Gavin Hardy

Gav is a community food-growing facilitator and permaculture teacher. Since 1996 Gavin has been planning, designing and building numerous sustainable landscapes and food systems in Australia. Gav is a respected figure in Australia's community food scene and is connected with a network of colleagues nationally and internationally. He was also multi-award winning landscape architect, qualified engineer and worked as a senior landscape architect in local government and ran his own design practice.

Gav has a passion for urban agroforestry with a depth of knowledge, based on case study research, of sustainable governance and operational models for community food projects. In 2015, Gav won the AILA State Planning award for the Intensive Food Production Code, a national and international first, that incorporates a town planning ordinance to guide the development industry towards the delivery of intensive food production systems in major centres of the city. In 2016, Gavin was part of the team that won the AILA National Award for Communities for The Green Space Strategy which, in the jury’s words ‘developed an excellent model for local action and collaborative planning approaches that could be employed widely across Australia’. For 25 years Gav has worked on over 30 food projects in Australia and internationally including the co-founding of Brisbane’s largest community food site - Northey Street City Farm - and consulting to state and territory government agencies and national not-for-profits.