Symposium
9 national and international speakers

The symposium brought together a multidisciplinary panel of local and international speakers, enabling discussion around Matchpoint.Melbourne to broaden.

The speakers, in their individual presentations and in the round-table discussion that followed, brought up several new facets relating to the themes and potentials highlighted by Matchpoint.Melbourne. For example, it was made clear how there is a long history of sports feeding into and being part of a reflection on Australian identity and culture. Melburnian sportspeople have always been very flexible in re-articulating the rules of a game and have often appropriated urban space. However, while the sporting participants are often very open to innovation and improvisation, the sports administration and built environment appears to be far more inflexible. Despite the trend within Sports and Recreation Victoria to try to make everything they build multi-purpose, it turned out that there are still several things such as fences, timetables or security laws that make spontaneous play in the city almost impossible. The panellists agreed that reducing barriers might be the future challenge for design. We have to adapt urban planning to our contemporary lifestyles and get greater flexibility in everything we do!

The unplanned and newly invented game ‘chairpolo’ that spontaneously happened after the symposium may provide clues as to where future initiatives might fall upon fertile ground. For this game we set no rules, and determined no particular type of stick that had to be played with; there was only a pitch with some line markings that was open for everyone to use it!