Student podcast – urban positions and practices – Playgrounds

This Must Be The Place Podcast

Here’s a bit of a cheat update of the This Must Be The Place podcast: 4 episodes of student work from a course I recently coordinated for Monash Masters of Urban Planning and Design and Masters of Architecture students. A new course Called Urban Positions and Practices, this was essentially urban history and theory, focused on critically interpreting the role of professionals like architects and planners. I structured it around a series of 12 ‘things’: fence, pipe, pig, garden, house, plan, pub, tower, street, person, car park and pylon. One assessment task was group story telling– AKA critical audio, or basically, podcasting. In groups of 3-4, students researched, recorded, and edited a roughly 15-minute audio story on the theme of “the past is present” – connecting planning history to a contemporary urban feature. Students picked their own topics and the podcasts had to have 3 parts –scripted part, conversational, and something else. This was a research task but also about learning an unfamiliar medium. I’m sharing a few partly to draw attention to our students and the Monash UPD course. Also, to illustrate podcasting as a learning tool. And hopefully they’re just interesting. I’ve picked 4 student podcasts to share – the topics are ‘dogs’, ‘park benches’, ‘playgrounds’ and ‘billboards’. This third one is ‘Playgrounds’ with Zara, Elicia, Julian and Nick. Join them in exploring the historical links between the arrival of cars and the emergence of the playground movement. Small proviso here – as a parent who takes a young child to playgrounds that are very well-used, I don’t share the students’ assessment as playgrounds as increasingly obsolete. I do agree children’s independent mobility has fundamentally changed over the century or so since playgrounds first appeared.