Place Value Ashfield is a project by the UWA School of Design and Future West (Australian Urbanism) that explores the potentials of a coordinated approach to infill housing in the Perth suburb of Ashfield. From the outset, it asked multidisciplinary design teams to consider infill housing as part of the broader site context in Ashfield, with each team allocated one of six dispersed groups of sites across the suburb. Each design team was asked to imagine that these site groupings represented the ownership of the Department of Communities, to enable the realisation of a suburb-wide strategy.
Teams were guided by an overarching landscape framework between rail and river, developed by the landscape coordination team, to demonstrate how housing regeneration can respond to existing values of place.
Through its exploration of how housing density can be designed in a way that responds to site and community desires, this project offers an alternative approach to Perth’s development status quo.
People
Landscape coordination team
Daniel Jan Martin is a Perth-based freelance designer and research officer at the UWA School of Design and Cooperative Research Centre for Water Sensitive Cities.
Rosie Halsmith is a director at To & Fro Studio and lecturer in landscape architecture at the UWA School of Design.
Loren Holmes is a director at To & Fro Studio. She teaches within the architecture and landscape architecture streams at the UWA School of Design.
Design teams
Comprising architects, landscape architects and developers
A. Living Stream
Rene Van Meeuwen, Craig McCormack and Liam Mouritz with Nic Osboine and Luke Parker from OP Properties
See Scheme A
B. The Scale of the House
Fernando Jerez, Belen Perez de Juan, Joshua Cobb-Diamond and Stephen Thick with Tao Bourton from Yolk Property Group
See Scheme B
C. Home Amongst the Gum Trees
Sophie Giles, Amber Martin, Felix Joensson, Yangyan Ou and Samantha Dye with Hootan Golestani from Golestani Developments
See Scheme C
D. Small Wins
Emily Van Eyk, Jessica Mountain, Matthew Delroy-Carr, Serena Pangestu and Anika Kalotay of with Megan Buckland from LWP
See Scheme D
E. Community Hub
Nigel Bertram and Geoffrey London with Roscoe Power from Codev
See Scheme E
F. Future Maidos
Simon Anderson, Richard Hassell and James Rietveld with Matthew McNeilly from Sirona Capital
See Scheme F
The design teams were led by UWA School of Design staff and design team members were affiliated with: Hassell, SMAR, With_Architecture Studio, Gary Marinko Architects, Mt Eyk, MDC Architects, Kura Studio, NMBW Architecture Studio and WOHA.
Community and stakeholder representatives
Peta Mabbs, Renee McLennan, Luke Gibson and Jai Wilson from the Town of Bassendean
Alex Snadden and all members of Design Basso
Simon Perree, Lenny McLeod and all involved in Ashfield Community Action Network
Jane Bennett from the Urban Development Institute of Australia
Janine Egan, Jenna Campbell, Daniel Bromley and Nic Brunsdon from the Department of Planning, Lands and Heritage
Greg Cash, Tiffany Allen and Michelle Duke from the Department of Communities
Process
A three-stage process, facilitated by the landscape coordination team, enabled multiple levels of collaboration and knowledge sharing to take place between community, stakeholders and the six multidisciplinary design teams as the Place Value project was developed.
During the first stage, the landscape coordination team undertook extensive analysis to set the scene for design teams to take part in shared, broad-scale thinking about the issues at play. Key to the analysis was a series of conversations with community members and stakeholders.
A suburb-wide landscape framework – a spatial strategy with associated principles – was developed during the second stage. The framework was developed to guide the design of the public realm, to offset and enhance an increase in urban density. At a suburb-wide scale, the framework links the rail to river through an upgraded public realm, and at a site grouping scale, it enables connectivity between dwellings and their context.
For stage three, six multidisciplinary teams, consisting of architects, developers and landscape architects, were formed. In response to the Place Value Ashfield Briefing Document, teams were asked to develop medium-density infill housing schemes to integrate with the landscape framework, including developing financial scenarios. A collaborative design period followed, resulting in the development of six schemes for infill housing in Ashfield.
Schemes
Multidisciplinary design teams were asked to consider infill housing as part of the broader site context in Ashfield, with each team allocated one of six dispersed groups of sites across the suburb. See the six schemes here.
Select articles
The Place Value project was the focus of Future West (Australian Urbanism) Issue 8. You can read the articles and conversations here.