Symposium Location: Federation Square BMW Edge: Melbourne

The forum explores how the design and construction of temporary urban spatial and social interventions as a means of researching experiential and adaptive emergent strategies for the reorganisation of the urban landscape.

The process of urban development is in a constant state of flux that we must learn to embrace through a mode of environmental design and construction of environments that is responsive to continual transition. The notion of temporary usage apposes traditional masterplanning: it emerges from the current contextual condition, not from a distant goal; it seeks to employ existing qualities rather than inventing everything anew; it is concerned with small places and brief spans of time as well as the conditions at various points in time. Temporary uses result from an alternative understanding to traditional urban planning strategies that explore an appropriation of the city as an alternative to authoritarian development by government bodies, and economically driven policies. Temporary urban landscapes therefore offer a unique opportunity for design events of limited life to exist, injecting the urban environment with playfulness, imagining possible futures that are experiential and adaptive.