Global Cities Research Institute

Transcription

Annual Review 2012
Global Cities
Contents
1. Introduction
Manifesto..............................................................................................................................................................................4
The Challenge.......................................................................................................................................................................4
Research Directions and Partnerships..................................................................................................................................5
Key Themes and Concepts..................................................................................................................................................6
Research Aims......................................................................................................................................................................7
Research Objectives.............................................................................................................................................................7
Research Programs..............................................................................................................................................................8
Geographical Focus............................................................................................................................................................10
Partnerships........................................................................................................................................................................12
2. Themes
Understanding Urban Sustainability....................................................................................................................................20
Urban Sustainability Systems..............................................................................................................................................25
Sustainability.......................................................................................................................................................................29
Resilience............................................................................................................................................................................33
Adaptation..........................................................................................................................................................................40
Looking for Community in the City......................................................................................................................................44
Social Innovation and the City.............................................................................................................................................47
Sustainable Entrepreneurship.............................................................................................................................................51
Co-working in the City........................................................................................................................................................58
Greening Citizenship?.........................................................................................................................................................62
Ethical Consumption...........................................................................................................................................................67
Urban Children and Sustainability: UNICEF’s Child-Friendly Cities Initiative.........................................................................72
Indigeneity and the City: Australian Indigenous Youth and their Strategies of Cultural Survival through Hip Hop................78
The Healthy City..................................................................................................................................................................83
Learning-City Regions, or City-Regional Learning...............................................................................................................87
Communicating Sustainability in the City............................................................................................................................90
Sustainable Urban Tourism.................................................................................................................................................94
Urban Sustainability: The Aesthetics of Change, Material Process and the Social Imaginary..............................................98
The City as Curated Space...............................................................................................................................................104
Environmental Art and Urban Sustainability......................................................................................................................109
The Role of Public Participation in Urban Sustainability Planning......................................................................................113
Place-Making....................................................................................................................................................................119
Barcelona was the site for a demonstration on 11 September 2012 that drew an estimated 1.5 million people onto the street to demand independence for Catalonia.
The mood was joyous and celebratory with protesters, such as the man and young girl pictured, waving flags in the late-afternoon autumn sunshine. The Global Cities
Institute is working in Barcelona with Metropolis, the United Cities and Local Governments organization and the City Hall on issues of sustainability.
Barcelona, Spain, 2012.
The Peri-Urban Fringe.......................................................................................................................................................125
Developing Sustainability Strategies: Double Diamond Method of Life Cycle and Design Thinking..................................131
3. Researchers.............................................................................................................................................................................138
4. Administrative Structure............................................................................................................................................................146
5. Visiting Scholars.......................................................................................................................................................................150
6.
Research Programs
Climate Change Adaptation..............................................................................................................................................154
Community Sustainability..................................................................................................................................................158
Globalization and Culture..................................................................................................................................................164
Global Indigeneity and Reconciliation................................................................................................................................170
Human Security and Disasters..........................................................................................................................................174
Sustainable Urban and Regional Futures..........................................................................................................................180
Urban Decision-Making and Complex Decisions..............................................................................................................190
contents continued over page
7. Affiliated Research Centres
Centre for Applied Social Research..................................................................................................................................196
AHURI Research Centre...................................................................................................................................................197
Globalism Reserch Centre................................................................................................................................................198
Centre for Sustainable Organisations and Work...............................................................................................................199
8.Publications..............................................................................................................................................................................202
9. Conferences and Forums.........................................................................................................................................................220
10. Postgraduate Students............................................................................................................................................................230
Published by: Global Cities Research Institute (RMIT University)
Building 96, Level 2
17-23 Lygon Street
Carlton VIC 3053
GPO Box 2476
Melbourne VIC 3001
Australia
www.rmit.edu.au www. global-cities.info
ISBN 978-0-9870988-3-2
General Editors: Paul James and Nevzat Soguk
Themes Editor: John Fien
Production Editor: Melissa Postma
Layout and design: Melissa Postma
Photographs: Matty Day, Tommaso Durante, Fergus Hudson, James Henry, Tammy Hulbert,
Paul James, Tania Lewis, Jane Mullett
Printed by: Arena Printers, Fitzroy, Australia
Printing process: EcoStar, carbon neutral 100% post-consumer stock, FSC certified
Soy based inks used
Page 3: In November the Global Cities Institute was invited to be part of a major forum to in Guangzhou organized by Metropolis and
the City of Guangzhou. Our role was to lead a taskforce developing an approach for assessing sustainability linked to the ‘Circles of
Sustainability’ method outlined in the 2011 Global Cities Annual Review. A central part of that methodology is that sustainability needs to
be understood across the domains of ecology, economics, politics and culture. Appropriately, cultural celebration was an important part
of the forum with, on one occasion, 1,200 guests invited to the State Opera Theatre. The man pictured in the photograph was part of a
classical dance group who performed at a banquet during the forum. Guangzhou, China, 2012.
2
3
1. Introduction
Research Directions and Partnerships
RMIT University’s Global Cities Research Institute addresses the challenge
of sustainability, resilience, security, adaptation and reconciliation.
Manifesto
The Global Cities Institute aims to understand the processes
of urban change in the global context, both positive and
problematic. This involves researching the complexity of what
it means to live on this planet, focusing on urban settings and
their hinterlands—from mega-cities to provincial centres. In
collaboration with our local-global partners, we aim to develop
practical, socially engaged, and ethically considered responses
to two questions. How can we make cities better places to live?
How can we project conditions of positive sustainability?
Here positive sustainability means much more than maintaining
the conditions of ‘going on’ or ‘business as usual’. Questions
of positive sustainability are taken to encompass social
processes of resilience, adaptation, livability, human security
and reconciliation—economic, ecological, political and cultural.
Even this spelling out of the domains of the social—economic,
ecological, political and cultural—requires a rethinking of usually
taken-for-granted categories. However important economics
might be, our approach challenges mainstream configurations
that prioritize economics over culture, politics and ecology.
The Challenge
Cities, for all their vibrancy and liveliness, have long faced the
challenge of providing secure and sustainable places to live.
Writing some time ago, Lewis Mumford argued that ‘The blind
forces of urbanization, flowing along the lines of least resistance,
show no aptitude for creating and urban and industrial pattern
that will be stable, self-sustaining, and self-renewing.’ 1 This
challenge of making cities better has been intensifying. A global
demographic shift across the course of the twentieth century
and into the present has seen the majority of the world’s
population living in cities. 2 However, instead of focusing on
the fact of the demographic shift, we confront a shibboleth in
scholarly writing. Instead of marking a momentous change, the
recent shift, we argue, is only a marginal signal of a much deeper
process. The urbanization of the world has been a long-term if
massively accelerating process, and, for at least the last century,
urbanizing capitalism has been increasingly organizing the planet
in its own image. This has major consequences for ways of life
that do not take the dominant modern path.
1 L Mumford 1956,‘The natural history of urbanization’, cited in J Brugman 2009,
Welcome to the urban revolution, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia,
p. 16.
2 M Davis 2006, Planet of slums, Verso, London, p. 1.
4
Secondly, it should also be said that the world’s cities have long
been the locus of globalization processes. Against those writers
who emphasize the importance of financial exchange systems
and distinguish a few special cities as ‘global cities’—commonly
London, Paris, New York and Tokyo—we assert the uneven
global dimensions of all the cities that we study. Los Angeles, the
home of Hollywood, is a global city. And so is Dili, the small and
‘insignificant’ capital of Timor Leste. Dili was established as an
administrative town by the Portuguese in October 1769, a year
before the English explorer Captain Cook ‘discovered’ Australia,
seven years before the American Revolution, and two decades
before the French Revolution.
When cities are researched in their full complexity, it does
not make much sense to set up hierarchies of global
interconnectedness based on counting the number of
economic transactions with other financial centres. While we
take empirical research very seriously—from statistics to global
ethnography and narrative history—our emphasis is on analytical
understanding and interpretation. This we call ‘engaged theory’.
As a way of giving further focus to this broad brief, the Institute
focuses on a number of carefully chosen cities. For the first
five years of the life of the Institute our core focus was on the
Asia-Pacific region. In 2012, with consolidation of the RMIT
global strategic plan, this was broadened to become a global
brief. We have added Porto Alegre, Barcelona and Singapore
to our focus cities. The cities at the centre of our research are
now Dili, Colombo, Ho Chi Minh City, Honolulu, Kuala Lumpur,
Melbourne, New Delhi, Port Moresby, Porto Alegre, Shanghai,
Singapore, and Vancouver. This gives us a remarkable range
of cities, all global cities in different ways, cities that cross the
North-South, East-West, rich-poor and communist-capitalist
divides.
Our brief goes to the heart of RMIT’s positioning of itself as
urban-oriented, globally projected and socially connected. In
summary, the Global Cities Institute conducts both cuttingedge and applied research that is intended to have engaged
consequences. We start with the city in which we live—
Melbourne—and reach out to a range of cities from which we
have much to learn.
In partnership with a number of like-minded institutions and
researchers around the world, the Global Cities Institute directly
addresses the challenge of urban sustainability through engaged
research programs intended to have significant on-the-ground
impact. The emphasis of our research is on questions of
sustainability, resilience, security, adaptation and reconciliation
in the face of the processes of globalization and global climate
change. Narrow questions of urbanization are not the only key
for us. We are not for the most part ‘urban studies’ scholars
in the usual sense. Rather we see cities—that is, metropolitan
locales in relation to ‘their’ hinterlands—as a crucible for
understanding the shifting human condition.
The Institute takes partnership as our key to success. For
example, we are engaged in local collaboration with the
Municipality of Melbourne and NGOs such as the Cultural
Development Network and World Vision, as well as in primary
global collaborations with the UN Global Compact, UN-Habitat,
Metropolis, and other institutes and centres across the world.
Through the work of the Global Cities Institute, RMIT was named
in 2008 as the first UN-Habitat university in the Asia-Pacific
region, and from 2007 the Institute has hosted the Global
Compact Cities Programme, the only International Secretariat of
the United Nations in the Asia-Pacific region.
Other more established research programs exist at other
universities and institutions. What makes this institute somewhat
different is the way in which it works across the manifold themes
of social and environmental sustainability from globalization
to global climate change. Secondly, the Institute crosses
the conventional divide between the technical sciences and
the social sciences/humanities. The Institute draws together
a diverse range of scholars from social theorists, political
scientists, anthropologists and art critics to sustainability
specialists, geospatial scientists and water engineers. Thirdly,
the Institute brings together on-the-ground deeply-engaged
research in communities around the world with analytical theory
that takes the social theory and social mapping of globalization
and global futures very seriously. Fourthly, the Institute, in
partnership with others, takes as part of its central brief the
responsibility to make a practical social difference in the world.
Here, for example, we provided the research basis for rewriting
the Integrated Community Development policy for the country
of Papua New Guinea; we were a key partner in contributing to
the Future Melbourne planning round for its next ten years; and
we are working as part of the United Nations Global Compact
to develop a new way of assessing urban sustainability called
‘Circles of Sustainability’.
Australia Day Parade, Melbourne, Australia, January 2012.
© Tommaso Durante, The Visual Archive Project of the Global
Imaginary.
Key Themes and Concepts
Research Aims
Research Objectives
Two of the most pressing overarching issues facing the world today are globalization and global climate change. They encompass
questions of urban adaptation, cultural change, community sustainability, human security, and global learning. Over the last
decade, billions of dollars have been spent on ameliorative and security-oriented projects by both government and non-government
agencies. However, many communities continue to live under difficult circumstances. Understanding this set of problems is central to
the research agenda of the Global Cities Institute, and has important implications for sustainability in general.
Cities are diverse. They are composed of distinctive social
relations and particular natural systems. They have varying
exposure and changing sensitivity to different internal and
external stresses. The people who dwell in them live across
multiple time-horizons over which risk and vulnerability may shift.
The Global Cities Institute’s research program involves mapping
and comparing the insecurities, resilience and sustainability of
strategically-chosen cities and hinterlands across the globe.
1.
To develop an overall understanding of the ways in which
patterns of globalization and global climate change impact
upon the human condition.
2.
To explore the basic sources of insecurity and sustainability
for different global cities, with particular reference to the
following:
These two themes of globalization and global sustainability are understood in terms of five key concepts: sustainability, security,
resilience, adaptation and reconciliation.
Sustainability
Adaptation
Bridging all research in the Institute is the concept of
‘sustainability’. Our concern here is to understand positive social
sustainability—economic, ecological, political, and cultural. This
involves developing the interpretative, practical and technical
bases for more adequately understanding how conditions of
positive human security, resilience, adaptation, and reconciliation
might best be cultivated or revitalized under different
circumstances. By bringing the interpretative social sciences
and the natural and engineering sciences into a dialogue, the
Institute works to develop a deep understanding of how to
deal with broad issues of social sustainability. In other words, in
collaboration with our local-global partners, we want to develop
practical, socially-engaged, and ethically-considered responses
to the question, ‘What is to be done?’ Critical sustainability is
thus our core concept.
