Greener Cities Won't Build Themselves

The 'Invisible' Workforce Challenge Behind Australia's Urban Greening Ambitions

A thought piece on the workforce required to deliver greener cities.

By Derryn De Ceuster, Chief Executive Officer, Landscape Queensland Industries Association; March 2026

Everyone says they want greener cities, but greener cities will not build themselves.  They depend on a workforce capable of delivering them.

Across Australia, governments, planners and developers are increasingly promoting urban cooling, green infrastructure and climate-resilient cities as part of the broader push to deliver higher-density housing and more liveable urban environments.  Green roofs, living walls, shaded streets, vegetated public spaces and podium-level gardens are becoming familiar features in planning documents and development proposals.  Developers highlight them in project brochures.  Real estate marketing uses them to signal sustainability and future-focused design.

Design ambition is not the problem.  There is plenty of it, and the shift toward more integrated urban greening is a positive one.  The challenge is ensuring the workforce exists to deliver those ambitions safely, effectively and over the long term.

Yet one question rarely appears in these conversations.  Who is actually going to build these landscapes, maintain them and keep them functioning over time?

Green infrastructure may be designed in studios and described in policy documents, but it is built and sustained by skilled tradespeople working on construction sites, in parks, on rooftops and across the public realm.  Landscapers are the professionals who take a construction site and turn it into a functioning environment, the places people live in, move through and experience every day.

Too often landscaping is still viewed through a narrow lens: the final visual layer that appears once the real construction work is finished.  The planting.  The green on the render.

Someone has to build the green on the render.

Professional landscaping is not decorative window dressing.  It is a construction trade.

Landscaping is the discipline that takes a site that may be little more than exposed ground, concrete edges, service corridors and unfinished levels, and turns it into something usable, valuable and alive.  It converts a worksite into a place.  It transforms a completed building into an environment people actually experience.

A landscape contractor is a multi-trade specialist.  Landscapers must understand levels and set-out, ground preparation, structural concreting, masonry and brickwork, retaining systems, paving and edging, timber construction, drainage interfaces, irrigation systems, structural load considerations, outdoor structures, planting systems and soil performance.  They must hold those hard construction skills alongside the biological requirements of horticulture.

Most trades specialise in one primary element of a project.  Concreters work with concrete, bricklayers construct masonry structures, painters finish surfaces.  Landscaping is different.  It is the only trade on site responsible for the integration of hard infrastructure and living systems, and for how all of those elements behave where they meet each other.

In many ways it is one of the most complex delivery trades operating within the built environment.

That breadth of capability is one of landscaping's greatest strengths.  It is also one of its greatest vulnerabilities.

Workers who begin in landscaping develop a wide range of transferable skills that are highly valued across the broader construction sector, and over time many develop higher-order capabilities in supervision, estimating, client liaison, procurement coordination, safety systems and project management.  Landscaping produces a construction all-rounder, which makes the sector a foundational skills incubator for the entire built environment.

It is precisely why workers with landscaping experience are frequently recruited into other parts of the construction industry.  When construction demand rises, landscaping is often the primary recruitment reservoir that other sectors draw on.

Landscape construction has become the quiet training ground for much of the construction industry.

This creates a critical policy blind spot.  Landscaping operates as a feeder workforce for the broader construction sector, yet the occupation itself is classified with horticulture and agriculture rather than with the construction trades.  The workforce is therefore difficult to isolate, measure and forecast within national workforce systems, which limits how training pathways are designed and how policy attention is directed.

To understand why that matters, it helps to know that the Census asks two separate questions about work.

One asks what your employer does.  The other asks what you do.

The first produces industry data.  A business that builds retaining walls, paves, installs drainage and plants out a site is classified as landscape construction, and landscape construction sits inside the construction industry. 

The second produces occupation data, and that depends entirely on what each worker writes in the box.  Landscaper.  Gardener.  Labourer.  Machine operator.  Foreman.  Whatever seemed closest on the night.

Both questions were answered by the same people on the same evening in August 2021.  The answers do not match.

Counted by industry, 47,412 people were working in landscape construction across Australia, 9,595 of them in Queensland.

Counted by occupation, 24,375 people recorded themselves as landscape gardeners.

Roughly half the workforce appears in one number and disappears from the other.  Nationally, around 22,700 landscape construction workers are scattered across more than fifty unrelated occupation codes.  In Queensland, about 4,600 people, close to half the state's landscape construction workforce, are not recorded under any clear landscape occupation at all.

The consequence is that governments do not plan workforces by industry.  They plan by occupation.  Training funding, apprenticeship incentives, skills forecasting and shortage lists are all built on the occupation figure, which is the smaller and less accurate of the two.

For a sense of what that smaller figure looks like in company, BuildSkills Australia lists Landscape Gardener as a core construction occupation in its 2025-26 Workforce Plan, at 24,375 workers with 82 per cent of them employed in construction.  The same table records wall and floor tilers at 17,005 and architects at 19,075.  Even on the undercount, landscaping is one of the larger occupations in the construction workforce.

