X-RAY THE

CITY!

28.5-27.11 2016
VENICE BIENNALE

UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE
MELBOURNE SCHOOL OF DESIGN
FUTURE FACTORY
Gideon Aschwanden
Donald Bates
Karen Burns
Mark Burry
Kim Dovey
Philip Goad
Xiaoran Huang
Justyna Karakiewicz
Geoff Kimm
Tom Kvan
Nano Langenheim
Hannah Lewi
Elek Pafka
Alan Pert
Stanislav Roudavski
Andrew Saniga
Paul Walker
Marcus White
 02 03

Key

1946 2016 2046

C o n t e nt s
DEDICATION Copyright National Library of Australia 04 06 34 58
Melbourne School of Design Cataloguing-in-Publication FUTURE FACTORY Introduction: MRI the city Doing Bigness
The University of Melbourne entry
This book is dedicated and the work Austria to Australia, Tom Kvan Stanislav Roudavski
to the memory of Ernest 2016
X-Ray The City! of Ernest Fooks Fuchs to Fooks
Fooks (born Ernest 1. Urban Design Alan Pert and 38 66
Published by
Leslie Fuchs, 6 October Melbourne School of Design 2. Architectural History Philip Goad X-Raying Urban Cities theyre so hot
1906 4 December The University of Melbourne 3. Architectural Design
Policy Frameworks right now
1985) and his wife Victoria 3010 Australia 4. Urban Analytics
Noemi Fooks. www.msd.unimelb.edu.au
14 Mark Burry Marcus White,
ISBN 978-0-7340-5258-2 Fooks, Rudofsky Geoff Kimm,
All rights reserved. No part and Henard 42 Nano Langenheim,
of this publication may be Alan Pert Connectivity and Xiaoran Huang and
reproduced, distributed,
or transmitted in any
morphology Mark Burry
form or by any means, 18 Xiaoran Huang,
including photocopying, Metric City Marcus White, 72
recording, or other Karen Burns Mark Burry and Fooks and the
electronic or mechanical
methods, without the prior
Geoff Kimm emergence of urban
written permission of the 22 science
publishers. Fooks: Integrating 46 Justyna Karakiewicz
Urban Functions The City as a
Printed by Brambra Press
6 Rocklea Drive
Paul Walker Mix of Mixes 76
Port Melbourne 3207 Kim Dovey and Studio Projects
Australia 26 Elek Pafka
Knowledge is not for 100
Publication Design:
Sean Hogan, Trampoline
knowing; knowledge 50 4D Data, Diagrams,
trampoline.net.au is for cutting How lear ning Density and
Hannah Lewi algor ithms suppor t Diagnostics
ur ban design AND Donald Bates
30 the problem of too
Taking Them B ack: much data 104
the Austro- Gideon Aschwanden Biographies
Austr alians
retur ned to Vienna 54
Andrew Saniga Spatial Nearness
Marcus White,
Geoff Kimm and
Nano Langenheim

F U T U R E FACTORY
an d the wor k of
Er ne st Fo oks
The Melbourne School of Design (MSD) at the University of
Melbourne is home to a diverse group of researchers and
practitioners who share a passion for design, design research and
studio-based teaching.
As part of the Universitys drive for a whole-of-
university approach to tacking several Grand
Challenges, a diverse group of individuals from
the School have formed a research hub to reach
across what would otherwise be rather disconnected
streams of inquiry. Established as a place for
04
transdisciplinary design-led research probes,the
Future Factory Research Hub explores, shapes and
tests design speculations across all scales working
with many discretedisciplines. We are organised
around project-based investigations that explore
alternative scenarios in the quest for insights into
possible credible urban futures.
Through his 1946 book X-Ray the City! Ernest Fooks
offers a provocative departure point for the Future
Factory community to develop theories, insights and
applications to support innovative adaptivedesigns
and to tackle the complexity of the future urban
challenges head on. Many of the arguments and
speculations Fooks presented 7 decades ago in
X-Ray the City! remain relevant to date, and will keep
on being so for generations to come. They are in
line with Future Factory members fields of inquiry
who together explore novel ecosystems at any scale
seeking a clearer understanding ofpast, actual and
emerging environmental issues ranging between
individual needs and their reasonable aspirations and
the collective needs of society and the planet as a
sustainable whole.
How can one contextualise Fooks work in a
contemporary setting?
For the 2016 Venice Biennale, Future Factory
members take a fresh look at X-Ray the City! 70
years after it was first published. Their contributions
to the exhibition in the Palazzo Mora contextualise a
broad range of Fooks influences and contemporaries
to reflect critically on the past, scrutinise the present
and speculate on the future. Split into three major
05
sections (each with a focus on a bespoke period:
1946 / 2016 / 2046), the exhibition touches on
a broad range of perspectives including urban
analytics, design tools, geometry, society and
stakeholders, and simply trying to understand the
city using the X-Ray analogy.
Urban development in practice typically assumes
that the built environment is essentially aforeseeable
set of outcomes for which, given sufficient data
and information, future behaviour ispredictable.
Instead the contemporary urban condition can
be understood alternatively as a set of systems:
complex spatialaggregates of social, natural
and technical phenomena that are destined to
supersede and mergetraditional typologies such
as cities, landscapes or biota. Such systems
do not follow universal orlinear laws leading us to
consider the role of complexity theory and its role
within creativeinvestigations of the future.As an
applied intellectual undertaking design is well suited
to suggest and interrogate unlikely pathwaysacross
datasets; this exhibition and catalogue demonstrates
the value of combining a critical view of both the
past and the present in any argument promoting
competing views of the future, and how the future
might be.
 06 07

Introduction Ernst Leslie Fuchs was born in Bratislava,

Czechoslovakia on 6 October 1906. His family
Fooks career can be broken down into three distinct
phases: first, his time in Vienna and his work on the

Austria to Australia, moved to Vienna in 1908 where he went on to study

architecture at the citys Technische Hochschule,
first high-rise development in that city; second, the
early years of life in Melbourne when he worked as

Fuchs to Fooks completing a doctorate in Technical Science with

A l a n P e rt and
Ph i lip Go a d
In the 1990s The University of Melbournes Architecture Building
and Planning Library was fortunate to have bequeathed to it the
Fooks Collection from Noemi Fooks, widower of the late Dr
Ernest Fooks (1906-1985), migr architect and town planner
and author of X-Ray the City! The density diagram: basis for
urban planning (1946).1 Who was this migr writing on the other
side of the world? Why was his book prescient, and what is its
message for today?
a major in Town Planning, and opening his own
architectural practice in 1932.2 His doctoral thesis,
entitled Stadt in Streifen, was a detailed analysis
of the concept of the linear city.3 After escaping
Europes increasing anti-Semitism, Fuchs married
Latvian-born Noemi Matusevic in Canada before
migrating to Australia, arriving in Melbourne in
May 1939. He initially worked for the Housing
Commission of Victoria before becoming in 1944 the
first lecturer in town planning at Melbourne Technical
College (now RMIT University). He changed his name
to Ernest Fooks on becoming an Australian citizen in
1945 and established an architectural practice under
his own name in 1948. Today, Fooks is best known
in Melbourne for his postwar modernist flats and
houses, many of which still exist. Despite common
public disdain for European style high-rise living,
these modernist flats represent some of the best
examples in Australia of European taste in modern
apartment living.4 From the notable Growing House
in the early 1930s, an expandable small house type
designed while in Vienna, to his more than forty
apartment blocks built throughout the Melbourne
suburbs of Caulfield, Toorak, St Kilda and South
Yarra, his large body of residential work produced in
Austria and Australia will be the subject of a future
research project at the University of Melbournes
Melbourne School of Design.
a design architect within the government agency of
the Housing Commission of Victoria and published
widely on urban design and town planning including
the publication of X-Ray the City! in 1946; and third,
his work in private practice which passes through
two distinctive phases, which, align with the impact
of his travels overseas. In particular his trips with
Noemi to Scandinavia and Japan which directly
influence his domestic work.
Fooks was also an accomplished artist, holding
exhibitions over the period from 1944 to 1984,
including Cities of Yesterday (1944) and The
Two Faced Metropolis (1952). He presents as a
significant figure from the migr design diaspora,
which brought numerous professionals from
Europe to Australia during the interwar, World War
II and immediate postwar periods.5 Positioned
within the ranks of both public and private
practice, and responding to pressures for housing,
infrastructure, and education, artists and design
professionals like Fooks had a lasting impact on
the development of postwar Australian visual and
design culture, especially during the significant
immediate postwar years. They also explored their
newly adopted country in ways that both reflected
the ideas associated with their formative years in
a European context and came to terms with the
unique (often outdated and conservative) conditions

X-Ray the City!, Ernest
Fooks, Ruskin Press 1946
1
Ernest Fooks, X-Ray the
City!: The density diagram:
basis for urban planning,
Canberra: Ministry of Post-War
Reconstruction, 1946.
2
Harriet Edquist, Fooks,
Ernest, in P. Goad and J. Willis,
The Encyclopedia of Australian
Architecture, Melbourne:
Cambridge University Press,
2012, pp. 258-9.
3
Ernst Fuchs, Stadt in Streifen
(City in Stripes), PhD Thesis
(in German), Technische
Hochschule zu Wien, 1931.
Held in the Ernest Fooks
Collection, Manuscripts Library,
State Library of Victoria,
Melbourne, Australia.
4
Caroline Butler-Bowdon
and Charles Pickett, Homes
in the sky: apartment living in
Australia, Carlton, Vic.; Sydney:
Miegunyah Press in association
with Historic Houses Trust,
2007, pp. 115, 118.
5
Accounts, largely biographical
case studies, of the impact
of migr artists, designers
and architects in Australia can
be found in Karl Bittman (ed),
Strauss to Matilda: Viennese
in Australia, 1938-1988,
Leichhardt, NSW: Wenkart
Foundation, 1988 and Roger
Butler (ed), The Europeans:
migr artists in Australia,
1930-1960, Canberra: National
Gallery of Australia, 1997.
 08 Alan Pert and Philip Goad 09

thrown up by Australian society, culture, politics
and economics. Fooks was also involved with his
wife Noemi in community life including the Jewish
service organisation Bnai Brith, and his prominence
within the Jewish community was later recognised
through his commission to design the National
Jewish Memorial Centre and Community Facility
in Canberra, completed in 1971. Fooks died in
1985. Despite his prolific output in built work and
publishing, especially his writing on modern housing
overseas in the 1940s,6 and the extensive national
coverage of his work in magazines such as Australian
Home Beautiful, Australian House and Garden and
Architecture Today Fooks work has not been widely
acknowledged in general architectural circles.
Ronnen Gorens exhibition catalogue, 45 Storeys:
A Retrospective of Works by Melbourne Jewish
architects from 1945 (1993) and Catherine
Townsends conference paper, Architects, exiles,
new Australian (1997) are to date, the most
extensive coverage of Fooks life and career along
with another slender publication entitled Ernest
Fooks: Architect (2001), prepared by Harriet Edquist,
which was conceived as a catalogue to accompany
a small exhibition curated by Helen Stuckey staged
at Melbournes Jewish Museum of Australia.7 By
Edquists admission, her 2001 booklet was not
intended to be an exhaustive study of Fooks, but
simply to draw attention to his body of work, and to
provide a useful framework for further investigation.
It is clear that a great deal of other information is yet
to be uncovered and documented within the Fooks
Collection, and also within other relevant archives.
So why look at Ernest Fooks now? October 2016
is the 50-year anniversary of the completion of
Fooks own home at 32 Howitt Road in Caulfield
North, Melbourne as well as the 70-year anniversary
of his most notable written work: X-Ray the City!
(1946). The house at Howitt Road was occupied by
Fooks wife Noemi until her death in 2013 and then
following the sale of the property Alan Pert has been
occupying the house while working with colleagues
at the Melbourne School of Design on research
which examines Fooks career (both in Vienna and
Melbourne) and his built-work, publications and
personal records held within various archives. The
ultimate goal is the formal creation of The Ernest
Fooks Collection, a research, exhibition and
publication project, which brings together disparate
archives and information located at the University
of Melbourne, RMIT University and the State
Library of Victoria. In the 1990s the University of
Melbourne Architecture Building and Planning Library
received the basis of the Fooks Collection from
Noemi Fooks. This collection has lain dormant until
recently and now a group of Melbourne academics
are recognizing that The Fooks Collection offers
a poignant window into the life of an exemplary
architect, urban thinker, designer, theorist and artist.
With the exile of so many Europeans from countries
like Austria during World War II, the influx of new
professionals brought with them new teachings,
new ideas, new theories and new skills that would
influence planning, design, architecture and culture
in the development of modernist Australia. These
contributions present undiscovered narratives
of the social and cultural capital of Europe and
Australia, offering insights into design trends during
the interwar years, the war years and importantly,
the post-WWII decades as Australia learned what
it meant to be cosmopolitan. In turn, the Fooks
Collection manifests as a potential exemplar into
the investigation of migr practitioners, as it
provides links to key areas of professional activity
such as domestic architecture, public housing
and speculative flat developments, and, to key
government institutions such as the Housing
Commission of Victoria. Furthermore, as universities
and professionals around the world engage in new
forms of urbanism, design and practice theory, it is
imperative that we reflect upon, understand, and
explore the significant contribution and influence
that migr architects like Fooks brought to the
development of not just Melbourne and indeed,
Australias design culture and thinking, but also to
countries like the United States, Canada, South
Africa, Brazil, Malaysia and the United States. Fooks
story is one with global parallels.
12-boxes of books which were removed from the
shelves of the house at Howitt Road following the
sale of the estate were retrieved and returned to the
house in 2013. This collection has provided valuable
information in relation to Fooks life and clues to the
thinking behind his work, his writings and his art.
For Pert, residing at the house has as much been a
process of discovery - uncovering the life of Fooks
- as well as experiencing a deeper understanding
of the motivations behind his work through a lived
experience. The house has provided a lens through
which to test some assumptions and explore a
distinct perspective on Fooks the Architect, The
Town Planner, The Furniture Designer, The Artist and
The Writer.
Fooks was far more than an architect. He was
a prolific traveller, artist, lecturer, designer and
theorist. Through boxes of letters to notables
such as Australian Prime Minister Ben Chifley, US
urban theorist Lewis Mumford and former Bauhaus
Director Walter Gropius as well as to the exemplary
photography of his frequent overseas endeavours; a
vast array of tangible histories preside around Fooks,
yet to be uncovered and documented. There is more
to understand and learn about Fooks, and in order to
do so, Venice 2016 begins to investigate, speculate
and test the theoretical position of the somewhat
forgotten urban polemic, X-Ray the City!
X-Ray the City!: 70-Years After
X-Ray the City!, published in 1946 while Ernest
Fooks was still working for the Housing Commission
of Victoria (including a foreword by Dr H C.
Coombs, Director General, Minister for Post-War
Reconstruction) was discovered inside one of the
boxes at 32 Howitt Road. The book pioneered in
Australia the topic of urban density, and in it, Fooks
declared that It is the principle of the integration of
the four urban functions, to live, to work, to recreate
and to distribute, which has to accompany every act
of urban planning.8 But he believed that integrated
urban research could only be achieved by a science

6
For example, Ernest Fooks,
A Growing House, Australian
Home Beautiful, March 1940,
pp. 26-7; An Architect Visits
Norway, Australian Home
Beautiful, July 1940, pp. 24-6;
Travels through Europe
Leaves from and architects
sketchbook, Australian Home
Beautiful, October 1943, pp. 19-
22; Wartime housing in Europe:
Switzerland, Australian Home
Beautiful, August 1945, pp.
12-15; and Wartime housing
in Europe: Sweden, Australian
Home Beautiful, September
1945, pp. 10-12.
7
Ronnen Goren (ed), 45
Storeys: A Retrospective of
Works by Melbourne Jewish
architects from 1945, Prahran,
Vic.: Jewish Festival of the Arts,
1993; Catherine Townsend,
Architects, exiles, new
Australians, Papers from the
15th Annual Conference of
The Society of Architectural
Historians, Australia and New
Zealand, Melbourne, 1998, pp.
379-87; Harriet Edquist, Ernest
Fooks: architect, Melbourne:
RMIT, 2001.
8 Fooks, X-Ray the City!, p. 95.

of urban planning that demanded the input of data.
What he proposed was a method [that] can be
compared to an X-Ray of the human body, the single
maps forming parts of an anatomic atlas of the
urban entity.9
While the debt to CIAMs Athens Charter (1933)
on urbanism10 was clear, Fooks added something
new he proposed two new research instruments:
the Distance Grid and the Density Diagram. These
graphic representations mapped his integrated
urban functions and calibrated the social needs
of the metropolitan population. He wrote: Visual
order is always the expression of the social order
which it serves. It is the human scale, which has
to be the guiding principle. Human beings, their
collective needs, their grouping, their distribution and
redistribution, become the primary concern of urban
planning.11
X-Ray the City! appears to have been forgotten
within Australias urban planning community with
the exception of the late Paul Mees from RMIT
University. In his paper How dense are we?, Mees
writes:
The problem is not new. More than six
decades ago, Ernest Fooks published a little
The four functions of living,
9
Fooks, X-Ray the City!, p. 95. 10
working, recreation and
circulation (distribution) were an
intrinsic part of the outcomes
of CIAM 4 which took place on
the SS Patris between Athens
and Marseilles in 1933, but
were then put into documentary
form by Le Corbusier initially
in La Ville Radieuse (1935), but
then more precisely in Charte
dAthnes in 1943. Both books
appear in the bibliography of
X-Ray the City!
10
book titled X-Ray the City! .. Fooks wanted
to place Australian town planning on an
intellectually rigorous footing, and wrote the
book to show how this might be done.
The central argument of X-Ray the City! is one
that still needs to be made in the 21st Century.
Most reported measurements of urban density
are calculated by dividing the population of a
municipality or other administrative region by
its gross area. It is of the utmost importance,
Fooks says, to stress the major defect of
such figures: THE ARBITRARY NATURE OF
URBAN BOUNDARIES (Fooks, 1946, p.
43; capitalisation in original). Municipal and
administrative boundaries rarely correspond
to actual urbanised areas. Some cities (e.g.
Brisbane) contain large areas of vacant land
within their boundaries, while others (e.g.
the City of Toronto) occupy only the inner
part of the urbanised area. Therefore, more
accurate density measures are needed: Fooks
proposed a series of them, linked to form
a density diagram that could be used to
X-Ray the City.
Fooks provided examples to illustrate his
main point: The artificial character of legal
11
Fooks, X-Ray the City!, p. 96. 13
Fooks, X-Ray the City!, p. 96.
12
Paul Mees, How Dense Are 14
Typewritten notes by Fooks
We? Another Look at Urban found in his archive/library at 32
Density and Transport Patterns Howitt Road, North Caulfield in
in Australia, Canada and the Melbourne.
USA, Road and Transport
Research, vol 18, no 4, 15
Franz Roh and Jan Tschichold
2009,5867. (eds.), Foto-Auge, Stuttgart:
Wedekind, 1929.
Alan Pert and Philip Goad 11
and administrative urban boundaries makes the interaction of its parts. Urban design
overall density figures meaningless. A study cannot be form alone. Purposeful social
of the two accompanying tables makes this commitment must precede all action in the
clear (p. 48). The two tables show self- design process without concern for the
evidently absurd results, such as Viennas techniques or shapes through which the
density being lower than Melbournes and commitment may finally be translated into
about the same as Los Angeles, and Detroit physical reality.14
having double the density of Zurich.12
Clues to Fooks interest in the X-ray as metaphor
Seventy years after X-Ray the City! first appeared, the
can be found in his book collection and archival
FUTURE FACTORY Research Group at Melbourne
notes. A paper clipping referring to the use of the
School of Design will reimagine the Distance Grid
X-ray to unlock secrets underneath paintings,
and the Density Diagram for Melbourne in 2016 and
including types of paper, materials, preparatory
2046. Fooks had suggested that some elements of
sketches, changes to the composition, and other
the city could never be measured, that some issues
clues is used as a bookmark in a book about
could not be reduced to a table of figures.13 What is
Picasso. The article describes the layering of
the immeasurable data missing from X-Ray the City!?
paintings from the sketch to the final composition.
How can it be graphically represented? And, why is
Fooks has underlined a section, which reads: X-rays
it critical to the reimagining of the future metropolis?
can see through different layers. But instead of flesh,
Our project investigates and presents a new way of
these X-rays see different layers of paint. A more
representing this missing immeasurable data.
significant clue to the X-ray metaphor would be
Fooks copy of the catalogue Foto-auge (Photo-
The X-Ray as Metaphor - space-time renderings
Eye),15 one of the most influential publications in
the field of the New Photography in the 1920s.16
Perhaps it is what you do not see which
Foto-auge contains seventy-six reproductions
makes sense of urban situations. We need to
reflecting the entire range of the Neues Sehen
see beyond superficial form and understand
(New Vision), and formulates the new photographic
the internal structure of the environment and
16
For further information on Photo-Auge, Wedekind, 1929
Foto-Auge, see Inka Graeve
Ingelmann, Mechanics and
Expression: Franz Roh and
the New VisionA Historical
Sketch, in Mitra Abbaspour,
Lee Ann Daffner, and Maria
Morris Hambourg (eds.), Object:
Photo. Modern Photographs:
The Thomas Walther Collection
19091949. An Online Project
of The Museum of Modern
Art. New York: The Museum of
Modern Art, 2014, pp. 1-14.

