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

CONCLUSIONS

Given the complexity of the built environment, and the breadth of the challenging questions posed for cities, the issues raised here are broad brush. The challenges faced, however, suggest several concluding pointers.

First, the impetus for innovation in BE industries is already here. Sustainability investment funds, corporate social responsibility drivers and changing interpretations of risk will continue to shift the balance where sustainability becomes the expected market norm rather than a novelty. Demand for new built form, and our existing built environments, will increasingly be assessed, priced and utilised in different ways as expectations and values evolve. Governments can facilitate this shift through proactive use of tax and subsidy mechanisms and by making sure regulatory tools lead, rather than hinder, innovation.

Second, the easier components of the complex challenges will be carried through by this impetus. Promoting landmark 'green' commercial buildings is an important part of spearheading the transition to sustainability but these 'pioneering' sites must not detract from addressing the much harder policy challenges, notably moving sustainability 'to scale', retrofitting our existing built environment, most of which will still be with us in a generation's time, and ensuring fairness in approach and assistance to those who will be adversely affected through the transition.

Third, although significant shifts are required to respond to all the drivers our built environments will face in the next twenty years and beyond, this paper has argued that intelligent incentivisation and clear direction can facilitate necessary technological advance to respond to these challenges. In each, there is a role for policy leadership across the range of governance levels to ensure that our cities in their entirety, their communities, and all BE industries are supported in ways where innovation is fostered, competitiveness is maximised, and issues of social inclusion and social equity fully incorporated.

Our cities are facing many challenges and the sustainability and innovation paradigm shift represents a global steer that not only demands a review of how our cities and built environment providers need to respond in terms of the risks faced, but also sets the agenda for us to think about where we want our cities to be and the quality of life they should strive to provide. In charting this transition, short term measures will be required to address immediate disparities and effective transitional arrangements must be put in place but long term arrangements are key. Support for vulnerable communities should be at the top of the agenda here.

In rising to these challenges, integration is a central theme--across a variety of spatial scales; across the entire building/neighbourhood life cycle; across organisational practice; and across all levels of governance impacting on our built environment. Coordinating the many partners involved requires a new approach; creating integration at the policy level will mean moving away from the 'technical' or single issue discussions and inventing new governance mechanisms to prioritise actions and effectively engage all stakeholders. This is the greatest challenge our BE industries face.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

This paper is based on research undertaken for the Australian Government Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research.

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SIMON PINNEGAR Deputy Director, City Futures Research Centre, Faculty of the Built Environment, University of NSW, Sydney NSW, Australia

JANE MARCEAU Adjunct Professor, City Futures Research Centre, Faculty of the Built Environment, University of NSW, Sydney NSW, Australia

BILL RANDOLPH Director, City Futures Research Centre and AHURI Research Centre, Faculty of the Built Environment, University of NSW, Sydney NSW, Australia

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