Placemaking Consortium Awarded 2020 Banksia Research and Academia Award
The Award winning placemaking teaching resources – open-source 12 modules to teach placemaking to Built Environment students, developed by the Place Agency and led by the University of Melbourne has received the 2020 Banksia Sustainability Award in the Research and Academia category.
In 2017, as the need to better understand the competencies needed in Built Environment graduates was raised by The Myer Foundation, a placemaking consortium of 26 academics in seven universities and 16 industry practitioners was formed, namely the Place Agency.
The Consortium developed a suite of educational and practice-based programs on placemaking and place development to enable current and future practitioners to integrate ecosystems, Indigenous knowledge and evaluation of Place.
With a vision to empower academics and non-academics interested in learning and teaching placemaking, we deployed the Place Agency’s knowledge sharing website that brings all the co-created placemaking resources together into an online learning assemblage
The modules are a mix of thorough and critical academic concepts as well the soft skills of engagement, listening, feedback, leadership, etc. All modules of the subject along with supporting resources can be accessed for free. This open-source resource provides 120 hours’ worth of content including in-class facilitation (~40 hrs) and self-study activities for the students (~80hrs).
The website also showcases the 29 studios and 2 intensives that we delivered so far. These projects dealt with social issues such as: drug hotspots (StudioD), Indigenous stories (SubjunctiveSpace), water (Bayswater Regeneration), biodiversity (Performing Landscape), violence (Planmaking WestEnd), and some with multicultural connection (Springvale Laneways), increasing each learner’s socio-cultural consciousness and competencies.
Sensing great potential in the programme, the judges at Banksia quoted, “The Placemaking Sandbox by the University of Melbourne has demonstrated great potential for impact and influence. By creating a set of resources, the project is well set up to be rolled out widely and the idea of bringing people to nature and culture to define place is admirable.”
Finally, the consortium collaborated on two books. The Placemaking Fundamentals grounds the course content and each module in the latest research, literature, concepts, and case studies https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9789813296237 while the Placemaking Sandbox critically documents several Sandbox studios case studies that were delivered in the University of Melbourne.
We hope that through making all of this open-sourced to be use and share and applied, we will support you, your students and communities to carry out effective placemaking.