Urban Myths is a PhD by practice in the field of urban design. Constituting four years of projects, design research, writing and peer review; it culminated in a published dissertation and a public examination at RMIT Design Hub Gallery in June 2025. Supervisors were Associate Professor John Doyle (RMIT) and Professor Mark Jaques (RMIT). Examiners were Associate Professor Rory Hyde (UniMelb) and Dr Alex Brown (Monash).
Copies can be accessed via RMIT Library Research Repository.
Abstract:
This PhD outlines and reveals a practice of urban design projects that work as unsolicited provocations to antagonise the orthodox language, patterns and ideologies of urban development. This practice demonstrates the adaptation of techniques from speculative architecture, journalism, creative writing, public art, exhibition design; and their application in, and as, urban design. The practice demonstrates linkages between these fields using generative writing and narrative construction, drawn towards the geopolitical and mass-cultural dimensions of urban design practice.
The PhD defines four modes of design as an analytical and generative structure for the practice: Extracontextual, Taste Baiting, Iconochasms and Multiplicities. Each of these modes is demonstrated to have its own utility and disposition within projects, acting alongside and in interaction with each other.
The practice makes a multifaceted contribution to the field of urban design. It is investigative, critical and political. It is discursively-driven, creating rhetorical spaces and imagery to provoke public engagement. It uses speculative design tools to identify structural tendencies and sites of agency in the complexities and vagaries of urban development.
PAUL VAN HERK 