informal urban practices

amazing

gets really relevant at around 1min 30secs

wallpaper: augmented city click here

Over two separate days Amy and I headed down to St Kilda to occupy an area and see if we could engage the people of this beautiful bay side suburb in a simple game of noughts and crosses.

Through this Informal Urban Practice we hoped to gain a greater knowledge of the residents of St Kilda as well as the visitors to the area. We set ourselves up on a wall just inside the arcade that lead to Woolworths on Acland Street on a busy weekend afternoon. Immediately we had people stopping and looking. We encouraged people to join us and in the end played over 20 games of noughts and crosses.

We then went back during the week and set up in exactly the same spot. Acland street was less busy and most people were residents doing their everyday shopping and therefore we found it a lot harder to find people that were willing to play with us as most of them had somewhere to be or something to be doing, as a result we only managed to play around 5 games vs. the 20 that we were able to play the day before.

It was clear in the end that the visitors and residents of St Kilda were a lot more willing to give us their time and enjoy a simple game with us on the weekends as apposed to a weekday. We did however have a lot of fun over the two days.

Laura Black & Amy Carlwell

We took this assignment to mean occupying a space in order to create a change. Our 1^st idea was to create a realistic looking roadside speed camera. We tried this in a number of locations till we found a place that would give a clear view of the camera the cars came down the road.

The result was amazing as even people doing the speed limit slowed considerably

The 2^nd experiment was about creating a realistic but signed as fake situation. There were three signs, fake danger, fake cleaning and fake maintenance. They were set up along with cones in believable situations. We first tried at Doncaster but this did not work out as security did not even alow us to set up. The 2^nd place we tried was Eastland, in this case we were able to set up and move to a safe location. But within 5 minutes staff removed both the sign and the cones.

While it was up however most people got a laugh out of it

Ryan O’Donnell

Miranda Nesci

Play with your city! Every day you change your city in the ways you traverse, occupy, engage with or otherwise ignore its various spaces. Architecture+Philosophy presents a panel of practitioners who have designed ways in which to engage with your own city as though for the first time. Come and play. Check it out here (RMIT 8.11.68)

Now in its sixth year, ARCHITECTURE+PHILOSOPHY provides a unique space of exchange. While what we provide is a local space – Melbourne practitioners on Melbourne issues – the series engages with questions of contemporary urbanism, planning, technology, space, system, design, distribution and other issues in the productive overlap between the two disciplines. We curate a diverse range of presentations, from research students and established academics to architecture and planning practitioners, policy makers, public artists and those working in the world between theory, buildings and the city.