Adaptation is the process by which responses to questions of
sustainability are embedded in the practices of communities,
organizations and governments. This involves developing
and implementing strategies to ameliorate, moderate and
cope with the consequences of global insecurities, including
climate change and broader social pressures. Adaptation is
one possible approach to enhancing resilience. In most cases,
however, adequate research has not been done to guide such
processes of adaptation.
Security
Our key focus here involves examining the broad question
of human security with particular attention to the local-global
context of a range of cities and communities in the Asia-Pacific
region. These settings range from communities dealing with the
aftermath of widespread violence or natural disasters to those
polities-communities in countries such as Australia, Canada, and
the United States where, despite the absence of the immediate
pressures of violence or natural disasters, cities are facing new
kinds of insecurity. This is expressed in economic, ecological,
political and cultural terms. Here one of our most pressing
concerns are those local groups and communities who are most
vulnerable in the face of insecurity, violence and risk.
Reconciliation
Our approach to concept of reconciliation is closely aligned with
how we treat human security. Both are understood critically
rather than as straightforward ideals. In these terms, positive
reconciliation requires more than dialogue, truth-telling or
saying ‘sorry’. It requires rethinking conventional approaches—
approaches that might be considered to be involved in
negative reconciliation, and which seek to achieve comfortable
harmony or to dissolve difference. Rather, reconciliation is best
understood as dialogue and practical engagement across
continuing difference where the aim is recognition and respect,
even across boundaries than continue to be uncomfortable.
Urbanized regions are places of immense change and
innovation. Nevertheless, they are vulnerable to major shocks
such as economic crises, terrorism, civil conflict, tsunamis, and
disease pandemics. They are also susceptible to the gradual
breakdown of basic infra-structural services that provide
communications, energy, mobility, and water. In turn, cities are
intensifying the resource impacts and environmental damage of
their ‘ecological footprints’. Intensifying urbanization is having
an impact upon the economic, ecological, political and cultural
sustainability of smaller communities through resource demands,
rural de-population, migration flows and the destabilizing of
social ties. Issues of urban inequality, homelessness and sociospatial polarization, both between and within urban regions,
undermine the social and cultural foundations that underpin
democratic institutions and practices. Globalization, at least in
its current form, tends to reinforce these trends by accelerating
some social changes that degrade the environment, displace
families, fragment community identity, and increase inequality
and social conflict. Our aim is to determine what might be
sustainable and innovative responses to these processes.
Our overall aim is to develop interpretations and strategies for
building sustainable cities in the world today, thus contributing
to the quality of human life and the viability of ecologies in those
places.
•
Risk analyses of urban infrastructure;
•
Structural analyses of insecurity and vulnerability;
•
Social analyses of cities, including through developing
indices of sustainability; and
•
Interpretive analyses of the conditions of adaptation
to climate change.
3.
To understand the resilience and adaptive capacities of
communities in relation to climate change, globalization and
other conditions of insecurity.
4.
To examine questions of cultural transformation and
develop an understanding of the conditions for alternative
pathways to learning, knowledge-exchange, reconciliation
and cross-community co-operation.
5.
To generate policies and strategies aimed at maximizing
social learning for cross-cultural dialogue and reconciliation;
addressing sources of insecurity; minimizing the impact
of natural and human-induced disasters and conflicts;
promoting approaches to reconstruction that integrate
physical rebuilding with political, cultural, and economic
renewal; and applying ecologically and culturally sustainable
technologies and techniques in the areas of urban
infrastructure.
6.
To contribute to the development of local-global
governance processes for dealing with complexity of social
and environmental change, and to engage with alternative
global futures.
Resilience
Our aim here is to understand the technical and social capacities
of cities and communities to respond actively to and practically
address processes of globalization and the emerging impacts
of climate change. In the face of social and environmental
change, cities are experiencing increasing pressures. Existing
and emerging patterns of resilience are important to the ongoing
viability of communities and their infrastructures. Such patterns
of resilience give communities a basis for considering different
ways of ameliorating or adapting to emerging conditions before
they reach crisis proportions. Here our research ranges from
a concern with housing and infrastructure to the nature of
community and different ways of living.
6
Our overall aim is to develop interpretations and strategies
for building sustainable cities in the world today, thus
contributing to the quality of human life and the viability of
ecologies in those places.
7
Research Programs
The Institute brings researchers across the University into an
ongoing collaboration framed by concerns about social and
environmental sustainability with a particular focus on the
themes of globalization and global environmental sustainability.
The strategically chosen cities provide the locus of our research,
but we want to understand those cities in context. In other
words, the Global Cities Institute is based on the premise that
cities can only be adequately understood in local, regional,
national and global contexts. The Research Programs are:
1.
Cliamte Change Adaptation
2.
Community Sustainability
3.
Global Indigeneity and Reconciliation
4.
Globalization and Culture
5.
Human Security and Disasters
6.
Sustainable Urban and Regional Futures
7.
Urban Decision-Making and Complex Systems
The research across the Institute integrates interpretative
analysis and practical engagement, developed in co-operation
with local partners. It thus involves the following:
1.
Collaborative scoping of the research, including by
engaging critical reference groups in different cities;
2.
Ongoing assessment and reassessment of current relevant
patterns and processes;
3.
Comparative case studies of issues in specific global
cities and regions, the development of theory and the
identification of lessons learnt and recommendations for
addressing economic, ecological, political and cultural
change;
4.
Public communication back to the cities and their
communities of lessons learnt, with ongoing dialogue
over emerging policy recommendations, models and
applications;
5.
Development of theory and methodology as the basis for
recommendations on appropriate and flexible policies,
models and tools; and
6.
Application of these flexible policies, models and tools in a
wide range of cities and further refinement, both in practice
and theory.
Circles of Sustainability
ECONOMICS
ECOLOGY
Materials & Energy
Water & Air
Flora & Fauna
Habitat & Food
Place & Space
Constructions & Settlements
Emission & Waste
Production & Resourcing
Exchange & Transfer
Accounting & Regulation
Consumption & Use
Labour & Welfare
Technology & Infrastructure
Wealth & Distribution
Engagement & Identity
Recreation & Creativity
Memory & Projection
Belief & Meaning
Gender & Generations
Enquiry & Learning
Health & Wellbeing
Organization & Governance
Law & Justice
Communication & Movement
Representation & Negotiation
Security & Accord
Dialogue & Reconciliation
Ethics & Accountability
CULTURE
POLITICS
Globalization
Social
Sustainability
8
Global Sustainability
Climate Change Adaptation
Environmental
Sustainability
Vibrant
Good
Highly Satisfactory
Satisfactory+
Satisfactory
Satisfactory–
Highly Unsatisfactory
Bad
Critical
CIRCLES OF SUSTAINABILITY
9
Geographical Focus
The Global Cities Institute on a number of specific cities, their hinterlands, and regional contexts. This
is not to exclude other places of research, but to focus on these locales as the places where longterm research relations including with universities, governments and NGOs are being developed.
It allows for a research database to be slowly accumulated. Even if our brief is global, because
RMIT is located in the Asia-Pacific region it makes sense that the University develops a powerful
specialization in this region, including Vietnam where RMIT currently has a major campus.
Barcelona, Spain
The Design Institute has worked in Barcelona for many years, and in 2012 the Global Cities Institute
also named Barcelona as a focus city. Barcelona has recently signed onto the UN Global Compact
Cities Programme hosted by the Institute, and partnerships have been developed with international
organizations based in the city including Metropolis, United Cities Local Governance, and Citymart.
Colombo, Sri Lanka
The work of the Global Cities Institute in Sri Lanka is led by Martin Mulligan. Here the work centres
on the resilience and adaptation of communities to crises such as the tsunami and the violence of
civil war. Research is conducted in partnership with the University of Colombo, the Foundation for
Goodness, and Global Reconciliation. Recent work has concentrated on reconciliation. In 2012,
the Institute in collaboration with Global Reconciliation successfully held the first national civil society
reconciliation forum in Sri Lanka since the civil war ended.
Dili, Timor Leste
Numerous major projects have been conducted in Dili and across Timor Leste by the Timor
group linked to the Human Security and Global Indigeneity programs, with comparative research
undertaken in Fatumean (Covalima district), Luro (Lautem district), Venilale (Baucau district), and
Kampung Baru (Dili district). The Global Cities Institute has been working with Irish Aid, Oxfam
Australia, Concern Worldwide, and the Office for the Promotion of Equality (now known as the
Secretariat of State for the Promotion of Equality), Prime Minister’s Office, Timor-Leste. The work of
the Global Cities Institute in Dili is lead by Damian Grenfell.
Honolulu, USA
The work of the Global Cities Institute in Honolulu is led by Manfred Steger. One of the key projects
in Hawaii concerns the role of indigenous festivals in relation to the culture of globalization and the
conditions of community sustainability. Working with the Institute’s Deputy Director Nevzat Soguk,
Barry Judd and Tim Butcher as research leaders of the Global Indigeneity and Reconciliation
program have been developing strong relations with colleagues in indigenous studies at the
University of Hawaii.
Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam
Vietnam is a key focus of RMIT University and continues to be an important emphasis of the
Institute. The Global Cities Institute has made a major commitment to research in Vietnam. Key
partnerships include the Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences and the Vietnam Green Building
Council. The work of the Global Cities Institute in Vietnam is led by John Fien.
Melbourne, Australia
Given that the home of the Global Cities Institute is in Melbourne, it is natural that this involves
engagement with many organizations in the city. One of those central partnerships is with the
Melbourne City Council. The Council’s planning strategy for inner-Melbourne is called ‘Future
Melbourne’ and the Global Cities Institute has worked in collaboration on this program and others.
The City of Melbourne is a supporter of the UN Global Compact Cities Programme (see below
under ‘Partnerships’). Liz Ryan convenes the work of the Global Cities Institute in Melbourne.
New Delhi, India
The engagement of the Institute is New Delhi is a recent development based on the alignment of
RMIT as it began to name its partner cities. We are now working closely with the National Institute
of Urban Affairs. We ran a major forum together in 2012, which included representatives of the cities
of New Delhi, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Sao Paulo, and Tehran. We are currently working together on
a Metropolis project on public-private partnerships, and a Metropolis Taskforce of methods and
approaches.
Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea
Through the Globalism Research Centre, the Global Cities Institute has been working with the
Department for Community Development since 2004. The Institute has contributed to policy
developments that are rewriting the national approach to community sustainability. Under their
Minister Dame Carol Kidu (recently retired) and Secretary Joseph Klapat, the Department has been
in the forefront of rethinking community development strategies and partnerships, particularly as
embodied in their recent major document Integrated Community Development Policy, 2007, and a
series of subsequent reports. Paul James leads the work of the Global Cities Institute in Papua New
Guinea.
Shanghai, China
The Institute’s key collaborator in Shanghai is the Shanghai Academy of Social Science. The Director
of the Academy came to Melbourne in 2008 and the Global Cities Institute participated in major
research forums in Shanghai in 2009 and 2010. Manfred Steger and Chris Hudson lead the work of
the Global Cities Institute in Shanghai.
Singapore
In 2012, after many years in which individual researchers in the Global Cities Institute had done
research in Singapore, the Institute decided to name Singapore as a focus city. This was done,
linked to RMIT’s overall strategy of engagement on partner cities. As part of this process the Institute
has agreed to collaborate with the Centre for Liveable Cities in Singapore. Chris Hudson will lead the
Institute’s engagement in Singapore.
Vancouver, Canada
The work of the Global Cities Institute in Vancouver is lead by Andy Scerri. Global Cities is
collaborating with the Simon Fraser University in developing a major project linked to the UN Global
Compact Cities Programme (see below under ‘Partnerships’) on the ‘Circles of Sustainability’
method for developing social indicators. The method is being piloted in the city concurrently with
research being conducted in Melbourne.
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Our research in Kuala Lumpur includes a longitudinal study following the relocation of squatter
settlement communities to new low-cost, high-rise complexes. This work has served as a catalyst
to broader enquiry into the workings of national development, ethnicity and identity politics. Partners
include the University of Malaya, University Kebangsaan Malaya, and University Sains Malaysia. Yaso
Nadarajah leads the work of the Global Cities Institute in Kuala Lumpur.
10
11
Partnerships
Global and International Organizations
Citymart
Citymart.com and Living Laboratories are sister organizations based in Copenhagen (Denmark)
and Barcelona (Spain), working with more than 80 global cities and 1,000 companies and research
centres in Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas with a mission to provide a platform for service
innovation in cities and overcome key technological and organizational barriers to collaboration.
In 2012, Citymart decided to use the Institute’s ‘Circles of Sustainability’ method as its basis for
engagement.
