TEMPORALITY Archives - Page 2 of 2 - Unsettling Queenstown

MELBOURNE METABOLISING

Ben Cottam on 12 May 2023

MELBOURNE METABOLISING

LOCATION
VIC
Melbourne
Naarm, Boon Wurrung and Woi Wurrung Country

Melbourne Metabolising is a temporal morphological study of Melbourne/Naarm’s Hoddle Grid that can be updated in the coming years and used in a variety of ways. Naarm sits on the land of the 5 clans of the Kulin Nation. The research borrows from the extension of dynamic legacies of Metabolist thinking relating to processes that affect urban growth and decline.

Research tactics:

Collating fragments of Melbourne’s Hoddle Grid through research into historical maps and photographs using public archives.
Exploring narratives through parallel timelines of economic forces, planning, and extractive resource booms that affect the morphology and typology.
Future speculations using dynamic algorithmic simulation.

Format
The contribution is an ongoing open-source project 50% finished, conducted by students at Monash University. The intended format is GIS shapefiles with data fields, embedded in a web page where users can scroll to a timeline to any point and view the state. Data fields include year constructed, demolition, height, program, and material. The research provides various lessons and trajectories, with the aim of providing critical commentary on probable future directions.

RESEARCH LEADER
Peter Charles

COMPILATION
Zeming Wang, Iris Leung, Caleb
Utembe, Carol Chia Jung Li, Erol Gok

CONTRIBUTORS
Carol Chia Jung Li, Iris Leung, Yueran
Gao, Faitma Yousuf, Caleb Utembe,
Zeming Kyle Wang, David Zhou, Erol
Gok, Tong Zhao, Jiaming Ge, Zahra
Aamiry, Maryam Kahan, Cara Cabriel,
Myounggi Jeong, Zhenyao Xu.

Explore Further

ALUMINIUM EXTRACTION URBANISM

Ben Cottam on 12 May 2023

Back to Open Archive

ALUMINIUM EXTRACTION URBANISM

SYSTEMS ANALYSIS AND MAPPING OPPORTUNITIES

Peter Charles, Monash University

LOCATION
VIC
Portland
Gunditjmara Country

The study uses mapping and diagramming tactics to explore resource extraction systems in relation to towns with processing smelters separated from resource extraction sites. These are used to identify sites for stimulators that focus on new carbon economies and environmental tourism.

Tactics include using Food-web and Sankey diagrams to explore aluminium processing systems, and Patrick Geddes Sieve method to explore the intersection of map layers combining concepts from Landscape Urbanism and Industrial Ecology. Environmental maps are created using Arduino microprocessors, environmental sensors, GPS, and GIS.

The tactics were applied to Portland, a pivotal port town 550km west of Melbourne which was the first European settlement in Victoria and holds world heritage Gunditjmara agricultural sites.

Portland has a relatively new aluminium smelter with a subsidised energy contract to 2036 from the Loy Yang Power station, located 500km away in the La Trobe Valley. The Bauxite that is smelted is also mined far away. The potline of the smelter can be used as a battery to stabilise energy flow. The smelter uses 10% of Victorian energy, playing a large role in decisions related to carbon and the economy.

RESEARCH LEADER
Peter Charles

CONTRIBUTORS
Chia Jung Carol Li, Aidan Hoyne,
Anna Chan, James Owens, Jess
Hordern, Marlow Brown, Yueran
Vera Gao, Swasti Jain, Kittaporn
Bamroong, Lingyuan Sydney Zhang,
Spike Thomson, Emily Foenander,
Natsumi Maeda, Aleez Vasaya, Erol
Gok

Explore Further

LEARNING COUNTRY

Ben Cottam on 12 May 2023

Back to Open Archive

LEARNING COUNTRY

MINUTE PORTALS

Jane Caught, Heliotope

LOCATION
various locations
First Nations Country as noted on image

Australia and its architecture tend to transplant ideas of place, form, and seasonality from afar, privileging a Western worldview. This tactic starts to learn place by collecting minute-long video recordings, capturing movement and sound; light interacting with the landscape; glittering spiders’ webs in the sun; breezes over native grasses. They become an archive, reflecting seasonal temporality and recording what actually occurs here across the year, to understand local micro-ecologies, to preserve a memory of Here, before it sustains radical change as our planet warms.

The videos are provocations – where exactly are you standing, gazing, all senses alive, for this minute? Whose traditional lands do you stand on? By what names were it known? What knowledge is embedded in this landscape? What were its cyclical, interconnected constructs? Each piece locates spatial coordinates; time and date stamps – Cartesian markers acting as portals to alternate perspectives. They demand questions that start to reveal both pre-settler experiences as well as the effects of colonisation on First Nations peoples. The act of researching an original place name reveals truth-telling and engenders relationships.

heliotope.com/Learning-Country-Archive