aesthetic that had established itself as the way of
the future around 1929. Along with photographs and
photographic experiments by well-known artists
and photographers such as El Lissitzky, Man Ray,
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Albert Renger-Patzsch, Walter
Peterhans, Hans Finsler, Umbo (Otto Umbehr),
and Sasha Stone, the publication also includes
anonymous photos from picture agencies, press
services, and business archives. These images
represent the various uses of the medium: reportage,
scientific photography, aerial photographs and X-ray
photographs. The content of the publication was
selected from Film und Foto (FIFO), the seminal
photography exhibition held in May-July 1929 in
Stuttgart which included on its selection committee
Swiss art and architectural historian and CIAM
Secretary-General Siegfried Giedion and Laszlo
Moholy-Nagy. Gideons Space, Time and Architecture
(1941)17 is also referenced in Fooks X-Ray the City!
and we can now start to understand Fooks wider
interest in scientific graphics and visualization.
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946) pops up elsewhere
in Fooks bookshelves and bizarrely it turns out
he shares a birthday with the X-ray. Jane Gaines
and Michael Renov in their book Collecting Visible
Evidence capture Moholy-Nagys interest in x-ray
technology and particularly its impact on art, an
interest expressed in print in 1947, contemporaneous
with Fooks 1946 book:
In x-ray photos, he writes, structure as X-rays are shaded from black to white, so are
becomes transparency and transparency
manifests structure. The x-ray pictures, to
which the futurist has consistently referred,
are among the outstanding space-time
renderings on the static plane.. Moholy-
Nagys description of the use of x-ray
technologies in art exceeds, however, that
17
Sigfried Giedion, Space, time 18
Jane Gaines and Michael
and architecture, Cambridge, Renov (eds.), Collecting
Mass.: Harvard University Visible Evidence, Minneapolis:
Press, 1941. University of Minnesota Press,
1999, p. 72. Moholy-Nagys
words are quoted from Lazlo
Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion,
Chicago: Theobald, 1947, p.
252.
12
of a mere technique. The ability to expose
simultaneously the inside and outside
of a thing, to retain the objects surface
even while probing its depths, describes
a scientific phantasy as well a scientific
imperative. The term artefact perhaps
best describes the x-ray image, which is
at once buried and revealed, invoking the
archaeological aspect of its function.18
Fooks also had a copy of Gyorgy Kepess Language
of Vision. Kepes pioneered the construction of
digital imagery and the fusion of design with art,
architecture, science and technology. His archives,
sold in 2010 to Stanford University, included letters
from Josef Albers, R. Buckminster Fuller, John Cage,
Walter Gropius, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Piet Mondrian
and Richard Neutra, all of whom he influenced.
The theories that he and Moholy-Nagy devised
in the 1930s are still relevant today in relation to
contemporary theories of data visualization and
digital information.
Within Fooks book collection there are also,
references to some of the avant-garde Russian
painters such as Mikhail Larionov and Kasimir
Malevich who famously wrote in 1915 that objects
have vanished like smoke. The Russian avant-garde
was fascinated by the idea of seeing through as a
precursor to seeing beyond. Naum Gabo is also
referenced and he declared his own rules of art: Just
layers of tissue they reveal. That grey scale is reality.
The real, Gabo announced, is what is beneath,
not what is superficially apparent.19 Gabos 1920
manifesto was one of a string of artistic declarations
announcing a new aesthetic. He was succeeded by
the Surrealists and preceded by Dada but his fixation
with transparency can also be found at the Bauhaus
19
Naum Gabo, Realist
Manifesto, 1920, quoted in
Bettyann Kevles, Naked to
the bone: medical imaging
in the twentieth century,New
Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers
University Press, 1997, p. 131.
13
from 1919 where this new aesthetic of transparency Unfashionable Human Body (1971). Are Clothes
was also being applied to buildings. The structural Modern? opened as an exhibition at the Museum
skeleton covered only by a skin of glass became a of Modern Art in New York in 1944 and the press
familiar architectural idea. release also makes reference to the use of X-rays.21
There is clearly a relationship between Fooks In the twentieth century, the widespread use of
fascination with the art world and emerging media X-rays made a new way of thinking about art and
(photography and film) around this time and modern architecture possible as Beatriz Colomina suggests.
architecture. Beatriz Colomina in her paper X-Ray At the turn of the twenty-first century, the CAT scan
Architecture: Illness as Metaphor suggests: (Computerized Axial Tomography) may be for the field
what the basic X-ray was for architects early in the
Avant-garde architects of the early decades of the twentieth century.20 In 1946, the exclamation mark of
20th century, from Le Corbusier to Jan Duiker or Ernest Fooks title X-Ray the City! was a command
Richard Neutra, presented their new architecture or an entreaty to look beneath the existing city and
as a kind of medical equipment for protecting discover its invisible form. To proclaim CAT scan the
and enhancing the body. Buildings even started City! somehow doesnt have the same mystique as
to look like X-rays, revealing the secrets within. searching for the hidden X of any city, so X-Ray the
Think about Mies van der Rohes project for City! it is.
the Glass Skyscraper in Berlin of 1922, with its
exposed skeleton. Its not by chance that Mies
even collected and published X-rays.20
But at the same time, Fooks book reveals an added
dimension that of the human, almost primitive,
quality of the city. The front cover to his book is not
an X-ray but his own hand drawing of the Belgian
late medieval city of Bruges. Its described in critical
terms within the book as Overcrowding in Europe
but almost contradictorily drawn with genuine
fondness that will increase with Fooks travels
and documentation of vernacular architecture. In
this regard, Fooks shares sympathies with fellow
Viennese-trained architect and exhibition curator
Bernard Rudofsky, then resident in the United States,
Amongst the Fooks bookshelves we can find almost
the entire Rudofsky book collection: Are Clothes
Modern? (1944), Behind the Picture Window (1955),
Architecture without Architects (1964), The Kimono
Mind (1965), Streets Are For People (1969) and The
20
Beatriz Colomina, X-Ray 21
Press release for Are Clothes
Architecture: Illness as Modern?, exhibition held at the
Metaphor, Positions, No. 0, Museum of Modern, New York,
Positioning Positions (Fall 2008), 29 November 1944 4 March
pp. 30-35. 1945, MOMA Archives.
 14
F o ok s , R udofsky by Rudofsky, Behind the Picture Window (1955),
there is a chapter titled: The Ballast of The Home
an d H e na rd: where Rudofsky refers to the importance of storage
as the organising principle of domestic life. Fooks
Thoughts on Sandals and a Pair of Nike - has written in his archival notes The Street and
The Street next to it The Ballast of The City. We can only
hypothesize on the parallels Fooks was intending
here in relation to the functional role of the street in
relation to the city; possibly provoking the thought
of the street as something to be filled (with people),
A l a n P e rt a vessel essential to social exchange and well-
being or something providing weight and stability
and of great functional importance in the life of a
city. Rudofsky and Fooks share an interest in the
human, almost primitive, quality of the city and
while X-Ray the City! promotes a scientific approach
In X-Ray the City! Fooks highlights the plight of
to urban research Fooks is also suggesting we
marginal shops sitting isolated on the outer areas
do not overlook the visual, experiential and social
of the city and how they contribute to an ailing
dimensions of the historic city. Linking Fooks and
urban form. Fooks was interested in the role that
Rudofsky to Eugene Henard is a clipping Fooks had
the space of the street played in the social life of
inserted in Rudofskys, Streets for People. Street of
communities and the convenience of everyday life.
the Future (1910) was the French planner Henards
He saw the street as a delineated area for common
paper, presented at the Royal Institute of British
use and the distribution of services along the street
Architects Town Planning Conference The Cities of
as a communal asset. Fooks often referred to his
the Future in London. In that paper, he presented
friend and colleague Bernard Rudofsky (BR) in his
plans and sections of existing and future city streets
lecture notes and as noted in the introduction to
and buildings. The Rue Future plan and cross-section
this publication Fooks had a copy of Rudofskys
posited a future where the complete integration
book, Streets for People (1969), in his collection.
of technology seamlessly links public and private
In the book Rudofsky argues that the street is the
realms through infrastructure. Yet, the futuristic built
historical stage for the mundane and the remarkable,
form of the city did not actually look very different
the personal and the communal. In another book
from the existing form.
1
Ernest Fooks, X-Ray the
City!: The density diagram:
basis for urban planning,
Canberra: Ministry of Post-War
Reconstruction, 1946.
Figure 1. From X-Ray the Figure 2. From X-Ray the
City!, Page 40 City!, Page 41
Vacant Shops, Strut St, The Isolated Shop
South Melbourne Originally situated within a
Endless rows of shops, purely residential district
interspersed with
dilapidated dwellings, line
the main roads of the inner
suburbs.
Architecture and city making for Fooks and Rudofsky
was not just a matter of technology and aesthetics
but the frame for a way of life. Rudofsky famously
designed sandals ("Footwear without tears"),
which he suggested were designed to liberate
the foot. He would have no doubt approved of
that quintessentially modern development, the
performance running shoe like a pair of Nike. The
science of footwear has never been so advanced
and just as the sandal is the most primitive form of
liberation for the foot so too could the Nike runner
be seen as liberating in a very different kind of way.
For Rudofsky and for Fooks the frustration is that our
homes and our streets havent kept pace.
Melbournes distinctive high street shopping
strips were established in the late 19th and early
20th centuries. They have seen little material
difference in the built fabric over the last 100 years.
In appearance the high street currently remains
familiar, yet the activities taking place there are
transforming: the shops remain, but with much
less shopping. The basic topography of the street
remains largely familiar, its buildings essentially the
same; the patterns and conditions of pavements,
roads, vehicles and street furniture are largely
consistent but change is acute. Recent planning
controls have allowed increased density to begin to
transform these largely two storey arterial routes.
Development companies and planning set back
controls have become the primary determiners of
urban form and swathes of individual shopfronts are
15
being consolidated to maximise building footprints.
Human-scale buildings and heritage overlays
struggle to survive the growth that is driving the
single use residential development.
70-years on from X-Ray the City! rates of retail
vacancy are at an all time high in many Melbourne
streets. The citys high streets and distribution of
shopping has been going through a rapid decline.
This follows the growth in retail centralization and the
globalization of brand shopping in major cities as well
as the steep rise in online shopping. Communities
were, literally, built around our high streets in the
past. Once the social glue of a community these
linear aggregations of diverse frontages, activities
and people will have to be reimagined beyond the
single purpose of retail.
Melbournes arterial network has been the focus
of an MSD design studio for the last two years
combining students from architecture, landscape
architecture and urban design. The Vacancy Market
studio 2014 explored Bridge Road in Richmond, an
inner suburb of Melbourne, while Almost Pretty
2015 explored Sydney Road, Melbournes longest
continuous shopping strip to the north of the CBD.
In their most basic form these streets form part of
a route that connects people and places, from the
CBD at one end to the outer suburbs at the other
end. They are also a series of spaces that align to
compose an urban strip. Behind this regulated
Figure 3. Eugne Mnard
CITIES OF THE FUTURE
Royal Institute of British
Architects, Town Planning
Conference London, 10-15
October 1910, Transactions
(London: The Royal Institute
of British Architects,
1911):345-367
 16 Alan Pert 17

urban strip lies a diverse range of laneways,
backdoors, service yards, garages and car-parks that
form a less regulated hinterland of opportunities.
This duality of spatial complexity raises some
fascinating opportunities when considering the
heterogeneous coexistence of cultures in places
like Melbourne. In contrast to the structure of the
grid found at the heart of the CBD and behind the
diverse frontages that form a typical high street we
can find an unusual distribution of left over spaces.
There is pressure on these hinterland spaces to
accommodate future residential development and
with this brings the risk of homogeneity of land
use. These spaces already mediate a variety of
uses around their edges (hospital warehouse -
workspace house church - supermarket) yet the
economics of development are forcing a singular
idea for residential use over an opportunity to
accommodate diversity and a distributed model
of communal activity. Just as the city is under
pressure to accommodate higher densities and a
globalized architecture of curtain walling there is a
similar concern that these unique neighbourhoods
are losing their distinctive local characters with an
architectural and spatial language of similarity void of
distinctiveness.
The MSD studios exploring high streets forms
part of a larger study of Melbournes major streets
and hinterland spaces. As these streets and open
spaces transition under the new urban policies
designed to drive a certain type of urbanity we
stand to miss a great opportunity for remaking the
middle ring. Fooks took on the quarter-acre plot by
introducing the residential six-pack to the suburbs
over 50-years ago and it is still an important lesson
in scale and density today. What is emerging along
our major streets is a generic tiered wedding cake
of recessive blocks and homogenized shop fronts.
We stand to lose the texture of the streets as the
assortment of individual verandahs and canopies
morph into over-sized protruding downstands that
have lost their human touch and fine grain detail.
The texture of small open spaces scattered across
the rear of the streets is a clue to a new relationship
between the street and the community beyond. New
routes, new intersections and new topographies can
reshape physical as well as social relationships.
The high streets were conceived as urban veneers
shop frontages with servicing and storage directed
to the rear, out of sight. As the physical form of
these streets begin to change and as new modes of
mobility have the potential to radically change the
way we move through our cities we might reconsider
the hierarchy of fronts and backs. Automated taxis
on-demand, increased cycling, electric bikes and
cars, improved public transit, hover-boards and an
ageing demographic requiring a range of mobility
devices have the potential to radically alter the
physical space of the street and its relationship to the
spaces beyond.
Celebrating this new mobility and reinforcing the
high street as a circulation corridor for all types of
services from collecting waste to moving people
helps to reinforce a radical rethinking of the urban
fabric. The hinterlands to our high streets are then
no longer the left over bits of the discussion but
the primary opportunity for a new typology of
distributed common space. Vast amounts of urban
space currently given over to wasteful parking for a
declining retail market become opportunities for new
forms of living, working, leisure time and learning
creating a new common experience of the future
city. The street is reinforced as a continuous space,
a high performance space (Nike trainer) while the
hinterlands offer a diversity of places for people to
pause (the sandal). A transportation and technology
conduit adjacent and connected to a new type of
dispersed civic realm could navigate the frustrations
of Fooks and Rudofsky.
As Fooks suggests: It is the demands of todays
society that makes the social needs of the human
being the nucleus of urban integration. Due to this
perception, todays approach towards urban planning
differs from that of yesterdays. Then it was the
optical, approach, the visual sensation forming the
decisive factor. Today it is the sociological approach.
The visual order cannot be divorced from the realities
of daily life. Visual order is always the expression
of the social order, which it serves. It is the human
scale, which has to be the guiding principle. Human
beings, their collective needs, their grouping, their
distribution and redistribution, become the primary
concern of urban planning.2
Maybe a new definition of the urban arterial needs to
be written in the context of the Ballast of The Future
City. At the same time we should update Eugne
Hnards
Cities of the Future narrative: Let us now
consider the buildings fronting (and backing) these
streets.

Figure 4. The Vacancy Figure 5. The Vacancy

Market, Melbourne Market Study of Melbourne
Hinterlands. High Streets
2
Fooks, X-Ray the City! p. 9
 18 19

M e tric C ity The cover features an expressive drawing of streets

of tightly packed houses; immediately conveying
the themes of overcrowding and density, and
the granular study of the size of population per
urban area. The texts X-Ray vision however, lies
in the narrators ability to see through the density
ratios: into the social fabric beneath and inside the
century visionaries who re-planned urban life around
the dreams of an organic community.
The long shadow of Ebenezer Howard and the
garden city ideal are cast on the book, leavening the
dominance of urban formulae on Fooks modernist
mind-set. Howard countered the ills of the industrial

K are n numbers. His interest in urban data looks backwards

Bu r ns
Ernest Fooks X-Ray the City! (1946)
brings together social and numeric
ways of knowing the city.
to the nineteenth century and gazes forwards to the
new post war world. In this short essay I use X-Ray
the City! to sketch out the brief history of density
contained within its pages and then move forwards
to consider a new kind of density diagram: maps of
financial density.
The overcrowding ratios and density diagrams of
X-Ray the City! extended a century old tradition of
mapping the city through the analytical category
of overcrowding. Unlike other modernist designers
however, Fooks also rekindled the nineteenth-
centurys scepticism towards mathematical data.
Opening with a famous quotation popularly attributed
to Mark Twain and Benjamin Disraeli, he declared
that there are Lies, damned lies and statistics.
The data was praised for its revelations but kept in
check by other empirical methods and social values.
I do not believe that figures and standards are able
to produce urban and community life, pronounced
Fooks. He was heir to nineteenth and early twentieth-
city with a pastoral urban world. Although Fooks
did not propose a garden city his thinking seems
indebted to Howards ideally sized population
centres, organisation of new urban formations by
concentric rings, and emphasis on the social basis of
communal life.
The X-Ray study stands out amongst the
abstractionism of famous modernist architectural
blueprints from Le Corbusier to CIAM. Fooks used
local knowledge to dissect universal measures. He
observed that Stockholm, Berlin and Birmingham
all share the same density ratio whilst being very
different cities. Equally attentive to Melbournes
differences, he compared the late nineteenth-century
century middle-class garden suburb of Malvern
with its 1940s density ratio of 11.2, to Melbournes
mid-nineteenth-century industrialised suburb of
Fitzroy and its density ratio of 33.4. The comparison
challenged a century-long tradition of linking
crowded, unhealthy environments with criminality.
Fooks found no link between overcrowding measures
 20 Karen Burns 21

and juvenile crime: rates of delinquency remained
equivalent for Malvern and Fitzroy. Ideology is one of
the intangible things exposed by his x-ray analysis.
Three important ways of knowing the city were
invented in the nineteenth century: eyewitness
testimony, ethnographic analysis and statistical
methods. Testimony and statistics operated side
by side in Britains famous blue books, the vast
government inquiries into industrial, and condition
of England questions. Huge reports collated
numeric survey data and hundreds of pages of
informant witness testimony was recorded from up
and down the social scale, from factory inspectors
to industrial workers. Fooks did not include
ethnographic information but his sensitivity to social
difference placed him closer to late 1950s and early
60s analyses of the city made famous by Jane
Jacobss work on Greenwich Village and Herbert
Gans investigation of Bostons West End. In Fooks industries.2 A map of extant regional training
humanist study density was analysed at the scale of
room, lot and area to produce an anatomic atlas,
and social relations were described as spatial
nearness. Ways of knowing zoom between intimate
proximity and numerical distance.
In 2014 architectural theorist Eyal Weizman called
for financial density maps: representations that
correlate the parts of society in boom with the other
parts in bust.1 Major cities hoard job opportunities
and resources at the expense of peripheries and
regions. The uneven geographical distribution of
population magnets and sparsely inhabited areas
was something Ebenezer Howard understood in
his planning of new towns. A financial density map
of the state of Victoria would depict Melbournes
concentration of employment resources, a monopoly
that provides a social and financial barrier to regional
redistribution. Recent predictions suggest that by
2056, 9 million people will be living in Melbourne.
This revelation has been accompanied by a call for
increased population densities across the state,
which could be formed from rural and regional
centres. These magnets would be anchored
around government service hubs or new specialist
institutions - from universities to TAFES, high
schools and community learning facilities and
local factories, workshops and businesses would
describe existing social, economic and intellectual
infrastructure as the basis for planning specific local
industries in a multi-city future. Financial density
maps place the city in a larger social context and tie
urban planning to economic futures.
Fooks wrote of the citys immeasurables, of the
social things that escape the net of measurement
and visualisation. Policy and master plans need
local and bottom-up knowledge. His anatomic atlas
could be reimagined as a compendium of life stories;
revealing individual experience of shifting economic
conditions and journeys. New integrated ways of
displaying information through sound, text and image
might make us more optimistic than Fooks about
what the data eye could not see nor understand. For
example, geographers working with GIS mapping
have been experimenting with ways of incorporating
ethnographic information such as individual and
local histories into geo-spatial displays.3 Density can
be interpreted as a form of Clifford Geertzs thick
description: an intensely detailed narration of events
and characters as a way of explaining and setting
behaviour in context.
X-Ray the Citys poetic nomenclature from the
anatomic atlas to spatial nearness extends
density debates beyond the efficient distribution
and management of populations into a web of
social bonds. In order to really map one of Fooks
immeasurables - the lived experience of community-
we will need to find new ways of bringing the analytic
and the anecdotal together.

1
Eyal Weizman, Interview in
Real Estates: Life Without Debt,
ed. Fulcrum (London: Bedford
Square, 2014), 124.
2
Farrah Tomazin, Population
Growth has become Victorias
biggest political issue, The
Age, 8/05/2016, 21.
3
M.P. Kwan, Feminist
visualization: re-envisioning
GIS as a method in feminist
geographic research, Annals
of the Association of American
Geographers, 92, 4, 2002: 653.
 22 23

F o ok s : Integr ati ng The bibliography in Fooks book bears his useful

annotations for several key works, and on the
Urb a n Functi ons Sert book he observes Based on the proposals
formulated by the CIAM, it contains an analytical
survey of the urban living conditions of today.
Popularly presented and excellently illustrated by
means of maps, graphs, diagrams and photographs.
The best book to convey an overall view of todays
urban problems.2Serts book, in turn, was for
Pa u l the most part an explication of the vast list of
points contained in the Charter of Athens, the
Wa lk e r urban doctrine adopted by CIAM - the Congrs
Internationaux dArchitecture Moderne - in 1933.
It appears that Serts book originally published in
1942 contained the first widely distributed version
of the Charter of Athens, or what it renders as The
Town-planning Chart, Fourth C.I.A.M. Congress,
Athens, 1933.
The urbanism of the Charter of Athens was of course
based on the functional approach to urban planning
adopted by Le Corbusier in his key urban project
of the 1920s, the Ville Contemporaine, the Voisin
Plan, and the Ville Radieuse. Serts version of the
four functions renders them as dwelling, recreation,
work, and transportation. And in these terms, the
four functions have been discussed by urbanists and
architects ever since, first as four unquestionable
principles, then as a problematic schematization that
disregarded urban complexity and whose pursuit
veiled real principles of human association (the
Ernest Fooks X-Ray the City! can be understood as a prescient Smithsons term that was in turn adopted by CIAMs
call to plan Melbourne on the basis of evidence and analysis. Team 10 critics), and then perhaps as a kind of
historical curiosity, to be viewed empathetically for
Published in 1946, it is apparent that it was influenced by Jos its aesthetic implications, but more in the manner
of an ancient discursive monument than as a living
Fooks renders the four functions in forceful
uppercase in the introduction to his book
as LIVING, WORKING, RECREATING and
DISTRIBUTING.
The most striking parallel between the Fooks book
and the Sert is not, however, their common adoption
of the Le Corbusier orthodoxy of CIAMs urbanism.
Rather, the telling common ground between X-Ray
the City! and Can Our Cities Survive? is in their
characterisation of the one of the basic components
of dwelling, which both Fooks and Sert call the
Neighbourhood Unit (give or take a hyphen). Both
define this unit as centring on an elementary school
Fooks even uses this American terminology.4 Fooks
reports English work that suggest a neighbourhood
unit is 1000 families; eight such units make a
borough unit which should contain all essential
amenities of a town, such as a town hall, railway
station, theatre, hospital and a wide range of shops.5
Eight boroughs constitute a district; while larger
cities would be clusters of such districts with open
spaces between and served by a central business
area. For Sert, the neighbourhood unit is similarly
composed of the dwellings required to house a
sufficient number of people to support an elementary
school, and a borough is likewise defined as a
cluster of neighbourhood units, including a range
of facilities that services them all administrative
offices, theatres and concert halls, cinemas, clubs,
a stadium, secondary schools, a central library,
department stores, medical facilities.6 With less
exactitude than Fooks, Sert also refers to broader
urban units as districts, which in turn collectively
making up larger cities.

