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Weekly UpdatesGlobal competition
All countries face the challenge of maintaining their economic position in a highly globalised market place. Cities are at the centre of national competitiveness and many are urban hubs, glocal bridges that link activities elsewhere in the country or overseas. Economic activity and the key knowledge generation and innovation are largely urban-focused and urban-directed. Export-oriented and knowledge-intensive services, the key growth and innovation job sectors, still seem to require city locations. The employment that supports these higher order functions is similarly city-focused. An increasingly mobile workforce at this level ensures that cities need to compete on the global stage, not only in terms of economic opportunities (and the BE that provides its offices and factories) but also in quality of life measures. 'Liveability' is big business, and cities are increasingly being measured through rankings that incorporate aspects of city living previously considered secondary, intangible or incidental. No city will want its rankings to drop or see its competitiveness waiver.
Social inclusion and social equity
If our built environment is to respond effectively to future challenges, commitment to creating more socially equitable and inclusive cities must be integral to innovation agendas to avoid social dislocation and conflict once the costs of adaptation start to impinge on established social behaviours. Some households and businesses can adapt more easily than others, most importantly through their ability to absorb the costs of change. The costs of doing so cannot fall unreasonably on the most vulnerable groups in society, making foreseeing and managing the impacts of the transition to a sustainable built environment on affordability, social cohesion and potential for social disruption and conflict a major challenge. Participation, in the form of active civil engagement in the sustainability agenda, is no less important politically. Innovation in policies and programs to change our use of the BE need to be understandable, transparent and accountable to the wider population to ensure on-going political support.
A new tool: Information and communication technologies
Innovation in information and communication technologies (ICTs) will increase in importance both as a major driver of built environment changes and problem solutions. ICT has greatly speeded the volume and intensity of communications between individuals, businesses and places. City planners recognise that it has permitted increasing separation of employment and economic functions in specialist locations, on a regional, national and international scale and stimulated the development of 'smart' and 'self-adapting' structures and is helping to manage energy and water consumption for both buildings and neighbourhoods. ICTs also provide a platform for more informed decision-making and democratic participation by residents if political processes permit and spatial decision-support systems will assist planners and residents to manage the complexity of the built environment and its capacity to respond to change. Increased use of sophisticated 'urban informatics' will provide robust and internationally comparable metrics for evolving environmental performance reporting requirements, by governments, communities and investors.
IDENTIFYING AND MEETING THE INNOVATION CHALLENGE
The drivers described above present significant challenges for the built environment industry in moving forward. They have implications for all sectors and interests, both in terms of responses required as well as the innovation opportunities to be gained by taking a lead in shaping the transition towards more sustainable environments, new economic spatial distribution and the demands of older and more diverse populations. This section of the paper explores four key challenges--urban retrofitting, spatial integration through effective governance, skills and delivery integration across the sector, and integration across the lifecycle--and considers how the industry can respond to these drivers of change, acknowledging the barriers they create as well as opportunities presented for innovation.
Urban retrofitting
Urban retrofitting presents the policy challenge in innovation in the built environment. Buildings represent the single biggest opportunity for greenhouse gas abatement globally, exceeding energy, transport and industry sectors combined. However, the vast majority of our built environment for the next twenty-five years--the timescale in which adaptation must take place--already exists and performs poorly in sustainability terms. New buildings and development provide a focus for innovation, not least driven by enhanced building code requirements, expectations of financiers and increased awareness of the benefits of moving towards sustainable practice, but new buildings will be only a small segment of the BE. The substantive challenge focuses on the resilience and adaptation of our existing buildings, infrastructure and neighbourhoods. It is clearly expensive to re-tool the existing built form and, even with that investment, will not do the work of new construction.
Property specialists Davis Langdon (2008a) argue that upgrading existing commercial stock will be a 'herculean' task due to cost constraints, design, and construction industry resource limitations. Market drivers and carbon emissions trading are considered insufficient in themselves to drive refurbishment to the required level. Additional incentives, such as tax breaks and subsidies, will be needed. The residential sector has been notably less innovative than the commercial, with energy efficiency gains often offset in practice by increased consumption and demands for space heating and cooling (Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts 2008). The levers available to promote transition in existing privately-owned homes are often limited; although building codes can establish minimum standards as part of major refurbishment activity, individual owner decisions regarding refurbishment, and the financial capacity to act upon options, will inevitably result in a partial and unpredictable level of take up. Innovation in cities via retrofitting both constrains innovation and makes the need for innovation even more pressing.
Retrofitting entire existing neighbourhoods presents even more innovation challenges than individual buildings. In recent years, Australian cities have adopted higher urban residential densities as a key goal in ensuring the BE performs better in terms of environmental, social and economic outcomes. High density living, intensification of land uses and promoting live-work arrangements are considered important driving principles behind constraining the carbon footprint more efficient. But they also pose many challenges, social as well as political and technological.
Retooling at this scale requires a huge investment effort in new transportation infrastructure, substantial rebuilding of the current urban landscape and major changes in how urban businesses and populations move around our cities. Transition and change will need to be negotiated alongside challenges of community cohesion, heritage considerations and possible impacts of change on affordability and community displacement. New forms of urban finance must be developed. Moving towards carbon-constrained cities may mean people living in smaller spaces. How households perceive and respond to changing urban conditions will be at least as important as physical adaptations to the built environment. This shift is a major innovation challenge.
Spatial integration: The governance challenge
Preparing our cities for the future means that cities must respond to the enormous challenges facing them in a coherent manner. As the then Mayor of London said (Greater London Authority 2007: 25):
Thinking as a city, acting as a city
There is a need to foster and integrate innovation across the range of spatial scales relevant to how our cities function and provide frameworks that respond to the drivers of change at the scale at which they will be experienced (Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment 2007). Cities around the world are building new governance structures to direct where they want their cities--and citizens--to be in a generation's time. This requires leadership to integrate activities both at the strategic level and at the level of their implementation and on-going management. The ability to deliver change in cities such as London has significantly improved since the creation of a single authority for the city and a single, strategic plan covering economic and social development and associated targets, mechanisms and outcomes. Paris now has a somewhat similar structure, with the Mayor holding overall authority over the arrondissement councils, who nonetheless retain appropriate roles in the management of their local communities. Similar structures are emerging elsewhere, not without difficulty as the example of Montreal shows.
Strategic integration at the city level enables broad impact decisions to be made, for example introduction of the congestion charge in London and the Velib bicycle rent scheme and soon-to-implemented electric car rent initiative in central Paris. In contrast, the low level of integration in Australian cities has been proved to be a major barrier to effective innovation in the provision of urban services. Sydney's integrated transport payment system, the T- card, may well have worked if the operating, planning and decision-making context around it had been redesigned first through the unification of Sydney's multiple and single focus transport management and funding systems into a single body. Finding the right governance structures is critical to innovative success in situations where rules and outcomes are inherently uncertain.
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