After visiting the London Festival of Architecture in 2008, I was moved when returning home to suggest to colleagues in the cultural and design sectors that a growing city like Brisbane, with its burgeoning design sector and focus on urban issues and ideas, might find it useful to plant a festival of architecture/urbanism into the urban and cultural fabric. The idea was dismissed too readily for my liking. In Brisbane alone there has been some important initiatives, many too isolated or singular to really attract the attention of the public, such as public art projects, the Superstudio, the occasional lecture at the library or one of the universities, seminars etc. Seems that the potential has already revealed itself but that it needs to be recast.
With its planning on steroids, emerging precincts, large scale gentrification, major developments, and potential climate change impacts, an event like that has the potential to engage the community in a larger conversation about what cities have becomes in the current millennium. It would certainly be a better proposition than the fragmented DA approach and the misguided masterplanning and engineering that scars our cities for decades, even centuries. Discussions about urbanism and architecture always prove to be quite popular – I recall from my involvement in the Ideas Festival that the architecture and city discussions always created a buzz, especially when dynamic thinking was applied to pressing problems such as disaster response, affordable housing, community planning and long term futuring. Seems there is scant public conversation – especially via the media – about the city as well as insufficient attempts to facilitate urban literacy and strategy. The federal government has also turned its attention to urban policy and population growth. The message is clear, we need very different kinds of cities and local planning and building regulations won’t catalyse that.
Having posted earlier about the Venice Bienniale of Architecture, it occurred to be that Australia could easily host an architecture event potentially with a focus on the Asia Pacific region, where many Australian firms are working, and, more broadly, the global south, considering the important work undertaken by organisations such as Architecture without Frontiers. Given that much of this blog has highlighted research centres and innovations in urban thinking and sustainability practice, it’s not as if we don’t have the creative and intellectual capital to initiate localised and international conversations.
Yesterday I received an email from David Barrie in which he discussed green infrastructure in the UK. I’m not across this in any meaningful way and thought I should do a bit a reading about it and identify how the idea is being taken up in Australia. Much to my delight I discovered the website of the Green Infrastructure Research Group at the University of Melbourne which states that green infrastructure is the network of designed and natural vegetation found in our cities and towns. It includes public parks, recreation areas, remnant vegetation, residential gardens and street trees, as well as innovative new urban greening technologies such as green roofs and green walls. Perhaps we can add to that quality landscaping and gardens at the street level and throughout industrial and commercial sites – presenting a major community dividend or design standard reform potential – rather than the meanly hacked hedging and sparing plantings that seems to prevail on such sites. I had previously thought that ‘green infrastructure’ was focused on energy and water management (and sustainable design in infrastructure systems) and not so attentive to land use, landscape and building design.
Green infrastructure is not, for example, considered in the South East Queensland Regional Plan even though there are provisions for open space, natural assets, bio-diversity protection and the like – what happens in the planning process or to the discourse of the plan when ‘green infrastructure’ registers as a priority? What does that mean for loaded assertions of ‘best and highest use’? A Google search of green infrastructure, named as such, did not reveal any statements from Brisbane City Council, although the city did host an international green infrastructure conference this year at which green roofs seemed to be a priority. (One objective [of the conference] is to shift the perception of green roofs from quirky to mainstream by demonstrating relevant examples, to be experienced first-hand by delegates with the proximity of the South Bank Car Park, one of Brisbane’s most public green roofs.) A green infrastructure plan as part of the River City Blueprint would be an ideal context in which to consider this network of issues – through the frame of green infrastructure and coalescing as a set of understandings of the city – in a growing city with due consideration of both retrofitting and new development.
What I particularly like about this shift in thinking about ‘living green’ in our built environment is that it positions it as integral – in the way that infrastructure is integral – rather than as a landscaping or urban design affect. In this respect, I am keen to see what artists and planners can do with green infrastructure as a city-making proposition. Rather than fragmenting the green across open space, recreation etc the clustered thinking about green infrastructure provides a less fragmented way of thinking about the city and the relationship between built and natural systems. A South Australian Government presentation about Green Infrastructure addresses some considerations (opens a PDF). Also look at the CSIRO’s research on urban ecologies.
Imagine the possibilities for figure and ground – what if, for example, instead of figure and ground (built and open space) our drawings of places represented their green and non-green elements? There are potentials for a more careful and caring approach to land use.
For more thinking around these issues, try the CABE Sustainable Cities (UK) website. CABE also initiated a Grey to Green campaign calling for a switch in public spending from grey projects, like road building and heavy engineering projects, to green schemes like street trees, parks, green roofs and waterways. Another resource is produced by the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) and their website says that green infrastructure can be considered a conceptual framework for understanding the ”valuable services nature provides the human environment.”
