Land Use Inequality: Melbourne's Ecological Future

Join us for a floor talk at the Land Use Inequality: Melbourne's Ecological Future exhibition.

Melbourne’s metropolitan footprint stretches over 10,000km² for just over 5 million people, making it one of the least dense major cities in the world. Driven by population growth and a housing crisis, the city continues to expand through low-rise housing and industrial development, despite thousands of empty buildings across its landscape. While cities worldwide explore ecological transitions in urban form, Melbourne persists in using land without ecological or cultural care, or regulations that consider these aspects across scales. This exhibition documents and questions these practices. It restages Land Use Inequality, the work produced by Monash Urban Lab for the 2025 Milan Triennale, representing Australia, as well as showing other research reveals the impacts of land use planning in Melbourne, advancing an ecological lens that advocates for approaches that repair, retain and reuse.

Floor talk:
Friday 24 October, 5-6pm, followed by official opening until 8pm

The exhibition is open:
Saturday 25 October, 11am-3pm
Thursday 30 October to Saturday 1 November, 11am-3pm

This exhibition and talk are part of the Festival of Urbanism 2025

Milan Triennale 'Land Use Inequality' - 2 screen didactic and 2 channel video projection
Monash Urban Lab / Baracco+Wright Architects

Connected Corridors - research, comprising 1,612 kilometres of possible bio-corridors across metropolitan Melbourne
OFFICE / MSD (Melbourne School of Design)

ReUse - database of vacant buildings in Melbourne, interactive/laptop, photographs
Mauro Baracco / Monash Architecture

1075 Houses/3225 Trees - video documenting demolition of 1075 houses and 3225 trees in the City of Boroondara
Louise Wright

Monash Urban Lab researchers Professor Nigel Bertram and Catherine Murphy, focus on the ways cities are made, the way they transform over time and how we can reset, repair and reimagine our relationship with the built environment.

Baracco+Wright Architects work over a diverse range of locations from conglomerate inner urban areas to sensitive rural and coastal environments, exploring how to make architecture that is generous, opportunistic and connected to a local physical environment as well as the non physical mixed conditions of each context.

Mauro Baracco is a practising architect and co-Director of Baracco+Wright Architects, who currently lectures at Monash Architecture. His research is focused on urban resilience through cross-programming and integration of open and built space.

MSD undertakes research on urban environmental policy, nature-based solutions and climate change for liveable and inclusive cities.

OFFICE is a not-for-profit multidisciplinary design and research practice based in Melbourne. Its projects span the intersections of built form, research, discourse and education.

Louise Wright is Practice Professor in the Monash Urban Lab and co-Director of Baracco+Wright Architects. Her research and practice investigates a reparative approach to architecture, grounded by spatial conditions and landscapes through built works, exhibitions and publications.

Banner Image: Photo: Still from video ‘East’ by Eugene Perepletchikov Land use inequality between species, Melbourne, Australia. The landscape of the endangered Southern Brown Bandicoot cleared and fragmented by continued development of low rise housing estates on the eastern edge of Melbourne, 2025.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

35-53 Emma St, 35-53 Emma Street, Collingwood, Australia