Living Closer Together: The Future of ‘Home’ in Post Pandemic Melbourne

Melbourne is predicted to overtake Sydney as our country’s biggest city in just under a decade, with a population growth of almost half a million people in four years the largest of any Australian city. This rapid growth poses a unique challenge to those designing housing solutions: how do we manage living closer together in a way that is sustainable, innovative, and affordable? 

This is a question that Andy Fergus, Katherine Sundermann, Alexis Kalagas, and Lisa Gerstman set out to answer in their exhibition Home Made: Reinventing How We Live In Melbourne. A retrospective of the last ten years in Melbourne housing innovation, Home Made explored what community-centred, sustainable models of housing looks like now, and in years to come.

The exhibition presented a survey of housing projects both built and unbuilt, which reflect new approaches to finance, design, development, and shared living, including by Nightingale Housing, Assemble, Property Collectives, Tripple, and the Third Way. Together, these diverse models suggest a more optimistic and inclusive vision of how housing can shape our city.