Wilding the Campus

Lower Pool Studio

Studio leaders: Maud Cassaignau with Heike Rahmann, Brent Greene

In partnership with Salad Dressing and RMIT Place Lab

Semester 1, 2023

The design research studio collaboration with and Salad Dressing Landscape Architects Singapore investigates Wilding Strategies within cities. It aims to test opportunities for wilding at a strategic to local scale, using the case of the RMIT Campus Innovation District.

Wild ecologies, it hypothesises, offer a more resilient mode of revegetation of cities, that contributes to counteract biodiversity decline and climate change: Contrary to prevalent single species revegetation, their complete ecologies comprising diverse plants, animals and fungi offer systemic robustness and elasticity that allows those ecologies to better react to climatic fluctuations, extremes and change.

It investigates a site centred around the RMIT Innovation precinct at three different scales how the live lab precinct could be rewilded: How could a rewilding strategy be initiated and tested through a series of built prototypes, how could these ecologies be extended to the whole Innovation district with its central Cardigan street turned into a linear park and how could this be connected to existing surrounding ecologies (parks). The prototypes will test community response to rewilding concepts, allow to scope and evaluate ecological and climatic impacts of wild ecologies at different scales, and be used as support to generate discussions around financing models alongside exhibition of urban strategies. The project is ongoing, and first urban strategies have been explored.