Design Futures Group at Melbourne School of Design, Metropolis of Melbourne Map: Diagram of Population Density. Installation view at Palazzo Mora, 2016.

X-Ray the City: Melbourne 1946 / 2016 / 2046
In 1946, the Melbourne-based architect Ernest Fooks pioneered the topic of urban density in his book X-RAY THE CITY. Every act of urban planning, he declared, must be accompanied by the “principle of integration”: the synthesis of four urban functions – living, working, recreation, and distribution. Integrated urban research could only be achieved by a science of urban planning that demanded the input of data. Fooks proposed two new research instruments: the Distance Grid and the Density Diagram. These graphic representations mapped his integrated urban functions and calibrated the social needs of the metropolitan population. He wrote, “visual order is always the expression of the social order which it serves. It is the human scale, which has to be the guiding principle. Human beings, their collective needs, their grouping, their distribution and redistribution, become the primary concern of urban planning”. Seventy years after X-RAY THE CITY first appeared, the Design Futures Group at Melbourne School of Design will reimagine the Distance Grid and the Density Diagram for the Melbourne of 2016 and the speculative future Melbourne of 2046. Fooks had suggested that some elements of the city could never be measured; some issues could not be reduced to a table of figures. What is the immeasurable data missing from X-Ray the City, how can it be graphically represented, and why is it critical to the reimagining of the Melbourne metropolis? Our project investigates and presents a new X-Ray and the missing “immeasurable data”.