Innovation for a carbon constrained city: challenges for the built environment industry.

City-level integration also provides an effective framework in which leading global cities can retain competitive advantages and spearhead innovation. New York (City of New York 2006) and London (Greater London Authority 2004, 2007) have been explicit in their planning goals for carbon reduction and the importance of climate change adaptation to their future direction and economies. Both have instigated dedicated well-funded units and established supplementary action plans to ensure necessary actions are taken at the appropriate spatial scale and that the impact of policy decisions across a breadth of spheres takes climate change implications into consideration.

'Spatial authority' is a crucial issue in this regard, with fragmented urban governance structures hindering Australian cities' capacity to function, deliver and fully realise their potential. Although a more innovative response is provided through Sustainable Sydney 2030 (City of Sydney/ SGS 2008), forward delivery is likely to be curtailed by planners remaining tied to governance structures that are no longer suitable for the speed and breadth of task to be undertaken. It is no longer appropriate, for example, for the City of Sydney to comprise only the CBD and some adjoining suburbs since the issues to be resolved involve much wider areas that need to cooperate and act in concert both in planning and implementation.

Network governance

The new emphasis on governance rather than government also reflects a shift from existing and increasingly ineffective hierarchical, public and representative structures to frameworks better understood in terms of the negotiated involvement of multiple public and private stakeholders operating at different scales. The concept of network governance is an emerging feature of the 21st Century city, capturing current innovation as well as providing an enabling framework for further change. This points towards a more diffuse, often localised response, that recognises and encourages diversity, context and opportunity and can improve citizens' acceptance of change. Similarly, cities are increasingly focusing on the local level for innovation to deliver desired outcomes and adoption of initiatives such as 'micro' local generation approaches where locally based power generation, water distribution and waste management replaces the current reliance on large scale and centralised infrastructure provision. This also implies a reworking of governance, funding and related arrangements.

Importantly, there are now areas of the BE of cities which are effectively managed not so much by local elected authorities but by private managers. The emerging role of the private governance of important areas of the city, more specifically the structures regulating activity in high and medium density housing developments, needs to considered when innovation in the BE is planned. These private managers control how their buildings operate in terms of investments in better sustainability, water use by residents who have few rights to take initiatives on their own or to respond to public sector incentives for change. These factors must be taken into account when assessing the chances of acceptance of particular changes and the speed with which they are adopted.

Challenges for elected representatives

In increasingly networked cities, elected city office-bearers will also have to adapt to fast-changing conditions and become much more skilled than they currently are, especially at local levels of government, as they take on new roles and have to understand and create complex policies for the BE as a whole. In preparing for undertaking these new and highly complex tasks, training for decision makers will be needed and curricula for planners will need reformulation. Practising planners and elected officials alike will need to find ways of consulting city residents most affected by proposed regulatory shifts and proposed decisions. In this task, new mobile ICTs can play a critical role in collecting ideas and seeking consensus from the citizens most affected.

Integrating the BE skills and delivery chain

New demands on planners

Although all segments of the BE industry will need to adapt, a particular onus will be placed on city planners who by necessity work across a variety of spatial scales. They are effectively day-today coordinators and must arbitrate between competing interests, economic realities and triple bottom line objectives. The planning challenge involves a shift to an environment where planners will play an increasingly integrative role and provide leadership, certainty and locally-informed and locally-relevant regulatory and incentive measures. They will need to become more proactive and more adept at bringing together elected officials of all levels of government whose immediate interests may be quite disparate. In ensuring a more adaptive and 'generative' built environment, urban landscape management and design will also become more significant as we redesign our suburbs, parks and open spaces to be more environmentally sustainable.

Integrating the delivery chain

One of the major potential drivers of change in the built environment will be the need for institutional and organisation reform. This issue cuts across many of the issues raised throughout this paper. The fragmentation of the BE industry as a whole (Hampson & Brandon 2004; Vandenberg 2007), of its organisational structures, professional and trades groupings, governance structures and localised markets, for example, is a dominant characteristic of the processes and practices that deliver built environment outcomes and presents a major challenge to substantial innovation and rapid change. The planning, design, delivery, utilisation and ultimately renewal or revitalisation of the built environment involves a multitude of players. While different organisations and stakeholders come together on any given project or site, their business structure, timing and duration of interest, impetus, ability and preparedness to innovate vary considerably.

The separation of trades from professions, poor co-ordination between sectors, the often small scale of localised building processes, the transfer of risk down the supply chain to those least able to manage this risk, and the reliance on traditional methods for the delivery of building and maintenance services with little incentive to innovate at the 'coalface', are all examples of problems stemming from fragmentation (Loosemore 2004). Achieving rapid and lasting change in this context is difficult. An agenda to drive the integration of the BE industry and establishing a view of the industry as a whole and its needs is therefore a key issue in the transition to sustainability.

Sharing and transferring innovation along the delivery chain

The complex pathways of the development process, between initial design and final implementation, restrict the flow of new techniques and the benefits to be derived from doing things differently tend to vary at different stages of the delivery chain which hinders investment in research and innovative practice. Significant innovations are regularly made by companies on a project by project basis but mechanisms to capture and pass these on to other projects or the wider industry are relatively weak.

With projects typically delivered through complex contracting and subcontracting arrangements and the realities of compartmentalised delivery on the ground, operational arrangements also restrict advances in practice both technologically and organisationally. Risk management is often a question of risk transfer, sending it down the procurement chain until it reaches a point of least resistance. With limited collective responsibility for the management of risks and opportunities throughout supply chains, a tendency to simply continue tried-and-tested approaches is clear. These barriers are difficult to break down, but there is clearly a role for industry leaders to promote structures for better transfer of new thinking and practice.

Larger BE organisations, involved across the development process, increasingly define their market positions on access to wider ranging skill sets and an organisational culture focused on the multidisciplinary tasks of project delivery. Within these structures, innovation has a greater potential for transfer. The creation of expert teams, with knowledge iteratively gained through 'project based' experience, also helps embed innovation within future practice.

Leading companies are also well placed to influence their supply chains and to work more closely with suppliers to meet objectives. These companies can be at the centre of strategies for change as they can 'pull' them through the industry. For instance, Lamb (2007) has recently reported on the draft sustainability supply chain management policy being put in place by Australian developer Stockland, which will shape the prerequisites for doing business with the company. The aim is to help suppliers go through the same 'greening' process through promoting particular practices and highlighting those they wish to avoid.

Championing the sector in a joined-up way

Given the fragmentation of the BE industry, a strong case can be made for a joined-up 'champion' to promote innovation and change. In the UK, the principal remit of the Government-sponsored Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE) is to champion good urban design across all sectors--providing advice across commercial, public sector and residential building and expertise in the creation of green and public space. While design-led, CABE's contribution is increasingly rooted in its involvement across the decision-making cycle at a range of scales.

In Australia, many industry peak bodies are increasingly active in building links and promoting integration across professions and interests. The Australian Sustainable Built Environment Council (ASBEC), for example, provides a consultative forum on BE sustainability and seeks to provide a uniform industry response to the environmental and ecological issues faced. ASBEC works in collaboration with all three levels of government (federal, State and local) and professional and other peak organisations to produce a prioritised action agenda for the future.

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