Martin Bryant

University of Technology Sydney | UTS · School of Architecture

Green infrastructure is an approach to land planning that aims to restore and manage the natural environment within human contexts. Its widespread use in post-industrial urban and peri-urban settings recognizes the need to reconcile environmental issues and regenerate social and cultural connections with the natural landscape. However, green infras...

In response to the related issues of natural habitat fragmentation and human disconnection from nature, we have been investigating an urban planning concept we call a ‘Green Mesh’, which is a fine-grained and continuous green network that could be retrofitted into the extensively built-up areas between a city’s skeletal grid of parklands and street...

Design and the Vernacular explores the intersection between vernacular architecture, local cultures, and modernity and globalization. Focussing on the vast and diverse global region of Australasia and Oceania, it examines the relevance and role of vernacular architecture to contemporary urban planning and architectural design, placing this against...

Spatial design at interior, site, city and regional scales is increasingly complex, and will continue to be so with the uncertainty of the climate crisis and the growing place-based intricacies of pluralist societies. In response to this complexity, professional design practice has pursued new ways of working. More design projects are becoming more...

Benson Tracey Tracey Benson Joachim Lee Lee Joachim Indigenous Australian songlines, river worlds and realities This section explores some of the river countries of Eastern Australia as a way of mapping and layering knowledge systems used to understand the river and to posit rivers systems and fresh water as a critical part of adapting to climate c...

In the context of anthropogenic climate change, Pacific Indigenous knowledge systems are a source of opportunity, albeit a vulnerable one. Opportunity arises because Indigenous systems embed cultural practices that confer resilience, which can facilitate knowledge of adaptation in the face of rising seas and floods. But the impact of economic globa...

There has often been a mutually beneficial relationship between cities and their rural hinterlands. The Kapiti region outside the city of Wellington in New Zealand is a prime example: it once provided Wellington's food, water and cultural diversity for both Māori and European settlers. However, productivity-driven agriculture and extensive dormitor...

Supervisors: Sam Kebbell, Martin Bryant This design-led research project addresses the rapid environmental degradation and socioeconomic decline to which many of New Zealand's low-lying swampland regions have succumbed. The research critiques existing settlement patterns, investigating innovative urban forms that work dually to reactivate the wetl...

Purpose – This paper aims to propose the concept of resilience as a way of aligning these disciplines. Theories of recovery planning and urban design theories have a common interest in providing for the health and safety of urban communities. However, the requirements of safe refuge and recovery after a disturbance, such as an earthquake, are somet...

This paper proposes a conceptual theory of resilience in urbanism and demonstrates its application through a case study. The theory's underpinnings are the attributes of resilience that have been developed in ecological sciences, but have clear parallels in urbanism. They suggest that it may be possible to enhance the resilience of a city through t...

Theories of recovery planning and urban design share a common interest in providing for the health and safety of urban communities. However, the requirements of safe refuge and recovery after a disturbance, such as an earthquake, are sometimes at odds with theories of urbanism. This paper proposes the concept of resilience and its interdependent at...

The largest earthquake of 2010 by magnitude (MW8.8), and the subject of this article, struck south-central Chile in the early hours of 27 February 2010. The earthquake was a “mega-thrust” event, involving the rupture of a section of the Nazca-South American plate boundary, where the Nazca plate dips at a shallow angle beneath the Pacific margin of...