New South Wales Projects and Sites
BIOCITY STUDIO
introduction / overview / images / Projects
Landscape Architect: mcgregor+partners
Listed as A Case Study for the AILA's 2008-2009 National Climate Change Project
BIOCITY STUDIO
In 2006, mcgregor+partners founded the Biocity Studio, a self funded internal Research and Development unit designed to facilitate academic research and foster dialogue in landscape architecture, urban design and the environment.
The first project resulting from the studio was a design elective in July 2007 through the Landscape Architecture programme at the University of New South Wales’ Faculty of the Built Environment.
The studio was structured around three key assignments progressively building upon the students’ growing body of work. The assignments required the student to select one of ten predetermined macro environmental city processes including; water/wastewater, energy, emissions/pollution, food/agriculture, shelter/built form, transport, garbage/waste/recycling, chemicals, biodiversity and governance.
In the first week of the studio, students were required to develop a thorough understanding of their chosen urban process and its relationship to the city, focusing on its development, resilience and limitations.
In tandem with this, they were asked to analyse the NSW State Government’s ‘Sydney Metropolitan Strategy’ with regards to their chosen process and investigate proposed developments and future initiatives as well as weaknesses or flaws in the current planning instruments.
In the second week of the studio, students were asked to develop a crisis scenario that would impact on their urban process. These crisis scenarios were developed from their initial research which exposed weaknesses within the city's existing infrastructure networks under climate change and peak oil scenarios.
The crises, either short-term events or longer term changes, presented potential real-life scenario and tested Sydney's resiliency to such a crisis. The effects of this crisis were developed as a basis for the studio's third component.
The third component of the studio was to develop a series of solutions to prevent or minimise the crisis impact by modifying the chosen infrastructure process. These solutions were presented to an invited jury in the final presentation as a series of policy or design recommendations. A hypothetical scenario was adopted for the final presentation whereby students became leading experts in their field presenting their recommendations to an imagined government agency.
These recommendations were guided by the validation of the potential crisis through relevant research. Solutions varied from short-term decision-making recommendations through to staged, long-term policy ideas.
introduction / overview / images / Projects
Uploaded April 2009
