What if there was a way to understand and enable climate action in cities that encompassed many of the other mission-critical agendas of urban sustainability including biodiversity, social equity, housing, First Nations reconciliation, resource depletion and cultural vibrancy?
The University of Melbourne, Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning’s upcoming 2024 Symposium – Climate Action in Cities, aims to explore, articulate and facilitate this kind of transformative perspective.
Some of the concepts will be familiar to those already engaging in regenerative design, place-based urban ecology and grassroots-led consultation and engagement practice, however, the two-day series of presentations, workshops, experiences and panels on 12 and 13 November will be adding a solid scientific dimension to concepts that can often be quite nebulous and intangible.
Director of the Melbourne School of Design, Professor Dan Hill, is one of the event convenors, and explains the conference agenda has emerged from the fact we are in a climate and biodiversity crisis.
“And the built environment lies at the heart of that,” Hill says.
“Almost everyone knows all the data about this, but it worth reiterating that, globally, the built environment is our most extractive sector by far and has no serious trajectory towards decarbonisation.”
Hill also flags the housing crisis as another thread. Planning is at the heart of it, however the calls for a supply-led solution imply a “huge increase in embodied carbon emissions.”
“Our property sector creates the conditions for that, just as our construction sector delivers it. Housing targets and climate targets must be aligned — they cannot be treated as if separate. Otherwise, our towns and cities continue to pursue largely unsustainable trajectories, despite increased risk in one of the most climate crisis–exposed countries in the world.”
Given this, the conference binds together multiple disciplines and perspectives – just as the issues do. One of the workstreams for the event, the Metabolism theme, illustrates this, through a deeper level of integrating considerations around nature, resource use and long-term sustainability.
“The idea of metabolism, more broadly, moves us beyond simple carbon accounting and into a more systemic, fluid and frankly ‘alive’ way of thinking about flows of things, whether the rich materiality of living systems or the cultural flows that form and shape identity,” Hill explains.
“We must avoid falling into reductive traps of accounting logics, as this would simply be repeating the methods and ideologies that got us into this mess in the first place. This is obviously the case with construction—as it sees the material flows as increasingly the most important thing.
“The materials that make a building existed before the building, and will exist afterwards. The building itself is just a certain configuration of these materials for a certain time.”
“In reality, even these buildings, which we pretend are static things, sitting inert in tightly-prescribed property boundaries, are constantly shifting things, evolving over time.”
International keynote speakers at the Symposium will include urbanist and founding director of Desire Lines, Sarah Ichioka, and globally-recognised academic and materials scientist, Professor Deb Chachra.
Local talent will include The University of Melbourne researchers Dr Judy Bush, Professor Sarah Bell, Dr Sareh Moosavi and Associate Professor Anna Hurlimann leading conversations around policy, urban metabolism flows and planning.
Dr Rob Crawford, Dr James Helal and Associate Professor André Stephan will showcase some of the technical solutions and enablers the faculty is creating. These include a suite of digital tools that allow us to better understand material stocks and flows, as they are drawn up into the built environment sector and transformed into emissions. Stephan’s ‘Nested Phoenix’ engine, for example, uses a bottom-up approach to modelling the built environment’s material stocks and flows, from door handles and window frames up to assemblages of building typologies, neighbourhoods and cities.
“(Nested Phoenix) also reveals that, generally, we may be underestimating the emissions embodied in the construction sector’s supply chain by as much as 50-75%,” Hill notes.
“But it might also reveal ways forward.”
And to ensure ideas can translate into action, speakers from government and industry including Alison Scotland, Trent McCarthy, Toomas Mirlieb, Dr Jonathan Spear, and Kelly Grigsby are bringing their insights and expertise.
Attendees are being drawn from across government, academia and industry sectors encompassing architecture, landscape architecture, planning, engineering, property and sustainability. Attendance is also eligible for Continuing Professional Development (CPD) through the Green Building Council of Australia, Planning Institute of Australia and Australian Institute of Landscape Architecture.
“We see cities as complex entanglings of natural systems, powered by natural resources, and generally built from transformed natural materials, just as they are also rich weaves of culture and identity,” Hill says.
“The question is one of degree: how much nature? What kind of nature? Is it thriving or diminishing? Biodiverse or monoculture? This more expansive view of nature means that we can explore a rich diversity of natural systems in the city, and the symposium will speak to how we shift those systems, built or otherwise, towards a place constructed from regenerative biomaterials, supporting a richness of thriving biodiversity — rather than the denuded ‘unnatural’ landscapes of recent times—as well as nature-based infrastructures and technologies.”
The symposium has been priced at a point that is deliberately affordable for persons on low incomes. This democratisation of conversation and economic inclusivity is deliberate, Hill says.
“We want to recognise that everyone is a practitioner, one way or another, and open it up accordingly.”
See the full program and book your ticket here.
