Suburban retail arcades, once vibrant centres of everyday life, now sit abandoned or fading on Sydney's main streets. These narrow passages, lined with shops, cafés, and small businesses, were often designed with ambition—arches, glass ceilings, statues, neon lights, and equally aspirational names like paradises and palaces. In their heyday, they were vibrant hubs – theatres of everyday life.
This studio revisits these forgotten places, drawing inspiration from Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project and its exploration of consumer culture, memory, and urban space. The aim is to uncover the architectural and social meaning embedded in suburban arcades and to ask how they might be reimagined for contemporary communities.
Rather than erasing the past, the task is to retain fragments of the arcade's physical or cultural legacy while weaving in new uses. Proposals will transform these spaces into hybrid cultural and commercial centres, designed to reflect and serve the surrounding diaspora. The work calls for a critical investigation of suburban life, considering how arcades can be re-embedded into main streets as civic anchors.
By looking beyond gentrification, the project explores how architecture can support inclusivity, memory, and belonging, giving renewed life to these overlooked urban relics.
With thanks to the following contributors and critics:
Campbell Drake, UTS, Urtzi Grau, UTS, Neena Mand, ADP, Rizal Muslimin, ADP, Alicia Pozniak, NSW Department of Planning, Housing and Infrastructure