There is one further problem with that number.  It comes from the 2021 Census, and the Census sorts job titles using a list of occupations written in 2013.  The data now shaping national construction workforce planning for this industry is a nearly five year old record of how workers described themselves, filed against a set of job categories that predates much of the work the industry is now being asked to do.

Undercounting would be a smaller problem if the workforce were growing.  It is not expanding at the pace urban policy appears to assume.

Across the sector, contractors report increasing difficulty attracting and retaining experienced staff.  Some small and medium-sized landscape businesses report spending tens of thousands of dollars each year advertising for staff, often with limited success.  For businesses employing ten or fifteen people, those costs are significant and reflect a labour market already under pressure.  These pressures sit within the same construction labour market that governments are relying on to deliver more housing.

The concern across the industry is not a shortage of work.  It is the growing difficulty of finding the skilled people needed to deliver it, and that is a structural problem rather than a commercial one.

At the same time, the work itself has changed.

For most of its history landscape construction happened at ground level.  Backyards, parks, streetscapes and public open space.  The landscapes now being drawn into development applications are a different proposition.  Green roofs, elevated podium gardens, vertical greening systems and rooftop amenity spaces sit above buildings, around building envelopes and within tightly integrated architectural environments.

They are not simply gardens placed on buildings.  They are layered built systems.

They rely on membrane protection, root barriers, drainage cells, irrigation systems, structural load considerations, access planning and long-term maintenance strategies.  They must perform through heat, wind, storms, plant failure and the ageing of materials.  When they fail, the consequences are not aesthetic.  They involve water ingress, structural risk, system breakdown and expensive remediation.

Urban greening now requires working around building envelopes, waterproofing interfaces, elevated structures and complex irrigation systems.  These environments demand a combination of construction capability, horticultural knowledge and an understanding of integrated building systems.

Higher qualifications do exist. A Certificate IV and a Diploma covering landscape construction management sit within the training package, and there are registered providers ready to deliver them. Queensland has made the Certificate IV available through a funded traineeship pathway, which is a real step and worth acknowledging.

The harder problem is demand.  The Diploma remains unfunded, and neither qualification reliably converts into a recognised outcome at the end of it.  It is not what employers are hiring on, and it is not what the licensing framework currently recognises as a pathway to a builder licence.  Providers cannot fill classes for a qualification the market has not yet been given a reason to value, and that is a recognition problem rather than a training one.

The issue is that the policy conversation about greener cities has moved faster than the workforce conversation required to deliver them.

Installation is only part of the task.

The long-term responsibility for maintaining these landscapes rarely sits with the trades that install the underlying building systems.  Plumbers and waterproofing contractors complete their scope, but they do not return to manage the living systems above.

Once operational, responsibility for plant health, irrigation performance, drainage and overall system function typically falls to landscape maintenance teams.  In practice, landscapers are the ones who return.  They are expected to understand how these systems interact, to diagnose issues when something goes wrong, and to respond to failures that may originate well beyond their original scope.

They are the trade called when systems fail, and the ones expected to keep these environments functioning over decades, often working around, but not within, the scope of other regulated trades.

That last point deserves more attention than it gets.  On a green roof every trade holds a licence covering its own component.  The waterproofer is licensed for the membrane.  The hydraulic contractor is licensed for the drainage.  The engineer certifies the structure.  The landscape contractor's scope of works covers what sits on top of all of it.  No licence covers the assembly, and the assembly is what fails.

Which raises a further question.  If landscapers are expected to maintain increasingly complex urban landscapes, are training pathways, workforce planning and regulatory oversight keeping pace with those demands?

The same construction workforce relied upon to deliver housing is also expected to deliver these increasingly complex landscapes.  If landscapers are expected to carry that responsibility, then landscaping must be recognised for what it is: a delivery trade within the built environment.

That recognition should extend beyond symbolism.  It should include accurate occupational classification, workforce planning, training pathways and a clearer understanding of the technical capabilities required.

As cities grow more complex, the performance of the public realm becomes increasingly critical.  Yet the workforce required to deliver and sustain it remains largely invisible.

Greener cities will not be delivered by concept.  They will be delivered by the landscapers who build them, and who keep them alive long after the project is finished.

Someone has to build the green on the render.
 

*Landscape Queensland is the peak body for landscape construction, landscape design and horticulture in Queensland.  It is currently working on occupational classification reform, licensing pathways and training alignment for the landscape construction workforce.*
 

Sources: BuildSkills Australia 2025-26 Workforce Plan, Appendix A: Core Occupations, construction table (ANZSCO 362213, drawn from the 2021 ABS Census of Population and Housing).  ABS Census of Population and Housing 2021, ANZSIC 3291 Landscape Construction Services.  Landscape Queensland, OSCA Landscaping Occupations Discussion Paper, 2026.  Green Pathways Gold Places, 2032 Green Grid Workshop Summary, October 2025, a joint publication of the Queensland chapters of the Australian Institute of Architects, the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects, the Planning Institute of Australia and the Design Institute of Australia, with Engineers Australia.