Vision: Sunshine 2.0 – Station Precinct

To develop low-carbon resilient communities from within the existing fabric of (sub)urban life it is important to have two things: visions of desirable future living scenarios – and visible interventions, today, that can re-orient the path of future development.

Studio outline

This studio focuses on the future development of the Sunshine railway station and the surrounding precinct. Sunshine is a suburb currently wrestling with many of the problems facing Australian suburbs. New planning developments can create sustainable communities from scratch; Sunshine requires the ‘retrofitting’ of an existing community. We re-imagine Sunshine through new architectural and design strategies. Sunshine is blessed with a well placed railway station but very poorly served by the design and operation of the station and the connective transport network. In our previous Sunshine studio in 2011 we identified key sites and interventions.

During this semester we conducted a more detailed investigation of the railway station precinct to further develop the themes of last semester. VEIL work has focused on food, water, transport, energy, information and eco-businesses and services and the development of new Local Activities Districts. Sunshine is a place of rich cultural diversity and history, and it is experiencing a rapid decline, from a position of leadership in national manufacturing and employment, opening up many new possibilities for innovative design thinking. Students in this studio immersed themselves in the context, with our studio atelier being based in a shop in Sunshine Plaza Shopping Centre, and worked with council and the State Government to develop innovative design outcomes. We examined sustainable design strategies at different scales to develop projects that capture radical and current sustainability thinking.