Andy Fergus

🌟 Mentor Forum is back! 🌟 Urban Design Forum is excited to announce that Mentor Forum returns this June and will run until August. This year we are kicking off the program with a gathering for all mentors and mentees on Wednesday 10th June. Similar to last year, sessions are tailored to participants at similar stages in their careers. 🤝 Meet our 2026 mentors: Andy Fergus Audrey Lopez Benjamin Driver Brogan Bradfield Dan Brady Danielle Cull Erica Orfanos Fae Ballingall Kate Cavanough Larry Parsons Leanne Hodyl Orlando Harrison Tim Parker ✨ Categories for mentoring: - Urban Curious (0 years – students and those exploring urban design) - Emerging Practitioners (1–5 years) - Established Practitioners (5+ years) 🗓️ Kick-off event Wednesday 10th June. 3 x session between 11th June - 8th August 2026 Mentor Forum is open to all UDF members and is one of our most popular events — spots fill fast and are first come, first served! Make sure your membership is up to date and head to the link in our bio to read the program outline and book your place now. Let the learning (and connection) begin! 💬👥 Follow the link in our bio to register 🔗 @andy_fergus @audrey.leonore @hodyl_ @hodyl_ @urbanfold @urbis_au @cityofmelbourne @brogan_bradfield

Northern Beaches - day 2 - southern half from Collaroy to Queenscliff. Now up to 64 nsw ocean pools 😍 An incredible density of ocean pools to match the increased population density of this section of coast. Even on a drizzly morning they were in incredibly high use. Over a short 8kms stretch there are 6 pools in quick succession, with a higher concentration of lane marking and decent circa 50m length compared to other sections of coast. So much more lap swimming focused than bathing. The approach to and experience of North Curl was a highlight, a stunning worn sandstone and boardwalk path down to an unusual headland pool with a central rock feature, with incredible sea life. Given its remoteness there is very little ability for Council access or maintenance so it is much more reliant on the tidal / wave flush.

The ocean pool adventure continues - after an inactive year. Northern section of the Northern Beaches Features - seeing cleaning and pumping and chatting to council maintenance crew, chats with charming elderly polish women about why clinging to nation state borders is a disaster in multi-ethnic regions, lots of chats to confused people why a melburnian is in their local pool, and a close up Osprey fishing experience! Of course shout outs again to @nlarkin_design for inspiring the mission to visit marginal pieces of coastal edge civic infrastructure that are so crucial to their communities and our post contact cultural heritage! All the more timely given the @mala_studio and @brunsdon.studio Portsea concept!

Join Urban Design Forum Australia for a guided walking tour with City of Merri-bek and GLAS Urban 🚶‍♂️🏙️ Starting at Jewell Station (Wilson Ave), this walk explores how Brunswick along the Upfield Rail corridor has transformed since 2010 — from a light industrial area behind the Sydney Road spine into a rare example of high density, mid rise urban development in Melbourne. Clusters of development at Wilson Avenue (Jewell Station) and Breese and Ovens Streets (Anstey Station), along with opportunistic new infill public space projects by the City of Merri-bek, have turned the area into a petri dish of experimentation — revealing both positive lessons and cautionary tales for the future impacts of the Activity Centre upzoning program. Led by local resident and UDF Committee Member Andy Fergus, with Merri-bek Urban Designer Thea Roberts, two groups will spend 90 minutes walking from Jewell Station to Anstey Station, visiting recent private and public projects before finishing with a drink in Bulleke-Bek Park 🍻🌿 And yes, there will likely be impromptu chalk drawings explaining floor plans on the pavement ✏️🙂 📍 Meet up location: Jewell Station 🗓️ 18th February, Wednesday ⏰ 6:15–7:45 pm (arrive 5–10 minutes early) 🎟️ Open to members and friends (non members welcome). 50 person maximum — get in quickly! Click on the link in our bio to grab your tickets 🔗

Cityplot Buiksloterham - urban concept by @studioninedots w @delva.la After seeing this on the drawing board for many years it was incredible to visit the completed complex networks of courtyards, pedestrian lanes and streets of the Buiksloterham iteration of Cityplot. Using subdivision within a 100x100 grid structure to generate urban complexity within a city block, a simple U shape loop road provides service access and drop off while all private cars are stored in a parking hub located on the perimeter roadway. In a few hours wandering around with @sundermann and @willpriestleyaus I saw about 3 cars within the block, mostly for families packing for summer camping trips! All people arriving by car distribute from the hub on foot through the network of pedestrian streets and courtyards to their front door, creating an intimacy and interiority within an increasingly busy precinct of Amsterdam. From theory to neighbourhood - it’s pretty clear that if you actually try, you can create a new piece of city with the complexity of the old city, simulating difference in typology, scale and housing tenure, along with super effective architectural diversity. This extended to intentionally seeding a few self build row house plots within the courtyards to create some further authentic, resident led variety. A bit more mixity in use would help elevate the precinct even further, avoiding the risk of a dormitory, although it’s important to note that some businesses are carefully positioned at the canal edge and busy road, intentionally keeping a quieter domestic environment internally - which is pretty effective. Get cars out of individual buildings!! It’s such a neighbourhood killer! Precinct mobility is so critical to trip reduction and claiming back neighbourhood streets for public life 💙

