Welcome to the Urban Design Forum
National Urban Design Forum 2008
This year’s National Urban Design Forum will be held in Nathalia and Shepparton in rural Victoria. The theme will be "Design for Vitality in Rural Communities".
Nathalia Post Office
Recent NUDFs have been in state capital cities and major regional centres, but never in a rural town. Yet today, large shires, after having catered for their larger towns are now engaging firms to do planning and landscape designs for many of their smaller rural towns - with varying success. Part of the reason for this may be the lack of local knowledge, and the differences between larger urban and regional centres and smaller communities. Nathalia provides the quintessential environment in which to hold this discussion. (Locate it on a map or Google Earth!) Some of the questions we will address include:
- how do you change the town centre streetscape (often only one or two blocks long) in a rural town and contribute to its economic strength, its amenity and its social cohesion?
- how can planners, landscape architects and artists acknowledge existing assets and create built form solutions that compliment these?
- what will be the effects to design (ESD for example) in rural communities in a future with greenhouse effect taking hold?
- what will be the effects of planning with the possibility of “peak oil” reducing travel to larger rural centres for materials and entertainment? (even before ‘peak oil’, current prices are affecting travel patterns to regional centres).
Recent news:
- 06 June 08: UDFQ 82 (June 2008) now available online