January 14, 2021
Press ReleasesDesigning futures for the Great Ocean Road
Teams of our post-graduates from Victorian universities to work together to develop future models for our premier tourist attraction.
Multi-university research hits
the Great Ocean Road in 2021.
The Great Ocean Road (GOR) is one of the world’s great ocean drives. The Victorian Minister for Energy, Environment and Climate Change has called it: “A living memorial. A tourism draw-card. A national treasure.”
In 2018-19 it attracted more tourists per year than Uluru and the Great Barrier Reef combined.
The future of the road, and its diverse ecosystems, landscapes, communities, and businesses, is under threat. Visitation has often been beyond capacity. Evidence of the deterioration of ‘the road’ has been impossible to ignore.
Earlier this year, determined to preserve all the great characteristics of the GOR, the Victorian government designated approximately 240 kilometres of the road as a single destination. On the first of December this year, responsibility for planning and management of this unified destination passed to a new Great Ocean Road Coast and Parks Authority (GORCAPA).
GORCAPA has a huge task ahead of it. Its work is of immense importance to Victorians and Australia. It needs creative thinking, new and innovative concepts for balancing access and equity of visitation, and new approaches to the preservation of natural systems
In 2021-22, a large, coordinated project initiated with four of the country’s top university design schools, aims to assist GORCAPA with the strategic challenges it faces.
We see this as the perfect time for a major injection of research and creative problem-solving. It will likely involve hundreds of participants.
Their task: to come up with new visions, new models for ‘regenerative tourism’ and ‘destination resilience’ for the GOR.
Challenges for the GOR and for GORCAPA are significant. As with tourism destinations everywhere, Victoria has to grapple with the many conflicts of visitation.
Around the world, badly managed tourism has shown just how quickly destinations can be loved to death. Local communities (like the 24,000 people who live and work along the GOR) can suffer first from visitor pressures and then from a drop off in tourist numbers putting hospitality investments in in jeopardy.
The universities, initially Melbourne, Monash, RMIT and Swinburne will work over 2021/22. PSC, Melbourne’s internationally acclaimed photography school will document the project. It is anticipated that other universities and institutes will join the program.
The Victorian government refers to tourism as part of ‘the visitor economy’, acknowledging the significant value of places that people love to visit. That is only true until they are no longer attractive!
Much of the GOR is precious and precarious; the pressures of nature are significant – even more so because of climate change. The GOR has to deal with the impact of people, rising sea levels, changing rainfall, heat waves and fire. Climate vulnerabilities often grow just as the visitor season peaks. In times of crisis, this wonderful coast-hugging road can become a narrow, crowded, precarious and dangerous escape route.
All work will be publicly accessible as it progresses, with presentations and exhibitions both on-line and in the towns of the GOR. It is planned (Covid permitting) that some design-research studios will be set up to operate from public venues along the road. GORAPA knows that community consultation and input must be at the core of its work. ‘Designing futures for the GOR’ will aim for maximum community involvement.
If Victoria can get the GOR tourism model right, it could be of huge international significance, a new ‘export’: Australian intellectual property addressing an area of growing global demand.
Additional statements for quotation:
Professor Chris Ryan
Project Coordinator, University of Melbourne, Eco-Acupuncture International
Professor Jane Burry
Dean, School of Design, Swinburne University of Technology
Professor Alan Pert
Director, Melbourne School of Design, University of Melbourne
Catherine Murphy & Ross Brewin
Department of Architecture, Monash University
Professor Michael Trudgeon
RMIT University
Professor Chris Ryan
Project Coordinator, University of Melbourne, Eco-Acupuncture International
“Melbourne has led the world in directing post-graduate design research and education to the exploration of emerging societal challenges. The international design-research and innovation program, Eco-Acupuncture, (www.ecoacupuncture.com) grew from the Victorian Eco-Innovation Lab (www.eco innovationlab.com), an earlier Victorian state funded program involving the four universities initiating this project.
Cities and communities around Australia have benefited from the creative involvement of university design-research programs, exploring and trialing solutions for future environmental challenges. We have taken that work to other countries with great success. Now, that wealth of knowledge will be focused back home, on the GOR.
Planning for the future of the road must avoid the damaging impacts of ‘extractive tourism’. That is surely one of the great creative challenges for our post-Covid recovery. This is something our future design and planning professionals must be equipped to address.”
Professor Ryan is available on: +61418374332
Professor Jane Burry
Dean, School of Design, Swinburne University of Technology
“The Great Ocean Road is an Australian icon and magnet for national and global tourism. It is a fragile and complex context in which to balance threatened ecosystems, regional communities, recreation and tourism. Major design challenges, such as this, need to bring together diverse input, drawing on urban, landscape, ecological and architectural analytics and design, while also needing service, wayfinding, web design and user experience design. It is a context that calls for the fresh thinking that higher degree university students can deliver. Education programs across university and discipline lines are pleased to unite under the “Eco-Acupuncture” banner in 2021 to focus their creative collaborative skills and energy on the sustainable future of the Great Ocean Road.”
Professor Jane Burry is available on: +61414757102
Professor Alan Pert
Director, Melbourne School of Design, University of Melbourne
“Uncertainty and upheaval appears to be our new ‘normal’ and the concept of rupture is being widely talked about politically, economically, scientifically and socially. But what does it all mean for Great Ocean Road? Climate change, last summer’s bushfires, coastal erosion, sea-level rise and the global pandemic have all magnified the deficiencies of how we manage our lives, and our environment and there is no question that we have come to a turning point in our relationship with the physical and the natural world. The concept of “future shock”, which Alvin and Heidi Toffler presented to us in 1970, “is the dizzying disorientation brought on by the premature arrival of the future”. Designing futures for the Great Ocean Road is a project about the process of change, and how we adapt to it. The lockdown has forced everyone into a kind of retreat, a moment for reflection, a global pause, and before we press play again we need to take stock and think about how we might create a better future.”
Professor Alan Pert is available on: +614181001882
Catherine Murphy & Ross Brewin
Department of Architecture, Monash University
“This multi-University series of studios will bring to bear the concentrated efforts of more than a hundred students, of which 40 will be Monash University post-graduate students, in exploring the complexities facing this distinctive and sensitive region. Monash urban planning and design and architecture students will produce imaginative and fresh ideas that connect inter-related issues and tackle the uncertainties facing the string of coastal settlements along the Great Ocean Road in the context of the Otways ecological system. Design and planning scenarios will consider how to adapt towns to secure their long-term survival and make them robust in response to the pressures of tourism and climate change.”
Catherine Murphy is available on: +61409 134 309
Ross Brewin is available on +61400 124 551
Professor Michael Trudgeon
RMIT University
“This project is an extraordinary opportunity to bring together the research capabilities of our leading design universities. We will integrate this approach with an unlocking of the accumulated knowledges of the many local communities along the Great Ocean Road. What we learn and test at those sites has the potential to transform our collective understanding about how to both enjoy and preserve this remarkable and unique destination for our collective future.”
Prof Trudgeon is available on: +61409504090