Suburban Realism: Scale Ability speculates that with a renewed civic and collective vision, Melbourne’s outer-edge suburbs might rival its prized inner-city neighbourhoods. Large scale illustrations and diagnostic graphics map these suburbs’ physical manifestations through ascending scales from supermarket aisles, parking lots, connected roads and transport systems to metropolitan markers of services infrastructure, water systems and landscape.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a symposium with a panel of speakers from a range of backgrounds that speculate on the governing planning frameworks and development systems that form the fringe conditions and how these can be warped or reformulated toward alternative patterns and visions for future suburban needs.

Image: by Mark Jacques and Dean Boothroyd. Background image by Martin Rowland. Photograph of M@STUDIO’s 2016 NGV Architecture Commission, Haven’t You Always Wanted…?, by Peter Bennetts.