2016 National Landscape Architecture Awards: Award of Excellence for Communities

Jury comment

The Afghan Bazaar Cultural Precinct celebrates the concentration of Afghan businesses along Thomas Street in Melbourne’s Dandenong. The jury highly commends this project for its multivalent approach to community engagement and its exploration and recognition of the diverse Afghan communities in Dandenong, as well as deep collaborations between artists, landscape architects, community members, traders and local government. The project moves beyond the often literal clichés of ethnic branding and explores multicultural notions of place and space in our public streetscape environments. The stakeholder consultation revealed discontent with previous attempts at placemaking and contentious symbolic gestures. The landscape architects focused on providing a variety of means to bring people together through acknowledging specific cultural differences and spatial use patterns. The design for the Afghan Bazaar Cultural Precinct provides richly layered spaces for social interaction within diverse, specific cultural norms while accommodating shared festivals such as Nowruz (Persian New Year), reinterpretations of culture and daily life in the precinct.