This paper discusses the vulnerability of Melbourne’s food and fuel supply within the interconnected frameworks of complexity and systems theory. This approach starts from the acceptance that this complex adaptive socio-technological system we label ‘Melbourne’ cannot ever be truly reified, as its composite infrastructures and subsystems, often labelled its ecofootprint, exist across an array of...

Quarrying is a noxious industrial activity necessary for the provision of stone and clay, utilised predominately in building activities as the city grows. In post-industrial Melbourne, the extraction of these materials has left a pock-marked landscape, reflecting the fact that the city was settled upon an opportune juncture of sand-and-clay, basalt, and mudstone fields.

The Post War expansion of onshore manufacturing created nationally significant industrial precincts in regional Australia, each surrounded by large swathes of suburban housing to accommodate their blue-collar workforces. However, a shift towards offshore manufacturing over the past decade led to the closure of many Australian manufacturing precincts and the substantial economic decline of many regional...

The contemporary Melbourne landscape is usually defined in a physical sense. The complex cultural landscape, however incorporates not only the physical, but also what’s beneath, on and above the surface, including the sky and the cosmos. These cultural landscapes form essential components of a Wurundjeri person’s identity and connection to ‘Country’, the Traditional Custodians of...

The nearly two-decade long creation of the medical/health research precinct at the University of Melbourne in the 1950s and 1960s transformed a previously unused part of the Parkville campus into a showpiece of modernist planning and architecture. This paper outlines the strategic colocation of a series of high-rise slabs containing laboratories and teaching spaces that...