Research Strengths
ABP's research program is organized into four research groupings involving staff and students working in similar areas of research interest. These research groups bring together staff and students to exchange knowledge and engage in debates on key topics. The groups are:
- Asia-Pacific Modernities: History & Social Critique.
Cluster leaders: Dr Hannah Lewi
This cluster will draw together leading research expertise spanning historical to contemporary understandings of Asian and Australian built environments. Existing strengths that research activities within the cluster will consolidate and disseminate include: historical studies of nineteenth and twentieth century architecture of the Asia-Pacific and Australia, and the influence of colonial and post-colonial discourses; the language of modernism from the everyday to the monumental, and its inflections across the region; issues of architectural representation, past and present; and the relations between historiography, conservation practice and heritage theories. - Design, Technologies and Practice.
Cluster leader: Associate Professor Bharat Dave
This research cluster focuses on development and impacts of advanced digital technologies, national and global networks of mobility and practice, and how these forces transform contemporary knowledge base, skills and the nature of professions in built environment. The research projects and outcomes in this cluster range from contributions to theory, practice and development of innovative digital technologies applied to spatial environments; professional education and practice; digital outsourcing and internationalisation of professional services; and workplace innovation through design. - Future Cities: Housing, Transport and Communities.
Cluster leader: Associate Professor Nick Low
The focus of this research cluster is the future of urban development and transport systems for Australian and East Asian metropolitan cities as they respond and adapt to imperatives of climate change, globalisation, sustainability, fuel and water constraints. The cluster extends the research program of the $4.5 million Australasian Centre for Governance and Management of Urban Transport funded by the Volvo Research and Educational Foundations (http://www.gamutcentre.org) to embrace major aspects of the future city: for instance, the power, process and institutions of urban development and planning, changing metro-geographies, the future of water supply and the means of retrofitting housing to reduce greenhouse emissions and water consumption, the key connections between land use regulation and transport planning, and the institutional opportunities and barriers to sustainable urban development. - Sustainable Built Environments.
Cluster leader: Associate Professor Ray Green
The Sustainable Built Environment Research Cluster is composed of a team of over 20 dedicated researchers, along with postgraduate research students they supervise, who are working on a wide range of multidisciplinary problems associated with the planning, design and management of sustainable urban environments. Cluster members are addressing some of the most pressing problems facing the world today, such combating and adapting to global warming and climate change and loss of biodiversity. The over-riding aim of the cluster is to build knowledge and develop technologies to guide environmental design and planning practices so that future generations might be able to inherit an ecologically healthy and livable world. Collectively, cluster members possess knowledge in a wide range of physical and social aspects of planning and design needed to solve the many complex problems we face in achieving sustainable development of the land and to disseminate this knowledge to key decision-makers and the public.
Funded Research
ABP researchers have enjoyed considerable success in winning external funding to support their work. Current Faculty projects are supported by grants from the Australian Research Council and from government, cultural, industry and community organisations.
Centres of Research
ABP is host to a number of leading built environment research centres and large projects:
- Australasian Centre for the Governance and Management of Urban Transport (GAMUT): GAMUT is a collaborative research centre in the Urban Planning Program of the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning dedicated to promoting and supporting sustainable urban transport in Australia and the Asia Pacific region. Based at the University of Melbourne, GAMUT works with an international network of researchers to focus attention on the need for innovative institutional design for integrated transport systems. GAMUT is one of a global network of Centres of Excellence in Future Urban Transport funded by the Volvo Research and Educational Foundations, an independent institution.
- UNESCO Observatory for Multidisciplinary Research in the Arts: The UNESCO Observatory brings together people with shared interests in the arts and encourages activities that cross disciplinary divisions, drawing on the combined expertise of national and internationally recognised researchers. The Observatory's focus crosses over the areas of architecture; the physical, natural, social and health sciences; well-being, culture, heritage, arts practice, education in the arts, community arts practice, research methodology, philosophy, ethics and program evaluation across pure, strategic, applied and action research.
- CRIDA: The research group CRIDA enagages in digital research and teaching projects as vehicles for critical inquiry and development of innovative design practices at various scales supported by digital media in architecture, urban design, landscape and environmental design. We are interested in development of digital technologies, their cultural implications and emerging design futures. Based in the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, the group maintains collaborative links with other departments at the University of Melbourne and international institutions.
- Transnational and Temporary: Place making, students and community in Central Melbourne Project: This project is motivated by the question of how place-making — the practice of fostering community in place — can be brought about when many people in that community are transnational and/or temporary. The research is innovative in its guiding contention: that public-private interactions, both in built spaces and in social relations, define the experience of place for those who are new to a locality and community, or temporary members of it, more than they do for long-term residents who are settled in their networks of belonging.
- Gender, Local Governance, and Violence Prevention: Making the Links between Violence in Private and Public Space (The GLOVE Project): This research project aims to develop Australian local government policy that can take an integrated approach to violence prevention in both public and private space, using a gender mainstreaming process and a community-government partnership model. It will analyse current local government community safety policies in the light of international good practice on violence prevention, and work with four local government/agency partnerships in Victoria to develop and evaluate integrated violence prevention programs. Lessons from these case studies will inform training materials and workshops for local government officials, community agencies, urban planners and health professionals in the final phase of the project.