URBANHEART is an urban design forum which integrates students entering their Master of Architecture degree at Deakin University Geelong, Australia into a studio based urban design research culture and allows them to engage in critical discourse by working on high profile strategic design projects in three areas significant to Victoria's future development:

Metropolitan Urbanism, Urbanism on the Periphery, and Regional Urbanism.

The question of whether or not design can be considered research has perplexed schools of architecture ever since they were first introduced into universities.

It was at the centre of the Oxbridge union debates in the early 1900s. It formed one of the corner stones of the Oxford conference on education organized by the RIBA in 1958 (Martin 1958) and came under scrutiny again in the UK with the introduction of the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) in 1992. While the arguments both for and against are considerable (Yeomans 1995),

"in order to understand the questions and the possibilities of architectural research and to respond to the difficulties that confront us now, we have to have a model which acknowledges what schools of architecture really are, and could be, and then work with that" (Hawkes 1995)

Drawing on professionally oriented research models, such as 'clinical research', from Medicine and the Health Sciences - where the processes of observation, investigation and exploration are conducted in-situ by the 'practitioner-as-researcher' (Chenail and Maione 1997) - this Web site supports an initiative introduced at the School of Architecture and Building, Deakin University, referred to as the 'Urban Heart Surgery', a program which actively integrates students entering their second degree program into a studio based urban design research culture.

With a growing core of government and community based associatsions and partnerships, including: four regional councils (Bendigo, Ballarat, Geelong and Warrnambool) and three metropolitan municipalities (City of Melbourne, Port Phillip and Wyndham), the forum facilitates graduate research through the Australian Research Council linkage grant program.