I’ve just been reading an interview with Kazys Varnelis (Triple Canopy #7), an architectural historian, who discusses the collapse of complex societies. He made the following comment about design in bad times, referring in part to the current financial crisis:
What do you do when labor is cheap, resources are expensive, and nobody is going to fund many new buildings? You design facades and small-scale urban interventions … What can we do for people today? How about allotment gardens on abandoned building sites (or at least those that aren’t too contaminated), so that people can grow their own food, eat in a healthy way, and get some exercise while doing it? … We need to back off of the obsession with the next big thing and its close relative, the urge to find a quick fix, for a while.
While several things Varnelis said in this interview jarred, something of this resonated with me because it introduces an idea of scale and of closeness. Instead of opting for large scale infrastructure fixes (which in part continue to create complexity) he proposes a multitude of smaller scale initiatives that take time. While not necessarily an argument for simplicity such interventions provide alternatives. Many of the works considered on PlaceBlog are small scale interventions. They are not total fixes or wholesale changes – they are localised alternatives in the experience, knowing and making of the city.
For many years, I had written as an art writer and it is interesting to reflect on this because now I tend to position my work as cultural writing or cultural journalism. While reviewing some older texts and interrogating it, my reading faltered on the words ‘ art world’ – or perhaps that should say ‘artworld’. It has a hermetic – almost claustrophobic or captive – feel to it and caused me to wonder about it. What is this artworld, where is it and what does it do? A quick Google doesn’t reveal much and for much of my 20 year engagement in the arts I simply didn’t think about it, just assumed there was an artworld and that I was somehow an agent in it or of it – albeit provisionally or conditionally. In my work about urban environments, I am yet to encounter a world within the world like this artworld, though for sure something like that exists. The urban is grounded yet concerned with cultural forms. Engagements with it often address the environmental and social dimensions of its making, shifting into a sphere of cultural awareness and reflexivity.
Twenty-four teams have been shortlisted for inclusion in the Australian pavilion’s NOW + WHEN exhibition at the 2010 Venice Biennale.
The proposals were selected from 129 submissions entered into the national Ideas for Australia’s cities 2050+ competition, run by the Australian Pavilion’s Creative Directors, John Gollings and Ivan Rijavec.
The team’s two-part ‘NOW + WHEN Australian Urbanism’ exhibition will highlight three of Australia’s most interesting urban regions as they are now, before dramatically representing around seven futuristic urban environments from the competition as they may be when we reach 2050 and beyond.
Proposals include:
- New cities housing between 50,000-100,000 people in current desert areas
- Cities in which urban development is concentrated in ‘peripheral’ areas, such as large landholdings on university campuses, ‘big box’ shopping centres, business parks, industrial estates, recreational reserves, and market gardens to establish a series of interlinked, self-sustaining districts dispersed along a transport ring
- Cities which feature a ‘tartan-like texture of pure urban areas (or cells), pure rural cells, and cells which are a hybrid of rural and urban’
- Cities designed for ‘urban life without fear’
- Cities in which ‘within tightly controlled boundaries exist Multiple Cities’
- Cities ‘woven into the landscape’ – balancing dense human settlement with flora and fauna biodiversity
- Cities hugging the coast from Noosa to Geelong to accommodate population growth and the preferred coastal climate
Gollings said the number and scope of the entries “exceeded expectations”, adding: “Of great interest now, is that these varied ideas must be turned into tangible 3D models which can be screened as virtual, built projects for exhibition in the Australian Pavilion in Venice.
“This process will challenge the normal speculative imaging often produced by architects, and lead to new presentation techniques benefiting the whole profession as the world embraces 3D, virtual, and holographic media.”
Rijavec explained that the exhibition “[spotlights] our most pressing national concern – how we best manage our cities and their future growth,” with 93 per cent of Australians living in urban areas affected by the ways in which our cities function.
Rijavec explained that the host city is in itself a pertinent reminder of the threats facing our urban environments. “Venice itself has shown how a city might blossom in a global context, but also how the vicissitudes of a changing world can turn it into a caricature of itself – some 60,000 people live there, while more than 20million visit it annually. It floods 50 times a year and, saving protective measures, by 2030 it will be under water.”
Shortlisted teams are:
Terroir
Whitford and Brearley
Faculty of Architecture Building and Planning, University of Melbourne
EDMOND & CORRIGAN
Colony Architects
University of Queensland
NH Architecture
John Wardle Architects
Arup Sydney
fmd architects
Woodhead & Bangarra Dance
BKK Architects, Village Well, Charter Keck Kramer
Hassell, Holopoint, University of Adelaide
Lean Productions
Arup Sydney
Curtin Uni + The University of Western Australia
room11 hobart + Katrina Stoll
Lacoste + Stevenson Architects, Craig Allchin, FROST design
Harrison and White Pty Ltd
Statkus Architecture + others
MGS with BILD + DYSKORS and MATERIAL THINKING
Billard Leece Partnership
Innovarchi
Minifie Nixon Architects + RMIT