Luis Serts book of 1942, Can Our Cities Survive? An ABC of philosophy. Here of course I am thinking of the Fooks and Sert also share a common attitude to
approach adopted by Rowe and Koetters Collage the problems of density. Both point to the tendency
Urban Problems; Their Analysis; Their Solution.1 City of 1978.3 to see high population densities per se as bad,

1
Sert, Can Our Cities Survive?
An ABC of Urban Problems;
Their Analysis; Their Solution
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, reprinted
1947).
2
Ernest Fooks, X-Ray the
City! The Density Diagram:
Basis for Urban Planning
(Canberra: Ministry of Post-war
Reconstruction, 1946), 104.
Colin Rowe & Fred Koetter,
3 6
Sert, Can Our Cities Survive?, 70. See also Sert, The
Collage City (Cambridge, Mass.: Neighborhood Unit: A Human Measure in City Planning (circa 1953)
MIT Press, 1978). in The Writings of Josep Lluis Sert, ed. Eric Mumford, (New Haven:
4
Fooks, X-Ray the City!, 33. Yale University Press, & Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Graduate
School of Design, 2015).
5
Fooks, X-Ray the City!, 30.

since crowding characterises slum conditions, and
slums feature various kinds of social pathology.
But very low densities lead to facilities being
too dispersed to be conveniently accessed by
households, and to heavy investments in roads and
other infrastructure for relatively small populations.
While Sert emphasises that urban centres will have
high levels of population concentration because of
their high land values and because concentration
is needed in order to sustain their specialised
activities, Fooks comments that even on the urban
fringe comparative concentration of the population
is needed. The grouping of men into social and
economically balanced communities, as instruments
for healthy life: that is the primary task.7
What distinguishes Fooks, however, apart from his
constant reference to the specific planning problems
of Melbourne, is his analytical and quantitative bent.
Thus, his sifting of data he had gathered about the
population needed to sustain an elementary school,
coupled with his view that it is generally agreed
that the maximum walking distance to schools
for children of the elementary school age should
not exceed half-a-mile leads to a very specific
proposal for the viable range of minimum densities
of an average Australian residential neighbourhood.
Having surveyed expert opinion as to advisable
class sizes for elementary schools in Europe,
England, the United States, and Australia, Fooks
settles on 28 as the optimum average class head
count, within an acceptable range from 20 to 35
children per class. Australian government statistics
7
Sert, Can Our Cities Survive?, Fooks, X-Ray the City!, 34-35.
8
60; Fooks, X-Ray the City!, 29.
24 Paul Walker 25
had demonstrated that there were 1.5 children for
each school grade per 100 of urban population. He
suggests that schools can only be run economically
if they have two classes at each level. This leads to
the calculation that a population of 3740 is needed
to sustain an optimally operating school this is
the head count of the neighbourhood unit. The
acceptable variation in class size leads to minimum
and maximum neighbourhood populations of 2680
and 4660. The Time-Space factor of a childs
maximum walking distance leads Fooks to estimate
a maximum area in which this population range can
live (taking into account that paths from school to
home will not be in straight lines), which in turn leads
to a population density of 13.4 persons per acre for
the desirable neighbourhood population of 3740,
and a minimum density of 9.6 persons per acre for
the minimum neighbourhood population of 2680. No
maximum desirable density logically emerges out of
this analysis.8
Fooks X-Ray the City! stays within the functional,
CIAM doctrine of Serts Can Our Cities Survive? But
his empirical turn in relation to scale and related
space-time factors (re-emergent in Melbourne
in recent discussion of the 20- or 30-minute city)
leads him to advocate integration between functions
just as strongly as the functions themselves. As
Fooks comments in his concluding chapter It is
the principle of the integration of the four urban
functions, to live, to work, to recreate and to
distribute, which has to accompany every act of
urban planning.
A page from Jos Luis
Serts Can Our Cities
Survive? demonstrating
neighbourhood units
Fooks, X-Ray the City!, 95.
9 and their clustering into
boroughs
 26 27

K no wle d ge is
n o t fo r k nowing:
kn owle d g e i s for
cu t ting .
Michel Foucault

This method creates the proper technical tools of

coordinating and integrating the various urban factors

Ha n na h in SPACE and TIME, and it adheres to the essential

principle underlying todays functional approach to
Lewi physical planning. It is the principle of the integration
of the four urban functions, to live, to work, to
recreate and to distribute, which has to accompany
every act of urban planning.

The principle of the DISTANCE GRID and
the DENSITY DIAGRAM, with their different
applications, as suggested in this study, offers
a wide scope for a scientific method or
urban research.
This method can be compared to an X-Ray of the human
body, the single maps forming parts of an anatomic atlas
of the urban entity.
To all but the scientist, tables of figures are
liable to strike a rather inhuman note; all the
more when they refer to human beings and are
accompanied by the technical terminology of the
town-planner. None the less, it is only by starting
with figures and standards and drawing certain
deductions from them that an improvement of
the living conditions of great numbers of human
beings can be achieved.
I do not believe that figures and standards are
able to produce urban and community life,
which can only grow from the actions of human
beings. No matter how thoroughly we may
scrutinize a town, there will be an element that
cannot be measured, even by the most elaborate
system of scoring; that cannot be expressed
in figures or graphic exhibits; that cannot be
caught by forumulae and definitions, and can hardly
be expressed with words: it is the life pulsating in
the town, the life of generations, past and present,
an inkling of which we find expressed in the physical
environment in the structure, face and spatial order of
a town.
But I do believe that this method of integrated urban
research will furnish the practical tools for urban
analysis. I do believe that such an analysis based
upon adequate methods can reveal the true degree
of the defects and diseases of urban structures, the
cancerous growth, as well as the overcrowding and
decentralization diseases, in all their ramifications.
Only then shall we be able to find methods or urban
rehabilitation. Tools for analysis have to form the
dynamic preparation for further action; they have to
become the tools for activity, the tools for creating
the new urban environment. Ernest Fooks X-Ray the
City!

Melbourne 1946: With the rise of the welfare state in
Australia, as elsewhere, there came a concern for the
proselytisation of a code of social and professional
responsibility. Professionals including planners,
architects, engineers and landscape architects
alongside civil servants were key protagonists in
designing the post-WWII social contract which was
founded on the principles of extended citizenship
rights and consensus politics and backed by the
power of expert knowledge.
A raft of media types was enthusiastically adopted
from the 1930s onwards to persuade and promote
new ideas about social and physical modernisation
and reconstruction. Documentary films, travelling
exhibitions, photographic surveys, public lectures
pamphlets and books all offered new ways of
persuasively communicating to a broad public
audience. Through this media the design professions
attempted to project themselves at the frontline;
experts who could both educate about and
28
implement unprecedented changes to everyday living
in modern urban environments.
The formation of the persona of the expert
professional, and the depiction of new kinds
of technical expertise and work, was a crucial
mechanism of modernity. Although extensive
urban census data and social mapping had been
undertaken from the latter nineteenth century
(famously by Charles Booth among others), it
was in the mid-twentieth century decades that
professional knowledges and tools relating to urban
planning and design were systematically established.
Anthony Giddens has termed these techniques as
symptomatic of a dis-embedding expert system
of modernity: dis-embedding because of how such
systems attempt to restructure social relations
away from immediate local, traditional contexts and
towards more universal and indefinite organisation
of the material and social urban environment across
space and time.1
1
Anthony Giddens, The
Consequences of Modernity
(Cambridge, England: Polity
Press, 1991), 21.
Hannah Lewi
In X-Ray the City!, Ernest Fooks focuses on the
problems of the modern city of Melbourne in
comparison to other major world cities of the day.
Akin to Giddens dis-embedding, here Fooks makes
expansive comparisons to international contexts and
away from the local, and he closely echoes other
contemporary international planning organisational
systems like Patrick Abercrombies Greater London
Plan of 1944.
Through photographic reportage, maps, charts
and diagrams, the wholesale investment in the
codification and visualisation of information is striking
in this genre of planning and design documents.
Despite a veneer of factual distance, audio-visual
techniques were used as amplification of ideologies
as well as invitations towards policies and actions.
X-Ray the City! is no exception. Together words,
maps, diagrams and surveys become blueprints,
or what Fooks describes as an atlas, for both
scrutinising the problems and envisioning the future.
Through forensic scientific examination, planning
2
Thomas Osborne and Nikolas
Rose, Spatial phenomotechnis:
making space with Charles
Booth and Patrick Geddes,
Environment and Planning D:
Society and Space 22 (2004):
225.
29
know-how is depicted by Fooks as, on the one hand
the source of mis-guided and blinkered technocratic
solutions, and on the other hand a valuable resource
for re-imagining, re-ordering and eventually curing
the damaged urban body. Programs of post-WWII
reconstruction and repair like Fooks anatomic
atlas were to be operated upon the Anglo-Saxon
body; a body laid bare by industrialisation, economic
depression, war and decentralisation.
X-Ray the City! attempted to show readers
how urban space and time could be made more
visible and thereby more manageable through the
knowledge and actions of designers and experts.
It was these technicians of space social
statisticians, doctors, urban reformers, town
plannerswho, in making space thinkable, also make
it practicable and enable certain intellectual and
practical authority to be exercised over human beings
by acting on the spatial aspects of their existence.
Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose.2
 30 31

Tak ing T hem Back: In 2011 I took up a position as Gastprofessor at

the Institute for Landscape Architecture, University
t h e Aus tro -Austr alians of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (BOKU),
Vienna. The aim of my visit was to spend time
ret ur ne d to Vi enna completing my manuscript which ended up being
published a year later as Making Landscape
Architecture in Australia (2012). I also agreed to lead
a seminar based on my research, thus involving a
group of landscape architecture students at BOKU
A n d re w on a project of my choice. My research was primarily
concerned with explaining the origins of landscape
S a nig a architecture in Australia, particularly during the years
following World War II. I decided to explore any links
that could be established between Australia and
Austria. I knew migr architects to Australia like
Ernest Fooks (1906-85) and Karl Langer (1903-69)
had links with Vienna early in their careers, but it was
their trajectories in Australia that I had researched up
to that date.
To my good fortune, I was presented with a
Culture is bound to single points, it reaches its blossom fantastically receptive student cohort who took to my
in the cities. Nature is not bound to anything. It can be ambitions without reservation. This was important
because I really had no confidence that we could
everywhere. It has to be in the metropolis also. That is find any extant building or landscape that had
clear connections to either Fooks or Langer. So it
the assignment.1 was with great excitement that within two weeks
we discovered that one building could be linked
to both! Hochhaus at Herrengasse 6-8 has the
ominous-sounding mantle of being Viennas First
Skyscraper. Designed by architects Theiss-Jaksch
in1931-32 and built within approximately 200 metres
of Michaelerplatz and the entrance gates to the
Hofburg, this high-rise apartment building consisted
of 224 flats, a roof-top restaurant with dance floor,
and ground floor shops including a circular glass
corner caf (see Figures 1 and 2). After opening,
Hochhaus attracted Viennas notoriety. It became a
hub of activity, not only for a suite of Viennas artists,
performers, and other people of note, but also for the
general public who came to its shops, cafs, dance
events and the like.
My students became intrigued by the discovery
that two practitioners with expansive and influential
careers in Australia had also been involved in early
modern building projects in their city. At the time
Hochhaus was constructed Fooks was working
as an architect for Theiss-Jaksch. We found
photographic evidence of him in discussion with
builders, climbing scaffolding and generally being
in the thick of building this modern and radical new
development within a part of the city steeped in
historic buildings and infrastructure. Karl Langers

Figure 1: The entrance

foyer of Hochhaus in 2011.
Photograph: A Saniga

Figure 2: A model of
Hochhaus on display within
the vacant corner caf in
the buildings foyer in 2011.
Photograph: A Saniga.
1
Ernst Fuchs (Ernest Fooks),
Stadt in Streifen, excerpt
trans, Christian Car (PhD diss.,
Technical University of Vienna,
1932), 102.

connection involved a 1927 concept for the site
called The Cityhaus Projekt. His scheme was never
built however the design reflected bold thinking
and challenging ideas for the time. It consisted of
a number of large rectangular volumes banded
horizontally in alternating colours: red for the lower
parts, orange for the middle storeys and yellow at
the top. Some of the students thought echoes of
his scheme permeated the eventual design, sans
the bold colours. In the students reading of various
accounts (written in Austrian) they argued that Langer
wanted the buildings multi-coloured quality to have
psychological meaning for the urban space, that
it should be therapeutic but also that the colours
should correspond to functional differentiation, and
hence, legibility.
It is interesting that both Fooks and Langers careers
in Australia should involve innovation and speculation
in terms of housing development and a citys shape
Iris Meder and Judith Andrew Saniga, Making
Eiblmayer, Haus Hoch: Das Landscape Architecture in
Hochhaus Herrengasse und Australia (Sydney: UNSW Press,
seine berubmten Bewohner, 2012).
(Vienna: Verlagsburo W.GmbH.,
Metroverlag, 2009), 46.
32
and form. This includes propositions for alternative
forms of housing and density that might be adopted
for Australian cities. Importantly, they identified a role
for landscape architecture in Australia. The value of
landscape within the metropolis and the domestic
garden was clearly on their radar. Yet given that their
existence seemed virtually unknown in Vienna, many
of the students became dedicated to the project of
expressing this past, much of which involved tragic
histories relating to the Jewish community in Austria.
The students explored ways of infiltrating the fabric
of Hochhaus and its curtilage and adjacent streets
with the stories of Fooks and Langer. They were
encouraged to avoid the ubiquitous bronze memorial
plaque and to instead explore alternative designs
for interpreting the traces of Fooks and Langer in
Vienna.
student projects left us pondering the void these
A scheme by Christian Car sparked my imagination
the most. He researched some of the notoriety
Figures 3 and 4: A Doorbell
to the Past interpretive
design for the cultural
heritage of Hochhaus, by
Christian Car, 2011.
Andrew Saniga 33
to have resided in, or been linked closely with, Acknowledgement
Hochhaus in the early years. Discovering their
breadth of importance historically, Car proposed, Thanks to the students of BOKU in 2011, for their
amongst other things, an interactive doorbell (see preparedness to explore the unknown, and their
Figures 3 and 4) in an attempt to reclaim lost pieces willingness to engage in the history of Australian
of Viennese cultural heritage. It used an original landscape architecture.
doorbell at Hochhaus that he found to be defunct
and for each button he developed a series of sound-
scapes consisting of 10-20 second sound-grabs
that epitomised the particular character chosen.
He scoured the telephone records and archives to
determine the residential address of Fooks in Vienna
prior to his departure for Australia and recorded its
streetscape sounds at the doorstep. For Langer,
Car used the sounds of birds in a forest, an idea
generated through reading Langers accounts of
early experiences in Australia. In these ways the
two practitioners left behind in Austria, but also, the
inspiration that permeated their new lives in Australia:
new ideals forged in a new land.
 34 35

M R I the c ity We can imagine the extensive transcribing of facts

from numerous data tables from diverse sources and
checking to ensure that a mistake had not crept into
the transcriptions, then laying these onto maps to
obtain the spatial distribution and next drafting the
geometries to carry out the analysis needed for this
To m Distance Grid and Density Diagrams that constitute
had to literally explore the site, in doing so inflicting
damage to what might have been something that
was in good condition (but they did not know it).
What Fooks did was show that a compilation of data,
brought together from several sources and overlaid
into a spatial representation, could tell us things we

K v an
The insights that Ernest Fooks delivered in his slim book X-Ray
the City! are remarkable. From our contemporary perspective,
it is difficult to conceive of the detailed work that went into this
intellectually rich exploration of how we read a city.
the X-ray, a Space Time presentation of the city.
An X-ray offers insights into particular portion of
the anatomy that has been imaged, revealing its
structure and composition with the shades of grey
revealing what we cannot see otherwise. The image
distinguishes between dense bone and soft tissue,
revealing facts to identify if anomalies exist that
provide the information needed to decide the extent
of a problem, allowing us to decide where to act on
the nature of our interventions. Without an X-ray,
the person who needed to act (usually the surgeon)
might not see if we had not made the composition.
Once the laborious transcriptions of facts was
completed and their information re-represented
and additional boundaries drawn over them, he
was able to show us the consequences of what he
called unbalanced and haphazard growth. From his
diagrams (figures 29 and 30) we can see how the
population did not align with the location of work (in
his day, it was industry that depended on factories
and warehouses). Although he did not produce the
maps, he wrote too about the poorly located schools
that were not coincident with the centre of the child

Figure 1. X-Ray the City! Figure 2. X-Ray the City!

Diagram of Area Densities Distribution of Population
Necessitated by Location of
industry

population. His summary observation was that the
population of Melbourne was too low to properly
support the social infrastructures that it needed.
As with an X-ray, the insights afforded by the image
make you wonder how we carried on without
these for so long. Our understanding was so much
impoverished by only relying on what we can see
if we cannot use tools to analyse and look past the
surface. In recent years, though, the X-ray has been
supplemented and increasingly replaced by other
techniques the computer tomography (CT) scan
and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). With these,
not only is the data different but so is its method
of acquisition. While an X-ray is a photography, the
MRI gives us into a three dimensional model. We
can tile photographs together to render a picture of
the landscape (like a panoramic picture) but a 3D
model lets us pick up the object and turn it around,
looking from different points of view and therefore
reveal things we did not see when we took the image
(or made the model). Cities are multi-dimensional
entities consisting of objects, experiences, ecologies
and capabilities with flows in and out of resources,
agents and products across time. A two dimensional
understanding of a city is inadequate as is a three
dimensional representation. A city is N dimensional.
36
How can we produce this multi-dimensional
representation? Ernest Fooks had to work with
census tables and government reports that conveyed
data in particular tables printed on paper. If he
wanted to carry out an analysis he copied the figures
and built his own interim tables. If the information
was not available in one set of tables he had to
find another source, calling upon government
departments or other agencies to send him the text
or visiting the library. Perhaps many of the questions
he wanted of these data to ask went unanswered
because a key item was not available.
Today we have an abundance of data. Not only are
we collecting more but every digital device generates
data constantly. We know what the economic
activity of a neighbourhood is because we can
track shop registers and card transactions. We can
quickly gather education outcomes of every precinct
because schools track these. These datasets can
be used to gain insights about our cities. Medical
records can generate a health profile of a community.
These facts can be integrated and overlaid onto
maps so that you can derive your own insights.
Locations of fast food outlets can be considered
against supermarkets as we examine the prevalence
Tom Kvan
of obesity. Not only can we ensure, as Fooks
suggested, that there is a school for every 1000
families but we can ensure that the schools can be
reached by cycling without crossing major roads.
Public transport routes and timetables can be
mapped to employment and we can determine the
proportion of the population who can readily get to
work by bus or train. The combinations of data are
unlimited as we seek answers to diverse questions.
All this, of course, without leaving your desk.
Increasingly we are bringing these capabilities to
everyones laptop (even if they are in the caf, not at
their desk). For example, Australia now has a national
map service (nationalmap.gov.au) through which we
can learn about the hydrology of the country or of a
neighbourhood. We also have a data portal for urban
data, the first in the world, the Australian Urban
Research Infrastructure Network (AURIN, aurin.org.
au). The national map has now been enhanced with
additional datasets from AURIN (maps.aurin.org.
au) that can tell you about housing stress, economic
activity and education. If you access AURIN itself
and are qualified (as Fooks would have been), you
can get access to almost another 2000 datasets.
If we can use these data sets over time, we can
diagnose changes and determine if the change is
37
malignant or benign, just as the medical profession is
now using multidimensional photographs to screen
for cancerous growths.
What then might we do with all these data? Where
Fooks had to laboriously construct his Distance Grid
and Density Diagrams, we can use all that saved time
to construct questions of the data. This is the hard
part what do we want to know. Just as desktop 3D
printers mean you can finally make your own chess
pieces at home, these online datasets can allow you
to know more about your community. As with the 3D
printers, the challenge is to work out why you want
this capability. Do you really need a chess set or is
that the only use that comes to mind?
Ernest Fooks was able to conceive of the question,
conceptualise the tool and show us what an x-ray
could tell us. It was a static urban image, that
x-ray. With a multi-dimensional MRI, a smart and
responsive city can be seen to be operating and we
know where to perform the keyhole surgery.
 38
X- Ra ying Ur ban Fooks book X-ray the City! explained the advantages
of deliberately restructuring the city around the
Po l ic y Fra mewor ks findings of careful statistical analysis framed by
humanistic and sociologically motivated priorities
The opportunities lost (Fooks, 1946). He was reacting to the peri-urban ad
hoc sprawl from developers who had made no effort
to ensure appropriate levels of civic, health, leisure,
commercial, educational, or employment amenity
were offered close to inhabitants dwellings. At the
M ark same time the sprawl was already leaving behind an
ex-industrial urban wasteland and significant inner
B u rry urban decay, the unwitting by-product of a lack of
any comprehensive socially driven framework for a
denser, more organized major city.
At the end of the book he likened his urban analytics
as the equivalent of undertaking an X-Ray of the
70 years ago Dr Ernest Fooks (1906 1985) X-rayed Melbourne. human body, the single maps forming parts of an
anatomic atlas of the urban entity. He did not
In doing so he set out to diagnose Melbournes growth pains pretend to provide the anatomic atlas of Melbourne
and propose a prosperous course of action - an integrated only some leaves of it.
technique of urban research - to ensure that the rapidly growing The book is a strangely antipodean reworking of
crucial aspects of the work of Spains Idefonso Cerd
metropolitan Melbourne would work for all its citizens. (1815-1876). Almost a century earlier, Cerds 1867
3D Building Diagrams
Ildefonso Cerds General Theory of Urbanization published in 1867 was ruthlessly logical but profoundly civic. He
proposed a framework by which city blocks would be public gardens with two parallel blocks on either side. These
were arranged such that pedestrians could filter through the city without interfacing with vehicular transport too closely,
while trains were envisaged as being underground for the same reason. Cerds plan shows his polycentric egalitarian 2D City Blocks Layout - typical
approach extending the city far beyond the highly constrained medieval walled city. From the first speculators protested
about the poor use of the blocks and densified the arrangement such that there is hardly any evidence remaining of the
openness that Cerd had proposed. The policy framework proved to be insufficiently robust.
39
Teora General de la Urbanizacin (General Theory
of Urbanization) was published as the theoretical
adjunct to his commissioned 1859 survey and
proposed expansion to Barcelona; the city would
ultimately expand into the fields surrounding its
medieval walls, within which it had been constrained
despite a burgeoning population and new needs
coming from the industrial revolution. Cerd actually
coined the word urbanization to encapsulate the
phenomenon of a urban populations swelling through
mass rural emigration. Like Fooks, Cerd proposed
a scientific method to x-ray under the skin of the
distressed city in order to understand it systemically,
and plan for a polycentric expansion. Fooks book
makes no reference to Cerd, Barcelona, or any
19th Century urbanisation theory which is a pity, as
he might have pushed some far more radical ideas
(Burry, 2013). The word policy appears only three
times in the entire book too: clearly there is a sense
of transcendent idealism taking centre stage.
For Melburnians today the lack of any meaningful
outcome from Fooks prescient advice from 7
decades ago is especially frustrating just as it is not
being able to identify who exactly is at fault. With
Cerds characteristic grid may have been corrupted
at the detailed level of individual city blocks, but as a
schema for the citys expansion it was fully implemented,
accommodating natural obstacles and existing historic
settlement with reasonable facility.
 40 Mark Burry 41