Global Reconciliation
Global Reconciliation grew out of the Global Reconciliation Network and collaboration between
RMIT and Monash Universities going back to 2002. Global Reconciliation brings together members
of community groups, social activists, academics and others around the world, working towards the
broad goal of reconciliation. Here reconciliation is understood as the process of establishing dialogue
and collaborative practice across the divides of difference—nationality, religion, race and culture. It is
focuses upon grounded engagement with local communities. The patrons of Global Reconciliation
include The Reverend Desmond Tutu, The Honourable Sir William Deane, Aung San Suu Kyi,
President Jose Ramos-Horta, Professor Bernard Lown, Professor Amartya Sen, and Dr Lowitja
O’Donaghue. As part of joint initiative with the Global Cities Institute, and in particular the Human
Security Program, the Pathways to Reconciliation Summit held in December 2009 followed on from
a series of previous events: Melbourne, London, New Delhi, Sarajevo and Amman. The Summit was
organized as a response to the paradox that political violence and insecurity have been intensifying
across the world despite the expansion of security regimes and other short-term solutions. More
recently work has focused on Sri Lanka with a major reconciliation forum held in Colombo in 2012.
The objective across all the projects is to explore alternative pathways to peace, pathways which
emphasize informal reconciliation processes operating beneath the radar of conventional regimes.
Metropolis
Created in 1985, the Metropolis Association is represented by more than a hundred member
cities from across the world and operates as an international forum for exploring issues and
concerns common to all big cities. The main goal of the association is to better control the
development process of metropolitan areas in order to enhance the wellbeing of their citizens. To
do this, Metropolis represents regions and metropolitan areas at the world-wide level. The Global
Cities Institute was represented on Metropolis’ Commission 2, Managing Urban Growth which
reported in 2011. The Institute is currently involved in a Metropolis initiative in India on integrated
strategic planning, and leads a Taskforce to develop a sustainability assessment approach for the
organization.
Spire International
Spire International is a not-for-profit organization that links donors to local initiatives in developing
communities. Spire specializes in identifying smaller locally-based initiatives where there is a need for
external assistance so that goals can be achieved. Spire focuses on the areas of education, health,
income-generation and environment. The Global Cities Institute is a supporter and sponsor of some
Spire International events, and is represented on the executive of Spire Australia.
The City of Colombo was the site for the first national reconciliation forum organized by civil society groups including the Global
Cities Institute in collaboration with Global Reconciliation: ‘Ancient Peoples, New Futures’, 24–26 August 2012. The highly
successful forum drew over 60 senior civil society activists, religious leaders, and government advisors to a three-day event to
work out positive pathways for post-war Sri Lanka. The background to the forum was a tense political culture of criticism and
recrimination, and a series of unsuccessful attempts by the Rajapaksa government to respond adequately to local and global
concerns or to implement to suggestions of the Lessons Learned and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC). The photograph, taken
in the heart of the city of Colombo with its global references, symbolizes the tensions of popular culture and an armed police
officer in a district of high security. Colombo, Sri Lanka, 2012.
12
13
United Nations Global Compact Cities Programme
World Vision
The Global Cities Institute became the host of the United Nations Global Compact Cities
Programme (UNGCCP) International Secretariat in 2007 with support from the City of Melbourne
and the Committee for Melbourne. This means that RMIT hosts the only United Nations International
Secretariat based in Australia and the Asia-Pacific. This relationship provides the Institute with
a direct partnership with the United Nations through the Global Compact in New York and the
Secretary General’s Department. The Cities Programme was initiated in 2003 by former UN
Secretary General, Kofi Annan. It is a discrete component of the Global Compact and provides
a unique framework for cities to develop and implement sustainable and concrete solutions to
economic, ecological, political and cultural challenges of a long-term and often intractable nature.
The Cities Programme was developed in response to the need for an evolution of corporate social
responsibility to enable a meaningful engagement of the private sector at a systemic level. However,
it went much further. By utilizing a common methodology, the ‘Melbourne Model’ and ‘Circles
of Sustainability’, it combines the ideas, knowledge, experience, and resources inherent within
business, government, and civil society in a manner that directly benefits all participants.
World Vision Australia is part of an international aid organization for children and youth, mostly in
rural areas. In order to begin a reorientation of its operations globally towards urban engagement,
World Vision has established a Centre of Expertise for Urban Programming. The Global Cities
Institute is working with the Centre to develop an integrated approach to sustainable urban and
community development. The approach is based on the ‘Circles of Sustainability’ method that is
also used by the United Nations Global Compact Cities Programme. It will establish a process for
initiating, monitoring and evaluating projects and for locally negotiating indicators of sustainability.
Public-Political Bodies and Grassroots Organizations
Arena Publications
Established in 1963, Arena Publications publishes Arena Journal, an academic bi-annual, and Arena
Magazine, Australia’s leading left magazine of cultural and political comment. Both publications
frequently publish articles and commentary pieces on areas ranging across the work of the Institute,
including globalization, Indigenous politics and culture, and the role of intellectuals and technology
in the transformation of the current cultural and political landscape. Arena has a thriving centre in
Fitzroy, Melbourne, which combines publication, public discussion and a commercial printery.
Cultural Development Network
The Cultural Development Network is an independent non-profit organisation that links communities,
artists, local government and organisations in order to promote cultural vitality. The Cultural
Development Network advocates a stronger role for cultural expression to build a healthier, more
engaged and sustainable society and is based in Melbourne, Australia. The Cultural Development
Network has since 2012 been based in the Global Cities Institute building.
Institute of Postcolonial Studies
Felicity Cahill is a lawyer and a post graduate researcher with the UN Global Compact Cities Programme.
She was part of the Urbanisation and Cities coordinating team for the Rio+20 Corporate Sustainability
Forum held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, June 2012.
United Nations Human Settlement Programme
The United Nations Human Settlements Programme, UN-Habitat, is the United Nations agency
for human settlements. It is mandated by the UN General Assembly to promote socially and
environmentally sustainable towns and cities with the goal of providing adequate shelter for all. In
2008 UN-Habitat invited RMIT University through the Global Cities Institute to become a Habitat
Partner University. This was confirmed in 2009 with the visit of a delegation from UN-Habitat to
Melbourne, including Executive Director Anna Tibaijuka. The visit was marked by a major public
launch of the partnership. The partnership directly engages research staff and students in the
activities of the UN Human Settlement Program. It links the Global Cities Institute with a unique
group of international universities, including Simon Fraser University in Canada which also hosts a
UN-Habitat Urban Observatory. RMIT was the first university in Australia, and the first university in
the Asia-Pacific to be so invited.
14
The aim of the Institute of Postcolonial Studies is to understand and undo the continuing legacies
of colonialism today: dispossession, displacement, racism, and intercultural violence. In particular,
this entails understanding political and economic pressures and cultural prejudices faced by
indigenous peoples and impoverished communities, supporting those facing the consequences
of political upheaval and violence, and generating dialogue across worlds of continuing and often
positive cultural difference. RMIT’s Global Cities Institute is represented on the Postcolonial Institute’s
Council, the Institute’s peak policy body. The IPS publishes Postcolonial Studies, an international
journal, founded in 1997 by a group of scholars associated with the Institute of Postcolonial Studies,
including Global Cities’ representation, and a book series with the University of Hawaii Press.
The Victorian Centre for Climate Change Adaptation Research
The Victorian Centre for Climate Change Adaptation Research (VCCCAR) is an initiative which
aims to promote multi-disciplinary research activity in the region, as well as fostering increased
collaborative working between universities, other research organizations, and government, in order
to better inform strategic planning and other decision-making processes. Four main Victorian
universities are involved, with Darryn McEvoy from RMIT (through the Global Cities Research
Institute) as Deputy Director for the Centre.
Universities and Research Centres
Simon Fraser University
Simon Fraser University is located in Vancouver, Canada, as is the home to a UN-Habitat Urban
Observatory led by Meg Holden. She is part of a SFU-RMIT team doing pilot studies in Vancouver
and Melbourne to develop the ‘Circles of Sustainability’ approach as part of the United Nations
Cities Programme (see United Nations Global Compact Cities Programme above).
15
University of Colombo
In 2006, the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka, and the Globalism Research Centre signed a
Memorandum of Understanding with the objective of developing collaborative research projects.
This has been carried forward by members of the Community Sustainability Program of the Global
Cities Institute through exchange research trips by academics both from RMIT to Sri
Lanka and Colombo to Australia. Most recently, the Institute in collaboration with Global
Reconciliation conducted the first national civil-society reconciliation forum in Sri Lanka since the
end of the war. Professor Siri Hettige from the University of Colombo was a key participant.
University of Hawai’i
In September 2003, the Globalism Research Centre and the Globalization Research Centre at
the University of Hawai’i , USA, collaborated with a number of other institutes in establishing the
Globalization Studies Network. Over the 2000s Manfred Steger worked with its Director, Mike
Douglass, to develop ongoing research collaboration around the theme of ‘Globalization and
Culture’, one of the programs in the Global Cities Institute. More recently, Barry Judd and Tim
Butcher, leaders of the ‘Global Indigeneity and Reconciliation’ program have been developing
close research ties with the Department of Politics and their indigenous studies program.
Corporations
Accenture
Researchers in the Institute have worked closely with a team at Accenture in Australia, France
and India (led by Simon Vardy) to develop a sustainability simulation tool which was launched
in Singapore in November 2010. The web-based software is framed by the United Nations City
Programme method and allows city planners to project sustainability programs and to see the
potential effects of those programs over time as different parameters are changed.
ARUP
ARUP is a global construction and design company committed to sustainable development. The
Global Cities Institute have been working with Arup London and Melbourne with the aim of forming
a strategic research partnership on sustainability indicators, climate change adaptation, and on
urban infrastructure.
B2B Lawyers
B2B is a Melbourne-based law firm operating in the areas of corporate and commercial Law,
insolvency, commercial litigation, alternate dispute resolution, domestic and international taxation.
David Lurie, one of the B2B partners, does significant pro bono work for the Global Cities Institute
on important areas of reconciliation. B2B is the legal organization behind the Global Cities Institute
and Centre of Ethics (Monash University) initiative Global Reconciliation (see Global Reconciliation
above) and has provided financial support for some of its projects.
Costa Group
The Costa Family Foundation has been a significant and ongoing philanthropic supporter of the
work of Global Cities in the area of reconciliation and human security. Through Rob Costa it was a
major under-writer of the Reconciliation Summit in Amman, Jordan. Most recently, it has supported
the ‘Playing Together’ project involving indigenous footballers in Sri Lanka.
Drapac Group
Drapac is a property investment group committed to creating sustainable environments and
investments. Through Michael Drapac, the company has provided significant financial support for
reconciliation projects in the Middle East and Sri Lanka.
Microsoft
The campus of the University of Hawai’i, Moama, 2012.
Microsoft Australia is providing software tools to develop our ‘Circles of Sustainability’ project in
conjunction with the UN Global Compact Cities Programme. Greg Stone of Microsoft is an advisor
to our ARC-funded project ‘Accounting for Sustainability’.
SJB Urban
University Kebangsaan Malaysia
UKM is the National University of Malaysia mandated with safeguarding ‘the sovereignty of the
Malay language while globalizing knowledge in the context of local culture’. It is located in Bangi,
south of Kuala Lumpur. In 2007 discussions began with the objective of developing collaborative
research. This has been carried through in joint work with the Institute of Malaysian and
International Studies (IKAMS).
SJB Urban is a specialist urban design practice with a focus on liveability and sustainability.
SJB Urban is working with the Urban Decision-Making and Complex Systems program of the
Global Cities Research Institute on a decision-support system that will assist individuals to assess
options as to where to live, based on a range of lifestyle issues, and taking a long-term holistic
perspective.
University of Salford
The University of Salford is in the City of Salford, part of the Greater Manchester Region, in central
England. High-level visits of staff from Salford and RMIT across 2008 to 2010 have been part of
a strong and developing relationship between the two universities. The Sustainable Urban and
Regional Futures centre (SURF) at Salford is mirrored by a program of the same name at RMIT.
16
17
In February, the Global Cities Institute organized a conference on disasters and human security in Tokyo with the United Nations
University and Waseda University. This photograph was taken of a shopfront at the Toyama campus of Waseda University. The
image carries the complexity of Waseda’s Global Centre of Excellence program, in this case Global Robot Academia.
Tokyo, Japan, 2012.
18
19
2. Themes
Understanding Urban Sustainability
John Fien and Ralph Horne
Cities and regional centres are centres of cultural, political and economic advantage. This is
particularly so in Asia, where rapid urbanization has underpinned economic development. In
1950, around 10 per cent of people in Asia lived in urban areas. By 2010, the urbanized Asia
population was approaching 40 per cent, and it is expected to have exceeded 50 per cent by
2025. Accordingly, urban centres are increasing in both size and number. At the beginning of the
last century, there were only 11 megacities—those with populations of more than 1 million each.
By 2030, the United Nations predicts that there will be more than 500 megacities, and more than
half of them will be in Asia. Already Asia is home to almost half of the earth’s total urban population,
providing a home for more than three times that of urban Europe, the world region with the second
largest urban population (Asian Development Bank 2012a: xxxvii).
Policy and governance for sustainable urban and regional futures is a key global concern, including
specifically across Asia. Yet applied urban research—and the capacity to undertake it—is critically
lacking. Such research is vital to providing the evidence base for policy and strategies for addressing
the quality of life and environmental problems that rapid, unplanned urban growth has brought. In
addition, research is particularly needed on ways of sustaining urban areas as engines of economic
prosperity, bridging supply and demand gaps in infrastructure services, managing urban growth,
and strengthening urban management capacity (Asian Development Bank 2012b).
