Occupying a site is not the same as belonging to it

Why do developments get opposed or rejected? Often, a project draws opposition because it doesn’t feel like it belongs where it’s been put. Perhaps the design itself sits awkwardly against its surroundings, or perhaps the people living around it feel its history has been ignored. Both are versions of the same failure: a project that hasn’t engaged honestly with what a site already is. Recently at a Gray Puksand panel during Melbourne Design Week, I was asked why a deeper understanding of a site’s history produces stronger design outcomes. My answer was about the second of those failures: memory.

Brad Buller, PhD speaking at the Melbourne Design Week event “Authentic Stories in Architecture: The Importance of Indigenous Co-Design”, hosted by Gray Puksand, alongside Gray Puksand Senior Associate Ian Khoo (left), Wurundjeri Elder Uncle Dave Wandin (not pictured), Medibank Indigenous Engagement Lead Jeff Gray (right) and moderator Heidi Smith, Gray Puksand Victoria Lead Partner (not pictured). May 2026.

A building doesn’t just occupy its site. It embodies memory, whether or not the design responds to it – memory of how the place was used, what stood there before, what the site meant to the people who lived in and around it long before a development application existed. Where a project engages honestly with that memory, it can come to feel like it belongs to a place. Where it doesn’t, the result can feel technically accomplished but still read as something dropped onto a street rather than grown out of it.

An unacknowledged history doesn’t read as neutral. It reads as indifference.

This distinction isn’t a matter of sentiment, and it isn’t decorative. A community objecting to a proposal is very often objecting on behalf of a version of the site’s history it feels has gone unacknowledged: a factory that carried three generations of a suburb’s employment, a house that was the last visible trace of a particular wave of settlement, a corner that was a meeting place for First Nations people before it was anything else. Whether or not that history makes it into the final design, its absence from the conversation is noticed. An unacknowledged history doesn’t read as neutral. It reads as indifference.

None of this requires history to be comfortable or even settled. Places carry contested pasts as often as they carry pleasant ones, and a process that only wants the flattering version isn’t engaging honestly with anything. The point isn’t to produce a story that makes a project easier to sell. It’s to show, plainly, that someone actually did the work of understanding what a site has been – which is a different thing from a project simply asserting that it respects “the history of the site” as a line in a marketing document.

That difference is what separates belonging from imposition. A project can announce that it honours a place’s history. Whether it actually belongs to that place is a judgement the people who already live there will make regardless of what the announcement says.