The Melbourne Section: A Context Specific Design-Research Applied Across A Strategic Metropolitan Territory

How we balance the competing demands of the global economy with local employment, food production, water resourcing and management over the long term is a central question for urban designers. Building on Sassen’s and Jacobs’ theories of diverse urban environments as sites of creative opportunities, our research by design project set out to examine how we can utilise urban assets which model resilience, innovation and regeneration. Our hybrid approach draws on a series case studies of Melbourne and a wide set of methods: first-person inquisition, historical investigation, demographic analysis and rigorous mapping to challenge planimetric thinking. Our hybrid urban project tests how found patterns of collaboration can be extracted and implemented in a densified form and how learning from each site’s local synergies, interactions can inform wider thinking across territory. While our findings on latent substrata of urban innovation which are rooted in the history of place potentially hold a key to global resource shortages our design strategies show how connecting existing innovation seeds new productivity. Ideogrammatic mappings spatialize opportunities in unexpected adjacencies between knowledge, production and cultural-exchange centres, unearthed through non-quantitative sources of information.