Within the Asia-Pacific region, Australia is notable as a highly urbanized country. Australian cities
house 80 per cent of the nation’s population and are still experiencing rapid growth, while supporting
liveable lifestyles. By 2029, 3.2 million additional homes will be required and by 2040 the number
of urban Australians will double. Climate change and resource scarcity, coupled with demographic
change are key challenges facing Australian cities, and have profound implications for the way
such Westernized cities are configured, developed and governed. Conventional responses to
expand existing infrastructure and urban form would make urban areas increasingly dysfunctional,
congested and unaffordable, with declining wellbeing and productivity. By one estimate, maintaining
the urban status quo would cost the Australian economy $480 trillion dollars over the next 50 years.
Without better city and regional centre design, progressive urbanization will be a major constraint to
economic, environmental and social prosperity (Trubka et al., 2008).
Current urban opportunities and challenges drive a need for comparative, transdisciplinary studies
to prompt and test possible urban futures for both emerging and established urban populations. In
such studies, the prime need is to develop new knowledge between and beyond existing bodies of
knowledge; to posit alternatives that are both plausible and practical, yet radical and far reaching in
their vision. In turn, these require coalitions of researchers working across national boundaries and
regions, and across traditional disciplines.
RMIT’s Global Cities Institute was established for just these purposes.
A University and a Research Program for the Urban Age
RMIT is an internationally-focused university of technology and design, and derives its mission and
identity from its deep roots in both its urban settings and its Asia-Pacific location. RMIT also has a
presence in Asia, with two campuses in Vietnam and a permanent presence in Tianjin, plus major
new campus-scale initiatives in Singapore and Indonesia (Jakarta). It is also developing a major new
European hub in Barcelona (opening early 2013). It has numerous transnational education partners,
including in China, Singapore, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Hong Kong, Laos, Shanghai, Kuala Lumpur,
Tokyo and Colombo.
20
RMIT Vietnam opened in 2001, and currently has around 8,000 students in higher education and
English programs, and a rapidly developing research base. RMIT is approaching 30,000 international
students out of a total of over 74,000 students, studying on university campuses in Melbourne
and in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, and at its international study centres in Singapore,
Hong Kong. RMIT academics also have research linkages with industry, municipalities, international
agencies and community-based organizations in almost all Asian countries and the small island
states of the Pacific. In all these relationships, RMIT’s research is addressing the challenges of the
urban age.
The university’s origin is as a metropolitan college, providing education in the arts, sciences and
technologies for working people in the nineteenth-century colony of Victoria. Over more than a
century, RMIT has linked its development and focus to the dynamic life and growth of Melbourne,
now one of the world’s most liveable cities. RMIT is urban in its outlook, its research and its location.
It is the largest non-government holder of space in Melbourne CBD occupying over 6 per cent of
CBD office space.
In Transforming the Future: Strategic Plan 2015, RMIT has made a commitment to orient its
teaching, research and engagement activities to three goals:
•
Global in attitude, action and presence, offering our students a global passport to learning and
work;
•
Urban in orientation and creativity, shaping sustainable cities and drawing inspiration from the
challenges and opportunities they provide; and
•
Connected through active partnerships with professions, industries and organizations to
support the quality, reach and impact of our education and research.
Focusing on a central theme of ‘urban sustainable futures’, RMIT has established dedicated
transdisciplinary urban research programs within the Global Cities Institute. Urban research in the
Institute extends beyond economics and planning to include the development and transaction of
knowledge and governance. It extends beyond urban design to include place-making and the coproduction and consumption of urban services. To undertake diverse urban research from food
security to retrofit transitions to art and urban sustainability, RMIT researchers collaborate across
social and technical disciplines; across Australian researchers, and across international researchers.
Concepts in Urban Sustainability
The Global Cities Institute has been operating for six years, and one of the obvious but seldom
overlooked lessons we have learnt is that the urban sustainability concepts we use often have
different meanings and uses in different disciplines. The concept of resilience is a case in point.
Originally seen as a quality of biophysical systems, resilience is now regularly used to describe
communities that have sufficiently high social and human capital as well as the well-built
infrastructure needed to withstand shocks from natural hazards, impending climate change or the
loss of a major employing industry.
Thus, in the second year of the Institute’s life, we held monthly breakfast seminars at which we
asked researchers to explore the meanings of the various concepts they used in seeking to
understand the nature of urban sustainability. Our hope was to be better able to talk with each other
or, at least, appreciate where our colleagues from other disciplines are coming from.
We have done the same in relation to the research methods and techniques we use, with the essays
in the 2011 Global Cities Annual Review devoted to outlining these diverse but shared research
approaches. This year, the Annual Review revisits concepts for understanding urban sustainability.
There is not space enough to include essays on all the concepts we use. This year’s Annual Review
features 24 of them and have been selected to be a representative of the diverse interests and
projects being conducted by Institute researchers.
Each essay is 2000–2500 words in length and explains the origins and (multiple) meaning(s) of
the concept and brief summaries of case studies or examples to illustrate how the term is used in
the literature. This focus on definitions is a positive one. It is not, as one UK study described it, a
matter of social scientists with a definition being ‘like dogs with a bone’ gnawing at it ‘while ignoring
21
more nutritious alternatives’ (Grant, 2000: 2). Rather, we are sharing our understanding of urban
sustainability concepts as a way of pooling our expertise in order to generate cross-disciplinary
understanding and new questions, issues and problems to explore.
Thus, in addition to mainstream urban research on themes such as mobility, design, built
environment, innovation, governance, competitiveness and sustainability, a range of emerging
themes may be discerned in this collection of essays. These include social infrastructure, placemaking, creative and healthy cities, livability, local cities, learning to live and work sustainably, and
urban resilience. Each of these themes is briefly described below together with indications of RMIT
expertise in them.
Social Infrastructure
Social infrastructure includes both the hard infrastructure and utilities that deliver the material
bases for public well-being, and the service-and community-based social processes that enable
participation—as distinct from the provision of urban infrastructure, usually understood as the
pipes, wires, roads and bridges of the city. For example, schools and teachers constitute urban
infrastructure. The processes of social inclusion that enable households and students to participate,
learn, and maximize their potential through use of the school, and perhaps adults to use it out of
hours for their own social development purposes, also require social infrastructure. Linked to social
inclusion in this way, social infrastructure is also a vital underpinning of productivity and liveability.
Typically, research and policy is posited around projects or programs that are designed for
and delivered to ‘a community’. An emerging theme of RMIT urban research focuses upon
implementation (or lack of) regarding urban and social infrastructure. The mechanisms for delivery
sustainable urban futures are well-known, but the effectiveness of delivery and outcomes are less
well-understood and not sufficiently researched. Associated with policy delivery is the emerging
research area of digital techniques of simulation to test future scenarios. Such research methods,
including 3-D visualization, system dynamics and agent-based modelling and ‘serious games’,
provide potentially productive and innovative means to research and investigate radical propositions
for urban futures, involving various stakeholders as participants.
Place-Making
The recent literature also suggests a need to also consider the idea of co-creation and
participation—indicating the need for co-operative cities and social connectivity as important
research topics. Similarly, integrative themes such as ‘place-making’ and ‘networked cities’ are
useful in linking the social, economic, technical and design processes of urban planning and
management. RMIT researchers have recently reviewed international policies and strategies for
place-making as an heuristic for sustainable urban development in urban renewal and urban
consolidation for Places Victoria, and developed a Place-Making Primer as a flexible set of guidelines
for future government urban design projects. Places Victoria is also sponsoring this research team
to conduct a five-year longitudinal evaluation of the economic, ecological, political and cultural
outcomes of a major place-making-based urban consolidation project in Melbourne.
Creative and Healthy Cities
Policy concerns with post-industrial restructuring have seen creativity and innovation increasingly
being associated with economic competitiveness and social cohesion. This association has,
however, recently been challenged with the idea that creativity may be an insufficient focus for
economic productivity (Moretti, 2012). Similarly, since the World Health Organization launched
the Healthy Cities Project in 1987, the notion of healthy cities—what that means and how to foster
it—has spread and, in association with related concepts of wellbeing and liveability, this less overtly
GDP-related concern has been adopted by a range of programs, alliances, conferences and
initiatives.
22
Liveability
Liveability is now an established part of the discourse around ‘successful’ cities. Metrics of liveability
are viewed with varying critique and the term is often used in association with terms such as ‘healthy
cities’. Liveability and healthy cities broadly refer to qualities and processes of the built environment
and their contribution to notions of public health and liveability. What we have already found is
missing from the research in this area is a focus on the reflexivity of cities and communities around
liveability—that is, how communities affect liveable/healthy design as well as how liveable/healthy
design affects communities.
Local Cities
Concepts such as ‘liveability’ also point to another emerging area for potential research surrounding
the broad concept of localism. In a globalized world of competitive cities, high-waged economies
such as those in Australian cities face multiple problems. As post-industrial restructuring gives
way to services, and as services increasingly go online, what new and distinctive, place-based
economic opportunities are created amongst a highly educated workforce? How can ideas of Slow
Cities, co-operative production and local consumption be fostered in ways that address the triple
concerns of liveability, productivity and social inclusivity? We propose the term ‘local cities’ as both
a counterpoint to the recent decades of concern with global cities, and a focus for thinking about
new ways to address contemporary problems of urban innovation in a resource constrained highly
networked future with an ageing population. Local cities will focus particularly on the distinctiveness
and uniqueness of their places and people, with urban infrastructure as a facilitator and co-creator
rather than as the key driver of urban outcomes.
Learning for Sustainability
The knowledge, insights, values and skills to live and work sustainably are vital underpinnings of a
sustainable urban future. RMIT urban researchers include three former Presidents of the Australian
Association for Environmental Education and the President of the Asia South Pacific Association for
Basic and Adult Education, who are also members of the International Council for Adult Education.
Another researcher is a long-term consultant to UNESCO, UNEP and UNICEF on education for
sustainable development, a member of the International Advisory Group of the SIDA-supported
Swedish International Centre for Education for Sustainable Development, and the author of the
UN position papers on this topic for both the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development
and 2012 Rio+20 Conference. This research focus on school and adult learning for sustainability is
supplemented by significant research programs on community mobilization for disaster planning and
on the community learning and capacity building for health promotion, poverty alleviation, greening
workforce development, and environmental improvement in Asian and Pacific communities and
cities.
Conservation behaviour requires more than personal decisions and lifestyle choices. It also requires
social learning and cultural change. Research to underpin social learning and cultural change
is being undertaken through a Beyond Behaviour Change research projects based upon social
practice theories, with an international conference on the themes being hosted at RMIT in November
2012.
Cultural studies and policy researchers are investigating notions of urban citizenship and
sustainability citizenship, ‘sharing economies’, development communications, and the roles of
cultural institutions and the arts in promoting sustainable lifestyles. The theme of skills for a green
economy is also a significant research program with studies being conducted in Australia and,
in partnership with the Asian Development Bank and research institutions in Korea, Hong Kong,
Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Vietnam and India.
23
Urban Resilience
Other integrating concepts for urban sustainability include risk, vulnerability, resilience, adaptation
and adaptive capacity. Three significant programs on these themes have emerged from research
on disaster management, climate-change adaptation, and post-disaster and post-conflict
reconstruction, with studies being conducted in Australia as well as in Vietnam, Sri Lanka,
Bangladesh, China, Japan, various Pacific small island states, Haiti and USA. Researchers in these
programs include the only Australian Research Council Future Fellow in urban resilience, the lead
author of the chapter on disasters and climate change for the next IPCC report (2014) and a senior
advisor to the ADB on climate-change adaptation.
Conclusion
Urban Sustainability Systems
Stephen Coyle
The built environment consists of the physical structures and organization patterns of buildings,
blocks, neighbourhoods, villages, towns, cities and regions. It requires the support of each of the
seven essential systems of physical infrastructure, resources and operational components essential
to the survival and health of each place. The supporting systems of the built environment consist of:
•
Nearly forty researchers in the Global Cities Institute and their colleagues and research partners in
other universities have contributed to the essays in this collection. They will join with other Institute
researchers in a seminar in the first half of 2103 to review the essays, seek ways of integrating
concepts, decide upon illustrative case studies and then revise the chapters.
