Re-commission

In the midst of a housing crisis, the Victorian government has deemed 44 public housing towers unfit-for-purpose – announcing plans for demolition and redevelopment, and in doing so displacing thousands of residents while severing ties to home, community and place.

Taking the red brick towers of the Carlton Housing Estate as our site, the studio asks students to speculate on alternative interventions and strategies that avoid this scale of displacement.

Students will be tasked with researching the history of public housing in Victoria to understand the political, cultural and economic factors that have led to their procurement, neglect and subsequent demolition, whether already occurred or imminent, to interrogate public opinion and stigma and challenge the prevailing narrative.

Students will take their broader research and apply it to a reading of the estate as it was, is and how it could be, prioritising careful observation and critical thinking over more typical site data collection and analysis, to trace connections of dispossession and displacement up until our current time to create an archive of the lived and living histories of the site.

The second half of the semester will focus on translating these observations of limbo states into strategies that avoid demolition and displacement and instead propose imagined narratives of repair and care, of pride of home and connection to place, ultimately asking the question, who gets to (re)commission (public) housing?

Studio Leaders: Pia Socias

Image: Carlton Housing Commission Estate, R. Storey 2014 (edited)