Transcript

Going green with infrastructure: Sharon MacKay at TEDxAdelaide

he were my project projects a new practice in Vancouver doing home residential I also worked doing projects like remote villages for flying flyer minds in Far North Queensland and also my favorite to have worked on the first giant panda exhibit in the southern hemisphere which was most enjoyable all that was his private practice turn about 18 months ago I made a small but not insignificant shift into the public sector and I'm not embarrassed to say that I spent about the first month in a metaphorical fetal position wondering what was actually going on I didn't understand the language I didn't understand the rooms couldn't work out what what what was actually happening around me but eventually I realized that in government and most of what we do what gets measured matters and we measure all sorts of things in government we measure really easy very tangible things about us our selves we measure our own performance we also measure the performance of our leaders in event or in their success or otherwise in a very short time period we also measure cities we measure it by GDP he measured by really simple demographics that we can find from census data we also measure things like energy use we also set targets for ourselves that we can then also measure and the thing about targets is if I pick one from from that's relevant today which is creating more vibrant city we often set targets like let's get more people to come and live an hour late well let's get more people to come and invest here or work here or play here or whatever it might be but we also all know that just getting people to come and live here isn't necessarily a target that will deliver a more vibrant city or a way that we actually want to leave it's a much more complex situation than just hitting individual targets so for the purpose of today I've chosen to cities to consider I've chosen Adelaide Australia because this is where I'm growing my family and have chosen to leave and I'm also going to compare it to darker in Bangladesh where my sister-in-law is growing her family so last year the the economic intelligence unit r-rated Adelaide is the fifth most livable city in the world which is pretty exciting to know that I already lived here it's also really exciting because we shot up we're now more livable than Sydney and getting closer to Melbourne unfortunately out of 140 cities darker actually came 140th hey sis their enemies from my sister-in-law's fifth floor balcony and is that in actually pretty nice part of town the interesting thing about that particular that global liveability metric is it considered things like crime rates each quality of education and also infrastructure so we do pretty well in a delay because we do infrastructure really well we certainly design for cars pretty successfully and in dark roads will be different when some days can't even make a phone call and it has pretty poor infrastructure but then also on that Happy Planet Index which is also a very well-known global index rating tool for cities darker actually comes 11th they've got an amazing respect for their own culture and the way that they celebrated not surprisingly Australia k100 and second and that what's interesting about that particular in diseases then consider things like your ecological footprint but they also do something called the ladder of life where they actually asked people to rate how they're feeling how happy they are at any particular time and what's interesting about that is that your own perception of happiness can be quite different regardless of your GDP or the other things like infrastructure that we r rating and with all global cities s there's all sorts of different ways that we can write a city and there are many different tools there's this one the young that obviously they've better life index there's a vitality index this is just a u.s. one that starting to write the cultural aspects of a city there is a green city in next one of my favorites which is a very successful way around rating cities and then there's even the quality of life survey by monocle which I call the hipster amazing tool it always puts Melvin pretty high and if there's a couple that actually a government uses all the time the really serious ones this one being human development reports and they use this to actually work out where they're going to fund major projects and done and apply an aid and you're like but then there's one that I'm really interesting how do you rate a city just through social media all your own networks and friends this guy Marty of Phuket also responds and says that Thailand is safer he feels safer in time than he actually does walking in the streets of Melbourne for six months live all the city in the world and then there's a whole lot of or I should point out that then there's a one from the scenery down below my friends on that on radio Adelaide that actually talk about their rating of cultural vitality in Adelaide and we're probably not doing as well as maybe what some other people think we are now is the whole plethora of different programs and tools that private practice and public practice and public sector and developing to capture that social media or that that conversation that we have is together so that they can actually increase the engagement start don't stand a little bit better about what people say about cities so why is it important to measure a city I think getting as we all know we don't often stay where we were born anymore people are able to move around more freely we choose our city somewhere we think we're going to have the best time so many reports around what is the most liveable or what is the most enjoyable or maybe we're not to go on live actually have a big impact not just on humans on our lifestyle but also on business and investment in a particular city I'd like to think that Adelaide seems those shooting upwards might be very attractive for investors and but then we also makes mistakes Vancouver where I used to live which is actually number two in the green cities index and a really successful city always sits up there at number one or two on the most livable cities in the world it's actually just been declared the North fun city they've changed a whole lot of their small bowel licenses and venues Niblick licensing they've increased the big box of nightclubs and on one particular Street which is kratom on social behavior sounds a bit familiar to Adelaide and there's even a whole website now that's just dedicated to movies about the no fun city in Vancouver so it's really easy if you just start their own number one to drop off it pretty quickly and this has only happened when I lived there was certainly didn't have this situation 25 years ago so I wonder if we're actually measuring the right themes now I'm not I don't develop tools for measuring sees that there's certainly some people doing some great work like Andy a national group are actually looking at more holistic ways of measuring the city for wellbeing when I'd like