Transportation: technologies, infrastructure and vehicles responsible for the optimum circulation
or mobility of people, goods, and services;
•
Energy: the design, management and supply of energy sources required to power devices,
equipment, industries, buildings, infrastructure and communities, which includes generation,
storage, conveyance, conservation and efficiency;
References
•
Asian Development Bank 2012a, Green Urbanization in Asia: Development: Key Indicators for Asia
and the Pacific 2012 Special Chapter, Asian Development Bank, Manila, accessed 29 August 2012
at <http://www.adb.org/sites/default/files/pub/2012/ki2012-special-chapter.pdf>
Water: the technological and infrastructure system that supplies, treats and conveys potable
water; collects, treats, and disposes and/or recycles wastewater; and collects, treats, and
discharges and/or recycles stormwater from regional watershed to the plumbing system;
•
Asian Development Bank 2012b, Urban Development: Key Issues and Trends. Accessed 29 August
2012 at <http://www.adb.org/themes/urban-development/issues>
Natural environment: the ecosystem of biological resources, landscapes, habitat and other
natural resources providing a continuous state of environmental health and sustenance;
•
Grant, W 2000, Globalisation, Big Business and the Blair Government, Centre for the Study of
Regionalization and Globalisation, Working Paper No. 58/00, University of Warwick,UK, accessed
18 November 2008 at < http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/2067/1/WRAP_Grant_wp5800.pdf>
Food production and agriculture: Planning and managing the community food supply produced
by local and regional agricultural, ranching, and forestry sources;
•
Solid waste: the technologies, facilities, and vehicles that collect, treat, dispose of and/or
recycle residential, commercial, industrial, and institutional waste; and
Moretti, E 2012, The New Geography of Jobs, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, New
York.
•
Economic supports for the health, maintenance and survival of the built environment, defined
in this context as the economic strategies, policies, programs, and activities administered in
support of the other systems.
Trubka, R, Newman, P & Bilsborough, D 2008, Assessing the Costs of Alternative Development
Paths in Australian Cities, Curtin University Sustainability Policy Institute, Perth, accessed 17 October
2011 at <http://www.earthsharing.org.au/wp-content/uploads/Curtin_Sustainability_Paper_0209.
pdf>
Types of Built Environment
Sustainably designed communities serve multiple functions—shelter, commerce, education and
food production—within walking or driving distance. Their resilience extends to adaptive and durable
buildings accommodating changing uses to meet shifting market and societal demands. At-risk or
conventional communities provide multiple uses accessed by car only. Single-use buildings confined
within single-use pods, subdivisions or strips require replacement or significant renovation in order to
repurpose. The resilient and adaptable community was the only type built through the first half of the
twentieth century.
The built environment consists of two fundamental types: the conventional high-carbon (CHC)
community and resilient low-carbon (RLC) development.
The conventional high-carbon (CHC) community, also known as conventional suburban
development, emerged in response to the gradual adoption of separated-use zoning, and the
decline of mass transit and walking as mobility choices. Over the last 60 years, this development
type, fuelled by cheap oil, flourished with highway developments relying on a continuous supply
of land—building on existing farmland, forests, and drainable swamps. Automobile dependency
defines the CHC. The CHC moniker should not be applied to: pedestrian-oriented pre-World War
II suburbs; railroad, subway, and streetcar suburbs; resort or industrial suburbs; or single-family
houses on a tree-lined street, with walkable town centre.
Resilient low-Carbon (RLC), or traditional city, town and neighbourhood developments, describe
historic settlement patterns that developed throughout the United States from the eighteenth to the
mid-twentieth century. RLC settlements developed local commerce, managed available resources,
exploited rail and water access, adapted to population growth and endured from Charleston, South
24
25
Carolina and Nashville, Indiana to Pacific Grove, California and Forest Grove, Oregon. The RLC most
often reflects a continuum or morphing of attributes, as communities outgrew and expanded beyond
their original boundaries.
Conventional High-Carbon Built Environments
CHC built environments consist primarily of segregated, auto-oriented, low-density (less than four
dwelling units per acre) developments. Typically organized into clusters of single-use buildings, the
single-family residential pods, high-density apartment complexes, retail strip centres and malls,
office and industrial parks, and school campuses are generally scaled to the size and spacing of
the local and regional thoroughfare systems. The dendritic, or branching, street system yields large
‘superblocks’ with undevelopable land or left over property set aside for parkland.
Support systems for the CHC environment are conventional economic, energy, water, natural
environment, transportation, food production or agricultural and solid waste systems, which are:
•
Nonrenewable, resource-based, wholly or largely dependent on the extraction, processing,
consumption and/or distribution of nonrenewable resources;
•
Inflexible, incapable of (or resistant to) expansion, contraction or modification over time;
•
Inefficient, directly or indirectly generating waste as a development or operational by-product;
•
Non-virtuous, directly or indirectly generating harmful by-products, or hazardous as a
consequence of their development or operations; and
•
Temporary or intentionally built for obsolescence or replacement.
Resilient Low-Carbon Built Environments
RLC built environments, generally compact in form, comprised of pedestrian-scale blocks and
streets, boast a diversity of necessary and desirable functions. The residential, employment,
shopping and civic functions are integrated into mixed-use buildings and blocks. The location, scale
and design of squares, plazas and parks reflect their importance and value as cultural, commercial
and natural resources. Boundaries between built and natural environments are clearly defined to
protect both habitats.
Typical RLC built environments have the following characteristics:
•
Compact and bounded: physically contained, pedestrian- and transit-oriented urbanization with
graduated densities and clearly defined boundaries between development and nature, though
agriculture can be integrated into both;
•
Connected and multi-use: a fine-grained, interconnected, multimodal transportation network with
a balance of motor vehicle, pedestrian, bike, and transit amenities;
•
Employ form-based zoning: allocating land uses based primarily on the control of or influence
over the physical form, intensity and arrangement of buildings, landscapes and public spaces
that enable land or building functions to adapt to economic, environmental, energy and social
changes over time;
•
Pedestrian scaled and formed: public streets and other rights-of-way scaled around the
pedestrian and transit systems; buildings, lots, and blocks primarily scaled around the pedestrianand transit-oriented thoroughfare or right-of-way, and buildings informed by the surrounding
physical context, the adjacent landscapes, structures, local conditions, building traditions and the
microclimate;
•
Multifunction, multimodal transportation corridors with transit, motor vehicle, bike, and pedestrian
facilities, spatially enclosed by buildings and, where appropriate to the urban context, trees; and
•
Parks and other public open space connected to, informed by and in a hierarchical relationship
with the surrounding physical context, development intensities, and natural and landscaped
parcels required for normative ‘place-making’, food production, and/or federal, state, or local
regulations configured into environmental resource areas.
26
Support Systems
Both CHC and RLC require the support of the seven essential systems of physical infrastructure,
resources, and operational components, which are essential to the survival and health of each place.
Support systems for the RLC environment include economic, energy, water, natural environment,
transportation, food production, agricultural and solid waste systems. They are characterized by the
following:
•
Renewable, resource-based, and over time capable of achieving full dependency on, and
supporting and enhancing, the health of their renewable resources;
•
Flexible, capable of (or responsive to) expansion, contraction or modification over time;
•
Efficient, zero-waste, directly or indirectly generating renewable waste as a development or
operational by-product;
•
Virtuous, directly or indirectly generating beneficial impacts as a consequence of their
development or operations; and
•
Durable, built to last.
Resilient Low-Carbon Transportation System
The sustainable transportation system makes a net positive contribution to the environmental, social,
and economic health of the community by providing safe, convenient, efficient and diverse means of
mobility. The resilient and healthy mobility system reduces tailpipe emissions and improves vehicle
energy efficiency; employs intelligent thoroughfare design; facilitates the use of public transit, low/
no-carbon fuels and vehicles, and transportation demand–management technologies; promotes
low/no-tech/healthy modes, such as walking and biking; provides economic and environmental
alternatives that encourage more efficient passenger and freight movement; and, reduces
consumption of nonrenewable fuels. At the scale of the corridor, neighbourhood and block, the
‘complete’ or multi-modal street provides mobility choices capable of accommodating changing
functional demands.
Resilient Low-Carbon Energy Systems
The sustainable energy system serves the municipality and community primarily through renewable,
and limited fossil fuel generated, electric power. The sustainable low-carbon energy system focuses
on conservation and efficiency measures to reduce demand before the development of renewable
power, such as solar, wind, geothermal, hydro and microbial, as well as interim, power storage.
Resilient Low-Carbon Water Systems
The sustainable/low-carbon water supply system focuses on conservation measures to reduce
water demand, and on increasing the efficiency or performance of infrastructure and plumbing
fixtures and devices, as well as the reclamation of wastewater to meet non-potable demand.
The sustainable stormwater system addresses rainwater from the watershed scale to the site. It
mimics or approximates the cleansing function of nature, firstly, by integrating stormwater collection
and discharge into building, site, street, park, and other developed areas and, secondly, through
conveyance, temporary retention, treatment, and/or discharge into aquifers or other watershed
elements. The system employs landscaped planters, swales and rain gardens, and subsurface
drains to constrain, disperse and reduce the quantity and increase the quality of stormwater on and
off site, replenish groundwater and restore healthy watershed function.
At the watershed scale, the resilient stormwater system works with the regional and local topography
by configuring development around where, when, and how stormwater flows. It removes, restricts, or
prohibits the quantities, rates and concentrations of chemical, physical, biological, and other harmful
constituents discharged from point sources into the stormwater, through environmental restoration
activities and healthy development design, management and practices. At the local scale, the resilient
stormwater system employs permeable pavements, compact development, and the restoration of
natural drainage basins that help maintain a natural hydrologic balance in the watershed.
27
Sustainable wastewater systems use biological processes instead of, or with minimal, chemical
inputs to treat waste, minimizing both the quantity of and need for chemical treatment through natural
systems, and reducing energy use. Sustainable systems include modified or constructed wetlands
that provide aerobic biological improvement to augment or replace secondary sewage treatment, and
employ cellular, adding or omitting cells without disturbing the entire ecosystem.
A recycled or closed loop wastewater system treats and purifies all or part of the effluent sufficient to
produce non-potable water for landscape and agriculture, dust control, and fire fighting, and/or to
reintroduce potable water back into the municipal water supply source through replenishment of the
aquifer, wetlands or other water source.
Resilient Low-Carbon Natural Environment
The sustainable natural environmental system protects biological resources and seeks to restore
or expand the habitats, resource lands, forests, grasslands, and wilderness that exist. The fully
functioning natural ecosystem contains a diversity of species in accordance with their microclimate
and geographical settings within geological and hydrological contexts.
Resilient Low-Carbon Food Production And Agricultural System
Sustainable agriculture produces food within and beyond the built environment without damaging or
depleting renewable resources or polluting the surrounding environment, integrating environmental
health, economic profitability, and social and economic equity. Sustainable agriculture and ranching
produce food, without resource depletion, for local consumption using home, business, school and
community gardens and diversified farms of an appropriate scale, as much as feasible, supplying the
majority of their region’s food.
Sustainability
George Cairns
As Chick and Micklethwaite (2011, p. 75) point out, the “S” word can often mystify more than
illuminate our thoughts on where we want our society to go … Confusion as to what sustainability
is can hamper our attempts to respond to it as an agenda.’ This mystification is a function of
how the term ‘sustainability’ has been used, misused or abused in a wide range of societal and
organizational contexts.
In some areas, sustainability is equated with a ‘green’ agenda, addressing a fairly narrow ecological
stream of thought. In a challenging polemic posted on The Conversation, Tony Fry (2011) goes
further to state that the concept ‘sustainability’ ‘has been evacuated of any substantial meaning
it may once have had. It’s been appropriated by a ragbag of ‘green-washing’ market interests,
opportunists and political hacks.’ Fry addresses our failure either to commit to and properly
implement decisions already taken in support of sustainability or to take the necessary actions for
fundamental change to our lifestyles to make sustainability meaningful. By way of examples he
points, firstly, to Australia’s failure to put in place infrastructure to enable recycling of recyclable
materials and, secondly, to our global failure to reduce our demand for new products: ‘[o]ne simple
fact screams at us, but we fail to hear it. We are finite beings living on a finite planet with finite
resources that we squander at the speed of light, in geological terms.’
Resilient Low-Carbon Solid Waste System
Origins and Pre-Existing Debates
The sustainable solid waste system returns materials to the economic mainstream for reuse, recycling
and composting, with residual materials used as resources to create clean renewable energy.
Sustainable waste management ranges from planning for ‘zero waste’, waste energy management
and energy efficiency, to renewable energy generation and water conservation.
The term ‘sustainability’ and its contemporary usage are generally accepted as originating in the
report of the United Nations’ World Commission on Environment and Development (1987) report,
also known as the Brundtland Report. This report outlined a sustainability agenda that accepted
human economic growth and development and originated the term ‘sustainable development’,
which has become the foundation for much contemporary debate and controversy. The commission
qualified its promotion of sustainable development, stating that its ‘hope for the future [was]
conditional on decisive political action [and then] to begin managing environmental resources to
ensure both sustainable human progress and human survival’ (World Commission on Environment
and Development 1987, p. 11). Before I consider our failure to establish such ‘decisive political
action’ on a globally co-ordinated scale in the 25 years since the Brundtland Report, I show that
its publication in 1987 followed a period of at least 15 years of inaction on similar calls for change.
Whilst the word ‘sustainability’ was not present in this discourse, the ideas that underpin it certainly
were.
Resilient Low-Carbon Economics
The sustainable low-carbon municipal economic system focuses on increasing community prosperity
through the production, distribution and consumption of goods and services that minimize or
eliminate waste and reliance on non-renewables. It enhances the health of renewable resources both
in municipal operations and in the community as a whole through conservation, efficiency, adaptation
and self-sufficiency. A sustainable economy maintains an adequate supply of renewable resources
and reduces energy consumption and greenhouse emissions.
