Resource+3


 * Resource 3- Designing and Mapping**

Mapping, planning and designing are integral parts of designing a city/town. The visual layout of a city is reliant on varying factors and is important for students to reflect on when creating their own layout for their town. This resource focuses on Canberra as a planned city. It includes an up to date map of the city centre, as well as a poster that shows Walter Burley Griffins original winning design for the city.



These are just representations of the resources, within the classroom it would be ideal to have hard copies that students can interact with. Posters of the cities design can be obtained for free from the National Capital Exhibition in Canberra. The poster has few written descriptions of elements of the design. The main focus for the poster is the visual layout of the city; the shapes and lines chosen. The modern map of the City is a simplified map that does not include a legend or grid but it does include locations for places of interest. This allows for students to explore on their own, the different features of the map and how they are represented, such as the depiction of two different types of roads and the labeling of suburbs.

As students are designing their towns from scratch, Canberra was a better example than Sydney. Similar to what the students' are doing but on a larger scale, the layout and design for Canberra was considered in depth before any building was done, unlike Sydney that slowly developed over time, building upon already existing paths and settlements. The comparison of the two resources shows the similarities of the plan and the final product, emphasizing the importance of planning in order to achieve a goal.

This resource is useful in both the capacity to develop students visual literacy and also in linking with the units outcomes of exploring built and natural environments in order to aid the development of their own town. Maps can aid student understanding of how visual representations are made up of choices and although they are a factual text, they are still expressing a viewpoint (Winch, Johnston, March, Ljungdahl and Holliday, 2006, p0.258-259). Firstly maps show the importance of the placement allowing for the questioning of what has been placed where and why, looking at the decisions of the planning of the town. Secondly a map shows its purpose through what is included in the map and what is left out. This map has a large focus on places of interest such as the National Gallery and the Australian war Memorial. Students can explore the purpose of this map as a tourist information map and the purpose it serves, whilst at the same time exploring that the planning of this city involved positioning these places of interest all in the city centre.

This resource will aid students in the development of their multimodel text of their own town through allowing them to explore layout and visual aesthetics in a less time consuming and technical reliant form, before moving onto the actual construction of their town.

Reference:
 * Winch, G., johnston, R., March, P., Ljungdahl,L., & Holliday, M. (2006). Literacy: reading, writing and children’s literature. New York: Oxford University Press.

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