Living Networks: re-imagining regional communities and their heritage

Working from the periphery on Djaara Country, Castlemaine Regional Victoria,140km out of Melbourne, our proposal starts from the centre of this old gold mining town and seeks to document and capture our more-than-architectural endeavour. For this narrative, the architect’s business is as much about observing and taking note, revealing and paying heed to the invisible and often intangible systems of just what’s there now. Drawing from a Kraussian expanded architectural field, we have evolved a design process of building site knowledge and context that uncovers the histories, peripheral stories, forgotten memories and patterns of occupation. In seeking solutions to accommodate a growing community, to house those now homeless and to give more agency to our Indigenous people, we reflect on currently accepted design strategies and propose an alternative model that rethinks property boundaries and ownership, occupancy and vacancy regulations.  Our work has been resisting the additions of new buildings and instead foregrounds what already exists, to recast the accumulations of built fabric and of its interstitial landscapes as inherently value filled. In doing this we reveal an eclectic town fabric, a mix of industrial, Victorian and 20th century material that holds traces of past occupation but also reflects a kind of vibrant eclecticism that speaks more to a possible future than carbon-hungry developer-led solutions. Our essay will build an alternative spatial narrative that makes visible a process that tracks and traces the voices of those invisible and marginalized protagonists as well as the value of existing built fabric. What we aim to construct is not more built stuff, but a more robust future that accepts what is already there; the ordinary, the unremarkable as well as remarkable. Our conclusions and contributions are as much in spatialising and making active – sensible – those forgotten and intangible voices and peripheral built heritages.<p></p>