Chris Tankard, a Landscape Architecture masters student at the Melbourne School of Design, was awarded the Steve Calhoun Scholarship. The scholarship supports landscape architecture students to travel across the globe to undertake field work.
We spoke to Chris about his trip to study one of Japan’s oldest surviving markets, what saving Preston Market means to his community, and why landscape architecture can sometimes feel like anthropology.
Why Japan?
The framing [of my thesis] was using Japan as a case study for market preservation. Nishiki Market has been around since 700 AD and was officially a market since the 1600s. What are they doing that we’re not able to grasp? What is it that allows them to organise their markets in a way that they can preserve these spaces? They have this market atmosphere that is kind of intangible and hard to pin down. [Nishiki Market] is still used by locals, so it hasn’t just become a tourist destination.
The scholarship [enabled me to] understand how the market functions on the ground. Doing fieldwork to try to understand what the design elements are that make Nishiki Market work and then trying to take that back and apply that to Preston Market.
What was your biggest takeaway from that trip?
The most important thing was just perspective. It helped me understand the way that Asian markets are designed. [European markets] are great markets, but there are lessons to be learned from other regions that aren’t rooted in most of the market design literature.
Tell us about Save Preston Market.
I’m part of the Save Preston Market group, and we get labelled as “nimby” sometimes because there’s a general consensus that we’re anti market development, but really what we’re “anti” is the type of market development that they’re proposing.
The owners [of Preston Market] mainly do retail shopping centres and residential stuff. And so, unsurprisingly, their original proposal was [to build] 3,080 apartments in that one little block. They talk about replacing the market with a Coles.
What the community wants, at least the part of the community that I’m from, is a community centric space. And none of the options that [the Preston Market owners] put forward are that at all.
What’s your vision for the market?
My design is about how to incorporate these different, competing interests. A site needs to be functional; it needs to be profitable – we understand that. And because it’s privately owned, it needs to function as a commercial operation. But there are other ways to do that that don’t involve demolishing the market and replacing it with a Coles.
The Asian model would use multi-layered development that’s truly mixed use. The bottom floor would be market space, and you can fit other things on top of that. And so, you’re embedding all of the needs of the market space into a single spatial arrangement.
Successful markets are the sum of many parts. How do you factor that in?
It’s very difficult to pin down the landscape components of [my thesis] because it bleeds into so many other things. What I’m looking at is almost anthropological.
To make projects successful, it’s not about sitting in the studio. If I want to this work to be robust, it needs to engage with planning and architecture, and it needs to engage with all these other disciplines that are broadly apart.
How do you bring these complex intersections back to landscape design?
The way I’m approaching the landscape part is to ask, “How have we gone about preserving markets in Australia thus far?” And almost all of those approaches haven’t included landscape.
If you want to get a heritage overlay on something, that something tends to be a built structure. We use architecture to justify that to a planner.
I’m making the case that the built form of the market is irrelevant to what happens within that market. And that’s what makes it special, it’s the activities that happen within that space. And to design something that allows for those activities, that’s landscape.
That’s the only component that’s missing when we talk about protecting markets.
What do you see happening if Preston Market is redeveloped?
The community function that the market serves [wouldn’t be] served anymore. I think it becomes very tempting to focus on just “Where will people buy the things?” The informality [of markets] is a big component. You can have a conversation with a person who is intimately connected with whatever it is that they’re selling, and often what they’re selling is personal and important to them.
Having that experience is worth more than just the exchange of goods. Having the social, convivial atmosphere that you’re in when you’re buying those goods is, for a lot of people, a very important part of their week.
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