WEEK 4 TUTORIAL...

During week 4's class we formed our group (Claire, Dee and myself) and started discussing ideas of MOBILE strategies, as this was the theme group I got put into. The main issues that were discusses were about air travel and transportation. Our main theory was that politicians are constantly travelling around Australia through aeroplane travel and creating harmful emissions. This is because our country is so large as well as so far away from other countries. This obviously can't be changed, but can the way they travel be changed somehow? Or can the amount of travel they do be altered?

We then asked ourselves why people in general, not just politicians travel both domestically and internationally, which can all be meshed in together:
Domestically: climate, jobs and education
Internationally: lifestyle and family.

With the growing population though comes population growth from people coming to Australia from overseas and urban sprawl within our country. So there is no real way that we can play any part in reducing the amount of people travelling and using things like aeroplanes and trains on a regular basis. The only way this will happen (bans on flight etc.) will be when we finally run out of resources in the future and we can no longer how these privileges in life.

So, it was from this discussion that we moved away from ideas of creating a mobile form of architecture that moves around Australia, or trying to create ways of more sustainable forms of travel, or even moving parts of the government away from the ACT. We decided to focus our attention on somehow ENHANCING Canberra, and trying to create a capital that really shows off our identity and culture.

This reason this idea came about was from the bad reputation Canberra currently holds. Although it is obviously successful due to parliamentary reasons, it’s not really somewhere a lot of people plan on going for a holiday.

From here we made a list of the issues in Canberra:

-        Lack of tourism

-        People only travelling in and out for parliament

-        International politicians only travelling into Australia and only seeing Canberra (first impressions)

-        Bad transportation- no trains

From this we thoughts of a few ways to enhance Canberra:

-        Underground rail network/subway

-        Light rail network

-        Cultural identity enhanced- HOW?

After this initial investigation and brainstorming session we decided to research issues on:

-        Facts about Canberra- how many people live there etc.

-        Demographics- why people go?

-        New methods of transportation- light rail proposal on the sunshine coast