Byhusene, Islands Brygge Copenhagen. One of my favourite streets of 2025 travels - a bit late to the party given it was finished in 2016 - designed by Vandkunsten. This is an essay in child friendly neighbourhood design and how to achieve low rise high density close to the city with exceptional private AND public amenity. The carpet of homes riffs off the traditional Potato Row housing of old Copenhagen (Kartoffelrækkerne) with the addition of a car free promenade to a small, child friendly beach on a shallow spur from the main harbour canal and a more urban north south spine that links bikes through the various projects that make up the neighbourhood. The degree of agency and freedom of movement of children is partly cultural but there is no car street of more than 20kms per hour inside the living zone, with only a peripheral street to the east buffered quite intentionally by slab apartments - so the risk is super low. Tight streets with delicate interfaces ensure intimacy while providing privacy to occupants, who also have private fenced yards to the rear. Streets are full of toys, chalk drawings and balls, cars are banished to the edges with parking ‘tubes’ slipped under each of the 3 level townhouse rows within the block. 47 dwellings per hectare including internal streets and open space but not perimeter. 1.3ha area. Some photos mine, others @vandkunsten

Back teaching @msdsocial for the first time in a while has been a delight so far! Hybrid Archi and UD - focused on the practice of making a new piece of city - with emphasis on the use of tactics from a fine scale to inform precinct scale moves. Define the experiential ambition of key spaces, sample successful precedent liberally, then make the plan fit - none of this top down rubbish. This workshop riffed off @studioninedots Cityplot - 100x100 urban blocks which are intentionally too big for pure perimeter and require greater sophistication and spatial layering as a result. From individual blocks the students then bring together two, then all four and adjust the strategy as their thinking scales up and each block comes into tension. 1:400 proved a perfect scale with a precut catalogue of mixed use / housing typologies. It shouldn’t be a surprise but more was learned from the tactility of this exercise than weeks of drawing ✌️ models for thinking not display! Fun!

The degree of damage caused to Tbilisi’s built fabric after independence in just a short period of time was extraordinary. Independence was followed by a decade marred by civil war, conflict with separatist regions and the dual effects of economic isolation and poor planning / building regulation. In this context - government efforts to repair districts of high significance in Tbilisi are fascinating, with a series of areas chosen for disproportionate effort for improvement to both the private and the public realm. From Sololaki to Chugureti / New Tiflis, a series of areas were identified where public money is provided to either upgrade or detonate and replace buildings, and facilitate new ventures which would make economic use of these structures. Existing owners are provided with rent during the period of works and opportunities for economic development on completion. It is hard to ascertain as an outsider how ‘fair’ these processes are - are they state sponsored gentrification? What happens to renters? Are the new hotel owners in any way connected to who once lived here? These questions are complicated in an environment where the buildings are objectively unsafe and risk the life of their occupants. What is extraordinary is the complexity of this urban operation - bringing both private and public repairs together in a coordinated way that in my home city would be impossible. This could be the highest bar in urban design to repair a district while retaining its occupants in Situ! All of this in a fiercely individualist cultural context that couldn’t be further from the strong state context such as Denmark. The jewel in the crown for me was Gudiashvilli Square (last images) in Sololaki which turns a prospective shopping mall proposal into one of the best new public spaces in the city - a successful shared zone and new buildings lining and activating its edges. Take one step behind though - and is it all just a Potemkin Village mirage? Locals described it to me as being about face and the touristic image alone. The first image just steps away from one district shows the extraordinary contrast of the repair and the decay.

A surprising highlight tagging along on @sundermann ‘s research tour of Nordhaven was this exquisite little part of the Den Røde or ‘red district’ in Aarhusgade. As part of the masterplan this district of adaptive reuse was complemented with an exquisite collection of intimate lanes and urban spaces with little green ‘rills’ at the building line and bridge thresholds. A palette was prescribed for all of the buildings to work from the base brick and render tones of the warehouse - without being a pastiche. New infill buildings complete the pattern as a transitional scale of 2-5 while much taller form is located at the edges and barely visible from within. The @entasisarkitekter Kanonhuset office is a highlight among these infill elements. This is such an incredible example of how small and intimate can and should co-exist with larger grain higher form. It brings use diversity, continuity and memory into a new type of urban space. There were things I didn’t love about the shapeless hardscape moments of public realm in Nordhaven but this little sub district is completely rad. Obsessed

