What could housing look like at the urban fringe? Sub-topia is calling for your ideas
We’re proud to be a sponsor of Sub-topia: A clustered vision for living at the urban fringe, a new Ideas Competition for students and early-career practitioners that asks how greenfield development in Victoria could be done differently.
Convened by the Urban Design Forum with the Robin Boyd Foundation, Australian Institute of Landscape Architects (AILA) Victoria, VicHealth, Council Alliance for a Sustainable Built Environment (CASBE), National Growth Areas Alliance (NGAA) and The Municipal Association of Victoria (MAV), the competition centres on a regional town-edge site west of Melbourne, on Wadawurrung Country. The brief invites multidisciplinary teams to propose neighbourhood-scale alternatives to the default subdivision model – designs that support ecological repair, health and wellbeing, and community life at the urban fringe.
The initiative asks questions like: What does housing look like when Country is treated as a design driver, not a constraint? How do you build diversity of typology into a greenfield site from the outset? What changes when the unit of design is a cluster, a neighbourhood, a piece of landscape – rather than a single lot?
These are the kinds of questions we engage with across our own work, in housing, masterplanning and advisory. Sponsoring Sub-topia is a way of putting the same thinking into the hands of the next generation of practitioners and seeing where they take it.
With a prize pool of $15,000, the competition launches on Sunday 24 May at Robin Boyd’s Walsh Street house as part of Melbourne Design Week.
Registrations close 8 June, and submissions are due 12 July 2026.