Collaboration needed for sustainable cities

Jul 13, 2010

An excerpt from a speech given by Golder Associates’ Managing Director in Australia, Darren Watt, at a 2010 Consult Australia conference.

Engineers and scientists are at the heart of our society’s continual improvement mantra. We deliver better solutions, stronger and more efficient structures, improved transportation etc.

But our research is telling us that the rate of change, the rate of continual improvement must now increase. Our models are telling us business as usual won’t cut it any more.
So how do we achieve rapid change?

Our approach in the past has been focused on isolated examples of what our future might look like. We focused on a building-by-building or car-by-car approach with each step of improvement based on mitigation action.

At present, best practice for improving the sustainability of our cities involves collaboration across multiple stakeholder groups tackling specific parts of the sustainability puzzle. The basic concepts behind how our cities are designed are being challenged, and a better understanding of mobility needs allows us to consider adaptation actions rather than simply mitigation.

Toronto, which this year was awarded the gong of Canada’s most sustainable city, moved to a balanced mitigation/adaptation approach in 2006 when, after catastrophic failures of infrastructure due to weather, it became clear that mitigation alone would not make the city durable.

Council House 2 in Melbourne, the first new office building to receive a 6-star rating from the Green Building Council of Australia in 2007,  used innovative ways of reducing energy consumption such as exchanging heat with the environment to improve efficiency of HVAC.  Toronto is taking this approach one step further through collaboration and building a system that allows up to 100 CBD towers to use the benefits of deep lake water cooling that can reduce electricity costs for airconditioning by up to 90%.  This approach has gathered momentum and a Leadership Counsel has been established that represents over 40% of the Toronto CBD building owners and major tenants, along with government regulators.

The difference in approach is the move from individual heroes to collaboration.
In the future, collaboration will have to extend across areas of interest. Rob Adams articulates this in the preface to the Transforming Australian Cities report (July 2009) when he challenges why we are not succeeding in our quest. He partly answers his own question by stating that as yet we do not have a collective shared vision of the future and as such we are limited to simply putting up various options.

However, at the southern end of Africa, Johannesburg and Durban are breaking new ground by commissioning all-of-city studies to understand all the dimensions of vulnerability to our society over the next 50 years. These are among the first studies that are attempting to look at greenhouse gas, health, livability etc in a combined way, as well as actively engage stakeholders including those in the vulnerable areas asking them what their vision is for the future.

So the step change for improving the sustainability of our cities is not what we do, but how we do it collaboratively.

Our role as engineers, as it has been for the past 100 years, is to continue to show society what our future can be. But the difference is that we must craft our solutions to meet society’s needs and not just our clients’.  We have a role to tell people about the benefits associated with what is possible and not fall into the default position of telling them what is probable.

We need to sell our ideas, and selling societal benefits can only be done in a collaborative way by involving all stakeholders.

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Golder Associates is a global company specialising in ground engineering and environmental services. Employee owned since its formation in 1960, Golder now employs 7,000 people who operate from more than 160 offices located throughout Africa, Asia, Australasia, Europe, North America and South America. www.golder.com

For more information contact:
Daniel Garland (National Communications)
T: 02 9478 3993
E: dgarland@golder.com.au