PRS Australia PhD Examination - Paul Van Herk (School of Architecture and Urban Design - RMIT University)

Urban Myths: Counterfactuals for Articulating Political Dissonance

This PhD outlines and reveals a practice of urban design projects that work as unsolicited provocations to antagonise the orthodox language, patterns and ideologies of urban development. This practice demonstrates the adaptation of techniques from speculative architecture, journalism, creative writing, public art, exhibition design; and their application in, and as, urban design. The practice demonstrates linkages between these fields using generative writing and narrative construction, drawn towards the geopolitical and mass-cultural dimensions of urban design practice. 

The PhD defines four modes of design as an analytical and generative structure for the practice: Extracontextual, Taste Baiting, Iconochasms and Multiplicities. Each of these modes is demonstrated to have its own utility and disposition within projects, acting alongside and in interaction with each other. These four modes were identified and defined through iterative reflection on projects completed before and during the PhD. These include writing projects by me and with others, and public works completed as co-director of practice EXCX. The primary project used to demonstrate the practice is the 2024 urban research exhibition What Killed Fishermans Bend?. 

The practice makes a multifaceted contribution to the field of urban design. It is investigative, critical and political. It is discursively-driven, creating rhetorical spaces and imagery to provoke public engagement. It uses speculative design tools to identify structural tendencies and sites of agency in the complexities and vagaries of urban development.