Festival of urbanism 2021
Endangered adolescence: are public spaces dead to teens?
Teens have found new public spaces on-line, while children’s ability to access quality place spaces and recreation areas is highly variable across Australia’s cities and regions. This session asks whether online spaces are the new public realm for young people and how urban planners and policy makers can make real space in the city for the next generation coming of age.
Planning for Recovery: Leading urbanists in conversation
Leading urbanists – from North America to Australia, discuss the lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic for future city planning and urban life.
Student film competition and screening
As part of the inaugural Festival of Urbanism short film competition, you are invited to join the screening of short-listed films and the announcement of the competition winners.
Endangered communities and resurgent urbanism
With ongoing processes of dispossession, marginalisation, gentrification and exclusion threatening urban and regional communities, what forms of insurgent and resurgent urbanism are emerging and how might urban policy makers and planners support these efforts?
Endangered infrastructures: Discussion led by the HHT Infrastructure Governance Incubator
In the absence of integrated governance and in the wake of the weak leadership on the unfolding risks of climate change, are infrastructure systems capable of keeping up with the unprecedented environmental, economic, social, and health crisis facing cities on unceded First Nations land?
Endangered discourse: Improving the quality of public debate on urban and housing policy
An informed citizenry, independent analysis, and robust public debate are all essential for good public policy particularly in relation to housing and urban policy. This panel event, which also celebrates the work of the inaugural Director of the Henry Halloran Trust, Peter Phibbs, features perspectives from University and industry research, independent journalism, and the public sector.
Endangered governance: Public trust, urban decisions, and ethical practice
Clear and transparent ethical frameworks can and should feature much more overtly in decision making across development processes, which are uniquely exposed to risks associated with conflicts of interest, politicisation, compromise, and corruption. This panel explores the realities facing planners and policy makers, and highlights strategies for those committed to ethical practice.
What’s endangering public health in urban environments?
Diet, exercise, and sleep are fundamental aspects of good health. What role does design play in making sure you’re fit and healthy in a public health crisis? How can urban planning encourage more physical activity and good eating? Join our Charles Perkins Centre experts to hear about the impacts of urban living on our health, and what we can do to make the most of our environment.
Informal urbanism in Sydney: precarity, pop-ups, privilege, politics
A range of actors, from elites to the excluded, get things done by working around the laws and codes that are meant to govern urban life. This panel will bring together research that explores the way that a range of urban outcomes are delivered through informal practices across Sydney – in housing, employment, care, policing and culture.
Endangered Urbanism - Panel: Is Urbanism over?
With existential threats from global health to climate disaster through to ‘super-gentrification’ and exclusion, is urbanism – the diversity, creativity, and progress associated with urban life, and social connectivity in cities – still viable? Eminent speakers discuss the challenges and whether urbanism as we know it is ‘over.’
Endangered Country? Indigenous perspectives on planning, and development
A panel of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander experts discuss their perspectives on planning, land management, cultural heritage, economic opportunity and what must be changed.
Urban Undercurrents: The Hidden Infrastructure of Wild Cities
A panel that roams, tracing the human and more-than-human entanglements of what lies beneath the city and its culture/natures. Artistic intervention, speculative proposition, community discussion—this live/digital event takes place in and between the cultural spaces, inviting the audience into an experience of the city’s metaphoric and literal subterranean.
Endangered urban spaces: Industrial lands in Geelong, Melbourne and Sydney
Cities across Australia have rezoned a significant amount of urban industrial land, arguing that these areas are underutilized and better repurposed for new housing and office space. Yet planners, policymakers, and urban activists are rediscovering the diverse functions and roles of industrial zones. Join this panel discussion on industrial lands and their contribution to Australian urbanism.
Sprawl Repair? Planning for a city of 20-minute neighbourhoods
The notion of 20-minute neighbourhoods is appealing and simple. The appeal has only grown with COVID-19 lockdowns. Yet current planning for 20-minute neighbourhoods is ad-hoc and lacks structural guidance. This session brings together city planners and researchers as they share their views about how to successfully scale and integrate walkable design at the metropolitan scale.
Endangered Urban Visions?: Melbourne’s Mid-Century Satellite Cities- Ambitions and Failures
This panel will discuss findings from the ARC-funded project Australia’s New Cities, which explores the novel urban planning and design elements of new city projects in the mid-20th century. COVID has reignited debates about the purpose-built greenfield ‘new cities’ as antidotes to the unplanned entanglement of sprawling, un-serviced townships beyond the city limits.
Endangered public spaces?: Encountering the people of Melbourne City Centre
In light of COVID pandemic effects on the urban and real estate dynamics, we welcome contributions from people who make the CBD their home to share their experiences in a neighbourhood gathering. What lifestyles and cultures and needs of people in this space? How is the CBD being transformed right now? Together we map our identities, community relations and perceptions about the city.
Endangered Urbanism?: The Post-covid flight to the regions, a panel discussion with local government
The COVID normal experience of city lockdowns and working from home has prompted many to question the need to pay high housing costs to be able to live within a relatively close commute to the central city. Hear from local planners in Melbourne's CBD and Victoria's regional cities on the implications for their local areas and what actions planners are taking to manage this population shift.
Hidden, underground stories of a watery city: A sound and AR experience exploring buried water ecologies and cultural narratives
Join us for a discussion panel with geographers, anthropologists and planners to discuss the importance of protecting the vulnerable water ecologies. Following the panel, explore buried water ecologies and cultural narratives at Rippon Lea Estate through a sound and AR experience.