One moment you are surrounded by office towers, hospitals, universities and terrace houses, and the next all height and density falls away and the city breaks wide open. Bald land and a big sky never seemed so shocking.

It was 1845 when Charles La Trobe set aside the land (by then largely devoid of original vegetation) that is now Royal Park. To put his move in context, around the same time he selected some choice marshland and swamp for the Royal Botanic Gardens and set aside property for the Fitzroy and Carlton gardens.

But unlike these English-style showpieces, Royal Park never went down the structured, manicured route. For one thing, its vast size made it unwieldy for the sort of high-level upkeep that would be required, and for another there was such an assortment of amenities being stashed within it (a zoo, a slew of sporting facilities, a railway line, tram tracks) that for a long time it was difficult to achieve any sense of unity. When military encampments were called for during World War I, and then again in World War II, they were set up inside the park (and one remains to this day in the form of the Urban Camp, which puts up an assembly of school, sporting and community groups visiting Melbourne).

By the time the Melbourne City Council held a design competition for the park in 1984, it was a series of disconnected parcels of land pierced by roads and car parks. Ever utilitarian, a toilet block crowned its highest point.

Landscape architects Ron Jones and Brian Stafford won the competition with a design that stripped the park back to its central elements. Where most development plans propose adding features, this one was largely about removing them. The idea was to edit and clarify until the landscape felt unified and continuous.

Jones and Stafford, then of Laceworks Landscape Collaborative, outlined plans for a park that ''combined the perceived spaciousness of native landscapes'' with the function and artifice required of urban areas. They wanted to reintroduce a sense of horizon, sky and wind. ''It will not be an imitation nor a reconstruction of an idealised past but a novel synthesis which speaks well of the place and those who make it,'' they wrote in their plan.

Almost 30 years on, the bulk of their development plans have been implemented. Rob Adams, the City of Melbourne's director of city design, says it is a testament to the design that the council has consistently held true to the principles embedded within it.

But not everyone adores Royal Park. Where Adams sees a landscape of open woodland, wetland, and native grassland that is unique and special and transports him back to his childhood in the country, others read the place as scrappy and unkempt. One person I spoke to found it unwieldy , unwelcoming and too empty of people. Another described it as ''windy, inhospitable and pug-ugly''. Not so long ago Jones found himself at lunch with friends of friends (oblivious to his Royal Park role) who were saying, why would you go to Royal Park, there is nothing there. The landscape architect bit his tongue.

Jones, who won the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects' President's Award in 2010, when his urban design and landscape architectural work was described as ''thoughtful, highly contextual, considered and urbane'', says from the very start he has encountered the argument Royal Park should be a ''nice garden rather than a nasty, brown, empty space''.

First there were people calling for it to be more manicured and classic like the exotic diversions to be had at Melbourne's Royal Botanic Gardens. More recently people have started expressing a longing for a look that is defined and stylised, in line with what has been carved out at Cranbourne.

But the view held by Jones, Adams and many others is that Royal Park was never meant to be like anything else. It is important there be a suite of parks in the city providing quite different experiences, they say, and that Royal Park be allowed to be, well, Royal Park.

''As lovely as the botanic gardens are, they are a very enclosing, intimate space,'' Jones says. ''Wonderful as Cranbourne [the Australian Garden at the Cranbourne RBG] is, that level of art and stylisation would jar a bit to me here. Royal Park is providing something completely different. It's the juxtaposition of space with city, it's an extraordinary opening out that you don't get anywhere else in central Melbourne.''

But while Jones, who no longer works with, or is even in touch with Stafford, says he would be ''horrified'' if grand-scale changes occurred to the park, especially to its indigenous grassland, he does believe some aspects of the original plan could be developed further to ensure the park works for more people. He says there is potential for the creation of more ''intimate'' areas around the edges (in line with the native garden on the corner of Gatehouse Street and Royal Parade) and for the planting of more trees. ''There needs to be more of a look at the opportunities to make more habitable spaces that work with the big open spaces and also complement the sports facilities,'' he says. ''There still needs to be some level of amenity, places to sit, places to have a barbecue.''

Melbourne City Council says it does not have attendance figures for the park because entry is not controlled, but anyone who wanders through it regularly will tell you that utilisation of the parkland - as opposed to the sports facilities - often appears sparse.

''I don't think that kind of emptiness, openness and quietness is something you want everywhere,'' Jones says. ''But it's good to have at least some place where you can have that kind of escape. The big open hilltop works well for people who live in Parkville [and] are not driving across town and expecting something to keep them happy for three hours. It is when you have the combination of [open and intimate] spaces that is more likely to work for people.''

Designs that the council has just unveiled for the three hectares of land freed up by the demolition of the old children's hospital go some way to meeting some of this. When, in 2005, the state government announced plans to develop a new children's hospital adjacent to the old one, it promised that the site taken up by the old hospital (land excised from the park in 1957) would be returned to parkland.

