IN-PERSON Manchester Livable Cities
Abstract
Contemporary narratives of the urban renaissance often frame liveability through growth, density, and design-led revitalisation, while overlooking the slower, relational processes through which communities experience, remember, and care for place. This paper presents a practice-led research project undertaken in the regional town of Muswellbrook, Australia, which positions temporary urban activation as a critical method for rethinking liveability in post-industrial and climate-affected contexts. Structured across three phases—community engagement and concept generation, prototype design and testing, and implementation and monitoring—the project pairs local knowledge with architectural, landscape, and digital design expertise to explore alternative models of regional urbanism. An initial phase engaged over 100 architecture students and local stakeholders in speculative design propositions, producing a typology of activation strategies centred on connection, performance, surface, and greenery. These insights informed the design of a temporary pavilion, Things Gathering Things, conceived as climatic, social, and cultural infrastructure rather than an object of spectacle.
Central to the project is the concept of Lost Things: absent histories, ecological relationships, and Indigenous knowledge systems rendered invisible through extractive and post-industrial development. Through material prototyping, public gathering, and digital tools including 3D scanning and projection, the pavilion functioned as both a cooling shelter and a device for collective memory-making. By foregrounding care, temporality, and participation, the paper argues for a redefinition of urban liveability that challenges dominant regeneration paradigms. The Muswellbrook case offers transferable insights for post-industrial cities such as Manchester, demonstrating how small-scale, design-led interventions can support socially just, environmentally grounded, and culturally accountable urban futures.
Dr Nicholas Foulcher is the Head of Architecture and a Senior Lecturer at the School of Architecture and Built Environment, University of Newcastle, Australia. His research and teaching reside at the intersection of architectural theory, social science, and emergent computational technologies, focusing on how digital innovation reshapes design practice and education. Dr Foulcher’s scholarship critically engages with the cultural and pedagogical implications of digital and analogue design processes, exploring how immersive and computational technologies can expand architectural discourse.
Sam Spurr is an architectural theorist, critic and designer. Her current research on Mining Ideology and Coal Capitalism, examines the agency of architecture to make legible the complex forces at play in the age of the Anthropocene. Through this research Sam is exploring feminist theories of care and collective political subjectivity, ecological systems and indigenous cosmologies in the Australian context of Country. Sam has focused her attention over the last five years on the agency of architecture and the need for disciplinary transformation in a rapidly changing contemporary world.
Hugo Moline is an architect, urbanist and researcher. He is co-director of MAPA Art & Architecture. Central to Hugo’s architectural work is the ongoing question of why only those with money and power should decide on how the city is made, and seeking ways to make the products and processes of architecture radically democratic. His specialisation is in working with collective client groups, from the tight knit communities of migrant housing cooperatives to the complex, interwoven interest of diverse users of public space.
D’Arcy Newberry-Dupe is a creative practitioner and academic in the expanded field of Architecture. The works she produces focus on drawing out event based architectures, which focus on domestic rituals, and the role of design in rural Australian contexts. This practice is explored through Unmake Studios, and her collaborations with other research collectives – in particular the Global Extraction Observatory, who look at bringing the skills of architecture to the climate crisis and the denuded landscapes of extractive industries.
Heidi Axelsen is a research coordinator working for the School of Built Environment and the School of Creative Industries on research funded projects in public space. Heidi brings her expertise as visual artist working within industry to projects of tactical urbanism, public art and applied research.
1:30 pm - 3:00 pm
Thursday 18th June, 2026