Isabel
Fangyi Lu

I'm an urban scholar, strategist and author with a passion for the generative space where communities, institutions and digital life reshape each other. Working across academia, government and community organisations, I am committed to designing better systems and building stronger networks.

My monograph, Reassembling Digital Placemaking: Participation and Politics, explores how communities, industries and governments co-produce urban space, and what that means for participation and democracy. Drawing on cases from Australia, China and Taiwan, it examines #placemaking as a testing ground for urban politics, proposing a tripartite assemblage model of urban politics as issue-based, sociotechnically-enabled, relational and cosmopolitical. My co-edited volume with Nikos Papastergiadis and Danielle Wyatt, Place without Borders: Arts Precincts and Public Culture in Victoria, is forthcoming in 2026.

In practice, I apply this thinking as Principal Project Manager at the Victorian School Building Authority, leading early childhood infrastructure planning and delivery under the Best Start Best Life reforms. Place shapes learning. When we choose where education happens, we choose whose knowledge counts, whose community matters, whose future is being imagined. Infrastructure is never neutral. It is always an argument about new beginnings.

Previously, I was Senior Advisor at Victoria's Department of Education, leading strategic planning and partnerships for Tech Schools, a state-wide school centres of innovation network. Traditional education flows knowledge downward from centralised pedagogy and intellectual authorities. Tech Schools invert this: the places hold the knowledge, government brings students into that space, and students co-design problems and solutions guided by communities and industry experts.

Beyond government, I'm increasingly drawn to how communities find their footing and voice within the institutions that resource them. I work through my own practice, Studio Ouro, with place-based and regenerative communities navigating institutional systems.

With my partner and our cat Ophelia, I commute between Naarm (Melbourne) and regional Victoria as a proud owner and supporter of Passive House. I welcome collaboration on research, writing and strategic projects in English and Mandarin. Drop a line.