Learning from Chinatown: An Exploration in Designing for Cultural Diversity & Belonging

December 2023

It is a well-established fact that our cities will become the dominant environments for human habitation in the 21st Century. Indeed, the United Nations reported that in 2018, the global population living in urban settings surpassed rural populations and is predicted to surpass 70% by 2050. Whilst government policy is focused on the challenges of land use densification, changing amenity needs and growing transport mobility requirements to accommodate urban growth, the question of specific socio-cultural community needs and designing for the inclusion of emergent migrant communities is easily set aside in favour of standardised, metric-oriented approaches.

As a result, there is a clear and growing necessity to integrate and understand the socio-cultural frame by which our built environment, be they public amenities, commercial spaces or residential housing is planned, designed, and used by an ever more diverse society both in Sydney and across Australian cities at large. To examine these ideas, this research proposal seeks to investigate the connections between architecture, culture, belonging and memory and the role that the built environment plays in defining, shaping, and perpetuating self-identity and belonging of migrant communities in urban contexts.

Hope in High-Rise: An Exploration of Urban Density and Apartment Design

October 2021

As the idea of living together becomes an inevitable kind of modus vivendi, the time is right to consider how our urban habitats originated, what the state of our metropolises are today and where our cities are headed. Thus, to even begin scratching the surface of this hugely interwoven web of issues around living densely, this report has been structured to enable an unpackaging of the perceptions, the history, and the policies around apartment living. Structured in four over-arching parts, Hope in High-Rise: An Exploration of Urban Density and Apartment Design first explores the origins of the debate around dense living, including the YIMBY -vs- NIMBY debate, followed by a historical narrative recount which challenges the assumption that dense, urban living is a product of our recent modernity. In part three, the report delves into a comparison of current housing development guidelines and policies from Australia, Singapore, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, exploring how different regulatory frameworks have come to shape the conception and vision for modern apartment development. In the final chapter of the report, a seven point policy road map is presented, identifying key areas for both a cultural and political shift to aid in the delivery of better urban housing environments for the future.

Alternative Realities: Approaches to Adaptive Reuse in Architecture

October 2018

Alternative Realities presents a current snapshot of professional practice, taken as a cross section from four global cities: Sydney, Hong Kong, London and New York. Each of these four cities have had to face up to the challenge of increasing urban density juxtaposed against an increasingly ageing building stock and the need to future proof their cities for the 21st Century and beyond.

The aim of this research project was to identify the challenges and outline the opportunities associated with the adaptive reuse of architecture, to better understand the profession’s unique ability to transform our existing collection of buildings and structures into new spatial experiences as part of the temporal evolution of our urban fabric. Exploring a total of forty casestudy projects and twenty interviews with architects and urbanists spread across the cities of Hong Kong, London, New York and Sydney, this body of work undertook an interrogation the different policies and approaches for how buildings of different heritage significance classifications are retained, restored and adaptively reused. Through unraveling the challenges and opportunities associated with the adaptive reuse of architecture, this research project endeavoured to illustrate how the architectural and design professions’ can transform existing buildings into new spatial experiences as part of the inevitable, temporal evolution of our urban fabrics, without continued reliance upon the tabular rasa approach of demolition and reconstruction.