Mediating pressure, facilitating exchange : 3 architectural projects in pressured urban environments

The aim of the research is to demonstrate architectural design strategies and outcomes that provide alternative ways of considering the futures of areas under high developmental pressure. These areas are where the potential detrimental effects of unmediated, rapid change and development are at their most immediate and in need of consideration. Urban environments are complex physical manifestations of economic, environmental, social, cultural and political pressures represented by the often competing desires of public and private interest groups. Given the enormity of scale and complexity of these pressures, it is problematic to think of architecture as something that can design everything (perhaps as seen in traditional master planning) and in doing so, solve the problem. What may be more constructive is the consideration of architecture having the potential to be involved strategically in these issues, over a number of scales to work towards positive outcomes for the public domain. In recent years, both Victorian and Queensland state governments have released policy guiding the future growth of key regions within their borders. Each attempts to address accommodating large population increases over relatively short time periods by proposing consolidation in and around existing urban centres. This consolidation is seen as part of a strategy to limit urban sprawl and curtail its associated negative social, environmental and potential economic impacts. These targeted 'Activity Centres' become places of immanent transformation, points of pressure within the disaggregated field of the contemporary Australian city. Left un-mediated, developmental pressure in locations such as these is likely to create the same detrimental physical and social effects evident in the general prevailing homogeneity, commercialisation and piecemeal nature of current urban development. Through several architectural design projects, the research aims to explore the role of architecture as an urban mediator within these pressured locations. Through bridging scales from the broad metropolitan, to the finer grained specific, this mediation may begin to strategically 'set things up' for the public domain, towards facilitating valuable social exchange