The opening question for this research is how place-making—broadly defined as the practice of fostering community in place—might occur when the majority of people in that ‘community’ are transnational rather than local in their orientation, and temporary rather than permanent in their settlement. Our guiding contention is that public-private interactions, both in built spaces and in social relations, define the experience of place for those who are new to a locality and community, or temporary members of it, more than they do for long-term residents who are settled in their networks of belonging.

The population of the City of Melbourne is 65,000, of which 23,133, or 36 percent, are students (CoM 2007). Most of these are tertiary students, and just over half are enrolled from overseas. The study area for this project is the northern fringe of central Melbourne (Figure 1)—the location of the University of Melbourne and RMIT University. In this area, the student resident population is closer to 50 percent.

Commentators have noted for some time that there is little specific policy attention to students and their cultural experience in Melbourne, despite their increasing numbers. Students are not the only residents of these areas of course, and their housing and recreational activities need to become part of Melbourne’s history and future without swamping it entirely. Transnational and temporary residents seek new knowledge, new friends, new sources of familiarity and ways of being at home, and they must do this through the social organisations, facilities and public spaces beyond their limited, private domain. What opportunities are there for interaction between students and the longer-term residential communities? Where, beyond the university campuses, are places for interaction between international and local students? Most educators acknowledge that a great deal of learning, even the most important learning, occurs outside the classroom (Light 2001). How might the ‘university quarter’ on the northern fringe of central Melbourne unfold to contribute to this learning and in the process, make a lively and creative district of central Melbourne for the broader public?

Accordingly, we are asking what kinds of social policy, architectural and urban design frameworks can facilitate meaningful experiences of place-based community amongst a transient and diverse population. Our object is to develop a place-making strategy that centres on enhancing the public-private interactions residents have in built spaces and in their social relations. By the end of the project, in mid-2008, we plan to have in place alternative frameworks for institutional practices, new proposals for the form and design of student housing, and a fresh approach to the design of public space.

Why are we doing this research?

In 2006 there were 383,618 international students enrolled in Australia. Victoria’s share of these was 30 percent (AEI 2006). The average proportion of international to local students in Australia’s universities is one in four, by far the highest level of any nation in the OECD (Deumert et al 2005; OECD 2006). The University of Melbourne and RMIT University together have over 80,000 students, and reflect the national statistic with 25 percent being enrolled from overseas.

Both the University of Melbourne and RMIT University have as stated aims their desire to make ‘cosmopolitan citizens’ of their student body, and certainly local and international students in Melbourne have the quite extraordinary opportunity of meeting other students from over 100 countries. The formation of the bonds necessary to maintaining lasting links, however, requires more than proximity and chance encounters, although these are important, especially in the early stages. The development of deep cultural understanding requires genuine engagement in cross-cultural interaction. We wondered to what degree this is happening. Further, earlier research into the growth of high-rise apartment buildings in the Melbourne CBD revealed a large number of international students living in these apartments (Fincher and Costello 2003; 2005) many of whom were young and living alone, and we wondered about their networks and communities and the kind of support they were receiving.

A number of surveys evaluating aspects of international students’ experience in Australia demonstrate that the students rarely make friends with ‘Australians’ and ‘never get to see the inside of an Australian person’s home’. A 2005 exit survey by the University of Melbourne Planning Office says “about a third of comments were about social and cultural issues, with the majority of these about homesickness or loneliness, making friends, and socialising with Australian students. … Many [students] regretted that they had been unable to make friends with students from a different cultural background, and suggested that their respective cultural backgrounds made it ‘too difficult’, leading them to give up on the effort” (University of Melbourne 2005:22). A 2006 study of international students by the University of Melbourne’s Key Centre for Women’s Health in Society reports that low levels of ‘social connectedness’ are related to the relatively high levels of anxiety experienced by young and single and Asian students (Rosenthal et al 2006).

There are many barriers to social interaction that can easily precipitate a kind of cultural ‘clustering’, including language differences, religion, political affiliation, class, gender, even the size of a group within the ‘host’ society and the established patterns and attitudes of ‘locals’. Studies of individuals who are newcomers in cosmopolitan and global cities everywhere demonstrate the tendency to seek out the familiar (Dűrrschmidt 2000; Thomas 2005). But when people are only temporarily in a place as well, that life-long opportunity so often taken up by settler immigrants—to branch out from an initial start where one is settled with one’s familiars —is unavailable. The pattern followed by settler immigrants is not followed in the short time span that temporary transnationals are here.

We want to find out what opportunities for social interaction are available to international students living on the northern fringe of central Melbourne, where the residential concentration of students is highest. Having a particular interest in the relationship between social relations and spatial arrangements, we chose the following three aspects to focus on:

the institutional practices of the local universities, housing providers, social organisations and governments;
the design and built form of student housing in the area; and
the design of public space.

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