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The Future Suburb Symposium

The life of today's suburbs is interesting, complex, and diverse, but the suburban environments we are building are not.

2 October 2026

This is the central paradox of the contemporary Australian suburb: its social life has become more inventive, more culturally layered, and more economically dynamic, while its built form remains stubbornly generic, repetitive, and under-serviced.

The Future Suburb symposium seeks to approach these questions from first principles, by exploring six interconnected aspects of the suburbs: the Life of the suburbs, the Image of the suburbs, the suburbs as a System, the Modes of Practice required to operate in the suburbs, new Designs for the suburbs, and a series of speculative design Provocations for the future of the suburbs.

Together, this will form a vision of the future suburb that is inclusive, exciting, and better reflects the real needs and ambitions of its residents.

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Session recordings will be available soon

Symposium convenors

  • Ash Alam, Senior Lecturer in Social Planning
  • Rory Hyde,  Associate Professor in Architecture
  • Alan Pert, Interim Dean, Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning
  • Delia Teschendorff, Creative Practitioner (Education Fellow)

Partners

  • Naarm Architecture Foundation (NAF)
  • Melbourne Analytics Data Platform (MDAP)
  • The participation of Pier Vittorio Aureli and Martino Tattara (Dogma) was made possible by the Robert Garland Treseder Fellowship.