Not quite right urban landscapes: Designing within redundant space in a peri-urban agriculture region

In this case study design processes are used to explore potential new land-use patterns in redundant spaces in an intensive horticultural region, in peri-urban Melbourne, Victoria. Currently, a mismatch between title boundaries and commercial scale horticultural production methods has led to pockets of under-utilised land. The projects parameters were to increase efficiency, introduce cross programming and develop a strategy for recreation as a new activity in this region. The underlying purpose of this speculative design project was to develop design methods to work with aberrant and unusual sites without losing the very qualities that characterise these places. On this site the overriding imperative was to ensure that the outcome preserves the existing haunting beauty of this region. The case study offers a design framework that can be utilised in other circumstances where it is important to reorient land use without destroying the not-quite-right qualities of places that are so easily overlooked but so important to the genius loci.