notable exceptions much of Melbourne shows the
typical blight of unbridled land speculation and all
the concomitant failure to think ahead in the ways
that X-Ray the City! sought to promote. Will anything
be different in 2046 at the centenary of the books
publication?
The deficiency in sustainable urban growth despite
clear strategic advice from urban theorists such as
Cerd and Fooks reveals one of the more ironical
paradoxes of democracy: urban futures depend
on ultra-long-term strategic thinking whereas
politicians are inclined to look to the next election
and make make their decisions accordingly. Without
a robust policy framework in place their decisions
will inevitably be far too short-term to make viable
and durable inroads to future-proofing cities for
fully sustainable growth. As a society we need to
insist on a long-term bipartisan framework through
which all decisions will be shaped as policy. Political
parties can espouse radically competitive policies
to move forwards while ensuring that the framework
remains robust by not doing anything to set it
backwards. How will we break the cycle that neither
Cerd nor Fooks were able to succeed in doing?
As an emerging transdisciplinary thematic, Urban
Futures draws together and augments expertise
in urban visualisation, urban analytics, and urban
policy through a whole-of-university strategy. At
the University of Melbournes Architecture Building
and Planning Facultys Melbourne School of Design
(MSD), Urban Futures research posits possible
outcomes derived from credibly argued scenarios
supported by abundant evidence. Future-gazing
scenarios need to be undertaken with a scholarly
and respectful engagement with the past, the
crucial foreground for any such speculation. In
endeavouring to look today at how the City of
Melbourne might be in 2046 we have unparalleled
access to information and tools with which to access
it: Cerd and Fooks were aware of the opportunities
for drawing vital new information from data, but
they could not have foreseen the gifts that strategic
thinkers have today in this regard: ever deeper and
richer sources of data to be X-rayed in the quest for
radically fresh insights.
When we know what we are looking for within big
data we are rewarded. Even when what we are
looking for lies across several unrelated sets of data
there are tools with which to correlate even when
working beyond linked relational databases. To
make the most of big data the principal challenges
lies in being successful working with unrelated data
sets, and inferencing. This particular high-order
quest is characterised by knowing that we need to
know what we do not know that we do not know: the
unknown unknowns that both challenged NASAs
extra-terrestrial planners for years, but which also led
to many unanticipated yet valuable discoveries.
In presuming that unknown unknowns might
yield unanticipated and useful insights there is
the risk that something potentially vital might be
missed altogether simply through unfamiliarity:
if you do not know what you do not know, how
do you recognise a potential answer when it is
revealed? For the designer this is hardly a risk worth
worrying about adept as they are in absorbing the
emergence of something unexpectedly useful from
delving into the unknown as part of their creative
exploration. Handled the right way, unrelated
datasets explored via an unstructured route could
well yield extraordinary new insights into problems
that no one even conceived as being existential and,
more intriguing still, emerging viable solutions to
unimagined problems can be identified and taken-up.
The designer might well be able to see such
emergent possibilities but, ironically, they typically
do not have the skills to work the data. 2046
might see wholly different working arrangements in
place. Expert data managers, for example, could
be working closely with designers looking for an
elegant solution to a query into a problem that they
do not individually recognise, but are nevertheless
in a position to mutually comprehend once the dots
are connected. If an unbridgeable divide between
data parser, statistician, and designer has hitherto
contributed to the societys failure to benefit fully
from the advice given over the last century (Cerd,
Fooks, et al) might we assume that transdisciplinary
teams of the future will have a far better chance
of providing a more robust long-term framework
transcending the short-term expectations of the most
avaricious of developers and cynical of politicians?
Sustainable urban futures will depend on the team
being able to fuse data analysis with creative
exploration.

Fooks, Ernest X-Ray the City!. The Density Diagram: Basis for Urban
Planning, Ruskin Press, Melbourne, 1946.

Cerd, Ildefonso, Teora general de la urbanizacin y aplicacin de

San Fernando de Henares (near Madrid, Spain) is an example of a framework that is suffiuciently robust to defy two Melbourne 2016. Fooks would be entirely familiar with the
centuries of profound change. Settled in 1746 by King Philip V to accommodate a factory, the building has gone through peri-urban excrescence that characterises the entire urban
profound changes from being a hospice to its current use as the town hall. The entire town was arranged in a Beaux Art periphery, as if X-Ray the City! had never been published.
tradition in response to the factory, seen to the left of the green square in the blow-up. Effectively only the faade remains Vast quantities of data and powerful analytical algorithms
of the original building yet despite the majority of the buildings in the town being from the 20th Century, the masterplan will help ensure that Melbourne 2046 will have eschewed
imposed in 1746 has nevertheless driven all future development. all the unsustainable characteristics that define the current
urban sprawl.
sus principios y doctrinas a la reforma y ensanche de Barcelona.
Madrid: Imprenta Espaola, 1867. Facsimile republished by the
Instituto de Estudios Fiscales, 1968-1971.
Burry, Mark, Ideas and computation in contemporary urban design:
addressing the disconnect, in Adaptive ecologies : correlated
systems of living London, (edited Theodore Spyropoulos),
Architectural Association, London 2013
Image credits: all aerial photographs from Google Maps.

Co nne c tivi ty and mor phol ogy
refining urban density by taking X-Ray the City! as a historical review
Xi ao ra n H u ang
M a rc us W hite
M a r k B urry
G eo ff Kim m
70 years ago, Dr Ernest Fooks observed that urban vitality is
essentially derived from human activity.
His critical recognition was that the population
as a whole is the foremost consideration in urban
planning, and therefore he focused his urban
research on population density and its distribution
in a more demographic perspective.
42
problems are with us today. The emergence of the
Internet and big data affords architects and urban
designers with the opportunity to access and analyse
information with a complexity at an order of speed
and depth such that those of the 1940s could not
have conceived as being possible. Nevertheless,
the unprecedented data-bombardment that we face
today may confuse us or worse and, in particular
cases, even make things more difficult to read. Web
applications such as Mapbox, CartoDB and MapZen
are readily accessible to people even with limited
mapping experience, who can directly download
urban meta-data and create visual analyses based
on it. It therefore becomes especially important today
for digital tool users to understand not only how
to manipulate software but also grasp the intrinsic
meaning of data flow; how to interpret data and how
data can be used to inform today with a profundity
that Fooks was able to presume instinctively,
whereas there is an accessibility today that borders
on the democratic.
Going back to the 1940s, Fooks observation
In X-ray the City! he indicated that misconceptions revealed that a balanced distribution of the
drawn from an insufficiently critical appraisal of population must be differentiated from an even
statistical data had been extensively applied. The layout. ...density figures lose their practical value
'urban decay' issue was demonstrated as clear if they are not related to an area, the size of which
example of the misuse of facts (as data). Similar
3 4
5 6
Figure 1. Population Figure 2. Diagram of Figure 3. T1024 Integration Figure 4. T1024 Node Count
densities according to population density R1600 metric
suburban boundaries
43
represents a function of man's social activities.
(Fooks, 1946, p29) He introduced the problems for
urban density and population distribution as three
layers: spatial nearness, hierarchy and the size of
social units, and spotting discrete functions. All
these aspects could not be properly realised without
knowing the limitations and boundaries of data
analytics and its subsequent implementation.
Using examples of municipal borders which are
ubiquitously defined through jurisdiction and thereby
through administrative process and geographical
fundamentals such as the need to have an address,
Dr Fooks indicated the major challenge for
meaningful data analysis was the arbitrary urban
boundaries (figure 1) .
Based on these insights he summarised the
disadvantages of existing paradigms and cited
several cities drawn from the UK, continental
Europe and US in order to demonstrate that higher
density does not necessarily lead to environmental
deficiencies. He summarised the quality of urban
living conditions based on the physical features of
dwellings and space and environmental factors.
He also suggested new methods to refine the
distance grid by introducing the following key ideas:
Figure 5. T1024 Total Depth Figure 6. T1024 Total
[Segment Length Wgt] Segment Length R1600
R1600 metric metric.

1. The introduction of clearly-defined notions for
expressing the crucial environmental factors of
urban living conditions, crowding notions, measuring
population distribution, density notions.
2. Illustrating the distribution of the population within
urban areas by means of the diagram of population
density in its various forms, based on the distance
grid.
3. Replacing the vague overall density figures, by
distance-density figures and distance-density factors
in their various forms.
...The principle of the DISTANCE GRID and the
DENSITY DIAGRAM is to create the proper technical
tools of integrating the various urban factors in
SPACE and TIME... for four urban functions: live,
work, recreation and distribution. (Fooks, 1946, p95)
(figure 2.
"urban gravity is usually easy to determine...urban
life and urban facilities tend to become concentrated
near this centre of gravity, and the value and scarcity
of urban land are generally measured by the distance
from it." (Fooks, 1946, p81)
His ideas and the resulting paradigm proposals were
indeed ground-breaking especially for that time,
which described a proactive parametric thought
process. However, the distance grid is biased
through setting it in a singly-centred origin with
distributed areas based on evenly subdivided radii.
In contrast today, multi-centred cities are becoming
ubiquitous and the relationship between their transit
networks cannot be simplified through Fooks radial
Figure 7. Melbourne Census
Data 2013 overlapped
with network choices map,
Huang 2016. population
data source: Australian
Bureau of Statistics
44
model. It is important to realise the distance-density
figures, but without contemporary analytical tools,
Fooks was not able to interpret and engage with
the data as effectively as his instincts no doubt
determined.
Emerging technologies and mass computation
make it feasible today to consider city connectivity
and density in a more topological perspective,
rather than stick solely to Euclidian distance. From
the late 1970s, Bill Hillier and Julienne Hanson
started crystallising space syntax theories and
techniques, which are used to describe urban spatial
arrangements.(Hillier, B. and Hanson, J., 1984)
Spaces are not backgrounds of social and economic
activities but are constituent parts of them; the
subdivisions of urban precincts that can be used to
analyse a network of choices and potentially show
their intrinsic connections with urban vitality (Bill
Hillier et al. 2002). The graphs and maps generated
by this concept can describe the relative connectivity
in urban space, and the road segment, one of the
smallest components in the urban design scenario, is
an applicable unit to test. Topographical relationships
between transit networks could be better articulated
by using road centrelines as graph axes. Compared
with Fooks grid distance map, the boundaries
for density data would not simply derive from a
distribution resembling a pie-chart, but instead could
be tilted more in relation to business and centrality of
the network. (figures 2-6).
A busy or at least a prosperous space is usually
triggered by plenty of social activity with sufficient
participants to give it life. A choices map could be
interpreted as the number of intersections that need
Figure 8. Choice map
overlapped with urban
morphology and density
figure
Xiaoran Huang, Marcus White, Mark Burry, Geoff Kimm
to be passed to reach a street, in which the higher
number of choices could be considered as offering
the better location in terms of urban vitality. Since the
centrality of each road segment can be mapped and
visualised, we can therefore compare the existing
network with current population map. (figure 7)
The most populated areas are mainly concentrated
in precincts offering higher number of choices
although besides the centrality there are many
other aspects that have an affect on population
distribution. The relative location is nevertheless
one of the most vital factors and, in many cases,
can even be a vitality determining force. Apart from
a ready-densified district like the CBD area some
suburban precincts with high choice level factors
may have great potential to become emerging
municipalities than other candidate precincts with
precincts offering less choice.
A town must be regarded as a flexible shell, able
to meet the constantly changing needs of the
population. (Fooks, 1946, p32)
In one of our case studies, Werribee, a south-
west Melbourne suburb with a high choices factor,
has been considered as principle transit node in
the Melbourne 2030 Planning. (Department of
Infrastructure, 2002) Emerging as a consequence
of the 2013 census data and the Governments
white paper, a radical population growth can be
anticipated during the coming decades. (Department
of Transport, Planning and Local Infrastructure, State
Government of Victoria, 2013) With the assistance of
advanced digital toolboxes today, we are facilitated
to propose a new design methodology to distribute
Figure 9. Proposed urban
morphology coloured with
density figures
45
population through cannier management of urban
density and morphology. The choices network map
in Melbourne has been chosen and weighted with
segment length to achieve a more accurate result.
(Source data: State Government of Victoria, Australia,
2016) Consequently we have been able to zoom
into a precinct scale and select one viable test bed
(a central area near Werribee train station). Network
data outside the boundary was able to be deleted
to reduce system redundancy. Albeit the site has
an arbitrary margin the data is considered in a city
scale, which provides the possibility of marrying
planning information with local design strategies.
Urban density and height limitation were assigned
in relation with adjacent choices figures. (figure 8)
Public open space, offices, commercial amenities,
and the residential area could be potentially applied
according to further analysis with population layout
and spatial vitality (figure 8).
Compared with the 1940s, this method reveals
probable urban futures with more rigorous
interpretations of far richer sources of data compared
with Fooks era. A design process based on density
and connectivity is far better informed than possible
in the past, and arbitrary (political) boundaries
gradually fade. This method could potentially evolve
with higher resolution and complexity as ubiquitous
computing and big-data are further developed. We
envision with optimism a design shift in the near
future that builds more effective bridges between big
data (as output) and designers (who demand deeper
and more detailed data-driven input), guiding radical
shifts in urban morphology development during the
next 30 years (figure 9).
References
Fooks, Ernest. X-Ray the City!: The density diagram: basis for urban
planning. Ministry of Post-War Reconstruction, 1946.
Hillier, Bill, and Julienne Hanson. The social logic of space,
1984.Cambridge: Press syndicate of the University of Cambridge
(1984).
Hillier, Bill. A theory of the city as object: or, how spatial laws
mediate the social construction of urban space. Urban Design
International 7, no. 3 (2002): 153-179.
2011 Census QuickStats, 2011. http://www.censusdata.
abs.gov.au/census_services/getproduct/census/2011/
quickstat/2GMEL?opendocument&navpos=220
Department of infrastructure. Melbourne 2030 - Planning for
sustainable growth. Victorian Government Department of
Sustainability and Environment Melbourne, 2002
State Government of Victoria, Australia. Vicmap Transport. 2016.
https://services.land.vic.gov.au/landchannel/content/
vicmapdata?productID=3
 46
Th e C ity a s a The concept of functional or land-use mix is seminal
to urban studies: the mixing of functions shortens
M i x o f M ixes distances between attractions, increases walkability
and stimulates streetlife intensity. Here we develop a
new tool for mapping and understanding functional
mix, tested on detailed floorspace use databases
from the cities of New York, Barcelona and Bogot.
K i m D o ve y and In this work we conceive of mapping as the urban
El ek P a fk a design and planning parallel of the use of the x-ray
in medicine or security screening. The x-ray is a
technology that filters layers of data to produce an
image from which we can read the ways in which
something is working or to identify problems. While
it requires sophisticated techniques, it is primarily an
intellectual rather than technical tool. Good maps are
like x-rays of the city; they have an empirical base
but cannot be easily reduced to numbers and need
interpretation to reveal how the city works. The maps
are not illustrations, they are findings. Just as x-rays
are cross-sections of the body of evidence, so maps
are cross-sections of the city. What they reveal in
these cities is that functional mix is not one thing
-that the best of cities are a mix of mixes.
The Live/Work/Visit Triangle
A key goal of mapping functional mix is to
better understand productive alliances between
attractions - but what kind of functional categories
Aggregating Functions The L/W/V Triangle (adapted from Hoek 2008)
make sense? The diagram above shows how the
range of most commonly used functions might
overlap. Most categories incorporate aspects of
others and such categories are inherently unstable
with new functions and distinctions emerging
depending on whether we seek to understand
walkability, transport, health or streetlife. A key
problem with the mapping of functional mix has
long been that the greater the mix the harder it is
to map - suburbs are simple but intensive cities are
complex. Our approach is adapted from the work of
Hoek with a division of functions into three primary
categories of live, work and visit, organized as a
triangle to capture different levels of mix between
them. If we ask why anyone might be in any
given urban location at a given time, then it makes
sense to say that they live there, work there or used a 1:2:5 weighting ratio of live/work/visit
are visiting some kind of facility or amenity. The
triangle shows three primary kinds of mix: live/visit
(yellow) is mostly linked to lifestyle (where we live,
shop, eat and play); live/work (magenta) mix is the
commute; work/visit (cyan) is the ways we shop,
eat and play in conjunction with work.
MANHATTAN: CADASTRAL MIX WALKABLE MIX (one square km catchment)
47
Three Cities
We have mapped three cities with very different
histories and morphologies: New York, Barcelona
and Bogot. All functional categories other than
residential, office, education and industry are
combined to create the category of visit. Education
has been included with office and industry functions
to comprise the work category. While parks and
squares are not part of the floor area databases,
they are significant attractors and we have coloured
them with a darker green to distinguish from other
attractions such as shops and theatres.
To ensure that the significantly higher urban impact
of visitation functions is evident in the maps we
related floor space; in other words the floor area
data for workplace and visitation sites is multiplied
by 2 and 5 times respectively to determine the
colour represented in the maps. The ratio is thus
a filter that makes the extent to which different
functions contribute to the functional mix legible
 48 Kim Dovey and Elek Pafka 49

on the map. Our use of the multiplier is a loose A Mix of Mixes

correlate for tuning an x-ray machine in order to
render particular distinctions visible.
We present these maps at two scales of analysis. On
the left is the mix for each plot of land revealing the
kind of mix that emerges at streetscape scale. This
is the experiential mix of what we can see, hear
and smell in the city; the spectacle of streetlife and
face-to-face encounter. On these maps we can read
the degree of on-site mixing most pronounced in the
yellows (live/visit) of Barcelona and the cyans (live/
work) of Manhattan; contrasted against the reds,
blues and greens of Bogot.
The right hand map for each city applies a multi-
scale analysis where each hectare is mapped
according to the mix that is accessible within a
square kilometre (100 hectares) - roughly the scale
of walkable access (500 metres). The degree of
lightness represents the intensity of mixing and the
shade of colour represents the type of mix, thus the
map visualises both the quantity and quality of the
walkable mix.
Ternary graphs of this data from the three cities show
how their many neighbourhoods are distributed
across the Live/Work/Visit triangle - each hectare is
a dot with a walkable catchment. It can be tempting
to measure the mix in terms of closeness to the
centre of the triangle or whiteness on the map. Yet
the deeper potential lies in understanding the range
of different kinds and degree of functional mix - the
mix of mixes. There is no ideal mix but rather many
kinds of productive mix. The task for urban design
and planning is not so much to lighten the map, nor
to replicate white neighbourhoods; it is to address
the monofunctional corners. There can be no single
index for functional mix because the good city is a
mix of mixes. While functional mix is deeply complex,
it goes to the heart of what makes a city tick - great
cities are cities of difference and we need better
means of understanding how such differences work
together

BOGOT: CADASTRAL MIX WALKABLE MIX (one square km catchment)

References
Dovey, Kim. Urban Design
Thinking. London: Bloomsbury,
2016.
BARCELONA: CADASTRAL MIX WALKABLE MIX (one square km catchment)
Dovey, Kim. Elek Pafka
and Mirjana Ristic, editors.
Mapping Urbanities, New York:
Routledge, forthcoming.
Hoek, Joost. The Mixed Use
Index as a Tool for Urban
Planning and Analysis, 2008.
http://www.
corporationsandcities.org.
 50 51

Ho w le a r ning al gor i thms s u ppor t
u rb a n d e sign AND the probl em of
t oo m uc h data
Since Fooks our relation to data has changed
In 1946 Fooks invented a new method to understand
the city through urban data better by increasing the
granularity from large, distorted political boundaries
to concentric rings. Today the problem has shifted
to the other extreme. With data collected for each
person and building at multiple times within a day the
question shifts to How can we aggregate this data
over space and time to make it meaningful?.
Current data is collected constantly on the activity
and characteristics of individual properties and
people making letting grow constantly. When in
Fooks time residential location of people was
sufficient for tax purposes contemporary information
spans to employment sector, age, education, to
name a few of the over 2000 datasets are available
on Melbourne.

