Activating City North: Student Visions Shaping a Social Innovation Precinct
On Tuesday 16 September, RMIT students presented their bold ideas for Continuums, Data, Being: City North — a project led by Patrick Macasaet as part of the City North Activation Challenge 2025. The work showcases imaginative proposals that reimagine City North as a hub of social innovation, inclusion, and collaboration. The event highlighted how students are shaping not only the future of the precinct but also contributing to RMIT’s wider role in Melbourne’s urban landscape.
Continuums, Data, Being: City North explores how data, architecture, and human experience intersect to shape the precinct’s future. By examining City North as a continuum — where speculation and pragmatism, fiction and reality overlap — the project reframes design as a process of being, connecting students and community in new and transformative ways.
Student Projects
Hunter Gatherer
Located in the Cardigan Quarter, this project rethinks crisis accommodation as more than just temporary shelter. It envisions dignified housing that fosters belonging, safety, and community, with shared spaces encouraging interaction between residents, students, and workers—transforming City North into a socially conscious extension of the city.
City North Re-Imagined
Positioned in the Swanston Quarter, this project critiques conventional housing models by centring dignity, safety, and long-term wellbeing. Rather than simply offering shelter, it proposes a living environment that empowers people and creates opportunities for mutual learning, social exchange, and city-wide impact.
TEP: The Expandable Puzzle
This project introduces adaptable modular building blocks that can grow and change with community needs. Rejecting rigid, permanent structures, it instead focuses on flexibility, sustainability, and the re-use of materials. The result is resilient, people-centred spaces that adapt as the city evolves, supporting collaboration and quality of life.
The Art of Breaking Patterns
Exploring how architecture can disrupt everyday habits, this proposal transforms routine spaces into places of imagination and engagement. By challenging patterns of movement and interaction, it positions City North as a catalyst for creative thinking and cultural expression.
Pop Food Journey
In the Carlton Quarter, this project addresses food insecurity by reimagining food production as both spectacle and critique. Structured through the six Wurundjeri seasons, it integrates Indigenous knowledge with sustainable practices such as hydroponics. Visitors journey through immersive environments before arriving at a food court where food becomes a medium for cultural exchange.
Supra-City North
Engaging with Swanston Quarter, this project critiques architecture’s entanglement with economic systems that often neglect communities. Instead, it proposes a new architectural condition—messy, plural, and inclusive—where routines of sports, faith, welfare, and culture overlap. Supra-City North resists neutrality, aiming to express people rather than nation, and reframes architecture as a stage for community life.
Guiding the project
The project is guided by Patrick Macasaet, Lecturer and PhD candidate in RMIT Architecture, and co-founder of SUPERSCALE—a research and ideas-led experimental architecture studio working at the intersection of speculation and pragmatism, fiction and reality.
As Patrick reflects:
“City North gives us the chance to activate space in ways that go beyond architecture. It’s about creating a precinct where students, community, and ideas come together to imagine new futures for Melbourne.”
Together, these visionary proposals reflect the creativity and commitment of RMIT students to social innovation, resilience, and inclusivity. They not only advance RMIT’s ambition for the City North Social Innovation Precinct but also demonstrate how the district can serve as a living laboratory for ideas that benefit the whole of Melbourne.
You can also discover some of these works in person at the upcoming City North Shared Futures Festival on 4–5 October, in the heart of the City North Social Innovation Precinct.
The Activation Challenge: Impact in Action
The RMIT City North Activation Challenge is already leaving its mark. In 2024, the first cohort of students reimagined the future of City North through bold ideas that blended social innovation, design, and community impact.
Their work has been captured in the 2024 Compendium — a showcase of creativity and collaboration that highlights how the Challenge is shaping RMIT’s Social Innovation Precinct and contributing to the transformation of the wider City North district.
Explore the 2024 Compendium and see how student-led visions are already influencing the way we think about the future of Melbourne.