to propose today is what if we address that challenge a little bit differently and what if we addressed it from green infrastructure when I was considering today's content and icing about green infrastructure it's terrible words something is actually really exciting doesn't really have much impact as a human being the idea of green infrastructure so I thought it still might be a good idea to put uses green infrastructure as a lens to consider what might be the right solutions to Adelaide and I have three compositions at are very specific to this city off the first one being made when they could use the plan for us as a KPI for the health and biodiversity of our river that we all care about so much maybe using the platypus as a metaphor ironically we discovered during some work that we've been doing recently that plaintiff was actually don't mind where they spend actually quite like it in your brown muddy water but as men fought for biodiversity maybe it would have quite different impact on not just the way that we design or treat the riverbank but maybe it would be an interesting way to consider how we treat the water before it even gets to the river maybe it would encourage us to use more water seeped suburban are they can encourage us to think about how we use water in ourselves so that we can keep vivacity as that is the key indicator about our waterways it also might be a way to actually think about what else is important to us about the river maybe a brown muddy river that's returned to its original format isn't actually what we want for a city river so maybe the opportunity to actually have crystal blue water might be part of that same conversation for Paul in the river torrens my second proposition is around the humble beef and imagine why you would look like if we actually said Abby doesn't have to travel more than 20 meters for its food source as you know these they're actually our life force they sustain us they pollinate our plants and our food without bees would be living very very differently to what we are now it's a picture from Vancouver maybe this is the actual this is the Olympic Village that was just an instant design install less than two years ago right in the middle of the three million people city they've actually created space for biodiversity and actually placed biodiversity at the forefront of the actual site this is some work was done by hassle late last year where they actually looked at maybe ranking our the importance of our park lands at the same level as we do our roads so you could you actually have a biodiversity network that isn't intersected by our eight Lane roadways across the park lands and this makes me think also about things like maybe we need to reconsider our street trees maybe we could get more and continuous street trees I certainly know that you have tended to move away from street trees that have fruiting trees because of maintenance issues certainly moved away from using large trees of street treats and and maybe there's an opportunity to rethink whether we at least have flowering trees to keep the corridor for bees also interesting in that site in Vancouver was it have actually made a place on a post-industrial where they actually I have a habitat for their native animal the Canadian geese and that's really important i know a lot of people sort of laugh when you think about whether we should be trying to encourage koalas or our native animals into the city i think it's really important when you consider the site the size of the site here in vancouver maybe it would even change the way that we write briefs for our built environment maybe we can consider this is Adelaide Zoo here maybe consider actually doing something like they do where they actually said there should be no net loss of habitat by actually building that built environment but maybe even we can start using our older infrastructure that I used infrastructure just like Highline in New York like highway number one all the way from Brisbane through to Adelaide maybe in the future could be used for biodiversity cut wildlife corridors it's a great infrastructure that we already have my third composition is around the city urban heat island effect and considering what we could do if we understood what's currently invisible as a more visible and tangible measure of what we're doing every day we know in Adelaide that we get about a three to a six percent of degree change now urban heat throughout the day just based on their parties and the operation of a city which is really significant because we're also getting not just one of days but we're getting hotter nights and her nights are really worth thinking about because and these figures are taken from the year of the bush fires in time there was actually far more desk because of heat through that particular hot summer then there was from the catastrophe bushfires some work that great Hopkins has been doing with Flinders University and one of our government departments has actually started putting frogs around the city and they're really measuring now exactly where that heat bowl exists and they've learnt that when combined with our very unique gully moon that comes down from the Adelaide Hills we actually share see a shift of our heat bubble just across slightly right on top of where the new hospitals being built and then further into our part lands which is really not insignificant when you consider that the hospital is going to have to work extra hard for to mitigate the impact that it's inheriting so again maybe when it considered this as a measure or an indicator maybe we can start considering how cities could not only adapt to mitigate urban heat island effect but also maybe they can be adaptive throughout the day so when we've got our highest heat island bubble maybe buildings can actually transform in different ways to I wanted to include this beautiful project from two French artists called hehe and this is the green cloud project that was done in Helsinki a few years ago and what it looked at was actually how you create behavior change just by being able to see the impact of your energy use in the city this is quite interesting because what they did was they lit up their smokestack the more energy the study was collectively using at any time became visible and it actually resulted in a change in behavior maybe we need to be able to see how urban heat island effect instead of it actually to see invisible so as we move in the next few years 20 years or 30 years into 20 more million people in in Australia and we certainly think about how we are actually going to live in that term increased population but maybe whether it's just business as usual or maybe it's actually something really quite radically different from where we are today what we need to do is think about how we measure how our human input into our cities and the things that we really value and how can we actually measure those values so that we can get more tangible outcomes rather than some things like GDP that might not necessarily affect our daily lives thank you