Event banner for The Silvan Collective's Reimagine Urban Development talk.
A Lugarno project is giving southern Sydney a founder story with soil, housing and community resilience all in the same frame.
Permaculture Sydney South lists its October monthly meeting for Tuesday, 13 October, from 7pm to 9pm at Blackshaw Gould Community Pavilion in Hurstville. The session centres on The Silvan Collective, a project in Lugarno led by founder Claudia Walters with garden manager Daniel Di Fluri.
The official event description says The Silvan Collective is a partnership between three siblings. Its premise is to rethink urban development through a small, practical site rather than through a distant policy slogan. The project involves renovating two existing homes, adding two granny flats and one tiny home, and building edible forests, annual growing beds, aquaponics systems and poultry into a site of about 2,300 square metres.
That makes the story more than a gardening talk. Sydney's housing debate often splits into large apartment targets on one side and detached-home protection on the other. This Lugarno example sits in between, asking what can be done on existing suburban land when housing, food production and neighbourhood-scale resilience are planned together.
The founder angle is clear. The flyer says Walters has renovated a range of properties, including heritage-listed sites, boutique apartment blocks and standalone residential homes. It also says she runs Gilly's Kitchen Garden, focused on growing growers in the Illawarra, and serves on the board of the FrontFoot Collective.
Di Fluri's role adds the operating layer. The flyer says he has studied permaculture design, natural building and organic farming in Portugal and Italy, and brings an interdisciplinary background shaped by criminology and international business.
For readers, the useful local question is what a project like this can teach before anyone tries to scale it. Site limits, design choices, approval pathways, community partnerships and marketing all matter when a household-level idea becomes a lived urban experiment.
The event does not prove that The Silvan Collective is a model every suburb can copy. It does verify that a founder-led Lugarno project is now public enough to be discussed with a community audience. In a city still arguing over density, affordability and climate resilience, that is worth paying attention to.
