Introduction

The Future Cities Project is an exercise in intelligent dreaming. Scientific opinion flirts with imaginative play to create a series startling visions and intriguing possible future worlds.

Each year at our Future Cities Forums in Melbourne, Australia, environmental thinkers, designers, artists, writers, illustrators, design students and primary children come together to play and dream. The project aims to encourage cross-disciplinary collaboration, and to engage the public to rediscover their own creative potential for making a sustainable future.

The results from collaborations over the last four years have included short stories, scientific opinion and articles, transcripts, illustrations, a DVD animation shown at ACMI and on the large screen at Federation Square and large-scale sculptural installations on Federation Square.

In 2005, Future Cities Project workshops were conducted as a component of the RMIT Industrial Design curriculum and as part of a series of children's design workshops during the Melbourne Fringe Festival's Fringe Ideas Program.

Participants
Participants in the project have included:

• Moss Cass (Australia's first Federal Environment Minister)
• Tricia Caswell (former Executive Director, Global Sustainability RMIT)
• Joy Murphy Wandin (Aboriginal Elder of the Wurundjeri)
• Melanie Ashton (Co-Chair of the International Youth Earth Charter Initiative)
• Peter Newton (Science Director, Built Environment, CSIRO)
• David Holmgren (Co-originator of the Permaculture concept and movement)
• Michael Krockenberger (Strategies Director, Australian Conservation Foundation)

Partners / Sponsors
Over the last three years, sponsors and project partners have included:

• Department of Sustainability and Environment
• The City Of Melbourne
• Global Sustainability @ RMIT
• Melbourne Docklands
• Victoria Harbour by Lend Lease
• Drome Design
• ACMI
• Green Innovation

To find out more about the Future Cities Project, please contact Stephen Mushin

An experimental website

We are currently working on a series of experimental database / interface designs, which allow the complex web of related ideas, stories and images produced by the project to be visually interpreted in three dimensions. Have a look at a couple of our experiments below.

Future Cities 3D Interface concept.

RMIT Industrial Design Students 2005 concept