MPavilion

Climate change is a symptom of the failure of our systems: systems in which humans have constructed a theory of dominion and viewed the planet as an infinite resource to be exploited. In a fast-paced and provocative talk, Indy Johar presents a worrying overview of the climate crisis and global systems which have resulted in a fundamental transition in the way we relate to the world around us. But don’t be alarmed, Indy presents a range of opportunities and provocations to help create a ‘planetary civilisation’ in which resources are valued differently, new governance models emerge, and principles of ownership give way to ideas of stewardship. Finally, Indy leaves us with an invitation to acknowledge the massive scale of the problem and to act today.

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The Living Cities Forum is an annual assembly exploring the role of design, planning and architecture in shaping our society.

In July 2022 it returned to Melbourne with an impressive array of international and local architecture and urban design leaders—featuring keynote addresses from globally renowned thinkers including Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung Elder Dave Wandin, British architect and co-founder of Dark Matter Labs Indy Johar, Canadian landscape architect Jane Mah Hutton, British architect and educator Joseph Grima, Ghanaian educator and architectural scientist Mae-ling Lokko, Vietnamese architect Vo Trong Nghia, and Chinese architect Xu Tiantian.

For as long as humanity has traded, materials have flowed. The 2022 Living Cities Forum theme ‘Material Flows’ examined the global material flows that underwrite our growing built environments. Within the 2022 theme, Living Cities Forum delivered its fifth program of keynote lectures, with cross-disciplinary talks over the course of the day by globally renowned thinkers from around the world.

While there has been increased awareness into the impacts of our material use in recent times, our approach to building construction continues to reflect short-term commercial interests over long-term environmental sustainability. These short-term interests are most evident in the material flow of pollution.

Against this backdrop, the forum explored if the current global disruptions to material flows—as a result of the global pandemic, wars and other destabilising factors—might well be our chance to rethink the materials we have taken for granted. Can we seize this moment to accelerate our first steps towards a genuine circular economy? Can we support those who are decarbonising our supply chains, while also breathing new life into smaller footprint manufacturing? The forum was an opportunity to rethink logistics as ethics and to reframe scarcity as the catalyst for new abundance.

The Living Cities Forum is supported by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria and Development Victoria.

Living Cities Forum is the sister event to MPavilion, and is presented by the Naomi Milgrom Foundation.

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Visit: livingcitiesforum.org

Subscribe to the MPavilion YouTube channel for our latest videos and live streamed events: http://bit.ly/subscribempavilion​​​

Explore our Living Cites Forum video & podcast library: https://livingcitiesforum.org/watch

#LivingCities22

If we can re-conceptualise material flows as flows of energy – from the land, during use, and back to Country – we open the door to a conscientious stewardship of materials by acknowledging that energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed. After welcoming us to Country, Uncle Dave Wandin discusses how the financial cost of material acquisition ignores the ecological costs of material consumption. Following a discussion of circular ecology – an alternative method for valuing our global environment – Dave urges us to consider our personal responsibility to the environment and the energy that we borrow and use. The stage is set for the following speakers as we are invited to shift perspectives and ask ourselves: where does our personal and professional responsibility begin and end?

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The Living Cities Forum is an annual assembly exploring the role of design, planning and architecture in shaping our society.

In July 2022 it returned to Melbourne with an impressive array of international and local architecture and urban design leaders—featuring keynote addresses from globally renowned thinkers including Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung Elder Dave Wandin, British architect and co-founder of Dark Matter Labs Indy Johar, Canadian landscape architect Jane Mah Hutton, British architect and educator Joseph Grima, Ghanaian educator and architectural scientist Mae-ling Lokko, Vietnamese architect Vo Trong Nghia, and Chinese architect Xu Tiantian.

For as long as humanity has traded, materials have flowed. The 2022 Living Cities Forum theme ‘Material Flows’ examined the global material flows that underwrite our growing built environments. Within the 2022 theme, Living Cities Forum delivered its fifth program of keynote lectures, with cross-disciplinary talks over the course of the day by globally renowned thinkers from around the world.

While there has been increased awareness into the impacts of our material use in recent times, our approach to building construction continues to reflect short-term commercial interests over long-term environmental sustainability. These short-term interests are most evident in the material flow of pollution.

Against this backdrop, the forum explored if the current global disruptions to material flows—as a result of the global pandemic, wars and other destabilising factors—might well be our chance to rethink the materials we have taken for granted. Can we seize this moment to accelerate our first steps towards a genuine circular economy? Can we support those who are decarbonising our supply chains, while also breathing new life into smaller footprint manufacturing? The forum was an opportunity to rethink logistics as ethics and to reframe scarcity as the catalyst for new abundance.

The Living Cities Forum is supported by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria and Development Victoria.

Living Cities Forum is the sister event to MPavilion, and is presented by the Naomi Milgrom Foundation.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Visit: livingcitiesforum.org

Subscribe to the MPavilion YouTube channel for our latest videos and live streamed events: http://bit.ly/subscribempavilion​​​

Explore our Living Cites Forum video & podcast library: https://livingcitiesforum.org/watch

#LivingCities22

Mae-ling Lokko is an educator, architectural scientist and biomaterials technology researcher from Ghana and the Philippines whose work centres on the upcycling of agrowaste and biopolymer materials. Her research integrates a broad range of criteria that questions contemporary material-value systems to evolve life cycle design to meet generative justice criteria.

