A new exhibition being organised at the RMIT Design Hub in Melbourne aims to highlight the need for space-efficient design solutions to house the growing urban population in cities across Australia.

By 2050, it is estimated that 70 per cent of the world’s population will be urban with major Australian cities expected to nearly double in size. Ensuring sufficient and equitable access to housing for this segment is a major challenge for today’s creative thinkers who must find space for an ever-growing population within a finite and decaying urban fabric.

To open on Friday 29 July at the RMIT Design Hub, the exhibition, Occupied will bring together local and international practitioners and showcase proposals for housing more with less, retrofitting, adapting and repurposing existing structures and environments. Ranging from the pragmatic to the utopian, the research-driven to the purely speculative, Occupied anticipates the critical design approaches, ideas and strategies of the imminent future.

Supershared, a shared loft-like space projecting out and into Design Hub’s Project Room 1 gallery space will be open for students to book and occupy throughout the duration of the exhibition. Supershared is created by Jacqui Alexander and Sibling.

Occupied exhibitors include: 5th Studio, all(zone), Ash Keating, Atlanta Eke, Baracco + Wright Architects, Black Kosloff Knott Architects Architects and Monash Arts Projects (MAP), Breathe Architecture, Callum Morton and Toby Reed, Fake Industries Architectural Agonism & MAIO, Flores Prats Architects, Jack Self, Lacaton & Vassal and Frédéric Druot Architecture, Liam Young, Lyons Architecture, Harrison and White, Maddison Architects, Minifie van Schaik Architects, NMBW Architecture Studio, MAPA, Office for Political Innovation, otherothers, Spacemarket, Stefano Boeri Studio with The BlinkFish, TOMA!, Vokes and Peters. 

Occupied is curated by Grace Mortlock, David Neustein and Fleur Watson. Exhibition design is by otherothers and graphic design by Sean Hogan, Trampoline. The event is supported by BOOM Studios.

Occupied will be held from Friday 29 July until Saturday 24 September at the RMIT Design Hub, Project Rooms 1, 2 and 3, Corner Victoria and Swanston Streets, Carlton, 3053.