Making Resilient Low-Carbon Places and Support Systems
‘Exaptation’ describes shifts in the function of a trait or feature during evolution. Bird feathers
initially evolved for temperature regulation then later adapted for flight. The exaptational traits of
RCL communities include connectivity, compactness, diversity and completeness. Planning or
transforming communities in the face of uncertainty—economic upheavals, climate change, the car’s
demise or the rise of electric vehicles—demands the inclusion of qualities or traits capable of shifting
functionality to accommodate change over time. Ideally, these assets would range in scale from
roofing materials to entire buildings, blocks and neighbourhoods.
Our current hierarchical systems require perpetual growth. A resilient, adaptive community economy
needs to be less hierarchal and more locally self-sufficient by leveraging developments in distributed,
open-source and peer-to-peer building, manufacturing, and food production.
28
Fritz Schumacher (1973) called for a break in the cycle of economic and technological dependency
of the ‘less developed’ world on the so-called ‘developed’ world countries, identifying the
unsustainability of the prevailing form of economic growth and development predicated on resource
use and depletion on a global scale. The early 1970s saw the publication of a number of other texts
that sought to draw attention to the problems of the economic growth model that had dominated
the twentieth century. These included Only one Earth by Ward and Dubos (1972) and The Ecologist
editors’ A blueprint for survival (Goldsmith & Prescott-Allen 1972). Ward and Dubos (1972, p. 82)
highlighted a key issue and the dangers inherent within it: Homo sapiens is a ‘creature both within
the natural system and capable of seeing his place within it and even entertaining the illusion that he
could manipulate, command and conquer it wholly for his own designs’. I would say that it is this
dangerous illusion, or delusion, of human beings that leaves us struggling to acknowledge what Fry
(2011) refers to as our attempts to ‘sustain the unsustainable’.
29
Consumption and (Un)sustainability
The implications of humans usurping the planet for entirely selfish purposes that are manifest in our
‘developed world’ lifestyles were identified by American social theorist Thorstein Veblen in the late
nineteenth century. Veblen (1899) commented on the new social order that both fed into and fed
off the emerging industrialized world and that would spread across much of Europe and the USA
before becoming the key driver of capitalist market expansion and domination throughout much of
the world through most of the twentieth century. He ([1899] 1975, p. 84) identified and labelled the
aspirational lifestyle of ‘conspicuous consumption’ in which ‘members of each stratum accept as
their ideal of decency the scheme of life in vogue in the next higher stratum, and bend their energies
to live up to that ideal’.
Throughout much of the last century, most societies that have been exposed to the possibilities of
the ‘consumption society’ have quickly adopted principles of conspicuous consumption in part or
in whole with enthusiasm. If we consider the global market of luxury goods we see rapid expansion
of sales of expensive cars and boats, luxury cosmetics and high fashion clothing amongst the
nouveau riche of both the developing economies and of some of the poorest countries on the
planet. However, we also witness growth in demand for everyday ‘necessities’, such as cell phones,
televisions and personal wi-fi, across all strata of societies. Consumption technologies—both in
terms of manufacture and use—have replaced ‘sustainable’ technologies, such as the Indigenous
peoples of the Amazon using outboard motors rather than paddles and the Inuit of the Arctic using
snowmobiles in preference to sleds and teams of dogs. Of course, if we in the developed world view
this as a retrograde step and lament the loss of the ‘traditional’ ways of life, then we lay ourselves
open to charges of hypocrisy and to calls for us to return to the use of the horse and cart and the
sailing ship.
As we have settled comfortably into a lifestyle of auto-motive transportation, plentiful supply of exotic
foods from across the world, and homes in which every appliance possible is devoid of the need
for human energy inputs to use, we have developed ever-increasing dependencies on technologies
of life support, sustenance and entertainment that rapidly become norms. In the contemporary
post-GFC (global financial crisis) period, ‘poverty’ in the USA is currently widely identified, but is
also generally accepted, as being defined in terms of lack of access to goods and services that the
majority take for granted (cf. Schwartz, 2005). In a society in which it is taken for granted that families
will have access to multiple automobiles, home technologies and limitless supplies of ‘fast food’,
ideas of ‘lack’ become very different from those living a bare subsistence lifestyle in, say, sub-Sahara
Africa. What becomes an embedded concept in consumption society today is Veblen’s ([1899]
1975, p. 85) notion that ‘[n]o class of society, not even the most abjectly poor, forgoes all customary
conspicuous consumption. The last items of this category of consumption are not given up except
under stress of the direst necessity.’
Problematizing the Sustainability Agenda
From the above, there are three critical issues relevant to considering our notions of sustainability
and, hence, the potential for truly sustainable communities and societies. Firstly, the dominant
norms of our current societies are grounded in conspicuous consumption and this consumption
is predicated upon the use (or at best re-use) of resources. Secondly, the dominant discourse of
sustainability is then moulded to assume continuing consumption and growth. Thirdly, from these
positions emerge the discourse of ‘sustainable development’. From here, much consideration
of what constitutes such sustainable development starts from the position of where we stand
now—how to develop ‘sustainably’ in order to continue to fulfil human desires, not how to develop
sustainably on a ‘zero budget’ basis, from what the ecosystem can support to fulfil the needs of
balanced life forms.
Multinational businesses have embraced the sustainability agenda from the former stance. For
example, BP (2012, p. 4) publishes an annual Sustainability report, with the premise that the ‘world
needs energy and this need is growing. This energy will be in many forms. It is, and will always be,
vital for people and progress everywhere.’ At the same time, the dominant political structures of
free-market democracies, where they do address any agenda of sustainability, fail to promote the
30
‘decisive political action’ demanded of the Brundtland Report a quarter of a century ago—a quarter
century in which the human population has increased from five billion to exceed seven billion.
Nowhere has the lack of decisive political action been more apparent than in the global arena
supposedly constituted with the specific remit of initiating it, for example the so-called ‘Earth
Summits’, that, most recently in Rio de Janeiro, brought together world leaders and a vast array of
delegates, lobbyists, protestors and hangers-on to ‘solve’ problems associated with unconstrained
and unsustainable human development. Following the launch of the formal report by the organizers
of the 2012 Rio+20 Earth Summit, a group of civil society organizations responded with the following
argument:
[t]he future that we want has commitment and action, not just promises. It has the urgency
needed to reverse the social, environmental and economic crisis, not postpone it. It has
cooperation and is in tune with civil society and its aspirations, and not just the comfortable
position of governments. (Guardian 2012)
What is ‘Sustainable Sustainability’?
Comprehensive consideration of the sustainability agenda must reverse any secondary placement of
it, say, in relation to economy. As Chick and Micklethwaite (2011) illustrate, with sustainability as the
overall context, the three ‘legs’ of the sustainability stool—the social, economic and environmental—
must be given equal consideration. These writers also point out that implementing such a seemingly
simple agenda is highly problematic and complex, particularly starting from where we stand at
present. If we are to move beyond the illusion or delusion of trying to ‘sustain the unsustainable’ (Fry
2011) we must be willing to challenge what are considered by many to be ‘basic rights’, such as the
US poverty baseline definition. [Our approach in the Global Cities Institute goes further to suggest
that economics, ecology, politics and culture should be given equal weight as social domains
relevant to living on this planet.]
Roseland (2000, p. 104) states that the problem of sustainability is not one of poverty, but one
of wealth and argues that a successful sustainability agenda will not come from the top-down—
waiting for successful Earth summits—but from the bottom-up, through local government and
community action and activism: ‘[c]ommunities must be involved in defining sustainability from a
local perspective’. Roseland sets out a framework for sustainable development based on ‘natural
capital’ and ‘natural income’ rather than ‘forms of development that merely exploit natural resources.
With the increasing world population, climate change impacts and a seemingly insatiable demand
to consume, the question is to what extent, if any, have these and similar principles of bottom up
sustainable community development been adopted? Whilst there are some signs of hope, we face
an ocean of seeming indifference.
What is to be Done?
Thus far, I have painted what may appear a fairly bleak picture of the potential for a sustainable
existence for humanity. However, I seek primarily to avoid giving what I consider to be a ‘false
positive’ view of sustainable development predicated upon continuance of the consumption society
and unabated access to goods and benefits not only by those who currently enjoy them but also
those who aspire to them—driven by the ubiquitous stream of multinational corporation marketing
hype. Some may decry my negativity and say that new technologies such as solar energy, organic
fuels and microbotics will bring us back from the brink of energy, water and food crises. I would
respond that the ‘techno-futurist’ dreams of past eras have remained by and large unfulfilled and
have generated parallel nightmares, so we should not be reliant upon them for our salvation.
Neither do I propose that ‘all is lost’ and suggest that we should sit back and await our fate of
drought, starvation and inundations from rising sea levels. I certainly do not wish to see the growth
of what often appears an emergent culture of dependency or ‘learned helplessness’, whereby the
majority feel themselves powerless to respond to a situation of increasing discomfort and eventual
pain both psychological and physical. In saying that a truly sustainable-communities agenda will not
emerge from the macro-political or from the global business domains, I call for a new political and
business agenda driven by local interests, here meant in a positive sense, and resources.
31
References
BP 2012, BP sustainability review 2011, viewed 30 July 2012 at <http://www.bp.com/assets/
bp_internet/globalbp/STAGING/global_assets/e_s_assets/e_s_assets_2010/downloads_pdfs/
bp_sustainability_review_2011.pdf>.
Chick, A & Micklethwaite, P 2011, Design for sustainable change: How design and designers can
drive the sustainability agenda, AVA Publishing SA, Lausanne.
Goldsmith, E & Prescott-Allen, R 1972, A blueprint for survival, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth.
Fry, T 2011, ‘Sustainability is meaningless—It’s time for a new Enlightenment’, The Conversation, 3
May, viewed 29 July 2011 at <http://theconversation.edu.au/sustainability-is-meaningless-its-timefor-a-new-enlightenment-683>.
Guardian 2012, ‘Rio+20: The Earth Summit diaries’, 21 June, viewed 30 July2012 at <http://www.
guardian.co.uk/sustainable-business/rio-20-earth-summit-diary-21-june>.
Roseland, M 2000, ‘Sustainable community development: Integrating environmental, economic and
social objectives’, Progress in Planning, 54, pp. 73–132.
Schumacher, E 1973, Small is beautiful: A study of economics as if people mattered, Blond &
Briggs, London.
Schwartz, JE 2005, Freedom reclaimed: Rediscovering the American vision, G-University Press,
Baltimore.
Veblen, T [1899] 1975, The theory of the leisure class, M Kelly, New York City.
Ward, B & Dubos, R 1972, Only one Earth: The care and maintenance of a small planet, Penguin
Books, Harmondsworth.
World Commission on Environment and Development 1987, Our common future, United Nations,
Oslo.
Resilience
John Fien
I first learnt about resilience in a high school physics class, where it was seen as a property of
springs, and referred to the balance of tension and flexibility that allowed a spring to be stretched
and then return to its original state without any loss of ability to withstand future stretching. This is
what is now called ‘engineering resilience’. I remember mates and I laughed that our school football
team must be resilient because of the way we kept turning up for the next game after a long season
of defeats.
We seemingly learnt from our setbacks; our football team started to win a few more games than
we lost. And I did not think much about resilience for many years until I heard a radio interview with
Anne Deveson (2003) talking about a new book about the ways in which people could cope with
intense suffering and grief and rebuild their lives. It was all to do with the personal traits and strengths
they had before they experienced a trauma. She used the term ‘personal resilience’ to synthesize
these traits.
I later came across resilience as a property of nature, as the capacity of habitats and ecosystems
to recover from disturbances, such as bushfire or forest clearing, through the processes of
succession until a climax community was reached once again. Ecologists concerned with natural
resource management began to use the term in the 1990s to describe the importance of managing
ecosystems so that human interventions did not undermine their capacity to provide all necessary
ecosystem services such as clean air, purified water and stable food chains. In this case, resilience
was seen as the capacity to absorb perturbations (shocks) to a system without any loss of function.
Resilience in Complex Human–Ecological Systems
Resilient human–ecological systems have all the necessary elements and processes in place to
be able to be able to absorb shocks and renew its elements and processes when change occurs.
However, resilient systems are not responsive or passive. Rather, changes in resilient systems
create opportunities to reorganize their elements and processes in novel and innovative ways. Thus,
following Berkes et al. 2002, and Gunderson and Holling 2002, Resilience Alliance (2012) defines
resilience as ‘an integrated system of people and nature’, with at least three traits:
The massive building program in the financial district did not slow during the Global Financial Crisis.
Shanghai, China, 2012.
32
•
The ability to continue to function under conditions of uncertainty and increasing stress, to
absorb minor and major disturbances, and to still retain essential key attributes and functions;
•
The ability to self-organize (adapt) when disturbed and external conditions change; and
•
The ability to adapt in ways that increase the extent and range of opportunities for future
development and resilience.
