VIRTUAL London.

Abstract

This presentation/ article will showcase collaborative design-research projects that investigate potentials of adapting cities to climate and biodiversity challenges in the Australian context of Melbourne. One blueprint develops different novel typologies for rewilding combining urban strategy/exhibition and prototypical interventions/community consultation. Thereby it revisits different concepts of ‘(re-) wilding’ from Europe (Les Friches,) and Asia (Saladdressing), and reflects on how their transfer to a harsher climatic, post-industrial and postcolonial cultural context require a new take on ‘wilding’. This new approach, developed through design-research, inverts the conventional landscape design process: It starts from found space qualities and typologies, to assess ecosystem opportunities. From there, site-responsive typologies for habitats are derived. These form the base for new ecosystem designs and spatial urban landscape concepts. Reflection situates this process as similar to an inverted process articulated in the book Building within the Existing.(Schittich) The project also traces a lineage for developing adaptive reuse typologies for ecosystems to prior research that had looked at climate an adaptation from a strategic urbanism point of view. This research developed green urban space and building reuse typologies for different urban situations. The presented examples demonstrate how a typological approach allows to respond to particular urban situation in a strategic way, combining built and natural environments in new urban ecologies.