About
This project investigates how colonial patterns of urban design in Footscray have historically shaped and continue to shape the experiences of mobility, vulnerability, and belonging among First Nations people. By tracing the spatial legacies of dispossession and infrastructural violence, the work critically maps how extractive logics have severed Indigenous connections to place. In response, the project reimagines public space through the philosophies of Aboriginal people particularly the concepts of Songlines, Country, and Dreaming. It calls for a shift from control and surveillance to healing, gathering, and reciprocity. Using participatory design, counter mapping, and speculative spatial interventions, the project seeks to center First Nations knowledge systems in urban futures, and to make space for stories, bodies, and practices that have been systematically marginalized.
Acknowledgment
We acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the land on which this work is situated the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung and Bunurong peoples of the Eastern Kulin Nation. We pay our deepest respects to Elders past and present, and extend that respect to all First Nations people whose knowledge, culture, and resistance continue to shape these lands. This project stands on unceded sovereign land. Always was, always will be, Aboriginal land.
