A group of ex MA students, Sophie Lewis, David Wilkinson and Kate Johnson, orking with Ian Fisher, have produced an exciting entry for this international competition, run by the
Office
of Urban Transformations Research, RIMT University, Melbourne, Australia: www.transitingcities.com
The competition
aims to create informed visions of new, innovative and alternative
cities
of the near future by defining opportunities for transition into a low carbon,
prosperous and vibrant communities. The
intention is to produce strategies for an adaptive and resilient regional
centre, which
can respond to the variable scales and conditions of change that effect life in
the Latrobe City; enhancing the existing and future qualities of this urban environment,
the rehabilitated mines, associated infrastructures and define opportunities
for growth.
Their proposal is entitled, Dendrite City, an urban form
that is responsive to the terrain that it occupies; its physical ground plane is devolved but is
informationally involved; it is a net producer of knowledge and resources, a
negative carbon producer and a positive contributor to ecological diversity and
connectivity. It is a city that defies the logic and wisdom of
theoretical models that favour density and complexity of form. It reinterprets
the essential qualities of urbanism as an anthropocentrically aggregated
response of environmental opportunity, multiplicity and performance, networked
through information and exchange, globally and locally.
