Walking the walk

This studio questions how we can design suburban neighborhoods that people want to walk in.

Whittington 3219 has significant proportions of public housing and is amongst the most disadvantaged suburbs in Victoria. Design propositions for “healthy footpaths” and housing upgrades will aim to address issues of safety, health and wellbeing, social and spatial justice, neighborhood resilience and alleviation of locational disadvantage.

Walking is explored as a radical creative and critical tool for architectural inquiry and architectural propositions. Although walking does not constitute a physical construction of a space, this studio asks how it might imply a transformation of a place and its meanings. Walking is understood as critical to democracy and participation in public life. This studio is interested in how walking, and walking-generated architecture, can be an act of resistance to the status quo, enabling self-empowerment, modes of participation and agency. Can healthy footpaths serve to destigmatise a neighborhood?

Design briefs acknowledge the idea that the only way to have a safe neighborhood is to have people walking the street, where people see and watch out for each other. Site specific observation, research and creative walking methodologies will aim to establish where boundaries and barriers, both physical and otherwise, are to human activity and to community connection. Walking will be used as a design tool that aims to encourage social mixing, community cohesion and social interaction.

The design of private/public thresholds for housing along pedestrian routes will aim to co-create more inclusive, safe, high-quality shared footpath spaces where residents can gather, exercise, play, and interact. These threshold spaces will be a key focus as potential sites of messy vitality and as a nexus for social and spatial agency.

This studio aims to develop students' understanding of social housing, neighborhood revitalization and public space improvement strategies and their inter- relationship with contemporary social, environmental, cultural, political, ethical and ideological contexts.

Students will engage with a broad range of practices for design of inclusive and accessible public space. Housing design will aim to counter ‘privatisation,’ or resident retreat within private dwellings where people are shut off from the public realm of the footpath. Design tasks include the practice domains of health and wellbeing, housing and liveability and include strategies for densification and diversification of existing housing stock (including new social and affordable housing and renovation/adaptive reuse of existing public housing), public space improvements, place making and neighborhood revitalisation.

This is a hybrid studio, mixing online and face to face engagement. Students will work in groups and individually. Group design tasks will be aligned to the macro scale and to the scale of the street. For individual work, walking will be aligned to propositions at the scale of the single dwelling and to the suburban fragment, with consideration given to DIY suburbanism and with a focus on salvage and adaptation rather than large scale reversal.

Individual student designs will be located on neighbouring residential sites, collectively forming a new vision for a walkable streetscape. A need will arise for students to discuss and consider both shared- and contested-visions for that streetscape. This might include, for instance, dialogue around setback conditions and private/public thresholds. Iterative development of collective streetscape drawings and models will be informed by imagining the footpath as a place where “pluralism and solidarity are the common ground, a place where people are curious about each other instead of afraid.“1

A site visit to Whittington will be a requirement for face-to-face students. All students will be expected to regularly go outside and walk (please note that walking includes wheeling walks and any other means of embodied movement in public space).