springvale laneways

Project Description

The Placemaking project will engage students in reimagining the public realm in the most culturally diverse city in Australia, the City of Greater Dandenong. It will engage students in reimagining six laneways in Springvale Activity Centre. The suburb of Springvale in the City of Greater Dandenong will be its case study context. Springvale is approximately 25 kms south-east of Melbourne's CBD. It presents a complex interaction of diverse land uses as well as home to a multicultural populace, with residents who have emigrated from all over the world including Asia, the Americas, Europe and Africa. Springvale, therefore, presents a highly suitable transformative case study area.

Learning Methodology

The MUP Studio P is run as a weekly intensive studio which allows 2 days of 3 hourly face-to-face contact. This studio is a capstone option for the completion of the Master of Urban Planning (MUP). In this instance, students engage with the actual complexity of the city, to understand socio-spatial relations at street and neighbourhood scale, and explore the dialectics between the perceived, lived and conceived urban realm in the City of Greater Dandenong.

Initially, teams of 4 will work collaboratively to undertake fieldwork in the Springvale Activity Centre through a series of creative place‐based methods to uncover and document existing place‐making practices of communities. The Studio will be realised through four key themes of movement/access; temporal placemaking; diversity/multicultural use of space and multimodal mapping. Subsequently, students will work collaboratively in pairs to plan, design and implement placemaking interventions as strategies for community engagement. Then, their designs will reflect and respond to the community perceptions gathered during this engagement. Each group will be expected to manage their budget, safety and policies.

It is expected that students enrolling in this studio will be able to develop the following placemaking skills:
• site analysis through multi-modal mapping;
• identify and respond to ethical challenges;
• place and placemaking understanding;
• design inclusive & creative placemaking solutions to urban issues;
• communicate design work through visual and media representation;

How does this studio match PlaceAgency Objectives?

The MUP studio P would offer an opportunity for future-focused research, involving critique and evaluation of multiple scenarios for the site. It will also typically engage with questions of power, and how planning instruments mediate conflicting interests, in the pursuit of the public interest (such as social justice, environmental sustainability, public health and safety). The focus on an urban site will not distract from an understanding of the site as part of a larger assemblage, nor from the - life does not stop at the edge of a conceived site.