Fooks work shows that rearranging the
representation of information can yield new insights.
Gideon He used population data available on the level of
each Municipality he then calculated the population
A s c hwa nd en density for concentric rings of one-mile width with
the CBD as centre. This showed that the centre of
Melbourne is depopulating, while the fringes have an
increased population density (see Figure 1).
Within the last 70 years the granularity and number
of urban datasets have become finer and greater.
The problem with this ever-increasing avalanche of
information is to gain insights. What is different since
this is not a new problem that has been solved in
many occasions by data visualisation and statistics?
The current problem differs in three ways.
First data is collected without a particular question
in mind. This is different to hundreds of years where
scientists and governments first identified a problem
and consequently defined what data is required to
find gain insights and find a solution. This led to
purpose built information structures that couldnt be

Figure 1. Diagram of Figure 2. Diagram of Figure 3. Melbourne Roads

Population Density transportation, popularion
and activity density

used beyond the identified purpose. Today data is
collected even without a clear purpose, and can be
unstructured, incomplete and dirty.
The second change is in the dimensionality of data.
Contemporary datasets contain multiple attributes
and are as wide as they are tall. Visualising in a
manner that allows humans to understand the
structure of such datasets is impossible.
The third and last way the current problems
differ from the past is that the problems are not
anymore linear. Contemporary problems in health or
transportation are the result not of a single parameter
but of a myriad of interacting and counteracting
factors. For example having a heart attack is the
result of multiple risk factors and not a single virus.
These three challenges can be overcome by using
intelligent software. Current software allows us
to structure data without prior knowledge of the
purpose or the question we would like to ask. The
method is called pre-specific modelling or model free
Figure 4. Self Organising
Map
52
modelling and learns from examples. The following
example uses a Self-Organising Map that can
structure any data with a high number of dimensions
and finds similarities. This is not yet a general-
purpose artificial intelligence, but it comes very close.
Back to Fooks place of investigation: Melbourne.
The city of more than 4 million people is still
organised along political borders that are based
on historical boundaries and dont reflect the
current structure of the city. Also, the current
neighbourhoods do not reflect the current
municipality structure of the city.
The neighbourhood structure of the city is fluid and
constantly reconfiguring. A neighbourhood is defined
by a myriad of characteristics like travel behaviour,
land use patters, street characteristics, population
characteristics, borders etc. . Each one of these
characteristics is defined by multiple parameters
leading to a huge number of parameters to track
constantly (see Figures 2 and 3).
Gideon Aschwanden 53
To solve this problem software is written that The neighbourhoods that the software identified have
collects data about each place and tries to find the very distinct characteristics; one neighbourhood
neighbourhoods based on similarity. Finding similarity is closely related to the CBD, defined by detached
between two places that are defined by one attribute houses, industry or jobs etc. (see Figures 5-10)
can be done in a simple map but finding similarity These neighbourhoods can now be used to draw
between places with 10, 20 or 100 parameters is new political boundaries, highlight a problem area
beyond the capabilities of human cognition. and choose your next residential location.
Software on the other side can handle multiple To summarise, the problem of too much data is a
datasets in a high dimensional space. The software solved problem for which we have tools that support
uses the data and learns the characteristics of the our efforts of understanding the world better.
individual places. Like dreaming, it starts with a
random distribution and with each new data point
added the picture and understanding becomes
clearer. The understanding the software has is still
a high dimensional, not readable by humans. The
software then projects this high dimensional space
into 2 dimensions + colour (see Figure 4). In this
two dimensional space closeness is equivalent
to similarity. The software then continues to find
clusters of similarity. Each cluster represents places
that are similar to each other: the neighbourhood.
Figures 5-10. Self
Organising Map Clusters
 54
S p atia l N ear ness - He considered proximity and accessibility as a key
ingredient to healthy cities using the term Spatial
Pro x im ity and Accessi bili ty Nearness: Condition for Community Life:
In previous civilizations, in the Greek period or in the
Middle Ages, the sphere of mans social activities
was limited by walking distance. Towns in those
periods were limited in size. Ten or fifteen minutes'
walking distance to the communal facilities, such
M a rc us W hite as the Greek Agora, or the medieval market place,
usually formed the utmost limit for an effective social
G eo ff Kim m intercourse [] Modern transport facilities, telephone
and wireless have immeasurably increased the
Na n o La ngenhei m sphere of man's social activities; but these technical
achievements are not able to diminish the importance
of SPATIAL NEARNESS for creating community life,
not even nowadays, when the entire region becomes
the natural unit of social life (Fooks 1946 p.28).
Our communication technology has advanced in
unimaginable ways, we now have an endless list
of social communication media such as Twitter,
In the 1940s Fooks identified the need for planners to carefully SnapChat, Facebook, WeChat, and YouTube. The
method for accessing goods and services has also
consider the location of services with respect to uses and location changed dramatically. We seldom need convenient
walkable access to a cobbler, coal merchant or
of population density. tobacconist, and our tailor is not a human, but a
All images: Nano Langenheim
Figure 1: White and Kimms Figure 2: White and Kimms
PedCatch animated PedCatch animated
pedestrian access tool pedestrian access tool
applied to calculate the applied to calculate the
walkable pedestrian walkable pedestrian
catchment for Albert Park catchment for Albert Park
Primary School Primary School detailed
view
55
piece of parametric software generating patterns for
cheap overseas labor to stitch together. We have
access to online produce purchase systems such
as Ebay, Aliexpress, and Taobao delivering goods to
our doors in ubiquitous white vans or, as companies
like Amazon and Taco Bell begin to experiment with
UAV delivery, by quad-copter drones. Despite these
dramatic changes to how we access goods and
services (they come directly to us), Spatial Nearness
is even more important than it was in 1946. In 2016,
obesity and being overweight costs Australia over
$55 billion every year and has begun to overtake
smoking as the countrys leading cause of premature
death and illness. Promoting an active community
requires radically different strategic approaches
to urban transformation in the coming decade
necessitating innovative urban design to get people
out of their cars.
Pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods within walking
distance to services encourage walking over car use
resulting in higher levels of physical activity and a
positive impact on social inclusion.
Until very recently, modelling walking proximity to
services has been limited primarily to Euclidean
buffers or circular catchments (distance from
Figure 3: White and Kimms Figure 4: White and Kimms
PedCatch animated PedCatch animated
pedestrian access tool pedestrian access tool
applied to calculate the applied to calculate the
walkable pedestrian walkable pedestrian
catchment for Carlton catchment for Carlton
Gardens Primary School Gardens Primary School
detailed view
 56 Marcs White, Geoff Kimm, Nano Langenheim 57

services such as railway stations and schools as-
the-crow-flies). Little has changed since Fooks
observations in the 1940s:
Children cannot walk long distances to school;
it is generally agreed that the maximum walking
distance to school for children of the elementary
school age should not exceed half -a-mile. These
figures have been accepted in computing the size
of the social unit supporting an elementary school
[...] measurement of the sphere of influence of a
community facility by a circle drawn at the maximum
walking distance would be justified only by a strict,
radial street pattern which is not desirable, and
seldom possible. (Fooks 1946 p.35).
This method is grossly inaccurate and does not
allow what if scenario testing. Recent development
of proprietary GIS software with additional network
analysis plugins (ESRI Arc Map with Network-
Analyst plugin) makes a dramatic improvement
on this modelling though it can be prohibitively
costly, require a high level of expertise to operate
(particularly in the case of QGIS)1, and do not
consider time related factors such as traffic lights2.
PedCatch
PedCatch (www.pedcatch.com) is our online map
tool that provides modelling of urban pedestrian
catchments with an emphasis on mobility impaired
walkability. It builds on prior agent based pedestrian
modelling work by White3 and is designed to be
accessible to nonspecialists and displays walkability
analysis via an intuitive animation-based interface.
The method adopted for this study involved porting
an animation software based agent-based modelling
tool to a vector based GIS web tool using an open-
source data from the Australian Urban Research
Infrastructure Network (AURIN) as well as crowd
sourced and open source network data sets and
topographic/elevation data with worldwide coverage.
The tool was developed and tested with the input
from stakeholder working groups and provides an
agentbased modelling analysis method that can be
used by researchers, urban designers, planners and
policy makers and the wider community to assess
spatial nearness to key infrastructure and services
[Figures 1-14].
The resulting tool has proven effective and flexible,
allowing a diverse group of stakeholders to test a
variety of urban scenarios such as optimal location
of new schools, aged care facilities or medical
facilities and impacts of potential urban interventions
to increasing catchments such as pedestrian links.
Users can produce a range of metrics such as
average walking speeds; numbers of crossings,
catchment area versus circular buffer ratios; numbers
streets crossed; and test different walking speeds
(children, older adults) and set gradient limitations
(for people with mobility impairments).
The PedCatch tool has the capacity to influence
planning and public health advocacy and the open-
access nature of the tool means that it is available
to all. There is considerable scope for extending this
tool, including incorporating diverse spatial and non-
spatial data and integration with the more commonly
used walkability indexes.
Though currently limited to 2.5D (2D with height)
we are continuing to develop the tool set taking
into consideration spatio-temporal aspects with
potential for future development as cities become
denser, and complex three dimensional accessibility
is needed; the tool will be capable of testing
accessibility in hyper-dense urban scenarios. If,
as currently proposed for Melbourne, railway lines
are to be lifted from the ground plane to remove
on-grade-crossings, the height of this elevation
and relationship with future built form, vertical and
diagonal circulation inside and outside of buildings
could dramatically impact on accessibility. As
Melbourne densifies, there are opportunities to
improve walking and cycling accessibility to services
through strategic architectural and urban design
interventions.
Our PedCatch tool demonstrates the potential to
contribute to the development of more walkable
and accessible communities for all, to continue to
improve Spatial Nearness aiming for an optimal
Condition for Community Life.

Figure 7: White and Kimms Figure 8: White and Kimms Figure 9: White and Kimms Figure 10: White and
PedCatch animated PedCatch animated PedCatch animated Kimms PedCatch animated
pedestrian access tool pedestrian access tool pedestrian access tool pedestrian access tool
applied to calculate the applied to calculate the applied to calculate the applied to calculate the
walkable pedestrian walkable pedestrian walkable pedestrian walkable pedestrian
catchment for Middle Park catchment for Middle Park catchment for Port catchment for Port
Figure 5: White and Kimms PedCatch animated pedestrian Figure 6: White and Kimms PedCatch animated pedestrian Primary School Primary School detailed Melbourne Primary School Melbourne Primary School
access tool applied to calculate the walkable pedestrian access tool applied to calculate the walkable pedestrian view detailed view
catchment for Kensington Primary School catchment for Kensington Primary School detailed view

1
Badland, Hannah, Marcus
White, Gus MacAulay, Serryn
Eagleson, Suzanne Mavoa,
Christopher Pettit, and Billie
Giles-Corti. Using simple
agent-based modeling to inform
and enhance neighborhood
walkability. International journal
of health geographics 12, no. 1
(2013): 1.
2
for planning. in proceedings
of the International Conference
on Sustainable Urbanism, Texas
A&M University. 2007.
3
Marcus White, Densification,
Pedestrian Catchments and
the Battle for Middle Earth.
Can Agent Based Pedestrian
Modelling be Used to
Inform Urban Morphology
in proceedings of the IFHP
2007 Copenhagen Future of
Cities Impacts: Indicators:
Implementations 51st IFHP
World Congress. 2007
Figure 11: White and Figure 12: White and Figure 13: White and Figure 14: White and
Kimms PedCatch animated Kimms PedCatch animated Kimms PedCatch animated Kimms PedCatch animated
pedestrian access tool pedestrian access tool
pedestrian access tool pedestrian access tool
applied to calculate the applied to calculate the
applied to calculate the applied to calculate the
walkable pedestrian walkable pedestrian walkable pedestrian walkable pedestrian
catchment for Carlton catchment for Carlton catchment for South Yarra catchment for South Yarra
Primary School Primary School detailed Primary School Primary School detailed
view view
 58
Do i ng B ig ness
S t a nisla v
R oud a vs k i
What will architectural
design look like in a world
of ambient intelligence?
NatureTrader, a project by
Gwyllim Jahn, Tom Morgan
and Stanislav Roudavski;
other credits: Alexander
Holland, Julian Rutten.
Written as a provocation that reflects on some of the
relationships between data, habitable environment
and design, this article uses the essay called
X-Ray the City! that was written by architect and
town planner Ernest Fooks in 1946 as its starting
point.1 The discussion below compares some of
the propositions made by Fooks at that time with
two subsequent periods: the situation now, in 2016,
and near the symbolic future moment in 2046 when
Fooks essay will be 100 years old. Specifically, it
focuses on one characteristic that is comparable
between these periods: a practical attitude towards
bigness.
***
Writing in 1995, near the midpoint of the timeline
established above, a prominent architect and
architectural thinker Rem Koolhaas insisted that
[b]ecause there is no theory of Bigness, we dont
know what to do with it, we dont know where to put
it, we dont know when to use it, we dont know how
to plan it. Big mistakes are our only connection to
Bigness.2 But was he right?
Big Science
In other domains, bigness pre-existed Koolhaas, for
example in the form of big science that emerged
after the Second World War as a practice that was
distinct from the previous forms of science that were
small. Small science referred to the traditional
experimental physics that was done by individuals
with local resources, with little collaboration and with
rapid returns on personal initiatives. By contrast, big
science emerged in the US weapons laboratories
PocketPedal, a project by 1
Ernest Fooks, X-Ray the City! 2
Rem Koolhaas et al., S, M,
Alexander Holland and The Density Diagram: Basis for L, XL (New York, NY: Monacelli
Urban Planning (Melbourne: Press, 1995), 509, 510.
Stanislav Roudavski; other
Ministry of Post-War
credits: Julian Rutten. Reconstruction, 1946).
59
where it was conducted by large teams of physicists
and engineers, supported by huge amounts of
money and governed by hierarchical bureaucratic
processes.3 Fooks hopes to underpin design by
science are related to the spirit of such undertakings
but are modest by comparison. His site of application
is comparably large whole cities, his search for
patterns with statistical tools is also similar to the big
science approaches but his analysis is a one-man
job and his data are obtained from a limited selection
of existing sources.
The main device introduced by Fooks is the distance
grid or the diagram of population density. This
diagram has several core properties: its geometry it
is concentric; its uniformity it is made of even cells;
its universality it is meant to be applicable to any
city. The contemporary tools are allowing for greater
variety and yet, as will be discussed below, the future
tools might result in the return of the regular-pattern
superposition, the standardisation and the data
totalitarianism, even if in a new guise.
Fooks saw defects in the way statistical data was
collected and analysed and his proposal was to
sample and map the available data differently. And
yet, possibilities for such difference were limited:
on one hand, by the small number of available
typically, governmental data sources; and on the
other, by the inefficiency of manual processing.
One such defect was to do with the arbitrary
nature of urban boundaries.4 This question of
boundaries, or more generally of patterns,
remains important in the contemporary, and more
fluid, world of data. The data are influenced by
their providers, the data collection methods, the
3
Andrew Pickering, The 4
Fooks, X-Ray the City!, 43.
Mangle of Practice: Time,
Agency, and Science (Chicago;
London: University of Chicago
Press, 1995), 43. Derek J. de
Solla Price, Little Science, Big
Science (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1963).
 60
NatureTrader, or where it might lead. An experience of the world where all experience is
data-dependent. All environment is mapped. All mapping units are standardised, named,
indexed. All units are sentient and can act. All units trade. Everything is commodified,
everything is one market.
Stanislav Roudavski
suitability of particular phenomena for quantification
as well as by the character of specific systems,
data streams, data owners, and so. As the city
becomes increasingly cyber, the nature of boundaries
becomes more general. Boundaries take form
of pattern discontinuities that can appear as
indices, identities, standards, database formats,
communication protocols, resolution choices,
metadata specifications and so on. It is impossible
to understand or process large volumes of data
manually and many of these boundaries come to
the fore because they are intrinsic to automation. On
the other hand, contemporary and future data-
collection techniques can overcome many traditional
boundaries such as those that are to do with
physical space or site ownership. The types of data
defects change with technology but some defects
always remain. Data continues to be highly political,
decidedly contingent, dependent on craftsmanship,
reliant on human imagination.
Big Data
Today is characterised by the potential of big-data
tools to make decisions on small-grain, local and
dynamic information, making arbitrary boundaries
still further obsolete. As reported by the big-data
narratives, historically, data have been time-
consuming and expensive to generate, analyse
and interpret.5 It provided static and, often, coarse
representations of phenomena. Consequently,
good-quality data were valuable, proprietary and
expensively traded. With the advent of networked
computing, data have retained their value, but
their production has become significantly easier
and the result is an increasingly overwhelming
flow of relational data that is finely differentiated,
timely and of high resolution. Such data come from
heterogenous sources, at multiple scales and can be
fertile for exploratory data analysis. Often, these data
are of low cost and, increasingly, openly available
5
E.g., see Rob Kitchin, The Data Revolution: Big Data, Open Data,
Data Infrastructures and Their Consequences (London; Thousand
Oaks, CA: Sage, 2014).
61
and easily accessible. Availability of such data led
to the emergence of new data-analytic toolsets that
are designed to cope with the data abundance rather
than with data scarcity.
The resulting analytics can be descriptive reporting
on the past; predictive modelling the future from the
past trends; or prescriptive using models to specify
optimal actions with resulting approaches going by
the names such as data mining, predictive analytics,
data science and business intelligence. Such tools
provide new support for the design approaches
compatible with the Fooks insistence that [a] town
must be regarded as a flexible shell, able to meet
the constantly changing needs of the population.6
The relationship with data enabled by such methods
is much more active than before, however, they
still primarily focus on the understanding and
interpretation of the already-existing environments.
And yet, the reverse influence, that of data on
the environment, is becoming increasingly more
apparent, for example through such visions as
the Internet of Things. This network of objects is
predicted to link many billions of devices, some say
more than 50 billion by 2020. When every person will
have several connected devices, the whole world
will turn into a network of connected objects. Many
of the common things are already connected. Pets.
Livestock. Fridges. Tennis rackets. Most objects
that have a name already exist in versions that
can make, use and transmit data. Such connected
devices do not need independent interfaces. Smart
phones and tablets provide universal windows into
the relationships of interconnected entities and
support dashboards with which these objects can be
controlled.
That these new hybrid ecologies are more tightly
integrated with the surrounding environments is
only right, given the newly common appreciation for
the environmental concerns. Such concerns were
6
Fooks, X-Ray the City!, 32.
 62 Stanislav Roudavski
unfamiliar to Fooks and the discourse of his time.
His essay is concerned with humans only. It is the
STOP/GO BRAIN SPEED BRAIN human scale which has to be the guiding principle.
GO, GO YEAH! FASTER, FASTER, Human beings, their collective needs, their grouping,
FASTER!
their distribution and redistribution, become the
RISK BRAIN primary concern of urban planning.7 Today, the
TOO RISKY! need to pay attention to or consult with nonhuman
stakeholders is becoming increasingly evident. It
is by now uncontroversial in relationship to living
ecosystems and is becoming more accepted in
regard to artificial agents.
Big Cognition
The uniformity of standardising tools such as
Fooks distance grid can miss local variations; their
simplification is necessarily lossy. Future techniques
promise substantially greater data resolution but they
also make it impossible for humans to peruse this
TURN BRAIN data; requiring some form of automation. In addition,
SHARP RIGHT! and more significantly, stakeholder relationships
themselves are changing under the impact of
HAZARD BRAIN
CAR!
data. For example, the role of spatial nearness
as a condition for community life a relationship
emphasised by Fooks is diminishing as new social
aggregations become possible through electronic
networks and the proximity to data and data sources
emerges as more important than the nearness to
THE PHONE
physical locations.8 The exact nature and influence
The virtual cycling world
of these new relationships is far from obvious. To
is accessed through a
device familiar all. illustrate: if spatial nearness is no longer significant,
why are cities still growing so rapidly? The fact
that utility services such as water supply, garbage
disposal, drainage, sewerage, gas, electricity and
cultural institutions such as schools or kindergartens
are harder to distribute might be one of the reasons.
Fooks argues that technical achievements of
1946 were not able to diminish the importance
of SPATIAL NEARNESS for creating community
life.9 In this, his argument is compatible with more
PocketPedal, or one way to resist. An approach to design
7
Ibid., 96.
that places stakeholders in the midst of data. All data is felt, 8
For nearness and
performed, played. Designing occurs in the magic circle. All community life, see Ibid., 26.
design is negotiated. All action is rehearsed. Every decision
is supplied with an alternative. 9
Ibid., 28.
63
historically nuanced understandings of technological
development than those that are commonly
promoted by the pervasive-computing and big-data
enthusiasts.10
At the same time, the logic of Fooks method as
an all-revealing x-ray breaks down in these new
conditions. He claimed that his method can be
compared to an X-Ray of the human body, the single
maps forming parts of an anatomic atlas of the
urban entity.11 This metaphor stops to work when
tools, such as x-rays, become grown into the bodies
under study.
The situation where the amount of available data is
overwhelming, and where there is no clear distinction
between data producers and data consumers,
the environment and its users or the data and the
city motivates the introduction of new toolsets,
attitudes and behaviours. This new paradigm, first
conceptualised in the early 1990s, is termed here Big
Cognition and can also be encountered under the
names of automated analytics, ambient intelligence,
cognitive computing and deep learning.
As the number of connected entities grows, the
task of managing them becomes harder and more
expensive. The ambition of the industry is, therefore,
to define communication standards and procedures
that can support autonomous operation without
human interference. Already now, organisations are
building proof-of-concept machines that automate
aspects of decision-making. Their ambition is to
construct cognitive technologies that can support
multiple applications. The result can take form of
modular services or so-called cognitive platforms.
Such services can comprise analytics, analysis
of behaviour, visual recognition, natural-language
parsing and so. Such ambitions are seen by some
as a pervasive threat of automation while others
see this trend as a radical opportunity to construct
10
For the criticism of solutionism motivated by over- enthusiastic
embrace of networked technologies see Evgeny Morozov, To Save
Everything, Click Here: Technology, Solutionism and the Urge to Fix
Problems that Dont Exist (New York: Public Affairs, 2013).
11
Fooks, X-Ray the City!, 95
 64 Stanislav Roudavski 65

