecture visualisations are increasingly used to help address this challenge, but there is limited evaluation of their value in such planning. Drawing on a case study from the highly urbanised Port Philip Bay of Victoria, Australia, this paper presents reflections from coastal managers and planners on the value of participatory development and use of such visualisations in adaptation planning. Findings indicate a tension between the value of visualisations in helping people conceive possible futures and the tendency for those futures to be imagined within current budgetary and political parameters