Studio Leaders: Barnaby Bennett (architecture) Malte Wagenfeld (industrial design) & Mark Burry (SIAL)

Designing the Next Generation of affordable housing for Australia: the socio-cultural transformative capacity of architecture.

Australia currently has the least affordable housing of anywhere in the world and a patchy record with urban design. The era of fat plots of land for single dwelling urban homes is long over, but badly designed higher density apartments have resulted in ugly, ill-considered schemes, poor neighbourhood integration and a lack of vibrancy.  Broadmeadows is a site of ‘affordable’ housing but much of the housing stock and amenities are of low quality. There is also much vacant or underused land where major industrial sites have shut their doors.  The most striking examples of housing in Australia show ingenuity, but NextGen will tighten up and hone the argument, both in terms of the urban rationale and the passion for the home.  A better design approach engages with the many relevant issues: socio-economic and neighbourhood, materials and technology, mass production and mass customisation, the environment, and aesthetics. These projects experiment with design typologies, materials and construction, density and vibrancy, cultural shift strategies, modes of ownership, amenities, actionable neighbourhood design and city integration.

The hypothesis of NextGen is that design can only address the issue of affordable housing in Australia by evolving a design thinking that extends into, and embraces multiple criteria with a trans-disciplinary design-led approach.

Studio Leader: Dr. Sidh Sintusingha

Tutors: Matt Mackay (Hassell), Daniel Nunan (Aspect Studios)

Towards the objectives of 'urban sustainability' - what are the alternatives to Urban Sprawl?  How will the urban landscapes of Hume evolve from 2009 to 2032? This research studio into existing conditions in Broadmeadows ran alongside the Design Workshop, and the outcomes supported the second round of studios and design events in 2010.

Studio Leaders: Ammon Beyerle & Lisa Dew

In this studio we wanted architecture to engage with the everyday. Mess: Everyday Babylon was about suburban ecology, dispersed networks, people, diversity, social and material flows and filters – not just architectural aesthetics. Students endeavoured to participate with, respond to and create messy reality, very different from their previous studio experiences. With the use of iterative visions, diagrams and images, re-visioning a sustainable future became about listening and speaking, imagining, proposing and positively critiquing norms, while remembering to answer the big question: how do we get there?

Studio Leader: Simon Cookes, duckBuilD

Real sites, real research, real communities, real concerns, real constraints, real approach, real results.

The goals:
High density, trigger development. Buildings to be a minimum of 5000m² over a minimum of 3 floors. A civic gesture. Commercial, institutional, health, leisure, transport interchange, retail, mixed use programs (not solely residential though can have a residential component).
Triple bottom line. Ecologically sustainable development (ESD) ‐ aiming for a 6 star Green Star design rating. Sustaining and building on the skills and cultural diversity within the existing Broadmeadows community. How can these ecological and social assets tie in to an economically sensible program to create a vibrant, safe, healthy and sustainable district?

Studio Leader: Simon Curlis

The site of Broadmeadows is suitable to SLOW transport (super low consumptive transport), such as cycling and walking. Current bicycles are inappropriate for people with reduced capacity, the elderly, primary carers with infants and public amenities. With these target groups in mind the studio set out to envision pedal-powered alternatives to address a future without the convenience of the car.

The Broadmeadows urban profile dares one to dream of free public transport, active transport that benefits community health and which is locally buildable, maintainable, designable, economically beneficial and achievable. The community of Broadmeadows became a locale to test free transport viability where economic capacity is limited but social and cultural capital are high, although under-valued by many of the participant citizens and external stakeholders. Within the studio, students struggled against cultural conditioning of consumption and convenience as desirable activities, balanced against the realisation that active transport embodied multiple benefits at comparatively little cost.

Studio Leader: Mark Strachan

Tutors: Emma Luke, Nick Riddett, Andrew Hazelwinkel

Identifying opportunities - points of intervention through innovative services and systems - that will bring about positive change in individuals, neighbourhoods and communities of Broadmeadows.

What systems and service design solutions could evolve within the realms of the everyday activities, environments, organizations and communities of Broadmeadows?  Team projects explored and mapped the dynamics for one of the following topics: Health & Wellbeing (Play, recreation and shared community facilities); Industry (Up-cycling/up-skilling); Food & Drink (Production/storage/distribution/consumption/post-consumption); Memory (Engagement, history, culture, archiving & access).

Studio Leader: Simon Curlis

Students' immersion in Hume and Broadmeadows led to strategies for resilience to climate change and peak oil that respond to particular community needs.

Territories for design intervention based on community or industry sectors included mobility, energy, food, elderly and youth stakeholders. These projects envisage a community that has food and energy security, seeding of new industries and innovative means of investing in its own establishment. This ‘quiet revolution’ enables the local community to take control and responsibility for its own well-being and fosters community networks to build resilience to external economic fluctuations. Through the privileging of quality of life over fiscal capacity and proposing multiple interventions that distribute the risk and benefits, these studio projects create a re-democratised vision of local amenities and reduced reliability on externally provided services.

Studio Leaders: Kate Bissett-Johnson & Denis Smitka

A 2nd Year Industrial Design Studio envisaging a cohesive community which has a closer, visible, connection to energy and water use.

Broadmeadows is a growing hub that will be a major city in the near future. It is also an industrial centre with greater than 100 nationalities, countless religions and a car culture that does little to foster human interaction. There is a dearth of public spaces that promote a sense of neighbourhood, and the few areas that do exist appear neglected. The metaphor of a lounge room has been deliberately chosen to suggest the possible nature of the regenerated sites. As with lounge rooms, these sites should be seen as places for people to gather and places that encourage interaction. There are currently several disparate cultures that populate these sites and we want to cultivate social exchange in order to build a greater sense of openness and community.  Two sites were chosen as having great potential as blueprints for future sites.

A suite of elements is needed to create this "lounge room" - a system of parts that can be used to connect seemingly independent sites throughout the locality.  These public sites can also be perceived as "oases". Oases are traditionally places of rest and refreshment as well as places that draw together different living beings. They are places of refuge and are strongly linked - and sensitive to - the surrounding environment. Like oases, the designed objects need to be sensitive to the environment, incorporating sustainable aspects such as energy (wind or solar), water conservation or shelter from the elements (sun, wind and rain).

Studio Leader: Tania Ivanka

The studio was framed as ‘Adventures in interaction design’ with the directive: ‘Design for cultural change and exchange, communication and information’. Students chose from a range of themes addressing communication and culture: mobility and culture; food and culture; conversations and stories; water and/or energy visibility. Students applied Interaction Design (IxD) methods of user research, scenarios, prototyping and testing to create services and events that promoted or enabled more sustainable ways of living for the residents of Broadmeadows. The Broadmeadows project introduces innovative design for sustainability within the discipline of communication design, exposing students to potential design roles that contribute to social innovation.