systems that can self-improve through the running ambiguity, amorphousness, self-contradiction, YOUR GOAL
of continuous experiments and by doing this, shift and other such phenomena are not necessarily the You are a cyclist riding
from historical enumeration to real-time, predictive, problems that need fixing. Instead of being bugs, along St Kilda Road,
Melbourne. Can you
actionable intelligence. Many different types of they can function as valuable features. These get to the city?
processes from shopping, to plant growth, to traffic, features can be valuable because they are historically
THE ROAD
to energy fluctuations can be seen, analysed and unique expressions of complexly interrelated
St Kilda Rd lacks
affected as they occur, in real time; redirecting data behaviours. Elimination of such features can lead proper cycling
toolsets from accumulation to action and from to severe restrictions on the operation of known infrastructure. On your
way to the city youll
storage to value-making. systems including, not unimportantly, the restriction have to negotiate a
on freedoms such as the freedom to mention, the route full of traffic.
In 1995, Koolhaas claimed that [n]ot all architecture, freedom to act or the freedom to know. In this Some vehicles pay
attention to you;
not all program, not all events will be swallowed by light, characteristics that common sense interprets others not so much.
Bigness. There are many needs too unfocused, negatively and Big Cognition promises to eliminate HEALTH
too weak, too unrespectable, too defiant, too secret, including hypocrisy, inconsistency, ambiguity and How safe is you
too subversive, too weak, too nothing to be part of mendacity can be as essential to the operation riding? The health
the constellations of Bigness.12 Today, it seems that of the inclusive political processes as the similarly indicator reflects how
safely you ride.
all architecture, all program, all events or to put it unfancied inefficiency, redundancy and opportunism
Compliance with road
differently all matter, all processes and all life are are necessary for the robust operation of living rules, remaining within
delectable for the bigness of Big Cognition. systems. the bike lane, and
navigating obstacles
increases health.
In these conditions, design actions have diverging References Riding outside bike
potentials for activism. This may be illustrated by lanes and colliding
the contrast between two radical approaches. One Fooks, Ernest. X-Ray the City! The Density Diagram: Basis for Urban with traffic decreases
Planning. Melbourne: Ministry of Post-War Reconstruction, 1946. it.
of these seeks to formulate new labour demands
presuming the inevitability of automation at all levels: SCORE
Kitchin, Rob. The Data Revolution: Big Data, Open Data, Data
in manufacturing, data production, communication Infrastructures and Their Consequences. London; Thousand Oaks, You are awarded
CA: Sage, 2014. points for every ten
and analysis.13 The next step within this logic is to metres successfully
not just accept but to demand full automation and cycled towards the
Koolhaas, Rem, Bruce Mau, Jennifer Sigler, Hans Werlemann, and city.
with it such seemingly counter-intuitive arrangements Office for Metropolitan Architecture. S, M, L, XL. New York, NY:
Monacelli Press, 1995. You are much more
as the right to be lazy and the guaranteed basic likely to end your
minimum income. The second and contrasting Morozov, Evgeny. To Save Everything, Click Here: Technology,
ride in a high score
approach seeks to encourage general scepticism by cycling safely
Solutionism and the Urge to Fix Problems that Dont Exist. New York: than simply riding at
for all solutionism. The solutionism believes that Public Affairs, 2013. breakneck speeds.
network technologies can find the answer to most
Pickering, Andrew. The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and HAZARDS
of the worlds problems and optimise most of the Science. Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Colliding with traffic
existing life-patterns. This scepticism towards such decreases your road
beliefs rejects the fascination with the Internet along Price, Derek J. de Solla. Little Science, Big Science. New York: health per the severity
Columbia University Press, 1963. of the collision.
with the presumption that the network is an eternal
entity with intrinsic and immutable properties, On low bike health,
Srnicek, Nick, and Alex Williams. Inventing the Future: impacting an obstacle
deserving of the unquestioning respect.14 The logic Postcapitalism and a World without Work. London: Verso, 2015. will cause your cyclist BIKE LANE THE PLAYER
of this second approach is to see that imperfection, to crash, ending the Try to stay within the bike lane! Here, your This cyclist is
game. bike health will slowly recharge. you. Youre a
hipster girl;
Sticking to the bike lane means you will a MAMIL; a
gain more points, and have enough health reckless guy in
to survive a crash or two. his twenties.
Being in the bike lane has its own Tap to pedal, tap
dangers: watch out for those opening the sides of the
cars doors! phone to turn.

12
Koolhaas et al., S, M, L, XL, PocketPedal, the game
13
Nick Srnicek and Alex Morozov, To Save Everything,
14
515, 516. interface and mechanics.
Williams, Inventing the Future: Click Here.
Postcapitalism and a World
without Work (London: Verso,
2015).
 66 67

Ci t i e s theyre so hot Our cities are growing at unprecedented rates

undergoing rapid urbanisation and intensification13.
r i g ht no w Melbournes population is predicted to reach 8
million people by 2050, becoming Australias biggest
Hot in the city, hot in the city tonight city. Though much of this growth is in the form of
lateral expansion (usually referred to as sprawl),
a significant proportion will continue as urban
densification with both building and population
intensification in existing urban areas. Just as Fooks
M a rc us W hite identified population densities and arrangements of
overcrowded settlements as a major challenge for
G eo ff Kim m sanitation and health of a population (Fooks 1946
p.51), the densification of Melbourne will come with
Na n o La ngenhei m equally significant challenges if it is to continue as
comfortable microclimates can lead to greater car-
dependence which increases emissions pollution
and, in the long term, adds to the impact on global
climatic instability. This climatic impact then leads to
further car dependence and so goes the downward
spiral.
Heat retention, sunlight access and thermal comfort
become spatially complicated overlays in relation to
health in densifying cities. In Melbourne, with its high
rate of skin cancer, deep shaded street canyons of
high density streets might be seen as an advantage.
However these same deep street canyons can trap
longwave radiation, impacting local atmospheric
citizens access to sun light, contribute to Vitamin D
deficiencies and result in environments perceived as
dark, dank or oppressive, thereby discouraging
walking or other active modes of transport a critical
component of healthy cities.
Australia has one of the highest rates of skin cancer
in the world, which suggests the need for heavily
shaded streets particularly in walking proximity to
schools and business districts to protect people from
sun exposure while engaging in active transport.
However, a counter health issue is that nearly one
third of Australian adults are also currently suffering
vitamin D deficiency8 from a lack of sun exposure

Xi ao ra n H u ang one of the most liveable cities in the world.

M a r k B urry There is a strong relationship between urban
microclimates and walking comfort and accessibility
and spatial nearness. If the temperature is
uncomfortably hot or cold, the likelihood of people
walking to services is greatly reduced. Less
conditions, contributing to the phenomena known
as the Urban Heat Island (UHI) where temperatures
within urban centres can be considerably higher
when compared to surrounding rural areas4-7 and
contributing to heat related fatalities. And in the cool,
temperate Melbourne winter, when the shadows
are long, these deep canyons also decrease
which suggests an opposing street design which
preserves solar access through the cooler months of
May to August.
Compounding these health and comfort issues
Australian cities are also particularly susceptible to
impacts of climate change with increasing extreme

Figure 1: Photograph of seagulls sitting under a trees
shade on a 41 degree day in Swaby Square, Footscray in
Melbourne, Australia, with thermal image overlay taken
using a Seek Thermal camera. Photographs by Marcus
White.
Figure 2: Photograph of Vipoint Street Footscray in
Melbourne, Australia showing street trees shade with
thermal image overlay taken using a Seek Thermal
camera demonstrating the dramatic impact of street trees
on surface temperature. Photographs by Marcus White.
Figure 3: Urban street tree impact study showing light- Figure 4: Urban street tree impact study showing light-
shade measurement at precinct scale aerial view. Image shade measurement at precinct scale plan view. Image by
by Marcus White. Marcus White.

1 Brenner, N., and Schmid,
C. (2014) The urban agein
question, International Journal of
Urban and Regional Research,
Wiley Online Library 38, 731755.
2 Koolhaas, R., Boeri, S.,
Kwinter, S., Tazi, N., and Obrist,
H.-U. (2000) Mutations, Actar.
3 Rode, P. (2013) Trends and
challenges: global urbanisation
and urban mobility, Springer.
4 Basara, J. B., Basara, H. G.,
Illston, B. G., and Crawford,
K. C. (2010) The impact of the
urban heat island during an
intense heat wave in Oklahoma
City, Advances in Meteorology,
Hindawi Publishing Corporation
2010.
 68 Marcs White, Geoff Kimm, Nano Langenheim, 69
Xiaoran Huang, Mark Burry

weather events such as heat waves9 which are likely
to increase in frequency, intensity and duration as
a consequence of climate change10. City fabrics
with deep urban canyons are an unintended
consequence of densification - More density puts
more pressure on our public spaces to perform.
Densification puts pressure on solar amenity which,
potentially leads to winter Dark Cities like those
seen in the cult classic by Alex Proyas in 1998, or as
New York City described by Fooks The smoke of
its factories reduces the sun shine to almost 40 per
cent., and it swallows annually about one-fifth of its
natural light11 p.23. Dense cities can also potentially
become summer urban furnaces like Chinas
Chongqing, Wuhan, and Nanjing cities.
So how do we balance the need for protecting
people from excessive UV exposure and heat
whilst encouraging active modes of transport? And,
how can innovative strategic approaches to urban
transformation increase the potential for walking to
work or school, maximising exposure to sun (and
vitamin D) in winter but minimising UV exposure in
Summer?
It is critical for planners and urban designers to
understand the relationship between accessibility,
urban form, heat retention, solar access, thermal
comfort, micro-climates and health and integrate
analysis tools into the design decision making
process.
Youre in the jungle baby Urban street trees using
algorithmic botany and flexible urban models
Building form has a limited capacity to seasonally
adjust levels of sun exposure to the street through
building awnings or other tacked on additions.
Additionally, limitations for building over shadowing
are often legislated to Summer and Winter equinox
which result in streets, fully over shadowed in Winter
and highly sun exposed in Summer increasing
the vulnerability of active transport users to both
dangerous Summer UV and a lack of Winter light.
Vegetation on the other hand, is fundamentally
designed to seasonally adjust foliar cover and ground
shading making it ideal to include in dense cities
where building form is adjusted to maximise solar
access. Vegetation, if used in clever ways which
harness individual species traits and strategize
specimen placement and spacing, overlaid with
elements of Spatial Nearness, thermal comfort,
seasonal change, health data and land use data
improves both the perception of Spatial Nearness
and the performance of the city fabric for the health
of residents of dense urban settlements.
to city cooling through evapotranspiration and
The impact of green-roof on building temperature has
been a popular field of study recently. While making
roof spaces trafficable and habitable environments
for residents in dense cities with small apartments is
certainly sensible making these spaces green can
be prohibitively expensive, may not provide flexibility
for residents to use these spaces for passive clothes
drying or social gatherings and has been shown to
have no greater cooling benefit to the building or
the city at street level than a coat of reflective white
paint12.
The choice of street tree species, size, placement
and diversity is an integral part of street design
particularly in cities with large seasonal temperature
variation such as those experienced in Melbourne,
Australia13. People and animals know the benefits of
shade in heat mitigation [see Figure 1 and Figure 2].
Even in deep urban canyons which might experience
high levels of overshadowing all year, trees contribute
contribute to human health and comfort through air
and storm water pollution mitigation and a host of
aesthetic considerations.
Our approach for modelling urban street trees,
integrates spatio-temporal characteristics of
trees into the process of designing streets using

Figure 5: Aerial rendered view of Arden Macaulay area Figure 6: Aerial rendered view of Arden Macaulay area Figure 7: Solar radiation exposure analysis of Arden Figure 8: Solar radiation exposure analysis of Arden
digital model showing potential planting of Corymbia digital model showing potential planting of Platanus Macaulay area digital model showing potential planting Macaulay area digital model showing potential planting of
maculata 7m spacing in summer. Image by Marcus White orientalis 7m spacing, in winter. Image by Marcus White and of Platanus orientalis 7m spacing, in summer. Image by Platanus orientalis 7m spacing, in winter. Image by Marcus
and Nano Langenheim. Nano Langenheim. Marcus White and Nano Langenheim. White and Nano Langenheim.

5 Mills, G. (2004) The urban
canopy layer heat island, IAUC
Teaching Resources.
6 Oke, T. R. (1988) Street
design and urban canopy layer
climate, Energy and buildings,
Elsevier 11, 103113.
7 Oke, T. R. (1981) Canyon
geometry and the nocturnal
urban heat island: comparison
of scale model and field
observations, Journal of
Climatology, Wiley Online
Library 1, 237254.
9 Patz, J. A., Campbell- 10 Akompab, D. A., Bi, P., 11 Fooks, E. (1946) X-Ray 12 Sailor, D. J., Elley, T. 13 White, N. M. & Langenheim.
8 Daly, R. M., Gagnon, C., Lu,
Lendrum, D., Holloway, T., and Williams, S., Grant, J., Walker, the City!: The density B., and Gibson, M. (2011) (2014) Measuring urban
Z. X., Magliano, D. J., Dunstan,
Foley, J. A. (2005) Impact of I. A., and Augoustinos, M. diagram: basis for urban Exploring the building energy canyons with real-time
D. W., Sikaris, K. A., Zimmet,
regional climate change on (2013) Heat waves and planning, Ministry of Post-War impacts of green roof design light based sky view factor
P. Z., Ebeling, P. R., and Shaw,
human health, Nature, Nature climate change: Applying Reconstruction. decisionsa modeling study modelling. In Our common
J. E. (2012) Prevalence of
Publishing Group 438, 310317. the health belief model to of buildings in four distinct future in Urban Morphology:
vitamin D deficiency and its
identify predictors of risk climates, Journal of Building 21st International Seminar
determinants in Australian
perception and adaptive Physics, Sage Publications on Urban Form - ISUF2014
adults aged 25 years and older:
behaviours in Adelaide, 1744259111420076. (Oliveira V, P. T. Pinho P Batista
a national, population-based
study, Clinical endocrinology, Australia, International journal L, and C, M., Eds.), pp 239304,
Wiley Online Library 77, 2635. of environmental research and Faculdade de Engenharia da
public health, Multidisciplinary Universidade do Porto.
Digital Publishing Institute 10,
21642184.
 70 Marcs White, Geoff Kimm, Nano Langenheim, 71
Xiaoran Huang and Mark Burry

algorithmic botany and flexible urban models13.
We can prioritise the environment of the street,
modelling both the daylight hours trees will receive,
which inform growth rates and aspects of projected
morphology in a given urban fabric and also
modelling the shade over time and season that
trees provide if spacing, species and placement
are strategically prioritised to radically improve the
microclimate of our city streets [Figure 3 to Figure 8].
Subtracto-Sun the solar carvery
Preserving open space amenity can be achieved
using a four-dimensional subtractive volumetric
modelling method developed by White14,15 called
Subtracto-Sun, a technique which utilises
parametric digital sun systems with real-time
flexible Boolean operations. The technique creates
permissible building envelopes by subtracting a solid
negative shadow object derived from angles of the
sun during a given range of times. This approach
results in potential development envelopes within
which any buildings can be built without casting a
shadow onto the public space during the designated
time range [see Figure 9].
Urban Canyon assessment opening up to the sky
Urban canyon analysis tools can be used for
assessment of existing city canyons using the
hacked Go-Pro video processing method
developed by White and Kimm16, or integrated into
the design process using GPU based calculation
using a hemispherical light source for real-time Sky
View Factor calculation developed by White and
Langenheim13 [see Figure 10].
More than Hunch and Guess urban design and
planning
Fooks identified the intuitive urban design decision
making process in 1946 as problematic, with errors
inherent in the still widely used method of Hunch
and Guess in urban planning11 p.55. Though we
believe there is still some room in the urban design
process for intuition and hunches that urban design
is not a pure deterministic engineering discipline of
brute-force optimisation, when we have hunches,
our hunches are informed by rigorous analysis - the
equivalents to X-Rays, or CAT scans and MRIs
today. Rather than guess at solutions or guess our
proposed solutions will work, we can test them using
previously immeasurable data with rigorous spatio-
temporal simulations to evaluate our proposals, just
as surgeons will use bioinformatics through virtual
reality simulations.

Figure 9: Whites Subtracto-Sun public space solar Figure 10: GPU based calculation using a hemispherical
amenity preservation tool. Diagram showing plaza space light source for real-time Sky View Factor calculation
extrusions tapered to match the altitude and azimuth developed by White and Langenheim. Image by Marcus
angles of the sun at a range of day times, carved from White.
a surrounding potential building envelope to ensure no
shadow falls on the plaza during specified times. Image by
Marcus White.

14 White, M. (2010) Homo
Faber: Modelling identity and
the post digital (Burry, A. M
Ostwald M Downton P & Mina,
Ed.), pp 111124, Archadia
Press.
15 White, M. (2014) Global
Demographic and Climate
Challenges in the City
(Pfaffenbach, C., and Schneider,
C., Eds.), pp 107126,
Department of Geography
of RWTH Aachen University,
Aachen Germany.
16 White, G. M. Kimm. (2015) Measuring sky view factor of urban
canyons using hacked Gopro hemispheric video processing.
In Research for a Better Built Environment: 49th International
Conference of the Architectural Science Association 2015 (Crawford,
R. H., and Stephan, A., Eds.), pp 525535, Faculty of Architecture,
Building and Planning (UniMelb).
 72
F o ok s a nd the The image included in this report London Villages:
Social and functional analysis of London (Figure
em e rg e nc e of ur ban 1) identified London as highly organized and
inter-related system of communities (Forshaw,
s c i e nc e Abercrombie 1943). The major purpose of 1943
County of London Plan, was to strengthen and
sustain these communities:
The proposal is to emphasise the identity of
the existing communities, to increase their
degree of segregation, and where necessary
J u styna to reorganise them as separate and definite
entities. The aim would be to provide
K ara k ie wicz each community with its own schools,
public buildings, shops, open spaces, etc.
(Abercrombie 1943).
This innovative map was intended as a grand
Three years before Ernest Fooks book X-Ray the City! was master plan for rebuilding London after the war.
Abercrombie subdivided London into districts of
published, Patrick Abercrombie and John Forshaw produced the particular character and generalised their spatial
limits by showing them as rounded blobs. Just
1943 County of London Plan. as Fooks described his nucleui of integration with
dominating elements, Abercrombie defined and
separated the many districts of London by naming
them after their dominating element. Thus we
can see on the map districts named University,
Figure 1. London Social
and Functional Map 1942,
drawn by Arthur Ling and
D.K. Johnson in 1943 as a
part of comprehensive 1943
County of London Plan by
Forshaw and Abercrombie.
73
Government, Press, Law and so on. Each
district has its shopping street with recreational
space either within its boundaries or immediately
adjacent. Some of the communities, but not all, have
town halls, indicated by red dots. As in Fooks model
of a neighbourhood unit of 1000 families, the London
communities were subdivided into neighbourhood
units of 6,000 to 10,000 people with an elementary
school and service zones. Each of the districts
was to be surrounded by an open space to provide
a natural cut-off between it and its neighbours
(Forshaw, Abercrombie 1943). The Abercrombie city
is organised around communities, with each of them
defining a separate place with a specific identity.
Furthermore, each of these districts seems to be
aligned to one cultural reference. In a mid-twentieth
century response to the conflict of their immediate
past, this might be intended to create monoculture
settlements, something we might seek to avoid today
although very evident in Fooks post-war Melbourne.
Three years after this map was published, and
in the same year that Fooks book was issued,
the New Towns Act was promulgated in London.
The act established New Town Development
Corporations that were responsible for the delivery
and management of new towns. The development

