Urban agriculture has a long history entwined with place creation, personal expression and activism (Steel, 2008; Cohen, 2012). Despite regulatory and design interventions that attempt to hinder urban agriculture activities, communities continue to use it as a platform for exploration, experimentation and demonstration. What is revealing about the new food practices which have emerged in...

Melbourne group Boom Crash Opera’s 1987 single ‘City Flat’ is a musically exuberant (though according to at least one critic, lyrically ‘fairly bleak’) single celebrating a sparse inner-Melbourne lifestyle in which limited means enhance and highlight minor pleasures: coffee, kitchens, hanging out. Now just thirty years old, the song celebrates a cheap, recycled, ad hoc...

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 suburban municipality of Brimbank is strategically located across key transport corridors serving Melbourne’s rapid western and northwestern expansion. Brimbank Rising steps through local prehistory and history with attention to planning events from Hoddle’s 1840 survey to the recent Regional Rail Link which shape the area. Across five periods, this history sees planning as a...

The design-research Cremorne2025 investigated, though multiple iterations, the densification of an exemplary and historically crucial industrial suburb of Melbourne. It challenges consequences of urban sprawl, highlighting potentials of inner-city industrial sites for urban renewal and new activity. Careful intensification of urban heritage was acknowledged as necessary in retaining identity and attractiveness, avoiding gentrification.