Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Wednesday 26 July
6:15 PM - 7:15 PM
In 1961, autodidact urbanologist Jane Jacobs forever changed how we understood our cities. ‘Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody,’ she wrote in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, ‘only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.’
More than half a century later, her then-contentious argument – that the real life of a city emerges from the ground up – is a widely accepted wisdom.
Even so, in Melbourne and elsewhere, top-heavy developments are struggling to address urban planning problems like long-term homelessness, under-utilisation of public space and the socioeconomic fracturing of inner-city communities.
However, there are citizens, architects, artists and planners are working to change that. Whether it’s ‘tiny houses’, radically accessible public art spaces or ‘tactical urbanism’, there’s a growing movement devoted to exploring how low-cost, playful, and often impermanent forms of living can improve the lives of city-dwellers in meaningful ways.
RRR broadcaster and former editor of small footprint living bible Assemble Papers Sara Savage will be joined by a panel of guests, including Mimi Zeiger, Millie Cattlin and Jessica Christiansen-Franks, for a discussion of engaged, practical city-making with a sense of play. Self-Made City is part of the Open House Melbourne program: What Would Jane Do?
Presented in partnership with Open House Melbourne.
Featuring
Sara Savage
Sara Savage is a writer, editor and broadcaster based in Melbourne, where she hosts the weekly radio show Parallel Lines on Triple R, covering arts, culture, design and science. She is the former editor of Assemble Papers, a biannual print and weekly online publication exploring small footprint living across art, design, architecture, urbanism, the environment and finance.
Millie Cattlin
Millie Cattlin, Melbourne-based architect, is co-director of These Are The Projects We Do Together, a practice she runs with her partner, Joseph Norster. The practice is committed to developing experimental ideas in the fields of art, architecture and education through the design and ongoing operation of three key projects – Testing Grounds, Siteworks and The Quarry. The team, lead by Millie and Joe, has a hands-on approach with a generous and caring attitude towards community, physical infrastructure, local context and the public more broadly.
Mimi Zeiger
Mimi Zeiger is a Los Angeles-based critic, editor, and curator. Her work is situated at the intersection architecture and media cultures.
She has covered art, architecture, urbanism, and design for a number of publications including the New York Times, Domus, Architectural Review, and Architect, where she is a contributing editor. She is a regular opinion columnist for Dezeen and former West Coast Editor of the Architects Newspaper. Zeiger is the 2015 recipient of the Bradford Williams Medal for excellence in writing about landscape architecture.
Zeiger is author of New Museums, Tiny Houses, Micro Green: Tiny Houses in Nature, and Tiny Houses in the City. In 1997, Zeiger founded loud paper, an influential zine and digital publication dedicated to increasing the volume of architectural discourse.
She has curated, contributed to, and collaborated on projects that have been shown at the Art Institute Chicago, 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale, the New Museum, Storefront for Art and Architecture, pinkcomma gallery, and the AA School. She co-curated Now, There: Scenes from the Post-Geographic City, which received the Bronze Dragon award at the 2015 Bi-City Biennale of UrbanismArchitecture, Shenzhen.
She teaches in the Media Design Practices MFA program at Art Center College of Design and is former co-president of the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design. She has taught at the School of Visual Art, Art Center, Parsons New School of Design, the California College of the Arts (CCA) and at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc.)
She holds a Master of Architecture degree from SCI-Arc and a Bachelor of Architecture degree from Cornell University.
Jessica Christiansen-Franks
Jessica Christiansen-Franks is an urban designer and social entrepreneur who has dedicated her career to understanding the social dynamics of urbanisation. With experience across Australia, as well as the UK, Canada, India, Vietnam and the Philippines, Jessica has been fortunate enough to advise the public and private sectors, along with major international aid agencies.
Jessica is a programme advisor at CoDesign Studio, helping to steer Australia’s largest community-led placemaking initiative: the Neighbourhood Project. She is also co-founder and CEO of Neighbourlytics, a social analytics platform for neighbourhood development.