framework of these new towns was drawn up to
ensure the provision of mixed housing, industry,
services, open space and transport infrastructures.
Fooks refers to this framework frequently in his
book; he must have been very aware of what was
going on in the UK and has possibly drawn ideas
from Abercrombie.
Abercrombie just like Fooks shared the belief that
planning should be supported by science. His
work was rooted in physicalism, a theory that
assumed that social problems could be solved by
manipulating the physical built environment (Batty
and Marshall 2009). Abercrombie advocated top-
down planning as he stated unequivocally in his
lecture at the University College in 1937:
I would like to remark that we are (it is
assumed) agreed upon certain fundamentals
such as: the necessity of planning as
compared with a reliance upon the
evolutionary chaos, with Adam Smiths
invisible guiding hand behind the clouds an
ancient fallacy this, which still has its votaries.
(Abercrombie, 1937, 16).
This was intellectual environment in which Fooks
was writing X-Ray the City! The environment of
management and control and the will to create
new forms and impose them onto the city structure
believed that the new environment improved
quality of life for its residents. Much of the planning
and modelling was based on the belief that a city
could attain a state of equilibrium and therefore
optimization was not only possible but achievable
through modelling and that master planning could
guide the city to an desired ideal end state.
In this context Fooks work is decades years ahead
of his time. We might posit that Fooks was one of the
first planners who visualised the city as a dynamic
system, one today we call a complex adaptive
system. Although he never referred to the theory of
complex adaptive systems (CAS) since it was not
developed at that time, or even systems theory, his
INTEGRATION concept states that:
74
The term of integration connotes not only
a whole composed of an indefinite number
of parts and functions but also the close
interdependence of those numerous parts and
functions and their interpenetration. (Fooks
1946, p.95)
This clearly illustrates Fooks understanding of the
cities not as collection of integrated or interrelated
artefacts but rather as a dynamic system. His
description reads very much like CAS theory;
he frequently refers to elements that cannot be
measured and their influence on the city as a whole.
Without a theory to guide his way, however, the tools
that he deploys are not adequate to deliver what he
dreams of offering:
The tools for analyses have to form the dynamic
preparation for further action; they have to
become the tools for activity, the tools for
creating the new urban environments. (Fooks
1946, p.97).
Today we have at our disposal CAS and CES
(Control Engineering System) theories to help us.
CAS enables us to understand cities as natural
systems, capable of learning and readapting, while
CES conceptualises the city as an artificial system
able to be optimised on many levels. Both theories
give us insights in city structure and provide tools
for modelling what is happening around us. These
decades on, however, after the bright new future
promised by scientific methods has palled, we
are aware that using science in the quest for exact
answers to important problems is not any longer
possible (Batty and Torrens 2001). We now have
a growing recognition that the certainty it offers is
illusory.
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned
lies, and statistics. (quoted by Fooks 1946,
p. 7)
If Ernest Fooks was writing his book today, he would
most likely start again with this quotation. As we gain
access to ever more data on urban life, there remains
Figure 2. Infrastructure for
the 21st century by Justyna
Karakiewicz
Justyna Karakiewicz
a significant gap between these data and our
knowledge of how cities work and thus more robust,
meaningful theories about cities. Whether we try to
develop new a physicalism, which combines the
scientific inspiration of Geddes with Abercrombies
professional pragmatism, as suggested by Batty and
Marshall (2009), or apply methods of complexity
science with its well-established methodologies, we
can be confident that the role of science may deepen
our understanding of what is happening within
the city structure but it cannot give us answers or
provide us with design solutions. Nevertheless, it is
the rigorous understanding of data that can guide our
interventions in the city and thus influence the way
city functions, operates, grows and develops.
The tools at our disposal today allow us to create
what if scenarios. For example, we can use
disturbance theory (part of CAS theory) to test these
scenarios. Disturbance theory has been applied by
ecologists who suggest that natural systems require
periodic disruptions in order to evolve (Barnett and
Margetts, 2013); the same could be said of urban
systems. But if we want to be as insightful as Fooks,
a few steps ahead of our time, we could look to more
recent developments in science such as the Arrival
of the Fittest (Wagner, 2014). Complex adaptive
systems and disturbance theory are developed on
the premises of Darwins evolution theory. Wagner
believes that adaptation is not driven by chance
but by a set of laws that allow nature to discover
new molecules and mechanisms in a fraction of
the time that random variation would take place
(Wagner 2014). Urban development moves too
quickly for evolution alone to deliver changes. When
dealing with city development, we cannot rely just
on evolutionary processes. Even in nature natural
selection may explain the survival of the fittest, but it
cannot explain the arrival of the fittest (de Vries 1904,
p.826). As Wagner suggested:
When we begin to study natures libraries we
arent just investigating life innovability or that
of technology. We are shedding new light
75
on one of the most durable and fascinating
subjects in all of philosophy. And we learn
that lifes creativity draws from a source that
is older than life, and perhaps older than time
(Wagner 2014, p. 221).
With this in mind students from MSD, The University
of Melbourne were asked to develop their tools and
their ideas for Melbourne 2046. The following six
projects describe how our next design leaders think
about the future and articulate their dreams and
aspiration for the next 30 years. Perhaps this is what
Fooks would have done if he was describing an X-
Ray of the city in 2046.
References
Abercrombie, P. (1937) Planning in Town and Country: Difficulties and
Possibilities (An Inaugural Lecture), London, Hodder and Stoughton.
Barnett, R. and Margetts, J. (2013) Disturbanism in the South
Pacific, in Resilience in Ecology and Urban Design, edited By
Pickett, Cadenasso, McGrath, New York: Springer
Batty, M. and S. Marshall (2009) The evolution of cities: Geddes,
Abercrombie and the new Physicalism, Liverpool University Press,
Town Planning Review, Vol. 80: Issue.6: pages 551-574.
Batty, M. and P.M. Torrens (2002) Modelling Complexity: the limits
to predictions. CyberGeo 201
Forshaw, J. and P. Abercrombie (1943) 1943 County of London
Plan, London: Macmillan.
Stanton, A. (1896-01-23). Wilhelm Conrad Rntgen On a New
Kind of Rays: translation of a paper read before the Wrzburg
Physical and Medical Society, 1895
(de) Vries, H. (1904) Species and Varieties: Their Origin by Mutation,
Chicago: The Open Court Publishing Company. p.826
Wagner, A. (2014) Arrival of the Fittest: Solving evolutions greatest
puzzle, New York: Penguin Group
Watanabe, M. S. (2002) Induction Cities: a Method for Evolutionary
Design, Basel: Birkhauser
 76 Yu Wan and Cheng Chen 77

Pro je c ts

Our project is aiming to create reasonable

spaces that can avoid several potential
issues that Fooks argued in his book. Two
main theories are considered as our essential
referencesFooks ideas from his book X-ray
the city! : the density diagram: basis for urban
planning and ERG theory.

Density as an expansion, is a reasonable

proposal for Melbourne 2046 that largely
focuses on the current situation, and take a
bottom-up design method to approach our
concept. Fractal structure, agent behavior
simulation and optimisation algorithm are
three major methods that mainly helped us
design.

The project is based on two major parts:

Module and Journey. The module has
been developed as a mathematically
fractal structure, it can be understood as a
tree structure and staring from bottom as
individuals, following by residential units, and
social unit Class I, II, III and IV. Each class
covers different function spotting (Fooks).
The density number decides which function
should be placed in which class, furthermore,
it is a hierarchical structure that referred to the
size of population density. The functions in
each social unit are developed gradually from
private to more public.

The fractal structure can represent the idea of

Limitation Growth and Function spotting
in size of social unit in Fooks theory.
 78 Yu Wan and Cheng Chen 79

SOLID--LIQUID--GAS JOURNEY

As the stated by Fooks, the essential principle underlying

current functional approach to physical planning is to
integrate the four urban functions, living, work, recreation and
distribution. We assume that in the future, these four urban
functions will become more blurred and will mix together.
Consequently, the development of module has three stages:
SolidLiquidGas. The whole module becomes instability,
uncontrollability and equivocality. This picture is the module
looking at the first stageSolid.

Liquid, as the second stage, the whole urban functions are

gradually mixed, and it starts with each close social function
spotting, the colour gradient demonstrates how functions are
merged with each other at an abstractive aspect.

Gas is the last stage of the module, all urban functions mixed
in a fully blurry level. Function is not function anymore. We
only can see the multiple function space and the optimised
traffic system in our module.
The journey can be understood as the bridge that connects with each module. The journey is deeply relevant to
relatedness and growth of ERG theory. Instead of optimization, efficiency, and rational calculation, the Journey is more
about personal experience and preferences. The journey path is built by a random moving rule. For example, the 3D
agents have one single destination. However, where the path each agent will go is based on their personal preference, in
another word is random behavior but the final destination will be the same. And if we set the destination more than one,
the result will be much more complex. And later we modelled this simulation result into 3D space. Besides the function of
transportation, the journey also illustrated other functions that related to E and R part, for instance, landscape view, big
shopping malls, fancy restaurants, information exchange hubs, meditation rooms for people social, relax, and self-growth.

URBAN DEC O M PO SE R
In 1946, Ernest Fooks published his book X-Ray the City! and
voiced his concerns regarding construction and environments in
post-war Melbourne. Fooks foresee that apartment living as a
necessity in urban planning in the future and noted that density
alone was not responsible for poor urban living conditions, but
that the quality of urban living was related to community life and
access to quality facilities, housing and open spaces for leisure.
Fooks specifically addressed that social services are including:-
1) Educational; 2) Recreational; 3) Health facilities; 4)
utility services: i) water supply, ii) garbage disposal, iii) drainage,
iv) sewerage, iv) gas, v)electricity, vi) telephone and public
conveyances.
In the past seven decades, many of social services have been
changed by the adaptive use of internet and the advance of
science research, except the Utility services. The form of utility
services has not been changed since the date that it has been
developed, one of the reasons is that each of the infrastructure
costed huge amount of investment, and it takes at least 20 40
years to recover. In this project, we want to explore a different
way to access necessities in urban. For developed counties,
it seems that we take utilities services for granted, the problem
we face is only how much we need to pay, obviously human
being is addicted to energy, and only take the benefit from
limited resources to support services, without taking serious
consideration of the way how we live and the consequences of
our being, especially the way how we dispose waste and over-
produced products. It costs irreversible environmental impact
80 Chun Long Fok, Reed Sze Lok Chan, Yu Fu 81
to where we live, groundwater contamination and toxic the soil
that it takes few decades to be recovered. Since creating waste
is unavoidable, why dont we make us of it? We believed that
everyone in the futurewill not simple be a consumer any more,
all of us will become the source of the decomposer engine. That
it will change the relationship between social service and urban
dweller from linear supply and demand to interdependent
By understanding the current situation, that motivate our team
to think about what architecture and urban design can make
contribution and improvement. Decomposer in the nature system
gave us hints and insight in handling waste.
In nature, there is no waste. Waste become a resources, but in
order for waste to become the resource in urban area, we need
decomposers. Bacteria from nature are the natural engines of
decomposition. In our design, we are applying the concept
from the nature and inserting a missing part of urban organism.
It converts the current negative disposal to resources that can
recontribute to the utilities system, and that became an unlimited
resource to generate what we need. The urban decomposer
does not act on a single purpose which handling waste, it
also provides opportunities to convert chemical energy from
sewerage and food waste to electricity and heat, and it can also
carry out water treatment for both rainwater and sewerage. The
system should be further expend in large scale of urban farming
or planting industrial crops that can both provide food for urban
dweller, and industrial crops such as soya beans will accelerate
the energy regeneration rate to increases the efficiency of the
overall decomposer system.
82 Chun Long Fok, Reed Sze Lok Chan, Yu Fu 83

The initial design concept intents to

combine decomposer system and
rainwater collection system, by having
a mega amount of water as product
after sewerage treatment and rainwater
harvesting, a new layer of water
storage and distribution method will
be created, which can also establish
a new connection that connect urban
dwellers to access of wide range of
amenities and public spaces. Instead
of having traditional lagoon system that
will take large amount of floor space to
hold infrastructure for sewerage system,
the decomposer system is developed
vertically that minimise the footage of the
tower that it can fit in a such demanding
urban environment.

The configuration of each decomposer

tower can be unique, it is designed
to give responses to its surrounding
buildings and urban context. By having a
simple structure tower, it gives the tower
capability to glow vertically according to
different stage of urban development.

By adopting existing underground

sewerage system and introducing
organic waste collection point, the
decomposer tower will process unlimited
raw material from urban and operating in
24 hours and across the year. Unlimited
recourses mean electricity and heart will
also be non-stop generating. Spaces
in between decomposer equipments
creates platform to hold different social
services and enjoy ultimate city view.

[Island] There is a unique island on

each of the decomposer tower, the
island has multiple purpose including
but not limited to act as a pier for
water transportation between towers, a
place for relaxation and urban farming.
Diagrams on the above shown prototype
design of islands.

[Sky-bridge] Besides having activities

on the island, urban dweller can also
get different experience on decomposer
bridges through walking along the sky-
river, as well as swimming or taking
a sailing boat trip to home and work.
Industrial crops are planted on both
surface and islands, as part of the
urban farming associating with urban
decomposer system. Bubbles on the
river is one of our prototype design of
further transportation, which explores
the enjoyment and happiness about
transportation.

[Implementation of the tower] The

decomposer tower will be implemented
in stages; Stage 1, Erection of
decomposer tower at urban voids;
Stage 2, Establish connection between
towers; Stage 3, Decomposer network
influent urban form and planning such
that the overall system hybridised with
surrounding environment.
 84 Cheng Shun Ren Leon, Zhao Su Yang, Zhao Qing Quan 85

Introduction
2016 2026 2036
Volatile Melbourne is about creating a
system where information is the integral
aspect that flows through the various
components that would respond to fit the
conditions created by the population. It is
a system that is able to react to potential
problems as well as the emergent properties
from the population and subsequently have
the urban fabric reconfigured. Density
calculated by number of people per hectare
of land during Fooks time was very two 2 Dimension 2.5 Dimension
dimensional. Today, we see more mixed
use buildings and homes that are stacked
vertically but functions are minimal. What
we envision for 2046 is that humans will
breach across buildings on the horizontal
plane without having to proceed back
onto the ground level and functions that
respond to the behavioural patterns of the
population.

Vol atile Mel bou r n e Information Collection

3 Dimension 4 Dimension
20 46 The information that we have gathered
over the years on the human population
becomes less reliable as time passes. The
reaction time taken to make changes to the
urban settlement is always a long process
and by the time the implementation has
taken place, the problems that were initially
there may have changed. Furthermore, the
fact that we are still receiving information
from a two dimensional map indicating the
particular function from urban planning
authorities is a clear indication of how
our urban settlement is still stuck in a two
dimensional world. We propose for a way
that information could be gathered in real-
time through the use of sensors placed
around the urban fabric.

Energy Generation

Human beings are the largest consumers

of energy on this planet and we must
accept that we are part of the overall
system and cannot properly control how
the overall system operates. There is so
much potential for energy to be harnessed
from humans daily activities. Sensors
would be able to analyse the information
gathered from the movement patterns of
an individual. To ensure that there will be
enough power generated by human beings
to power the system, walking should be
encouraged within the urban fabric.

Removal of Motorised Transport
Pedestrian tends to walk more in exciting
and environmentally pleasant environment;
knowing that the pedestrian walking
system is connected to fast travel could
encourage more pedestrian movement.
This would draw the population towards
the areas of fast travel which would
allow for more energy to be generated.
Furthermore, these areas of fast travel will
provide a myriad if interactive spaces to
allow the population to be able to wander
around in the area. By doing so, we have
minimised motorised transport. This
breaks down the social barrier between
human beings as we are often confined
within our private vehicles and also
encourages active travel.
86
Psychological Well-being
Through active travel as well as the
energy nodes that harvest energy from
the population, the overall physical
well-being is increased. Furthermore,
the concentration of population along
the travel routes and consolidation of
functions together with the provision of
interactive spaces encourages social
interaction between individuals. The
quality of spaces within these areas are
significantly increased so that it would
be an added bonus on top of a myriad
of functions so that the population would
travel though these areas to their desired
destination.
Prefabrication - Assembly & The City that Changes with the People
Disassembly
The physicality of the urban fabric is that
buildings are always seen as a permanent
object. If a prefabricated building can be
assembled in a day, it should be able to
be disassembled with the same time.
Once that is achieved, the building will be
able to reconfigure itself to adjust to the
varying needs of the human population.
With the development of technology rising
at an exponential rate, this process has
the potential to be automated. This can
be achieved by the analysis of the human
population through information collection
where the building functions will be shifted
around the urban fabric to adjust to the
demands.
Cheng Shun Ren Leon, Zhao Su Yang, Zhao Qing Quan 87
The five components together forms the
overall system for Volatile Melbourne. Our
strategy to concentrate the human population,
consolidate various functions and communicate
the information gathered to the overall urban
settlement ties together the five components
into a system. In Volatile Melbourne, the density
of the urban population would give rise to the
accessibility.
The higher the density, the higher the energy
generated which would power the fast travel
system across the urban fabric and leads to
increased accessibility. Volatile Melbourne
is a system that would be able to react to the
irrationality of human beings and also able
to reconfigure itself according to the varying
demands of the population. Volatile Melbourne
will be the city that changes with the people.

Di v ers ity as Densi ty
There is a great latent potential in our
urban fabric today. This hidden potential
is located within our city buildings
currently lacking a connection to one
another. They currently do not function
as a collective in a physical sense. Yet,
we call our city a collective, we say that
our city is an interconnected, closely
woven together system, yet physically
in our architecture we do not see layers
of the city embedded within all of its
components and sub-components.
There is increased density, yet our
buildings still function and stand
separately. Our tall apartment and office
buildings are cut off from the rest of the
city, they have no street connectivity and
there is no visible relationship with their
neighbouring buildings. Furthermore,
despite common complaints about
less space for dwelling, and a call for
the Victorian government to implement
regulations regarding minimum size of
apartment dwellings, we continue to
use redundant spaces in our planning
of such establishments. The prime
example that can be identified is the
current utilisation of the corridor, or
rather, its underutilisation.
Density as Diversity, is a speculative
proposal for Melbourne 2046 that
focuses on taking a reductionist,
bottom-up approach by identifying
figurative genes and classifying
buildings into different species through
a process similar to phylogenetics.
Based on basic coupling rules following
a biological logic, different building
species are able to connect and reformat
themselves into hybrid complexes.
From the 11 core categories designated
for a building to be examined against
and 22 different sub classifications
under these categories, we can identify
unique building species. By using rules
88
of attraction and aversion, different
buildings can couple with compatible
partners to create hybrid spaces and
thus increase dense diversity.
In order to script this, each sub
classification is designated a number
so each building has its own unique
genetic code. If there is over a 50%
compatibility, that is, more than 50%
of the values in a buildings dna string
match with another building within
the zone of influence created by the
metaballs, then a positive coupling can
occur and a new breed of building can
be generated.
Each building is analysed based on the
following specifics:
Usage function Surface function
Usage generation Faciality
Degree of faciality Circulatory balance
Spatial continuity Spatial division
Density Diversity
Pace
A building is no longer seen as a
building and redundant spaces are
reduced as it is physically intertwined
with many other building species to
create a dense, diverse interconnected
urban system full of multiplicity, better
realising the spatial nearness and urban
interdependence that Fooks advocated.
diverse system. If we x-ray the city
This kind of script can run again
and again to increase complexity,
density and in turn diversity, allowing
for the citys architecture to expand
rhizomically, that is through infinite
expansion based on needs of the city.
As buildings slowly merge together
and fragment themselves new
characteristics from neighbouring areas
not within the immediate radius of the
meatball combine together thus further
increasing diversity
Sophie Farmer and Bi Wang 89
ty, allowing for the citys architecture
to expand rhizomically, that is through
infinite expansion based on needs of
the city. As buildings slowly merge
together and fragment themselves
new characteristics from neighbouring
areas not within the immediate radius
of a building cancombine together, thus
further increasing diversity
As a result of intersection and merging
of buildings and the creation of more
diverse species within the urban city
system, new hybrid typologies can arise,
particularly in the reformatted former
corridor spaces. Examples include:
Vertical farm and energy generator,
drone operated capsule flower and
vegetable garden, as well as apartment
living with neighbourhood fish farm and
aquarium.
What results from this experiment is
a complex and highly interconnected
urban system that allows for increased
accessibility through spatial nearness
and also through hyper-hybrid formation
through building genetic combination
that results in increased diversity and
density as the final outcome.
A building should not be considered as
sole building with direct boundaries,
we need to think of the city as a city,
a closely interconnected and hyper
and look at the little things in the
system that we do not pay so much
attention to in current urban design and
planning practices then we can create
architecture that allows all citizens to be
drawn in and enhance social cohesion
and lifestyle connectivity in a diverse,
lively environment for many years into
the future.
90 Sophie Farmer and Bi Wang 91

