Changing Melbourne (ENVS10012)

This subject investigates why Melbourne can be modelled as a most liveable city in a global context. It does this through an examination of the City’s built, natural, and social environment from a range of scientific, design and engineering perspectives. The subject features field-based activities that encourage students to experience and engage with the City while discovering the importance of interdisciplinary knowledge and collaboration supported by lectures about the architecture, landscape, ecology, engineering, geology, planning and social characteristics of this and other cities.

The city as laboratory approach acknowledge the range of expertise across the three areas of Science, Engineering and Design. It examines how human intervention has created and continues to affect the structure and performance of local environments. In order to achieve a broad-based understanding of the systems, processes and interventions that contribute to the ongoing development of Greater of Melbourne, the subject uses a series of interrelated disciplinary frameworks to focus on its diversity, through situating learning within a creative and directed studio-based format.

The subject examines the multi-disciplinary operations of team-based groups in accessing, forming and applying of new areas of knowledge. This subject provides an opportunity for students to gain insight and understanding through direct contact with a wide range of stakeholders involved with urban and natural environments including; leading people from industry, Government agencies and academics who are expert in their respective fields. It seeks to generate a future-focused, professionally and personally relevant understanding of the complex dynamics currently impacting our cities and lifestyles.

• Changing Melbourne’s primary focus is arranged through a fieldwork program located across Greater Melbourne to enable real world mapping of complex ecosystems in order to identify the relational aspects of designed environments.

• Adopt a localized approach to regional situations that impact upon sustainability and livability across a range of socio-economic, geo-political, environmental and virtual conditions

• Identification of a series of sites across Greater Melbourne at the demonstrated intersection of natural ecologies, constructed environments and infrastructural systems and networks, where complex interactions in everyday situations form the basis for enquiry and contribution to new knowledge.

• Encourage students to identify their primary disciplinary interests in the context of an interdisciplinary team. Sharing and negotiation across knowledge areas is a key attribute of Changing Melbourne.

• Mapping and documenting processes encourage disciplinary skills development with cross-disciplinary oversight within a collaborative studio-based tutorial format.

• Mimics real-world multidisciplinary practices where collaboration and shared understanding is an essential component in developing research and design strategies for environmental systems