Crown Casino and the Problem of Private Part 2 Project 2015 Amelyn Ng University of Melbourne | Australia This thesis critically re-assesses the urban conditions of laissez-faire privatisation, and addresses our inherent need for agency in today’s society. Southbank’s increasingly-passive civic life and its associated consumer behaviours are prevailing socio-economic concerns; this cultural decline is exacerbated by mega-developments such as the Crown Casino. This project aims to disarm the effects of privatisation- using unregulated market forces of a very different nature. A series of operable armatures have been invented for the propagation of bottom-up opportunism and self-governance across the Casino complex. Each intervention responds to the two drivers of civic life currently endangered by Crown’s influence: (1) civic monuments that formalise collective meaning, and (2) services and utilities that support everyday activity. The cross-programming of these entities reveals a new architectural ‘order’ that not only negotiates the mounting tensions between public and private, but diverts them into modes of productivity. From a ferry terminal of operable vaults, to an open-source marketplace colonnade, to massive voids that puncture the deepest parts of the Casino with rentable urban equipment, these 'infrastructural monuments’ collectively seek to dismantle Crown’s territorial stronghold, reinstate urban authenticity, and revive the role of the citizen within what may be the City's most deceptive public-private sphere. Tutor(s)