In the context of Melbourne’s public housing demolition program, it is fascinating to reflect on Tbilisi’s ongoing challenges with buildings (of a very different quality) at high risk of structural failure. 10,000 buildings are categorised as high risk across a city of 1.3 million - a phenomenal challenge. People are injured and die often, two in a building collapse just a few hundred metres from my temporary home. The challenge varies depending on the building era - but many of the characteristic ‘kamikaze balcony’ constructions are not as old as you might think. Where Stalin era flats are often coveted and in good condition with higher ceilings, better materials and spatial generosity, the Brezhnev era flats were built with a 60 year life span, small spaces and limited flexibility. That brings their life expectancy to pretty much now - assuming they have been kept in good condition. Now layer over this the impact of informal additions, added after the collapse of the Soviet Union where all housing was transferred to private occupants, at the same time that there was virtually no effective building and planning control. In the period of 1991-2004 in particular, neighbourhood associations facilitated thin street scaffolds on the outside of these buildings, carrying anything from balconies to precarious slabs with brick and concrete block walls. People needed space, unemployment was high, unskilled labour was plentiful, ownership was ambiguous and the law was weak - what could go wrong. The city’s answer is private developer led renewal schemes where residents sign onto a renewal process with total demolition, their rent paid and then an allocated new flat in a steroidal tower in park replacement development. Government doesn’t have the resources to undertake repair or renewal themselves and outsource to the private sector. Residents who are rightly often suspicious of this process and lacking options reject the proposal and are then left with no solution, occupying incredibly dangerous spaces. The property is private and there is little government can do without fear of significant unrest.

Shushabandi - a pleasing word - also a glazed balcony condition typically on the inside of a courtyard which mediates between the interior space of a home and circulation spaces. Sometimes annexed as interior spaces, always delicate and timber. Shushabandi are delightful elements that have an important microclimate and mediating threshold role, but it’s their containment to the courtyard behind ordered and somewhat discordant street facades that fascinates me. After the Treaty of Georgievsk in 1783 between Georgia and Russia - ostensibly signed to protect Georgia from its southern neighbours - Tbilisi was sacked in 1795 by the Persians with the Russians nowhere in sight. Within 6 years Georgia was annexed by their supposed northern protector who proceeded to reform the city. New districts were built through the 19th C lined with ordered European facades and often by European architects. But step into the rambling courtyard beyond and the character shifts to a more delicate, ornamented hybrid of eastern and western influences with carved screens and panels and bursting with community life. Referred to dubiously as ‘Italian courtyards’ (origin unknown) - these spaces became a place of identity and resistance for Georgian identity in urban Tbilisi. Now whether held together by lead paint in a poorer district or restored in a touristic district or fancy hotel - these elements are pretty universally loved parts of Tbilisi’s urban fabric. Unfortunately with Tbilisi inexplicably removing its trams in 2006 and the car population growing three fold in a decade these courtyard spaces have become asphalted chaos zones for wild parking. Somehow the Shushabandi still look on with dignity :-)

A few weeks ago I visited Radio City Tbilisi on an incredibly hot July afternoon. I knew very little about it, but was fascinated to see the first few stages operational and get a sense of the scale and ambition of what is to come. The project is a huge and multi stage transformation of a former Soviet radio factory by Adjara Group - a developer who made their money in gambling, and have become significant figures in the hotel scene with their incredible Rooms chain, specialising in adaption and celebration of former Soviet structures. Where all the other Rooms are in highly desirable locations - with projects that target wealthy Georgians, tourists and the massive digital nomad scene - this project is more exciting for the location in the Mukhianai microdistrict developed in the late 70s and early 80s (Brezhnev era). The hospo offer is scaled down in price to target locals in the surrounding area, which is a long way from the more fashionable inner city districts, while a the workspace targets young creative uses. This initial phase is complemented by padel courts, a verdant courtyard and beyond this a huge event come techno venue. This is clearly not just for the urban elite. While the building sits in a rubble and gravel apron from which you can barely find the entry, the early works are exquisite, peeling back layers of stone facade to reveal freshly overpainted slag concrete, new timber windows and galvanised detailing with huge new courtyards sliced through the deep factory floorplate to bring light and amenity space to the office function. Heavy, masculine and highly textural but with delicate moments and a sense of joy where it matters at entry doors and interior spaces. Time will tell how the huge spaces evolve and what it will mean for Mukhiani where unemployment is high and wages are low. But in a city that seems to be a Wild West for rampant low quality glass towers on its fringe this project to salvage a less loved layer of history as a new creative hub at the fringe is pretty damn inspiring 💚 Thanks @alexiskalagas for the tip ✌️