Changescaping, a project by Linda Carroli, engages one of the the Placing Project’s overall objectives to draw out emerging and changing ideas about urban environments and futures with a particular emphasis on the role artists, designers, planners, architects and other urbanists can play as changemakers and in creating alternative futures. In part, that change is about how practice itself is understood. The publication seeks to profile and foreground work happening in the Australian context, as it can seem that Australians aren’t prominently featured in the discussions about DIY urbanism, urban interventions and the like. Changescaping also aims to think beyond categories like ‘DIY urbanism’ and ‘urban intervention’ as a way of potentiating and tracing new trajectories for planning, design and art in the urban environment, as well as cutting across typologies and disciplines.

Placing | writing place | place writing

A paper presented at the Writing Architecture Symposium: a symposium on Innovation in the Textual and Visual Critique of Buildings. 22 – 23 July 2010, Queensland Art Gallery

From an Outer Suburban Life

An essay and Diffusion book commissioned by Proboscis as part of the Transformations, 2009. Several years ago, Linda Carroli relocated to the outer northern suburbs of Brisbane, Australia. Her local area bears all the hallmarks of outer suburban development and in this spatial complex she is considering how this pattern shapes us as individuals and shapes our communities. With reference to notions of ‘dwelling’ (Heidegger), ‘redirective practice’ (Fry) and ‘synoikismos’ (Ingersoll), the eBook considers local encounters, responding in small ways, in thought and act, that disrupt – and ultimately transform – the pattern of suburban life. If we transform the suburbs and our way of thinking about them, can we transform ourselves and bring new futures into the realm of possibility? Can community and gathering displace consumerism and retreat? This work reflects on such transformative potential through experience and through relationships between self, community and place.