Taking the Bend

By using maps as active creative tools rather than static repositories of data, Taking the bend seeks to challenge top down approaches of master planning in favour of a micro-to-macro set of hybrid maps that can mark observations, conditions and, historical traces, alternating between subjective and objective approaches; as a process for understanding site, further developing these findings through more drawing and modelmaking into proposing frameworks for possibilities of inhabitation and experience.

Students will be introduced to mapmaking as a tool for observing and understanding site, for collecting and charting glimpses of conditions and histories, and as a means to analyse and critique proposals and policies, promoted on the basis of all-encompassing masterplans and sketchy renders.

Subsequently, we will explore urban mapping as a tool for design, testing maps’ potential to display details that are unseen, revealing tangible and intangible relationships and conditions without relying on text and numerical data.

The site is Fishermans Bend, heralded as one of the great inner-urban regeneration opportunities of our me but a site also mired in moments of displacement– from Indigenous settlements to colonial invasion, from wetlands and floodplains to contamination through shipping and industry.

The most recent plans for the area, which runs from the CBD to the foot of the West Gate Bridge, are a utopian vision of public transport-centred, multi-tenured sustainable neighbourhoods, housing for 80,000 residents and a huge employment precinct. The varying iterations and visions for Fishermans Bend, and in particular the four newly identified ‘suburbs’, will form the backdrop to a series of site explorations and investigations undertaken through the process of mapmaking and modelmaking techniques to examine how we could do better in creating a truly inclusive, diverse and sustainable suburb on the doorstep of the CBD, while also addressing the critical lack of housing for those on low incomes.

The studio will highlight the importance of public housing, analyse and critique the shift from a welfare state to privatization and propose alternatives to the current narrative.

Broken into 3 main stages, the studio will progress from accurate documentation of the existing to mapping remnants and echoes through to speculative re-imaginings of the future of public housing. Requiring multiple site visits, collectively and individually throughout the semester, exercises will be undertaken as individuals, groups and as a class, turning into extensions of one another; culminating in a collection of narratives that intensify and transform varying understandings of the site. The summa on and consolidation of these findings as hybridised maps will be the process through which to consider possibilities of place-making + building.