Description

In times of inflationary investment and explosive urban growth, Building Mixity! challenges the status quo of expansive and unequal development in Melbourne, Australia. The long forgotten and unique post-industrial suburb of Cremorne serves as a blueprint for an alternative vision of robust and productive city making. Building Mixity! explores the potentials of combining adaptive re-use tactics with new densities as a holistic and tangible strategy for urban transformation in a context of rapid population growth in the Asia Pacific. Building on the existing rich atmospheres and assets of the place, strategies to foster mixity are discussed from a design perspective, as well as economic, historic, legal, and social angles. How can the coexistence of old and new, of diversity of urban fabric, spaces-but also of inhabitants, economies, programs, and architectures-be preserved in a context of extreme investment pressures by designers, planners, and decision-makers? The book combines different research strategies mutually informing each other: interspersing design approaches with historical investigations and interviews, discussing community engagement, and recontextualising Melbourne's urban development as part of a global post-Global Financial Crisis phenomenon. This book emerged from a design research project at Monash University's Architecture Department led by Maud Cassaignau and Markus Jung. (Series: Monash Architecture Booklets) [Subject: Architecture, Art & Design, Design Research]