Transiting Cities

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.