Built Upon By Design Symposium

A three-day intensive symposium to engage with issues of gendered spatial equity in the urban environment.

The team behind the Built Upon by Design Symposium: [Clockwise from top left] Isabella Webb, Dr Gene Bawden, Dr Nicole Kalms, Dr Jess Berry and Timothy Moore. Image credit: Ella Mitchell

This international symposium, held at the Monash Prato Centre in 2019, brought together interdisciplinary scholars and practitioners from the fields of design, architecture, sociology, criminology, urban geography and gender studies to engage in dialogue around the complex and multifaceted problems of addressing issues of gendered spatial inequity in cities.

Consisting of a series of workshops applying XYX Lab’s co-design, design thinking, and material making methods, the symposium enabled rich discussions regarding issues such as safety in public space, visibility in the city, the [im]possibilities of inclusion/exclusion and the ambiguities of queering space.

The project resulted in the edited book: Contentious Cities: Design and the Gendered Production of Space (Routledge 2021).

Symposium participants

  • Merve Bedir, Hong Kong University
  • Bianca Fileborn, University of Melbourne
  • Tegan Larin, Monash University
  • Justine Lloyd, Macquarie University
  • Gabriel A. Maher, designer Netherlands
  • Lo Marshall, The Bartlett School of Architecture
  • Helen Stratford, Sheffield University
  • Amy Tooth Murphy, University of London
  • Meagan Tyler, RMIT University
  • Olivier Vallerand, Arizona State University
  • Dirk van den Heuvel, Delft University of Technology
  • Stathis G Yeros, University of California