Placemaking for resilience showcased at Melbourne Design Week
Placemaking is an innovative, collaborative participatory-design research method that works with community members to improve the environments of local spaces and places based on connections between people, Country and the built environment.
At Fire to Flourish, we are partnering with Monash Art, Design and Architecture (MADA) to trial placemaking to address community-led disaster resilience, helping shift traditional methods used in planning and architectural design to support communities around a shared vision for resilience.
Throughout 2023 in the Clarence Valley NSW, our placemaking team worked closely with our Clarence Valley community team to articulate their resilience vision and provide architectural and urban designs that they can now use as a resource. You can learn more about the successfully funded placemaking projects in Clarence Valley here.
On 23 May, Fire to Flourish and MADA researchers Prof Mel Dodd, Nikhila Madabhushi and Robert Lees hosted a 'Practitioners in Conversation' session to launch the Participation in Action series as part of Melbourne Design Week, showcasing the placemaking work conducted in Clarence Valley.
Here are some reflections on the event from Robert Lees, Research Officer, Placemaking:
"We had some great discussions around how you find balance between running a professional design practice with the needed flexibility of participatory design and the challenges of funding, sustainability of projects (longevity) and how, if these challenges are overcome you end up with richer, more contextually appropriate design outcomes.
We also discussed in depth the benefits that educational integration and service learning models can have on participatory design and in shaping the overall design industry (this was interesting as some of our past students were in the audience and they reflected on their experiences). Another general highlight was having placemaking projects on display from all over Australia (Victoria, NSW, Western Australia) and even New Zealand.
Having the discussion as part of Melbourne Design Week was really meaningful as it gave us a platform to foreground this way of working, which traditionally isn’t platformed in the architecture industry, as those that partake in participatory design methods often are just busy doing the work and it isn’t glamorous of photo worthy like other big shiny projects. The open panel discussion that MDW gave us also enabled the general public to be a part of the conversation, which is important as they are the key to participatory design being successful.
The exhibition format of film, drawing and image also has enabled the process and the stories of each project be told and shared in an evocative way to highlight that participatory design takes time and isn't just an add on. The process itself became the project in a way."
You can get a taste of what a community placemaking session looks and feels like in this video showcasing sessions in the Clarence Valley.