MELBOURNE RING-ROAD ECOLOGY
Nigel Bertram, Sept 2001
EXPOSURE
One by-product of the Western Ring-Road in Melbourne (late 1990s) has been to expose large areas of the city that were previously hidden. The new road cuts across the grain of the previous city, and provides new vantage points. It has turned old backs into new fronts. Gradually, new developments on sites cut off from their previous foci are re-orienting themselves to the Ring-Road's opportunity for fresh, cheap commercial exposure (fig.1). This investigation is centered on a large gap in Keilor, approx. 15 km from the center of Melbourne, surrounded on all sides by suburban development.
PULSE
A journey on the Ring-Road is not focused like an arterial highway. Traveling along its length gives an uneven, pulsing view of the city fabric (fig.2). Its internalized smoothness as a connector on a metropolitan scale is at odds with its random, interrupting relationship to city structure and events on a local scale. At this particular moment there exists in this place a strange hybrid between an attracting (arterial) and dispersed (cross-cut) interaction with the rest of the city. This in-between state is a familiar experience of such 'gap' landscapes. What new tools can we find to let us be able to act within them? How can we engage with such an unfocussed, loose environment in a positive way? Following are some observations made with these questions in mind.
BIG VOLUME
A series of self-contained, self-centered figures float through Keilor. Most of these existed long before the Ring-Road. But the new road navigates a route between them and re-frames them (fig.3). Although these large figures are 'fat' and act as obstacles to horizontal movement (they are hard to get around), they are also transparent. Clearly defined as marks on a more-or-less blank field, they are more like holes than solid objects or what we might normally think of as (long-lasting) Urban Artifacts. A hole within a hole (a double-negative) can make a new type of positive.
LOW MASS
From ground level these lightweight figures are difficult to see. Sometimes their only definition is a painted line on the ground, or the difference between mown and un-mown grass. A typology of large, light objects emerges: fenced enclosure, re-vegetation zone, tennis courts, golf-driving range, ex-quarry, river bend, power terminal station, cemetery, island park, car park, football oval. These suburban things take up a lot of space but are not heavy (fig.4). They have a large effect, creating localized centers that 'fix' certain locations in place and in memory. Nevertheless, they are almost nothing.
LEFTOVER LANDSCAPE
The hole of Keilor considered from another angle is a type of compound-easement. It is made up of overlapping, invisible boundaries that have the cumulative effect of preventing permanent physical occupation (fig.5). These legally-enforced areas of no-building also act as means for preservation. Areas that are along fences or railway lines, under power lines, within flood plains, too steep for building, too noisy, inaccessible or landlocked (as is much of the Keilor site) are the most stable parts of this environment. They are the sites of least change and greatest resistance to the metropolitan dynamic surrounding them. These vacant, often invisible slices of land have much more inertia than buildings.
CONCAVE + CONVEX
The 'green space' of the Keilor suburb is made up of a combination of government reserves for public amenity, easements for infrastructural access, and disused land awaiting development. It is often difficult to distinguish between them (fig.6,10). Most parks are simply grass with a fence, and many easement reserves are used as extra backyards or recreation space by adjoining residents. Disused sites can be the most overgrown. There exists an indeterminate mixture of active and passive aspects within the one 'colour' or visual scene. Because of the formal similarity between functionally different parts of the environment, the potential for exchange is high.
RE-FOCUS
In a loose and flexible environment, it is possible for existing events to be seamlessly incorporated into new stories. No-one notices. What were industrial buildings backing onto nothing in particular can, now they are facing the Ring-Road, become re-painted as billboards or act as a double-insulated sound wall. A fire station that used to proudly address the local main road caused a small detour in a new route that consequentially allowed seemingly 'extra' space for an Italian and then a Greek community center to fit in (fig.7). Now they all share a common car park through which the fire trucks enter, and a default public space emerges. First by not-moving, and secondly by the addition of a back gate, the fire station makes a new focal point, and the suburb subtly shifts around it.
DOUBLE-BIND
In this area it is easy to get lost, or to not end up where you thought you should. The site is riddled with dead-ends due to steepness, lack of bridges (over rivers, railways, ring-road), impassable easements, or just incompleteness. The river plays its own part in this disorientation with a tight 'S' curve carving a valley in two halves (fig.8). The space of this double-valley is comprehended as a single open field (the entire rim is visible) but neither side can see the other. This makes a single arena infolded with pockets of other space. The ability to become lost presents us with easy opportunities to remove ourselves from other, perhaps undesirable adjacencies. It means that one part of the suburb may not know what the other part is doing. This type of 'unclear' spatial arrangement can allow for seemingly incompatible things to co-exist.
FLATNESS
The western side of Melbourne is mostly flat. Geologically it is a vast basalt plain with deep crevices formed by rivers and creeks (fig.9). This horizontal datum is reinforced by the steady spread of single-story houses and broad, low industrial buildings. In such a consistent formal environment even the slightest change from the horizontal is noticed. You only have to rise up one level to get a panoramic view, or conversely it is very easy to hide from the city by dropping down a few metres. A flat suburb is height-sensitive. It can be considered intimately in relation to a single human being in one direction, whilst remaining impossibly vast in the other. It can be 'human-scaled' and 'car-scaled' at the same time. This allows us to think again about the scale of buildings.
BARE MINIMUM
This is a minimal environment. Not in terms of any aesthetic or moral imperative, but in terms of a bare minimum of both material and effort. Considered in this way it is both economic and efficient. Sparsity, or 'not enough' (money, programme, time, action) necessarily shifts our attention to a frugality of means but here we have the simultaneous need to address broad expanses and large distances in order to make sense of where we are. Conventional urban criteria are difficult to apply. There is a need to make a lot out of a little, to get the most for the least, or better, to effect change without actually changing anything. In this type of place we need to think and work in the manner of magicians.
profile
Nigel Bertram
Nigel Bertram (b.1968) is a lecturer in architecture at RMIT University, and a director of NMBW Architecture Studio in Melbourne. From 1998-99 he worked in Tokyo for Coelacanth K&H architects, and was a joint-leader with Marika Neustupny and Shane Murray of an architectural exchange program between RMIT and Tokyo Institute of Technology.
This material is a small part of a research project carried out in the Architecture Program at RMIT in 2001.
Research leaders: Nigel Bertram, Shane Murray, Marika Neustupny. Masters students: Katja Bode, Manuele Morero, Stefano Scalzo, Simon Shiel, Stephen Staughton. Final-year undergraduate students: Weng Si Beh, Arthur Peng Kien Chow, Charina Coronado, Paul Dash, Peter Johnson, Andre Konarski, Sang Yew Lau, Tessalin Ng, Thi Vinh Phan.
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