One of the more interesting things to come out of our latest monthly leaders forum on Tuesday this week was moderator Maria Atkinson asking our panellists if they were an optimist or a pessimist.
It sounds simple enough, but in fact this generated some surprisingly responses.
In a departure from our normal run of speakers at these types of events the session was headlined by an economist, Adrian Hart from Oxford Economics. Maybe it’s the US’s trampling of the world’s economy right now, but suddenly this discipline seems more interesting than usual.
Hart, who is head of construction and infrastructure at his firm, said he was generally a pessimist; something to do with the nature of his profession. But as we moved through the session he became increasingly optimistic, he said. Maybe it was the close encounters with the people who are fearlessly rewriting our built environment future.
Hart kicked off with the facts. Australia has not been growing productivity in the past five years, he said. “It’s basically been flat.”
One of the reasons is that there’s been a lot of growth in industries that are very service related industries where productivity is typically lower.
But out of the four key sectors the Australian Bureau of Statistics looks at, construction is the worst performer. In fact, we’re operating at a level of productivity in the construction industry that, according to this data, is similar to what we had in the 1990s.
“We haven’t really step changed the way we do things across the industry, and we’re lagging a lot of other industry sectors in terms of the level of productivity that we’re experiencing. In housing it looks like productivity has fallen 53 per cent, he said.
That’s the reality of the problem we’re facing where the experts tell us we need 250,000 dwellings a year but delivering just 150,000.
Money, capital, the business case stacking up was critical, we heard throughout the day. It wasn’t happening. A case of “It’s the economy stupid”.
Adrian Harrington, chair of NSW Housing All Australians, who recently penned a provocative article on the bipartisan approach of previous politicians to solving housing in the post–war period, took the Audience Spotlight Intensive opportunity to flag his ideas. Labor’s design of the massive project was accompanied by an impressive 400–page document, he said. The Libs then delivered the program – under Bob Menzies.
The Curtin government set up the post war Reconstruction Authority, Harrington said, urging everyone to read this report.
“It is amazing. It’s about 400 pages long. It was bipartisan. It had all the different parties at the time participating. I think it was about eight or nine people on the panel. And unlike our inquiries today, where we always have a dissenting parties at the back and they all have their say, we’ve got the recommendation the front and the dissensions at the back – there was no dissensions.”
There were standardised designs, standardised subdivision designs and how to structure state and federal financing. “It was the most amazing textbook or workbook that you could use on how we were actually going to solve the shortfall in housing.”
But the audience said, this was unlikely to happen in this age where every positive opportunity is weaponised and sacrificed on the altar of some polling points.
It’s not “the economy stupid; it’s the politics,” they might have said.
There was more bad news, but in that disarming way that the creates innovation.
Lasse Lind of Danish-based GXN, the research arm of 3 XN, which is the architect for the Sydney Fish Market said that while his country may be lauded for its superior design and prefabrication skills, it’s done it in concrete.
“We’ve perfected the wrong thing!” Lind said.
The nation is now turning its mind to how to disassemble these houses that are now past their use by date and become so-called ghettos. If they can’t find the answers they will be facing the same problem in 40 years time, he said.
It was also exploring alternative fast growing bio materials such as eel grass that can be used for building materials and insulation. Lind is in Australia at least partly to work with Tim Schork of Queensland University of Technology on bio and composite materials that can be faster to market than timber – handy when there’s climate disasters.
A big question asked by architect and sustainability advocate Caroline Pidcock in the audience was how we can address the dichotomy between our need for 1.2 million homes and our need to achieve net zero emissions by 2050. Timber will help, but sadly, it’s not the whole story. We need both, was the answer. And we need to be cleverer – which is what our panellists were specifically there to address.
Another kibosh came from Karl-Heinz Weiss, the former head of Lendlease’s prefab business DesignMake, who was clear and steady in his warnings that prefab or modern methods of construction (MMC) would not solve all our problems. Everyone keeps focusing on the technology, but he said the business case was equally important – the need for a supply chain of demand that would keep the factories ticking over.
The industry’s been hit by a stop-start pattern for too many erstwhile hopefuls in the past, such as when someone pulls the pin on a contract.
But the scale needed to put a dent in the current housing problem was massive. Weiss said we’d need 40 or even 50 MMC factories.
Hmmm, as we start to mend our wounds from the Trump attacks on our economy and sense of security in the world, this might look like an increasingly sensible ambition instead of a crazy one: build more at home; stick to your carbon budget.
Globalisation has had many benefits, but it’s a two edged sword. It’s made us globally interdependent, which is great when we’re partying like there’s no tomorrow, but not so great when the planetary music stops and Mother Nature shouts: enough, you’ve had too much of every good thing. It’s time to sober up and stop stuffing your oversized appetites.
A bit of temperance is in order.
Oops. And ouch. Because there is no being quite so dangerous as a planetary system scorned.
This brings us to the outliers, the self-confessed “madmen” of the planet who happily go about the business of disruption, not minding the consequences of provoking, prodding and extracting good sense and resource discipline through sheer imagination and innovation.
Ross Harding from Finding Infinity did what we hoped he would. He shocked people with the scale of his ambition. The most recent is a 32 storey timber tower in Adelaide that’s not designed to be hybrid, anything but pure timber. On top of that, it would aim to be self-sustaining in every way.
“Can new construction give back to the city?” Harding asked.
“Can it sequester carbon? Can it give back energy? Can it give back water? Can it import waste and give back resources? And can it be made entirely from circular materials?”
So eight weeks out of a 12 week consulting process, Harding says: “We’ve just engaged, a kick ass dream team, and, right now, because I’m the client, there’s no one sitting there coming up with bullshit excuses as to why we can’t do these things. And what’s exciting is that so far, we haven’t found a reason not to do this, which is kind of, I can’t tell you that we’re definitely going to pull this off, but we’re going to give it a red hot go.”
And this is how we win the game. How innovation is created. The dreamers put the crazy over ambitious plans out there, and the rest of us come along behind and figure out how to make it happen.
Usually, it’s the fiction writers who invent new science, and it’s architects who create our new built environment of the future. In this case, it’s an engineer. Which means this is a man who can figure out how to make things work.
Fiction and other writers are the first to be locked up when the revolution goes nasty. Why? Because the mind is free and can imagine the world we want and the world we need, it can cut through the economics, the physical constraints and the political naysaying pessimists to demonstrate in our minds at least what good looks like.
Harding may not be a fiction writer nor an architect, but he’s borrowing from both those skills to write our future.