Following extensive public consultation, City of Melbourne senior landscape architect Skye Haldane says it was determined the new landscape should be in keeping with the rest of the park and provide a taste of what visitors might find elsewhere within it. ''In some ways it's a Royal Park in miniature,'' she says.

The river red gums planted around other parts of the park will be extended to the periphery of this section, which will contain stretches of scrubby woodland, gullies and grasslands. The landscaping details and plant selection have been influenced by the seven indigenous seasons of Melbourne and the relationships between flora and fauna, seasonal change and cultural associations.

There will be slopes, shallow pools of water, hilltop lookouts and picnic lawns. As Royal Park's closest point to the CBD, the new landscape will be a ''front door'' to the wider park, a children's play space and a broad-appeal recreational area rolled into one.

What it won't contain is the sort of timber play equipment with built-in slides and noughts and crosses games you see endlessly rolled out elsewhere around town. While Haldane confirms the new area will include play equipment, she says it will be designed expressly for the park and embedded into the topography of the site to give the feel of slipping down rocky embankments and flying off hilltops. ''We are mindful of the natural setting of the park and we want to encourage children into the park to play in that setting,'' she says

But it will also, she insists, ''be a landscape for everyone''. ''Some people haven't felt the invitation to come into Royal Park,'' she says. ''It doesn't have that formality we're used to in other parks and it can present a bit of a wild edge so that sometimes you are not quite sure what to expect when you progress beyond that. But it is one of the only spaces in the inner city where kids can find sticks and go exploring in a bushland setting and it's important to recognise one of its key strengths is that it is not like other city parks.''

Jones sees the newly designed space, the first stage of which is due to be completed in December next year, as ''a terrific thing for the park''. Born in America, where he grew up with prairie landscapes in the Midwest, Jones says he has been influenced by the strong tradition in America (think Olmsted at New York's Central Park) to bring nature into the city as a way of counteracting the evils of modern life.

But as we have seen with the incursions into Royal Park in previous decades, such a park can't always counteract everything. Too often, Adams says, parks have been seen as ''free land'' and an opportunity for something (roads, sports fields, the list goes on) to be bundled into them. We all know, however, that no land is free and the price we pay is loss of public amenity.

Which brings us to the latest potential incursion into Royal Park stemming from the state government's transport priority to link the Eastern Freeway to CityLink. Detailed designs released on Tuesday indicate the multibillion-dollar freeway will result in large sections of the park being dug up to lay freeway tunnels and construct overpasses. Parts of the park could be closed to the public for years, and some parts lost permanently. These include Ross Straw Field, which is used for a multitude of sports, and areas of wetland that attract many birds and other wildlife. While the City of Melbourne says the state government's plans need to be considered in detail before it can comment, Julianne Bell, secretary of Protectors of Public Lands Victoria, says the plans confirm the new road project will ''cut the heart out of Royal Park''. ''It's complete annihilation,'' she says.

People have long held strong views about this land, reflected in The Age's archives. In 1970, one journalist lamented the building of a baseball ground and tentative plans for a golf course ''in one of the last free areas Melbourne has left''. In the mid-'70s, reports detailed concerns about the erosion of space from the widening of roads and a few years later anxiety about a master plan (that was not acted on) proposing, among other things, rentable community garden allotments and bush regeneration. Then in 1986 a number of sporting bodies campaigned against Jones' and Stafford's plans to move the park away from its sporting emphasis.

Almost three decades on from the sporting lobby push and it can be argued that with our growing population and increasingly dense cities, the value in having the large, open, peaceful space of Royal Park is greater now than ever. Since 2009 the world's urban population has become bigger than its rural one. More of us are starting to appreciate the aesthetic and spiritual value to be had in non-pristine urban green space.

Not so long ago the American environmental writer Emma Marris wrote a book about what she termed the ''rambunctious garden''. ''If New Yorkers planted more fertile plants and loosened up their gardening standards, bees zooming across the five boroughs could tie isolated specimens together into a metapopulation,'' she wrote.

''If they were willing to plant species with less pest resistance, and accept the tattered leaves and petals that come with it, there would be more food available to the insect fauna, and the Big Apple would become a more diverse place. It would also become a buggier place with a perhaps challenging aesthetic.''

As in New York, new parks and gardens in Melbourne - in the Docklands, say - tend to be tightly contained and compact and come over all highly designed rather than sprawling and naturalistic. Although small spaces can work well (think of the city's laneways), Jones says it is increasingly important we also have a landscape ''that is big enough to hold its own in the city''.

Royal Park, where 15,000 people gathered in 1860 to farewell Burke and Wills in their fateful bid to cross Australia from south to north and back, is it.