M O N GRE L CITY
In pursuit of better urban conditions, Ernest Fooks
wanted to equip planners and designers with more
intellectually rigorous footings to consider urban
density and to change the way density measurements
are applied. Unfortunately, much of Fooks work has
gone unheeded and, as a consequence, today we
observe some poor urban conditions in Melbourne.
Namely, an unsustainable urban sprawl of sparsely
populated suburbs with little access to services and
amenities. Compounding the problem is the way we
currently treat services and amenities as discrete
units; impeding efficient use of space and making it
difficult for people to gain access to multiple services
within a limited area. Pushing against such conditions
and adapting Fooks theory for the 21st Century, our
proposition for 2046 aims to focus the design of our
cities on access. In doing so, we look at more efficient
92
and exciting uses of space through a contraction of
the city footprint and the use of hybridised spaces.
Looking to 2046 we examined how population was
distributed across Melbourne in terms of density
(people/hectare). We observed a correlation between
property prices, the gross number of people and
density. Within a municipality, lower property prices
generally result in a greater number of residents
distributed less densely. These municipalities
generally have less access to services but most have
a greater number of cars per household. Projecting
to 2046, we observed that municipalities that are
increasing at the greatest percentage are those with
lower property prices and low population density.
From this study we saw two opportunities arise. First,
the need for hybridisation. As the population increases
Faith Freeman, Isaac Chen and Tommy Heng
within municipalities so too do the required services.
To accommodate these new services in an efficient
way, we need to look at hybridised spaces. Second,
we saw the opportunity to focus on access rather than
mobility.
The prime method employed for our project was
complex adaptive modeling (CAM) which allows us to
quickly produce an exciting system where agents can
adapt, emerge, and recur according to parameters.
We are able to program features like complexity,
emergence and self-organisation to agents within a
defined system resulting in a high degree of adaptive
capacity and resilience. It allows us to review multiple
scenarios spawning from a single set of base
parameters in order to design for 2046. Our model
uses programmes as agents which seek population
growth according to a series of parameters.
93
The agents for our CAM are transportation, primary
and secondary education, tertiary education,
commerce, places of work, residential, hospitals,
and clinics. Their parametric criteria are size of unit,
size limit, proportion of solid/void, growth rate, agent
responsiveness, and the relationships between
agents and agents. With our agents and parameters
established we constructed our CAM using Quelea in
grasshopper. We were able to produce a scenario for
2046 where our programmatic agents are behaving
in interesting and unexpected spatial configurations
to serve the population. Observable are hybridised
programmes between commerce, residential,
healthcare, transport and education.
In designing the individual hybrids that emerged in
our CAM, we ran the risk of designing three distinct
and isolated clusters that could potentially undermine
94 Faith Freeman, Isaac Chen and Tommy Heng
our underlying thesis. To offset that risk, we decided
to design a common thread for Melbourne 2046.
That thread took the form of the adaptation and
diversification of an existing transport route to serve
as an artery of the city in 2046. Transport arteries in
Melbourne offer great opportunities for innovation
in the future. While in their current state most of
Melbournes major transport routes are inefficient and
unsustainable, with careful interventions, they can
evolve into wonderful and sustainable hubs to give life
to the city.
By 2030, it is estimated that 80% of the infrastructure
in Australian cities will have been built prior to 2010.
Combine with this the population projections for
Melbourne and it is clear that transforming our cities
for the future is intimately related to rationalising,
utilising, diversifying and adapting existing transport
infrastructure.
In order to create a more efficient and accessible city
in 2046 we propose the adaptation of major transport
routes in Melbourne into vibrant city arteries. The
core systems to be developed and integrated along
95
these arteries will be replicable and scalable across
the city over time in stages. In the first stage (2016-
2026), we propose the introduction of a raised
platform hovering above existing tram routes. On that
platform would be a tiered travelator system to move
people. Simultaneously, the trams will be converted
into mobile vessels for various services that slowly
traverse the strip - offering a dynamism and liveliness
to the strip.
In the second stage (2026-2036), we propose the
addition of raised bicycle networks as well as the
contraction and sinking of the road that services cars
and buses. Our aim is to provide a safe and efficient
route for cyclists while down-scaling our reliance on
the motor vehicle.
In the third stage (2036-2046), with the reduction in the
number of motor vehicles we propose the introduction
of a two pronged courier service: first, the pneumatic
tube system where individuals can shoot small items
from one place to another in a confined area; and
second, the use of drones to transport larger items to
various places beyond the strip.
 96 Sirui Guo 97

L o op Me lbour ne 2 04 6

The proposal is an attempt to connect the major

nodes of Melbourne by an Underground Railway
transit with a HUB in the Port Philip Bay created over
an artificial island. The island will act as a Center
for New development creating more space for Live,
Work and Move.
98 Sirui Guo 99

18,295
 100
4 D D a ta , Di agr ams,
De n sity a nd Diagnostics
Do na ld
Ba t e s
Contemporary plans, new techniques.
Progressive city, new plans.
Data
Statistical data is the evidence basis for Fooks and
his examination of Melbourne in 1946. But his very
introduction advances a cautionary overlay to the
uncertainties, ambiguities and abuses within the
application of statistics and collected data. It is
not so much that the data is un-true, but that it is
insufficient. Caught in the trap of all encyclopaedic
endeavours, the demands for comprehensiveness
are always undone by the acknowledgement that
there is always more to be gathered, more nuances
to be referenced and notated, newer, more relevant
categories yet to be identified.
In such scenarios, data is both fact and fiction. Its
very specificity and identity, is made tenuous and
provisional by the act of deeper investigation. This
is a pre-Mandelbrot fractal universe where solid
numbers and decimal point accuracy is challenged
each time a data set is interrogated, with additional
information, additional sub-categories, additional
attributes calling into question the relevance and
substantiality of previous inferences and conclusions.
Elsewhere in this volume, others have provided a
more precise, more authoritative presentation of
data collection and interpretation. My interest here
101
is rather in the architectural sensibility of Fooks and
his methods to coax an understanding out of data
sets, while remaining attuned to the particularly
social dimensions of the task at hand. Data not as
cold, hard fact, but data as an indicative, projective
swirl and swarm of tendencies, bringing visibility
to that which had more or less remained unseen,
unacknowledged.
Diagrams
Also elsewhere in this volume, several contributors
elaborate on the metaphor or instrumentality of the
X-ray. Its employment by Fooks is unique, but
also of a clear lineage. Historicity would suggest
that with its invention 50 years before Fooks applies
it to Melbourne, the X-ray was a known scientific
advance. And yet even today, some 120 years
after Rntgen, we still marvel at the mechanics of
revealing that which lies beneath the surface of our
daily world.
Issues of surface and depth, the superficial and the
substantial, the revealing of the real all these
categorisations seek a definitive determination of
what is more truthful, what is most worthy of placing
ones faith in, or simply deciding on what basis do we
make decisions from. The metaphor of the X-ray
is the employment of a technology of revelation. The

machine, the process; that reveals. Its scientific
acuity is the consequence of a mechanical
autonomy to the process. That is to say that the
use of the x-ray, reveals by its inherent nature,
irrespective of the operator. Of course, the
results have to be interpreted, explained. It takes
a skilled technician to discern muscle from bone,
cartilage from marrow, and injury from normal
occurrences.
Where Fooks overrides mechanical autonomy is
in his development of diagrams and maps. Here
is revelation through representation. The facts
dont change [subject to all the caveats previously
notated], the circumstance isnt altered, the
investigative mandate remains intact, and yet a
new graphic depiction, a new diagrammatic logic,
affords us a glimpse at something already present
but not apparent. The reveal is in the insight of
the graphic. In what might well be called the
gestalt of the graphic, in which a mostly full
and comprehensive understanding takes place
through the first glimpse of the new diagram,
the new map, the new chart. Embedded in
these graphic reveals are all the data sets,
all the relational coordinates, the contextual
backgrounds that situate this information in a
specific domain, but the sense of it all is made
to make sense by the fabrication of a particular
graphic logic.
102
Density
Unlike my fellow contributors, I am not a scholar
and therefore I dont have at my disposal the
techniques and practices that would allow me to
state with authority the supporting evidence for
my next claims. Rather, I have only an intuition; a
presumptive inclination that seems to coincide with
other observations.
I am conceptually surprised and heartened by Fooks
emphatic emphasis on the benefits of density in his
analysis of Melbourne in 1946. It might be written
off as the natural tendency of a European migr to
a post-colonial outpost at the other end of the globe,
attempting to remake a new world city into the form
of the old world. It might be nostalgia for a type
of urbanism (and resultant urbanity) more in tune
with the cosmopolitanism of central Europe now
removed and practically destroyed in both time and
space by WWII and resettlement on the far side of a
distant continent.
But the text of X-Ray the City! and the advocacy that
Fooks undertakes, is more precise and more spatial
determined by attention to issues of infrastructure,
growth, amenities, resources and one might even
say a nascent sustainability, than by any lingering
thoughts of caf societies and a golden age. Fooks
focuses and I suspect, does so very much against
Donald Bates
the grain of his contemporary colleagues and public
sentiment on the benefits socially, materially,
spatially, temporally and urbanistically on increased
density when managed thoughtfully and with
tectonic sensitivity. Melbourne has only taken
seriously the positive benefits of such a position
within the last 20 years. And even this change of
development orientation is patchy, limited and barely
advancing. It is a shock of the old to hear it so
eloquently advocated some many years back.
Diagnostics
This book is a trial balloon, a preamble to a larger
endeavour. It took its abbreviated form as a
response to an opportunity to exhibit and to provoke
within the context of the 2016 La Biennale di
Venezia. In the short preparation time allocated to
its formulation and production, only a shadow of an
idea was determined at the start. It was accepted
that it would be incomplete, provisional and without
clear objectives, much less clear thematics and well
argued positions.
Nonetheless, the push to inject a small provocation
into the large enterprise that is the Venice
Architecture Biennale has stimulated a measurable
collegiality across the Faculty of Architecture,
Building and Planning at the University of Melbourne,
and more specifically within its graduate and post-
103
graduate section, the Melbourne School of Design.
At the same time, the artifice of Ernest Fooks and his
X-Ray the City! has generated surprising connections
and insights, both about Melbourne and its urban
development, but also its place within a wider
discourse on the city, data insights, the graphic
representation of information and relationships, and
the social dimension of urban policy.
Our most distilled or journalistic tagline was: What
can we do now (with data, information, techniques
and technology for the city) that Fooks could not do
in 1946, and what does that afford us? This book
does not answer this simple question nor does it
confine our more ambitious mandate. What we hope
it does do, is to begin a more intense investigation
and more demanding speculation, through
research, through design production and through
new techniques to expand the encyclopaedia of
architectural and urban effects as a means and
opportunities for a more socially supportive urban
development, in a city such as Melbourne.

Bi og ra p hies
Dr. Gideon Aschwanden
is Lecturer in Urban
Analytics at the University
of Melbourne with a focus
on learning algorithms
to evaluate the urban
fabric to improve health,
transportation and
economic opportunities.
He joined the University
of Melbourne in 2015
from Princeton University
where his teaching and
research was on digital
fabrication methods and
building systems (cooling
and heating architecturally
optimized systems). He has
an MSc in Architecture and
a doctoral degree from the
ETH Zurich where he also
taught graduate students in
the use of digital evaluation
tools in urban planning. To
deepen his knowledge he
worked as a researcher at
the Future Cities Laboratory
in Singapore and has
professional experience in
Switzerland, Singapore and
the United States.
Dr Karen Burns teaches
architectural history, theory
and design at the University
of Melbourne. Her essays
on nineteenth-century
architecture and design
and post-1960s theory and
history have been widely
published in amongst
others: Assemblage, AD,
Journal of Architectural
Education, and the essay
collections Postcolonial
Spaces, Desiring Practices,
Deleuze and Architecture,
De-Signing Design. She is a
104 105
co-editor of Parlour and and resilience - through an modernism and buildings is currently focusing more resilient urban Professor Tom Kvan is Pro landscape architecture. She
co-director of Parlour urban futures perspective, for housing, education and on Enhancing precinct structures. Vice Chancellor Campus brings together education
Inc. cross-Faculty linkages, health. He is currently the walkability: improving and Global Developments in landscape architecture
and developing broader lead investigator on an design process by Geoff Kimm is an in which role he provides (RMIT), horticulture and
Professor Mark Burry research and industry Australian Research Council implementing agent-based experienced software leadership in the alignment Arboriculture (Burnley UoM)
is a practising architect connections. funded project, Bauhaus modelling developer who holds of academic and research with over fifteen years of
who has published Australia, which examines a Bachelor of Science strategies with opportunities design and construction
internationally on Kim Dovey is Professor the impact of European Dr Justyna Karakiewicz, with a major in computer for campus developments. practice experience in a
two main themes: of Architecture and Urban migrs on art, design and RIBA, currently Associate science, a Bachelor of With many years in senior diverse range of award
putting theory into Design in the faculty of architecture education in Professor at University of Environments and Master leadership roles in three winning projects in both
practice with regard to Architecture, Building and Australia. He is co-editor of Melbourne. She trained of Architecture (University universities, most recently the private and public
procuring challenging Planning at the University of Modernism and Australia: as an architect at the of Melbourne). Geoff serving from 2007 2015 realm. She has expertise
architecture, and the Melbourne. His research on Documents on Art, Design Westminster University has been a collaborating as Dean of the Faculty of in algorithmic botany
life, work and theories social issues in architecture and Architecture 1917-1967 and the Architectural researcher with Dr. White Architecture, Building and technology and works on
of the architect Antoni and urban design has (2006); Modern Times: The Association. In 1984, since 2014 applying his Planning in Melbourne urban research projects
Gaud. He has been included investigations of Untold Story of Modernism Justyna was appointed software development during which time he led relating to precinct
Senior Architect to the housing, shopping malls, in Australia (2008); and a full-time tutor of the skills to a range of research the establishment of the scaled data modelling for
Sagrada Famlia Basilica corporate towers, urban The Encyclopedia of AA and at the same time projects utilising a great Melbourne School of Design advocacy and decision
Foundation since 1979, waterfronts and the politics Australian Architecture established the practice variety of technologies and delivered an award making support in complex
pioneering distant of public space. Books (2012). In 2014, he was PCKO. She later joined including object-oriented winning building to host the built environments that are
collaboration with his include Framing Places: co-curator of Augmented the Bartlett School programming, web graduate school. Tom is facing densification and
colleagues based on-site Mediating Power in Built Australia: regenerating lost of Architecture at the services, image processing, internationally recognised climate change. Nanos
in Barcelona. Form (Routledge 1999, architecture, 1914-2014, University College London databases, user interfaces, for his pioneering work in urban design project
In December 2014 2008) Fluid City (Routledge the Australian exhibit at as a design tutor and then add-ons for industry tools, design, digital environments with Harrison and White
Mark Burry joined the 2005), Becoming Places the Venice International the University of Hong Kong modelling and simulation. and design management. called Implementing
University of Melbourne (Routledge 2009) and Architecture Biennale. as Associate Professor. He has developed custom, He is the founding Director the Rhetoric was one
as Professor of Urban Urban Design Thinking Justynas expertise high-availability network of LEaRN (the Learning of only 16 projects from
Futures at the Faculty (Bloomsbury 2016). Current Xiaoran Huang is a Ph.D. lies primarily in the of applications for routing Environments Applied Australia to be selected for
of Architecture, Building research projects include candidate at the University engagement of complex buy and sell orders Research Network), inclusion in the 2010 Venice
and Planning. In this those on urban place of Melbourne. He holds adaptive systems theory between clients and to the delivering multidisciplinary Biennale. The project
position he is developing identity, creative clusters, a BSc degree in urban in urban design and in Australian Stock Exchange research on learning and explored transit oriented
the Facultys capacity to transit-oriented urban planning. From 2013 - 2014, high-density urbanism and written digital design architecture, and was hyper-development, solar
consolidate research in design and the morphology he worked in the Bio- that she developed in her tools in diverse areas founding Director of AURIN, amenity preservation, and
urban futures by drawing of informal settlements. Urban Lab in the Bartlett doctoral thesis. She has including complex systems the Australian Urban pedestrian connectivity
together and augmenting School of Architecture; he won numerous architectural and emergent behaviour, Research Information modelling.
expertise in urban Professor Philip Goad received a master degree in competitions and her finite element analysis, Network, which has
visualisation, urban is Chair of Architecture Architecture from UCL with work has been exhibited computer vision, and developed a national digital Hannah Lewi is an
analytics, and urban and Redmond Barry distinction in 2014. He used around the world in more program optimisation. He infrastructure to support Associate Professor in
policy. He is assisting Distinguished Professor in to work in Gensler, MAD than 60 locations. Justyna developed for the popular urban research, both Architecture in the Faculty
with the University of the Faculty of Architecture, Architects and Landscape has published two books, Quokka tool, an add-on networks hosted at the of Architecture, Building and
Melbournes collective Building and Planning at the Architecture Cooperation 13 book chapters and 48 for the Grasshopper visual University of Melbourne. Planning at the University
goal of tackling three University of Melbourne. of China and has been papers. She was the leader scripting environment in the of Melbourne. Her interests
Grand Challenges He teaches architectural actively involved in many of the Linear City research Rhinoceros 3D modelling Nano Langenheim is span modern architecture
- understanding our history, theory and design. projects in Beijing, Hohhot project examining density package, which allows a landscape architect history, conservation
place and purpose, He has published widely and Shanghai. His interests and transportation in Hong the use of the Microsoft and urban designer, and heritage, and the
fostering health on Australian architecture, lie in parametric design Kong and is currently Kinect as a 3D point cloud horticulturist, and arborist. design of new media for
and wellbeing, and both recent and past, for both architectural and working on new tools for scanner. She is a practitioner, representing history and
supporting sustainability with a special focus on urban scales. His research analysing and designing researcher and lecturer in place. She is currently

the national vice-chair 2002 Alan established
of Docomomo Australia, NORD (Northern Office
and past president of of Research & Design).
SAHANZ (the Society of NORD has won numerous
Architectural Historians of awards including; Young
Australia and New Zealand). Architect of The year
She is historical advisor (YAYA) in 2006 awarded by
to the current Australian Building Design Magazine
exhibition and book on and RIBA and Scottish
The Pool for the Venice Architect of The Year 2007,
Architecture Biennale, 2016. while Shingle House for
She has recently written Living Architecture reached
extensively on the history the RIBA Manser Medal
of film and other media in shortlist for House of
the representation of urban the Year and the Primary
planning and architecture in Substation for London 2012
the twentieth century. And was included in the long-
is engaged in two major list for the RIBA Stirling
research projects on the Prize in 2012. In 2013
history of University campus NORD were also awarded
design in Australia, and an the Doolan Prize for a
exploration of citizen-led Creative Industries & Artists
digital heritage. studios co-work space in
Glasgow. Alan is also a
Elek Pafka is a Research partner in the AHRC funded
Fellow at the Faculty of Invisible College project,
Architecture, Building and which was modeled on
Planning at the University the experimental networks
of Melbourne. His research of the early scientific
focuses on the relationship revolution, and Patrick
between material density, Geddes summer schools. It
urban form and the intensity brings together academics,
of urban life, as well as policy makers, artists and
methods of mapping the local people to tackle
pulse of the city. He has issues of regeneration,
participated in research conservation and
on transit orientated education. Since arriving in
development, functional mix Melbourne in 2012 Alan has
and high-density living. been researching the life
and works of Ernest Fooks
Alan Pert was appointed (Ernst Fuchs) while working
Professor of Architecture on the restoration plans for
and Director of Melbourne Fooks modernist heritage
School of Design (MSD) house. Alan is also chair of
in October 2012. Alans the Strategy Board for the
research interests lie in Melbourne Housing Expo,
the boundary between which was set up in 2016
theory and practice. In to deliver a transformable
106
model of housing to
meet the current crisis of
affordability and lack of
diversity in housing choices
in Victoria.
Dr Stanislav Roudavski
is an architect and
Senior Lecturer in Digital
Architectural Design at the
University of Melbourne.
Stanislavs research
interests include philosophy
of ecology, technology
and design; speculative
designing; creative
computing; parametric and
generative processes in
architecture; emergence
and self-organisation;
complex geometries
and digital fabrication;
virtual and augmented
environments; theory and
practice of place-making;
and practice-based
research methodologies.
The outcomes of his
practice and research have
been disseminated through
multiple publications and
international exhibitions
including ACADIA, ISEA,
FutureEverything and
others. Before arriving
in Melbourne, Stanislav
worked on research
projects at the University of
Cambridge, had a teaching
engagement at MIT and
practised architecture in
several European countries.
Stanislav holds degrees
of Master of Architecture
/ Master of Fine Arts from
the Academy of Arts in St.
Petersburg (RU), Master
of Science in Computer-
Aided Architectural Design
from the University of
Strathclyde (UK) and Doctor
of Philosophy from the
University of Cambridge
(UK).
Dr Andrew Saniga is Senior
Lecturer in Landscape
Architecture, Planning and
Urbanism at the University
of Melbourne. He teaches
landscape architectural
history, landscape design
and the conservation
and management of
heritage landscapes. His
research is predominantly
concerned with the history
of landscape architecture
in Australia and he has
explored landscapes and
infrastructure in cities as
well as regional centres
and remote towns. His
book, Making Landscape
Architecture in Australia
(2012), profiles the people
who have shaped the
nations landscape and
forged a profession:
designers, architects,
public servants and
activists. It tells the story
of the battles fought over
the right to determine the
distinctive shapes and
forms of the landscapes
that make Australian cities.
Dr Sanigas book was
awarded the Victoria Medal
(2013) and the National
Landscape Architecture
Award for Research and
Communication (2014) from
the Australian Institute of
Landscape Architects.
Paul Walker is a professor
of architecture at the
University of Melbourne.
Walkers teaching focuses
on architecture history,
theory, and design. He was
co-editor of Fabrications,
the Journal of the
Society of Architectural
Historians, Australia & Laboratory). He has been
New Zealand 2007-2011, the recipient of numerous
and a contributing editor
to Architecture Australia
2001-2011. Walkers recent Scholarship, the AIA
research has encompassed
mid-twentieth century
architecture in Australia
& New Zealand,
contemporary museum
architecture, and colonial
museum buildings in
Australia, New Zealand
& India. He is currently
the lead investigator on
an Australian Research
Council funded project on Fellowship. His design
the work of the architect
John Andrews in Canada,
the United States, and
Australia. With Justine
Clark, Walker is co-author
of Looking for the Local:
Architecture and the
New Zealand Modern,
Victoria University Press,
Wellington, 2000; and
with Julia Gatley, Vertical
Living: the Architectural
Centre and the Remaking
of Wellington, Auckland
University Press, 2014.
Dr Marcus White is an
award winning architect
and urban designer, co-
director of Harrison and
White, lecturer, researcher,
Assistant Dean (IT) and
107
Master of Urban Design
Program Coordinator at the
Melbourne School of Design
University of Melbourne.
He holds an Honours
degree in Architecture
(RMIT University) and a
Doctorate Degree (Spatial
Information Architecture
design awards including
the RAIA Haddon Travelling
Victorian Emerging Architect
Award, the inaugural AIA
National Emerging Architect
Award for his contribution
to architectural practice,
education, design
excellence and community
involvement, an AIA
residential architecture
award and was recently
awarded the Graham Treloar
research into architectural
design, urban modelling
and new design approaches
have been widely published
and exhibited throughout
Australia, North America,
Asia and Europe.