Chris Bourke, the Melbourne bureau chief for Bloomberg News, spoke with Mae-ling ahead of the Living Cities Forum 2022, which centres around the theme of ‘Material Flows.’

In this conversation, they discuss the potential material uses of coconut husks, interrogate the colonial narratives that inform the cultural barriers which inhibit the uptake of certain materials, and much more.

The Melbourne Awards Alumni Breakfast Panel Discussion.

A panel conversation exploring the topic of redefining leadership in turbulent times, featuring Lord Mayor Sally Capp, Peggy O’Neal AO (President of the Richmond Football Club and Chancellor of RMIT University), Dr Linny Phuong (Founder of The Water Well Project) and Daniel Manly (Brand Director, Arbory Bar & Eatery/Arbory Afloat/HER Bar/BKK.

For the entirety of the period architecture and design have been part of university curriculums, Indigenous culture and heritage, First Nations perspectives and understandings of Country have been largely absent—or if present viewed through an anthropological lens rather than as a living culture. In recent times it has become clear this is not good enough. Yet with already packed curriculums where do we start? This yarn brings together three academics and practitioners to share their experiences and the work they are doing in relation to Indigenising curriculum.

MPavilion’s fifth annual BLAKitecture forum aimed to centralise Indigenous voices in conversations about architecture, the representation of histories, and the present and future states of our built environments. BLAKitecture is curated by MPavilion’s program consultant Sarah Lynn Rees.

This event was part of Melbourne Design Week 2022.

Older women’s lived experience of different housing types is not well understood or documented. How do we design housing for older women at risk of homelessness? What do these women need to make a place they can call home?

In the coming years, Victoria’s Big Housing Build will deliver thousands of homes for vulnerable Victorians. It is important that we get this right.

Recent research by architects Samantha Donnelly and Sophie Dyring evaluated four different housing types provided to women over 45 at risk of homelessness in suburban Melbourne. The research explored how housing design impacts the lives of these women, how interior and exterior spaces are valued and how their homes could be improved to further enrich their lives.

Listen to a discussion with the authors and participants of this research. The conversation will look at the important role design has to play in housing older women at risk of homelessness. It will address the idea of home as a safe refuge, a foundation for economic security and look at the design considerations that allow women to make these houses, homes.

Listen to a conversation where we unpacked a group of images to expose the covert narratives of colonialism and slow violence embedded in extractivism.

Focused on coal mining in Australia, but also looking into instances in the UK, South Africa and the Americas, we cross-examined visual narratives that expand our understanding of coal mining beyond its economic and environmental repercussions — and well into its social, political and cultural implications.

This talk forms part of a two part series by the Global Extraction Observatory (GEO)—a research collective led by Eduardo Kairuz and Sam Spurr exploring how new forms of visual and spatial practice can amplify our climate change understanding. From the open-cut mine landscapes in Australia to the mine-tunnel interiors in the United Kingdom, we examined the aesthetics of energy production and resource extraction to disclose the political, ecological and multi-scalar implications of extractivism.

This podcast expands existing knowledge on the environmental impact of resource extraction, listen as they examine the spatial and scalar implications of lithium mining.

Presenting alternatives to dominant extractivist socio-political narratives, they explored design’s value regarding the formulation of sustainable post-carbon futures.

The Global Extraction Observatory (GEO) is a research collective led by Dr Eduardo Kairuz and Dr Sam Spurr exploring how new forms of visual and spatial practice can amplify the understanding of the single most pressing issue of present time: the climate emergency. From the open-cut mine landscapes in Australia to the mine-tunnel interiors in the United Kingdom, they examined the aesthetics of energy production and resource extraction to disclose the political, ecological and multi-scalar implications of extractivism.

Too often, through expediency, ignorance or habit, the design profession shapes environments to suit the needs and experience of an ‘average’ human being. However, designing for ‘average’ results in average design that meets the needs of some, while a diversity of people can be made to feel uncomfortable or unwelcome in a place.

To create the space for different approaches to how we plan and design our cities, we must start by making the time to understand the lived experience of the city from multiple perspectives.

Facilitated by Cities People Love, this panel session brings together design practitioners whose work is informed by a diversity of lived experiences. This informal conversation brings to light the lived experiences and personal stories of people of diverse backgrounds and identities to understand how the design of our cities affects them, acknowledging that they are the experts in their own lives.

Listeners are invited to learn and empathise from others whose lives may be very different to theirs—the starting point for making more compassionate cities that we can all love.

The world has changed. What imprint has the unpredictable, sometimes unfathomable, global pandemic left on who we are as ‘the public’?

Over the course of their prolific careers, our panel members have each, in different ways, been tasked with understanding who ‘the public’ is, and how place and space can respond to public needs and wants.

Listen as as we explore what we can see and understand from the meaning of ‘public’ today—and muse on its possible futures in the design of our civic places and spaces.

Moderated by Principal at Architectus, Ruth Wilson and featuring Kate Torney (CEO, Peter MacCallum Cancer Foundation) Claire Martin (Associate Director at Oculus and President Australian Institute of Landscape Architects) and Dr Stephen Long (Principal at Architectus)

Architectus won the 2021 Melbourne Awards Urban Design Award supported by the Naomi Milgrom Foundation.