Jury comment
The Afghan Bazaar Cultural Precinct celebrates the concentration of Afghan businesses along Thomas Street in Melbourne’s Dandenong. The jury highly commends this project for its multivalent approach to community engagement and its exploration and recognition of the diverse Afghan communities in Dandenong, as well as deep collaborations between artists, landscape architects, community members, traders and local government. The project moves beyond the often literal clichés of ethnic branding and explores multicultural notions of place and space in our public streetscape environments. The stakeholder consultation revealed discontent with previous attempts at placemaking and contentious symbolic gestures. The landscape architects focused on providing a variety of means to bring people together through acknowledging specific cultural differences and spatial use patterns. The design for the Afghan Bazaar Cultural Precinct provides richly layered spaces for social interaction within diverse, specific cultural norms while accommodating shared festivals such as Nowruz (Persian New Year), reinterpretations of culture and daily life in the precinct.
Credits
- Project
- Afghan Bazaar Cultural Precinct
- Landscape architect
- Hassell
Australia
- Project Team
- Cassandra Chilton, Craig Guthrie, Ben Kronenberg, Jim Sinatra, Phin Murphy
- Community Engagement and Brief Development
- Sinatra Murphy
Melbourne, Vic, Australia
- Consultants
-
Civil engineer
Aurecon
Collaborating artist Aslam Akram
Construction 2Construct, Big Fish Workshop
Lighting & electrical WSP Parsons Brinkerhoff
- Site Details
-
Location
Dandenong,
Melbourne,
Vic,
Australia
Site type Urban
- Project Details
-
Completion date
2014
Design, documentation 3 months
Construction 24 months
Category Landscape / urban
Type Public / civic
- Client
-
Client name
City of Greater Dandenong and Office of Multicultural Affairs and Citizenship
Source
Award
Published online: 27 Oct 2016
Words:
National Landscape Architecture Awards Jury 2016
Images:
Andrew Lloyd,
Hilton Stone
Issue
Landscape Architecture Australia, November 2016