Building Mixity!

In times of inflationary investment and explosive urban growth, Building Mixity! challenges the status quo of expansive and unequal development in Melbourne, Australia. The long forgotten and unique post-industrial suburb of Cremorne serves as a blueprint for an alternative vision of robust and productive city making.

Building Mixity! explores the potentials of combining adaptive re-use tactics with new densities as a holistic and tangible strategy for urban transformation in a context of rapid population growth in the Asia Pacific. Building on the existing rich atmospheres and assets of the place, strategies to foster mixity are discussed from a design perspective, as well as economic, historic, legal, and social angles. How can the coexistence of old and new, of diversity of urban fabric, spaces, but also of inhabitants, economies, programs and architectures be preserved in a context of extreme investment pressures by designers, planners and decision makers?

The book combines different research strategies mutually informing each other: interspersing design approaches with historical investigations and interviews, discussing community engagement and recontextualising Melbourne’s urban development as part of a global post-Global Financial Crisis phenomenon…

This book emerged from a design research project at Monash University’s Architecture Department led by Maud Cassaignau and Markus Jung.