Studio A: led by IS.Ar Lisa Iwamoto & Craig Scott Architecture from the US

Urban Islands
generating tactics of engagement
1-12 August 2006, Cockatoo Island, Sydney Harbour

Urban Islands 2006

Shifting economies leave post industrial cities with iconic and dormant sites that are both physically and culturally vacant. These urban islands present new challenges and opportunities for the cities they inhabit. Cross disciplinary creativity, experimental tactics and broad based participation are needed to inject these places with renewed life. The Urban Islands Project seeks strategies of engagement that respond to the unique qualities of each site whilst imbuing them with the ideas and desires of the city.

Cockatoo Island, Sydney, is the site for the inaugural Urban Islands Project, which brings international and local guests to contribute to a series of studios, workshops, symposia and discussions.

Cockatoo Island at its peak during WWII.

About the Project

The Urban Islands Project aims to establish an innovative framework to encourage dialogue, experimentation and participation in the reprogramming of valuable post-industrial sites within the city.

The project recognises that in the era of continuing urbanisation the challenge of inner-city urban regeneration is one faced by many post-industrial and transitioning cities around the world. Its aim is to provide linkages and platforms to transform such challenges into opportunity. Indeed, these vast iconic sites provide the ideal skeleton upon which to build a new multi-faceted program for cultural inhabitation.

While initiating projects and discussions on particular sites within specific cities, the Urban Islands Project also aims to develop an ongoing cross-disciplinary dialogue with parallel projects and cities around the world. We welcome all forms of communication and collaboration with regards to this topic and related issues.

Through enhancement of awareness and participation in these sites we believe that they can play an important role in deepening cultural growth and in turn, economic vitality, for the city, advancing it towards a greater participation in the global cultural economy. The city, after all, is the pre-eminent place for the production of culture and ideas.

Related projects

Altogether Elsewhere was formed to take up the opportunity for imaginative engagement with an extraordinary site of Cockatoo Island, at a time of change and transformation. The aim is that AE will create a world class precinct at Cockatoo Island for artistic/cultural events, drawing on the skills and experiences of its consortium members. See the project's Catalogue of Ideas here.

Urban Typhoon (June 26-29, 2006) is a workshop about Shimokitazawa, one of the coolest neighborhoods of Tokyo, Japan. It is currently being threatened by a big development plan - to build a 26 meter wide road right through the neighborhood, cutting through vibrant historical streets (not destroyed during WW2). The workshop produced alternatives to the government’s plan as well as a multimedia testimony to the unique spirit of Shimokitazawa. The workshop itself was a joyous and participatory takeover of the city.
http://www.urbantyphoon.com

TADA Center / International Workshop on Asian Reality AR2005 (December 17-21, 2005) Just 1km from the center of the city of Taichung, Taiwan, is the Old Taichung Brewery, an abandoned light industrial site which the Taiwanese Government has set aside to be the new Taiwan Art, Design and Architecture Center (TADA Center). An international workshop with 150 participants and 20 international guests worked intensively within the site to reprogram the site as a cultural space amidst political and economic uncertainty in Taiwan. Currently the Taiwan Cultural Council is supporting a wide range of international guest lectures, exhibitions and activities on the TADA site.
http://arch.thu.edu.tw/AR2005/wor_eng_theme.htm