Sustaining collaborations : creative research and cross-cultural engagement

Increasingly, the linear, instrumentalist and culturally hegemonic character of dominant sustainability discourse is under critique, with the term accruing new or expanded associations that challenge the its future-oriented, temporally stable, and ontologically determinate history. In Australia, these shifts take in a recognition that indigenous Australian understandings of and relationships with the environment profoundly challenge the generic claims of sustainability applied to both theory and practice. But how do these radically different and still marginal understandings actually enter into the process of producing sustainable designs on the world? This paper will report on the beginnings of a collaborative project that seeks to advance a proposal for an Aboriginal cultural precinct in the heart of Melbourne. This project's intention is to develop innovative methods for consultation and participation through collaborative creative research between Aboriginal artists and academic architects. The paper will discuss this method as a strategy for moving beyond traditional modes of cross-cultural engagement in the design and construction of sustainable cultural precincts.