Mobile Edition
Print
Get the Mag
Weekly UpdatesINTRODUCTION: THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT--A VITAL FOCUS FOR INNOVATION
Cities are our most profligate consumers of scarce resources and our worst polluters. Cities are the primary cause of climate change and are most at risk from climate change, but they also provide the solution to tackling it.
It makes sense, therefore, to begin finding city-wide solutions to the problems of climate change. (Jones 2008)
While cities act as foci for innovation, the incremental and often longstanding nature of the fabric of the built form, and the interests ascribed within it, can be seen as a complex barrier to change and responsiveness to shifting demands and opportunities facing urban societies. Our cities and the built environment (BE) industry that creates, funds, manages and maintains them will face substantial challenges over the next several decades as they respond to several important drivers of city development. All actors involved in shaping our built environment and responding to both ongoing as well as emergent challenges must understand where innovative practice is required and how it can be facilitated. Many of the essential changes will be incremental but significant transformation in several areas will be required. The built environment of the future is largely already here. Given the timescales involved in designing and delivering the built environment, decisions made over the coming years will be fundamental in establishing frameworks for the next generation of innovative best practice.
The focus of this paper is Australian cities, especially Sydney, and the country's built environment industry. Although the relative scale and emphasis of issues will inevitably vary across different contexts, the core themes are similar to those faced by large and global cities. Much of BE industry is itself often multinational in its reach. The research reported in this paper draws on recent discussions with leading BE providers and specialists in Australia, who identified emerging issues and challenges facing cities and their potential impact on the growth and competitiveness of the BE industry. In turn, the research covered how innovation can be fostered and facilitated to help the industry meet environmental, economic and social sustainability agendas.
The 'built environment' industry is not an 'industry' in the traditional sense because it involves numerous players, both public and private, who are seldom thought of, and who seldom think of themselves, as a single industry. Indeed, the fragmentation of the industry is one of its key characteristics. For the purposes of this paper, we understand the BE industry to be composed of a range of players spanning the design, planning and construction phases of the creation of the BE as well as the operational and ultimately renewal phases. In the first phase, development and construction, the group of players includes land use regulators (in Australia, mostly local Councils and State government authorities) and other planners (notably transport, health and education), urban designers, developers and construction firms and the knowledge-intensive service providers standing within or behind their activities--architects, engineers, landscape and interior designers and IT specialists as well as trades and other sub-contractors and personnel. The construction industry itself has several segments, including the highly innovative complex engineering branch but also the far behind small residential building segment.
In the second, operational phase, where users are in place (residents, office workers and other users), the BE industry expands to include facilities managers, maintenance and repair personnel, affordable housing providers and building and strata managers. A third renewal phase brings the breadth of these actors back together, alongside redevelopment specialists and the community regeneration sector. Legal, financial specialists, consultants, government regulators, and the research and education sector are also involved across these phases.
Our paper takes a broad perspective, with a deliberate focus away from specific technologies or industry specific barriers. While new technologies can--and certainly do--play an important role in developing and reshaping cities through expanding the ways in which buildings can be built and operate (e.g. smart office blocks), reducing construction costs and making removal of buildings and waste disposal more effective and efficient, innovation in the technological field itself owes much to shifts in governance, regulatory and market environments and factors influencing take-up are critical. The innovators in the sense of R&D are largely in the materials side of the industry while innovation in methods and use of materials lies largely with the large 'assembly' firms who as large clients pull in knowledge provider suppliers (architects etc) and coordinate innovation on and around sites, in turn pushing innovation through to smaller players (AEGIS 1999; Marceau and Manley 1999, 2001; Manley, Marceau and Hampson 2001). These players can lead the field so it is especially important that they take investment in innovation seriously. As Brandon and his colleagues have said, important new technologies are now available but the tipping point has not been reached to push major change in all parts of this 'conservative industry' (2005: 286) We thus focus here on the complex challenges underlying development and adoption of new technologies, rather on the technologies themselves. These issues include integration of spatial decision-making, governance, institutional and organisational structures, and how we fund and value the built environment
DRIVERS OF CHANGE IN THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
The drivers of change in contemporary cities impact on all the actors mentioned above and demand responses from all involved in producing, maintaining, governing and using the built environment. Several drivers are longstanding and continuing, such as accommodating and working with demographic change and the need to address social equity and inclusion issues. Others, most notably a somewhat belated but now concerted recognition that the impact of climate change and peak oil will have, raise particularly challenging demands. These drivers operate at different spatial levels, from that of the city or city-region as a whole down to the neighbourhood and the individual building and its internal structure. Many of the drivers are shared globally and cities which act first and innovate in response to them may well be best placed to lead both transitional arrangements and long-term sustainability frameworks. The six main drivers are outlined below.
Climate change and peak oil
The still largely uncharted transition towards 'carbon constrained' (Garnaut, 2008) cities forms the framework within which all discussion of innovation is situated. More than any other, this driver will have significant repercussions on the nature of building and development, on how we value and price various elements of the city, and how we live in and use urban space.
The urgent need to adapt our cities to the likely impact of climate change and the requirement for greenhouse gas mitigation initiatives is now widely recognised. Engineering will provide only a partial solution to this issue: preparing for and living with climate change will require a more responsive built environment, and one in which residents adapt in terms of expectations and behaviours. Professionals will need to respond differently: architects, for example, will increasingly seek passive design solutions for heating and cooling rather than airconditioned structures; planners need the remit and information to rigorously adopt triple bottom line principles; and landscape architects must take a lead role in transforming our parks, nature corridors and open spaces into climate regulators as much as amenity space. The collective task of improving the sustainability equation requires our built environment to move from being a resource drain towards being an energy generator, water and waste recycler and emissions mitigator. The challenge is huge. Both new technologies and the context in which they are developed and used are critical.
The implications of the finite nature of oil supplies and increasing political uncertainty over those supplies are now major drivers of change and challenge the whole basis of the organisation of our cities. Reorganisation of most now 'normal' city activities will be essential. We cannot achieve an appropriate adaptation to climate change simply by investing in transport infrastructure in our cities, for example, without simultaneously adopting innovative change in the distribution of activities within the city and supporting appropriate actor responses and we will need significant innovation in many area-based services, notably the social and cultural realm. Many of these benefits could be obtained through innovations in institutional arrangements and governance.
Demographic change
Australia's major cities, and their associated metropolitan planning strategies, assume that urban population growth will continue, notably via migration to major urban areas and reducing average household size which means demand for more dwellings. The population will also continue to age, with an increasing proportion of urban populations made up of people in their retirement years. Demographic change will also impact on employment and labour markets, particularly in the type and location of jobs, income and wage levels and their interactions with the supply of labour. Impacts on housing demand, housing design, services and infrastructure due to such shifts are not fully understood but will involve much innovation. These demographic trends, especially population ageing, will change urban consumption propensities, as will the intergenerational shift in wealth and the 'boomer bulge' about to move into retirement but the effects are also far from clear, as is, for example, how housing and transport affordability may feed back into changed behaviours among different cohorts of the urban population.
FEED