Each of these traits is only operational, as indicated earlier, when prior conditions enable such
positive responses. Preparation, capacity-building, social capital and ‘hardened’ infrastructure are
essential to the adaptive capacity necessary for resilience in human systems while complexity,
systems interdependence and connectedness (biodiversity), non-linearity and system thresholds
are central traits of resilient ecosystems. In human–ecological systems, these two sets of a priori
conditions for resilience are synthesized through the concepts of ‘adaptive cycles’ and ‘panarchy’.
Gunderson and Holling (2002: Ch.2) explain how, in nature, an adaptive cycle involves four phases
that cumulatively enhance resilience: rapid growth, conservation, collapse and reorganization. Time
flows unevenly through each phase. In ecology, ‘r-strategists’ are species that grow and reproduce
quickly and disperse widely, rapidly colonizing newly disturbed areas. By contrast, ‘K-strategists’ are
slow to reach maturity, reproduce slowly and sparingly, and have limited ability for dispersal. Thus,
r-strategists belong to the first ‘exploitation’ or ‘r-phase’of the adaptive cycle. K-strategists belong to
the second ‘conservation’ or ‘K-phase’. Progression from the r-phase to the K-phase occurs slowly.
33
The third phase, the release or ‘omega (Ω) phase’, occurs abruptly when an ecosystem is suddenly
transformed by events such as fire, cyclones, droughts, insect plagues or over-grazing. Although
the event is destructive, it is also creative as new opportunities become available. The final phase is
reorganization—and is known as the ‘alpha (a) -phase’. This is a time when ecosystem boundaries
are more fluid; species diversity may change significantly, not only due to immigration and
emigration, but also through germination of seed banks and the growth of previously suppressed
vegetation. Disturbed systems move quickly from reorganization back to exploitation with chance
events influencing the way in which a system reorganizes itself into a new type of organization.
Figure 1. Adaptive Cycle Underpinning Resilience in Nature and Human–Ecological Systems
Source: Gunderson and Holling (2002) cited in Holling (2004, p. 3).
Resilience and Urban Sustainability
It was not long before scholars and managers in a number of public policy fields began to adopt
the concept of resilience and adapt it to their specialist concerns at the individual, organizational
and community levels (de Bruijne et al. 2010: Ch.2); in itself an indicator that researchers and
governments have a degree of resilience! Several of these areas of resilience research relate to urban
sustainability, including: climate change resilience, disaster resilience, and urban resilience.
However, before briefly reviewing each of these aspects of resilience and urban sustainability, there
is a need for caution when translating concepts of resilience from the natural to the social world.
Davoudi (2012) notes four such concerns: (i) the ability of human agency to break out of what seem
to be the overly deterministic nature of adaptive cycles through human intentionality, technology and
foresight; (ii) the normative nature of social resilience (e.g. resilience of what, for whom, and to what
ends) is at odds with the presupposition of desirable end-states in ecosystems; (iii) the consequent
lack of attention to issues of conflict, power and politics in ecosystem resilience; and (iv) thinking in
terms of systems boundaries, as in ecosystems, can lead to exclusionary practices when applied to
social systems.
However, rather than using these cautionary notes as a barrier to applying the concept of resilience
in the study of urban life, Davoudi (2012, p. 306) notes that: ‘In the social world, resilience has as
much to do with shaping the challenges we face as responding to them’. Thus, she recommends
adopting a reflexive approach in which insights from critical social science are used to reframe the
perspective of ecological modernization that infuse much research in urban sustainability. Indeed,
Leech (cited in Shaw 2012, p. 309) notes that it is possible to view resilience as ‘a spectrum from
discursive and deliberative politics to more antagonistic politics of resistance and struggle; all involve
moves away from the managerialism that characterized early resilience approaches, towards
conceptualizing it in fundamentally political terms’. It is with this caution that the following brief
vignettes of research on resilience and urban sustainability are outlined.
Climate Change Resilience
Researchers within the Resilience Alliance have used the concept of ‘adaptive cycle’ as a metaphor
to develop a theory for understanding people as an integral part of the complex socio-ecological
systems we find in the world, and our cities, today. This theory is known as ‘panarchy’:
The cross-scale, interdisciplinary, and dynamic nature of the theory has lead us to coin the term
panarchy for it. Its essential focus is to rationalize the interplay between change and persistence,
between the predictable and the unpredictable. Thus, we drew upon the Greek god Pan to
capture an image of unpredictable change and upon notions of hierarchies across scales to
represent structures that sustain experiments, test results, and allow adaptive evolution.
We start the search for sufficient theory by turning to examples of interactions between people and
nature at regional scales. There we see patterns of change that are similar to the more recent global
ones – but examples where there has been more history of response. (Holling et al. 2002: 5)
Panarchy explains the ways in which natural and human systems influence each other and why
some ecosystems and human communities can cope with stress more effectively than others, i.e.
be more resilient. Changes occur on many levels and scales, and some societies adapt better to
changes than others. Panarchy is a hierarchical structure in which systems of nature and people
are connected in never-ending transformational cycles of growth, accumulation, restructuring, and
renewal.
An understanding of panarchy helps clarify the concepts of resilience and sustainability, and how
they might be achieved. Panarchy describes healthy, sustainable systems, in which each level
operates at its own pace, with phases of stability and accumulation interspersed with phases of
innovation and change. A resilient system is one that has the traits that enable it to ‘bounce back’
in a creative and adaptive way to changes and shocks while a sustainable one is one in which
ecosystem and human health and wellbeing are enhanced through our ability to adapt to changing
circumstances, and pursue opportunities as they arise.
34
Judith Rodin (2008, p. 6), President of the Rockefeller Foundation, which sponsors the Asian Cities
Climate Change Resilience Network (ACCCRN), has argued that:
Communities around the world need better weapons—new tools, techniques, and strategies—if
they hope to tame the three-headed hydra of climate risk, poverty, and precipitous urbanization ...
Since it may be too late to stop the global warming that’s already occurred, we must figure out how
to survive it.
That strategy is climate change resilience, which ACCCRN (2012) defines as the capacity of
individuals, communities and institutions to ‘dynamically and effectively respond to shifting climatic
circumstances while continuing to function at an acceptable level’.
Many sets of policy guidelines, planning workbooks and online tools for achieving climate change
resilience have been developed in the past decade by governments and communities.1 While there
are subtle differences, these resources are, essentially, about climate change adaptation. Many
lack the focus on social learning, reorganization and transformation that are essential to resilience
thinking. As Fünfgeld and McEvoy (2012, p. 327) argue that many ‘decision-makers at the helm
of organizations would consider profound transformation as a system failure rather than part of a
healthy process of maintaining resilience’.
An alternative approach to climate change resilience has focused or the relationships among
resilience, vulnerability and adaptive capacity. The corollary of resilience is vulnerability: when
systems or societies lose resilience (e.g. due to over-fishing, a loss of biodiversity, increased flooding
or, simply, the slower, long-term ageing of a population), they become vulnerable to changes that
they could have responded to in a positive, adaptive way previously (Kelly & Adger 2009).
1 Relevant on-line portals include: ‘Methodologies and Tools to Evaluate Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation’, viewed 7 July
2012 at <http://unfccc.int/methods_and_science/impacts_vulnerability_and_adaptation/methods_and_tools_for_assessment/
items/596.php>; ‘Sharing Climate Adaptation Tools’, viewed 7 July 2012 at <www.iisd.org/pdf/2007/sharing_climate_
adaptation_tools.pdf>; and ‘Climate Change Vulnerability Assessment and Adaptation Tools’, viewed 7 July 2012 at <http://
www.ebmtoolsdatabase.org/resource/climate-change-vulnerability-assessment-and-adaptation-tools>.
35
Adaptive capacity comprises the resources and capabilities that a society of community can bring
to the task of reducing risk and vulnerability to, in this case, climate change. This can include all
physical, institutional, social and economic means as well as skilled personal and collective attributes
such as leadership and management (UNISDR 2004). Thus, a Tindall Centre report on adaptive
capacity argues that it involves ‘all the factors that facilitate and inhibit adaptation’ and, therefore, is a
function of the following:
•
A recognition of the need for adaptation;
•
A belief that adaptation is possible and desirable;
•
The willingness to undertake adaptation;
•
The availability of resources necessary for implementation of adaptation strategies;
•
The ability to deploy resources in an appropriate manner; and
•
Strategies on hand to address external constraints on, or obstacles to, the implementation of
adaptation strategies.
(Adger et al. 2004, 72.)
Disaster Resilience
Research on disaster resilience in the built environment is closely related to research on climate
change resilience. Indeed, the increasing irregularity and severity of extreme weather events being
experienced due to global warming mean that disaster risk reduction and the enhancement of
disaster resilience have become important priorities for city politicians and planners. Similarly, also,
the nature of social relations and socio-political capabilities are the keys to disaster resilience in a city
or region. As Haigh and Amaratunga (2011:7) write:
Resilient Cities
These understandings of resilience to climate change and disasters in cities allude to the wider
area of urban resilience. Newman and Jennings (2008) have written of resilient cities in the context
of adaptive cycles and panarchy in Cities as Sustainable Ecosystems and Newman et al. (2009)
discuss looming peak oil in Resilient Cities: Responding to peak oil and climate change. Others,
such as Frumkin (2004) in Urban Sprawl and Public Health: Designing, planning, and building
for healthy communities, and Dannenberg et al. (2011) in Making Healthy Places: Designing and
building for health, well-being and sustainability write of resilient cities in terms of public health and
the healthy cities movement.
Beatley has synthesized this work, along with that on physical design, landscape planning,
economic resilience and urban governance to propose a set of characteristics of a resilient city,
which is adapted here, in Table 1, as comprising five dimensions.
Table 1. The Five Dimensions of a Resilient City
Source: Adapted from Beatley, T (2011, p. 250)
Infrastructure and
landscapes
Radial, cross-city and peripheral
public transport systems
Large and robust city buildings
Underground utilities
Distributed energy systems
Pre-positioning of emergency
supplies
Preservation of natural systems
such as wetlands
Swales and water retention areas
Levees and rock walls
Hazard resistant landscaping and
tree management
Edible landscaping
Buildings
Structural soundness
Daylight interior and natural
ventilation
Mould and fire resistance
Emergency supplies of food and
water
Roof design and tie-downs
Earthquake bolts
Window shutters
On-site power generation
Elevated first floor
Community
Knowledge and concern about
neighbours
Active neighbourhood
associations
Rehearsed evacuation and
shelter plans
A culture of shared responsibility
Diversified leadership
Trust in government and civic
institutions
Structures for communication, e.g.
telephone trees, Twitter and other
social media
City/state
Functional governance and
interagency and level-ofgovernment cooperation
Trained and resourced
emergency, rescue and recovery
services
Functional communication
systems
Enforced planning and building
codes
Local government ‘rainy day’
emergency funds and accounts
A history of successful and
trusting partnerships with
private sector and community
organizations
Economy
Robust diverse economy
Business continuity plans
Off-site storage of copies of key
business records
Insurance coverage of individuals,
property and business and
community assets
As society becomes more complex, resilient communities tend to be those which are
well coordinated and share values and beliefs. This sense of interconnectedness can be
undermined by self-interest and personal gain, resulting in vulnerable societies that are less able
and willing to plan for, and react to, disruptive events.
A disaster resilient town or city has two advantages over others in mitigating the impacts of a
(un)natural disaster. First, it has strategies and processes in place that ensure a high degree of
preparedness for extreme events. This may include: appropriate zoning and building regulations
that reduce exposure to risk and increase resistance to damage, respectively; high levels of
resident and organizational knowledge of hazard risks; well-developed and rehearsed emergency
plans; evacuation and rescue plans for the socially and physically vulnerable, including, children,
women, the inform, disabled and elderly; business continuity plans; well-established and resourced
emergency services and warning, evacuation, rescue and recovery systems; and high levels of
intergovernmental relationships, divisions of responsibilities and communication protocols. Together,
these and related disaster risk reduction systems can reduce the potential for loss of life and
damage to property.
Second, a resilient community is generally well able to cope with a disaster event and its toll, and
to use its social and political networks, bonds of trust and other community assets to recover
and rebuild much more readily than those not so well prepared. Thus, the very high impacts and
delays in recovery experienced in New Orleans after Katrina and in Port-au-Prince and elsewhere
in Haiti were not just the results of the severity of the hurricane or earthquake but also, and more
significantly, of extremely low levels of disaster preparedness through inadequate governance,
inequalities in wealth and power, and neglected infrastructure (Rose 2007; Blakely 2012; Farmer
2011).
36
37
Resilience for the Sustainability Transition
Whether it is resilience to the challenges of climate change, (un)natural disasters or peak oil,
outlined here—or to economic change and recession, interethnic conflict, or the collapse of
internet infrastructure—resilience planning and enhancement is now a major policy issue for urban
politicians and planners. Planning merely for continuity, to maintain business-as-usual is not longer
an option. In a world of constant and accelerating change, the people, governance, infrastructure
and economic foundations of cities are changing, both in themselves and in response to external
changes. Resilience provides the opportunity for choice and to shape the future. As Davoudi (2012)
has noted, the determinism of adaptive cycles in ecological systems is not that relevant in the social
world of conflict, power and politics with the opportunity to ‘do otherwise’ through the power of
human agency and associated human intentionality, foresight and control of technology. The choice
is, thus, to facilitate the development of resilience as a responsive mechanism or as a precondition
and enabling mechanism in the sustainability transition (Wilson 2012) or, as Pelling (2012) argues, for
the social, economic and cultural transformations we need.
