Assemble Papers

1975. Around the world, the hard-fought battles of the Women’s Liberation Movement were slowly rippling into social legislative change. The United Nations declared it ‘International Women’s Year’. The Australian Family Law Act introduced ‘no-fault’ divorce and equal property rights for married women.1 Yet it was at the hyper-local level that feminism-in-practice often had the greatest impact.

The Tower of Babel, Metropolis, Alphaville, AI-generated urban environments – visions of future cities have forever captivated the public imagination. Yet opportunities for citizens to engage their own imagination towards improving their cities have historically been limited within the prevailing ‘top-down versus bottom-up’ planning paradigm.

In 19th-century Australian cities, some of the areas with the highest land values were inner-city industrial zones. These trailed only prime commercial strips – akin to the dark blue Boardwalk and Park Place in Monopoly – in their value per square metre. This may seem odd today, as many of us have grown up in cities that, since the 1970s, have deindustrialised.

An Indigenous framework is different from Western approaches to environmental practice. Concepts such as climate resilience and sustainability are embedded within a history of colonial greenwashing and extractionism, and are not Indigenous in thinking or origin. At the same time, changing climate patterns and the increasing frequency and severity of weather events are affecting Indigenous communities more than ever.

Piece by piece, the land was stolen. As Wilson Williams — a band council member of the Indigenous Squamish Nation in British Columbia, Canada — tells it, the creeping land grab by non-Indigenous settlers reached official status in 1877, when Canada’s federal government confined his ancestors to living on a 34-hectare reserve. Up until that time, they had flourished in and around the ancient village of Sen̓áḵw, a seaside trading hub at the mouth of False Creek in what is today Vancouver.

Post-industrial enclaves have long provided fertile grounds for creativity and innovation. Consider the depression era of 1960s lower east New York that spawned cultural icons like Andy Warhol and institutions like the Hotel Chelsea.1 Music subcultures like Chicago house or Detroit techno thrived in abandoned warehouses, as did the European rave scene from Manchester to Berlin.

The escalation of global warming and population growth are prompting reconsideration of conventional approaches to planning, designing and building homes and cities everywhere. Among the many open questions, one certainty is that we’re going to have to adapt to living closer together. In Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, where the long-cherished construct of the ‘quarter-acre dream’ has for years been slipping out of reach, the drift towards densification has been slow to gain momentum.

Country is burning, flooding, drying, and tenuously surviving. Whether we experience it directly or through images that propel 24-hour news cycles we have reached an inescapable new turning point. We are living through what will be settlers’ most significant attempt to confront the climate catastrophe – a step that requires us to interrogate government initiatives that drip-feed hope.

A few hundred years ago, you couldn’t live in Australia without cultivating your own food. Knowing where your produce came from was a necessity, not a privilege. But the world’s a different place now. I’ve met school-aged children who’ve never experienced the joys of a freshly plucked strawberry or a juicy, sun-kissed orange. They only know of such fruits from artificial flavours in packaged snacks , completely disconnected from their original form.

In 1996, the late architect and theorist Christopher Alexander – muse to the revered producer Brian Eno – addressed a conference room of computer programmers and proposed a future “in which computers play a fundamental role in making the world – and above all the built structure of the world – alive, humane, ecologically profound, and with a deep living structure.” Deeply inspired by nature, Christopher spent much of his practice thinking about how to evoke belonging and wellbeing – senses he...