References
ACCCRN 2012, ‘Responding to the Urban Climate Challenge’, Asian Cities Climate Change
Resilience Network, viewed 24 July 2012 at <http://www.acccrn.org/>.
Newman, P, Beatley, T & Boyer, H 2009, Resilient cities: responding to peak oil and climate change,
Island Press, Washington DC.
Pelling, M 2012, Adaptation to climate change: From resilience to transformation, Routledge,
London.
Resilience Alliance, <http://www.resalliance.org>
Rodin, J 2008, Climate change adaptation: The next great challenge for the developing world, paper
to American Association for the Advancement of Science 2008 Annual Meeting, Boston, viewed
24 July 2012 at <http://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/news/speeches-presentations/judith-rodinpresident-rockefeller-10>.
Rose, A 2007, ‘Economic resilience to natural and man-made disasters: Multidisciplinary origins and
contextual dimensions’, Environmental Hazards, 7(4): pp. 383–95.
Shaw, K 2012, ‘“Reframing” resilience: Challenges for planning theory and practice’, Planning
Theory & Practice, 13(2): pp. 308–12.
UNISDR 2004,Living with risk: A global review of disaster reduction initiatives’, viewed 24 July 2012
at <http://www.unisdr.org/we/inform/publications/657>
Wilson, GA 2012, Community resilience and environmental transitions, Routledge, London.
Adger, N, Brooks, N, Bentham, G, Agnew, M & Eriksen, S 2004, New indicators of vulnerability and
adaptive capacity, Tindall Centre for Climate Change, University of Norwich, Norwich.
Beatley, T 2011, ‘Resilience to disasters’, in Dannenberg et al.: pp. 244–88.
Berkes, F, Colding, J & Folkes, C (eds) 2002, Navigating social-ecological systems: Building
resilience for complexity and change, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Blakely, EJ 2012, My storm: Managing the recovery of New Orleans in the wake of Katrina,
University of Pennsylvania Press, Pittsburg.
Dannenberg, D, Frumkin, H & Jackson, R (eds) 2011, Making healthy places: Designing and
building for health, well-being and sustainability, Island Press, Washington DC.
Davoudi, S 2012, ‘Resilience: A bridging concept or a dead end?’ Planning Theory & Practice, 13(2):
pp. 299–307.
de Bruijne, M, Boin, A & van Eten, M 2010, ‘Resilience: Exploring the concept and its meanings’,
in Comfort, LK, Boin, A & Demchak, CC (eds) Designing Resilience: Preparing for extreme events,
University of Pittsburg Press, Pittsburg.
Deveson, A 2003, Resilience, Allen & Unwin, Sydney.
Farmer, P 2011, Haiti after the Earthquake, Public Affairs, New York.
Frumkin, H (2004) Urban sprawl and public health: Designing, planning, and building for healthy
communities, Island Press, Washington DC.
Justice for Indigenous Australians, Bourke Street Mall, Melbourne, Australia, December 2010.
© Tommaso Durante, The Visual Archive Project of the Global Imaginary.
Funfgeld, H & McEvoy, D 2012, ‘Resilience as a useful concept for climate change adaptation?’,
Planning Theory & Practice, 13(2): pp. 324–28.
Gunderson, L. H. & Holling, C.S (eds) 2002, Panarchy: Understanding transformations in human and
natural systems, Island Press: Washington DC.
Haigh, R & Amadatunga, D 2011, ‘Introduction’, in Amaratunga, D & Haigh, R (eds) Post-disaster
reconstruction of the built environment: Building for resilience, Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester.
Holling, CS, Gunderson, LH & Ludwig, D 2002, ‘In quest of a theory of adaptive change’, in Gunderson & Holling (eds).
Kelly, PM & Adger, WN 2009, ‘Theory and practice in assessing vulnerability to climate change
and facilitating adaptation’, in Schipper, EL & Burton, I (eds) The Earthscan reader on adaptation to
climate change, Earthscan, London: pp. 161–85.
Newman, P & Jennings, I 2008, Cities as Sustainable Ecosystems, Island Press, Washington DC.
38
39
Adaptation
Dana Thomsen and Timothy Smith
Adaptation may be conceived as an individual or societal response to the dynamics of socioecological systems and as a pathway towards resilience and sustainability. The nature, processes
and efficacy of adaptation are pivotal in determining system outcomes, i.e. vulnerability or resilience,
in response to change.
Background
Responding to the inevitable impacts of climate change has resulted in an increasing focus on
understanding and facilitating adaptation, particularly in research and policy contexts. In climate
change settings, adaptation is defined as ‘actual adjustments, or changes in decision environments,
which might ultimately enhance resilience or reduce vulnerability to observed or expected changes in
climate’ (Adger et al. 2007, p. 720).
Contributions by Working Group II to the fourth assessment report by the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change (IPCC) demonstrated that adaptation to climate change is underway, but only on
a limited scale (Adger et al., 2007). However, adaptation is not new and is increasingly recognized,
for instance by Bussey et al. 2011, as a feature of societies that have endured or prospered through
multiple cycles of socio-ecological change. Smit and Wandel (2006, p. 285) illustrate the established
nature of adaptive practices and associated research, and identify ‘a vast body of scholarship’ in
fields such as resource management, community development, planning, livelihood security and
sustainable development.
Evaluating Adaptation
Adaptation options may be categorized by: timing—anticipatory, concurrent or reactive; intent
—spontaneous or planned; scope, such as local or global; and form, such as technological,
behavioural or financial (Smit & Wandel 2006, p. 288). In particular, Smit et al. (1999, 2000) provide
a framework to examine the meaning of adaptation by asking what kind of adaptation is involved,
who or what adapts, and how the adaptation occurs. By clarifying the intentions, actors and nature
of adaptation practices, this framework facilitates a consideration of the impacts of adaptation, i.e.
beyond those initiating the adaptation and towards an examination of impacts on all those affected
within particular systems (Thomsen et al. 2012). This framework also enables reflection on the ethics
and values underpinning various adaptation options towards sustainable processes (Thomsen et al.
2012).
To this end Smit and Wandel (2006, p. 285) advocate participatory, ‘bottom up’, approaches to
researching and developing adaptation pathways with studies that aim to ‘identify what can be done
in a practical sense, in what way and by whom’. In addressing the practicalities associated with
implementing adaptation, they highlight the value of ‘mainstreaming’ and of recognizing the broad
range of drivers in any given context:
The whole point of the work on adaptation processes is to have risks (and opportunities)
associated with climate change (or other environmental changes) actually addressed in
decision-making at some practical level ... it is extremely unlikely for any type of adaptive action
to be taken in light of climate change alone. (Smit & Wandel 2006, p. 285)
Similarly, Adger et al. (2007, p. 719) concur that ‘adaptation measures are seldom undertaken in
response to climate change alone’ and recommend a greater focus on adaptations that support
sustainable development.
Despite these and other prominent reviews of the related literature—such as Nelson et al. (2007)—all
emphasizing that adaptation encompasses decision-making processes and intervention actions,
Thomsen et al. (2012, p. 2) contend that there is limited emphasis on the processes or impacts of
40
adaptation in contemporary public policy debates:
Adaptation is most often presented as an array of adaptation options in a shopping-list style
(e.g., air-conditioning, desalination, insurance, relocation, sea walls), where people are asked to
choose from a selection of alternative policies, practices, and/or technologies without deeper
consideration of the broader or systemic implications.
Adaptation, Maladaptation and Manipulation
The importance of context and of assessing adaptation using the broad frameworks of sustainability
indicates that adaptations may become less effective, or even inappropriate, across space and time
(Adger et al. 2005). In their third assessment report, the IPCC referred to such ‘changes in natural
or human systems that inadvertently increase vulnerability to climatic stimuli’ and ‘adaptation that
does not succeed in reducing vulnerability but increases it instead’ as ‘maladaptation’ (McCarthy et
al. 2001, p. 990). Barnett and O’Neill (2010) describe five types of maladaptation to climate change,
which are distinguished by their: increasing emissions, unfairly burdening vulnerable communities,
increasing high opportunity costs, decreasing adaptation incentives or producing path dependencies
that limit future alternative adaptations.
Thomsen et al. (2012) build on the frameworks of Smit et al. (1999, 2000) and Adger et al. (2005,
2009) to identify manipulation as an additional theoretical lens through which to assess individual
or societal response to change. They examine the intentions and focus of adaptation strategies to
reveal that many are manipulative and seek to change external contexts rather than focus on selfdirected change towards internal modification:
we can choose to respond to social–ecological dynamics by making internal adjustments
(i.e., adaptations) in human systems (at either individual or societal scales as appropriate) or
external adjustments (i.e., manipulations). The external focus of manipulation (i.e., who or what
changes) provides an essential distinction from adaptation. (Thomsen et al. 2012, p. 7).
Thomsen et al. (2012) argue that manipulative strategies tend to be narrowly defined with reference
to the needs and/or desires of the manipulator, as opposed to broader or systemic strategies,
and are likely to lead to suboptimal or short-term outcomes in the contexts of resilience and
sustainability. Furthermore, the deliberate avoidance of authentic learning opportunities from
direct experience of change limits adaptive learning processes and the capacity to adapt in future
contexts. They draw on the development and increasing urbanization of the Australian coastline
to demonstrate the ‘lure of manipulative approaches’ where historically adaptive approaches
have tended towards manipulative responses in recent times, following development pressures
and desires for more static environments (Thomsen et al. 2012). They note increasing difficulties
associated with reverting to adaptive responses, in this context resulting from the self-reinforcing
cycles of ‘engrained sociocultural norms and system expectations created’, so that ‘with every
manipulation, the actors are further removed from the system they are manipulating, and the
concept of adaptation becomes increasingly unfamiliar and less tangible (Thomsen et al. 2012,
p. 7). Finally, Thomsen et al. (2012) note that, as the intention of all maladaptations is to adapt,
such negative consequences may be deemed unintentional, further highlighting the importance of
intention in distinguishing between response strategies.
Adaptation and Adaptive Capacity
Our discussion has shown that adaptation is multidimensional and depends on various social,
political, technological, institutional and economic factors operating at different scales (Vincent 2007).
However, Adger et al. (2005, 2007) highlight the limits to adaptation: systemic limits to adaptation
may occur in the social dimension, such as with technological, behavioural, financial and institutional
constraints, and in the ecological dimension, for instance through the inability of natural systems
to cope with change. The set of preconditions that indicate the potential for adaptation at various
scales is often referred to as ‘adaptive capacity’, which is the ‘asset base’ from which individuals,
households, communities and nations draw for the purposes of adaptation (Vincent 2007, p. 13).
While, in response to a range of potential changes to systems, there have been attempts to define
generic determinants of adaptive capacity towards building more resilient communities, recent
41
studies have acknowledged uncertainties in doing so and have instead focused on context-specific
determinants. Smit and Wandel (2006) emphasize that determinants vary over time, type, stimulus,
place and system. Similarly, Adger et al. (2007) observe that adaptive capacity varies across and
within societies. In particular, Tompkins and Adger (2005) note the importance of the capacity of
individuals, groups or institutions in learning and modifying their response to change in order to
achieve sustainable outcomes.
Implications for Urban Settings
Urban settings often represent a mosaic of multiple and intertwining local socio-ecological contexts.
As most Australians live in cities, these settings represent the dominant context for individual and
societal adaptation within Australia, and elsewhere. However, it is also important to recognize the
importance of adaptation in the non-urban areas on which urbanites depend, for example for
food production. Australian cities have invested substantially in centralized infrastructure for the
provision of essential services, such as water and sewerage. These services, along with transport
and housing, are largely immobile, thus limiting the potential for adaptation through adjustment
or retrofitting. Furthermore, as Thomsen et al. (2012) emphasize, many current ‘adaptations’
are better defined as ‘manipulations’ and actually exacerbate the vulnerabilities that they were
designed to avoid—energy intensive air-conditioning is an example. However, cities also tend to be
technologically sophisticated and through technologies enhance societal adaptation. For example,
information and communication technologies may enhance access to timely information, such as
enabling weather reports, flood and fire warnings, and air and water quality assessments, thereby
facilitating informed and coordinated societal response. The challenge for adaptation, across all
settings, is the ability to learn in order to maintain sufficient awareness of dynamic and ever-changing
socio-ecological contexts such that actions contribute to the resilience of systems both now and
into the future.
Smit, B, Burton, I, Klein, R & Wandel, J 2000, ‘An anatomy of adaptation to climate change and
variability’, Climatic Change, 45, pp. 223–51.
Smit, B & Wandell, J. 2006, Adaptation, adaptive capacity and vulnerability, Global Environmental
Change, 16(3): 282–92.
Thomsen, DC, Smith, TF & Keys, N 2012, ‘Adaptation or manipulation? Unpacking climate change
response strategies’, Ecology and Society 17(3), [article] 20, accessed 15 October 2012 at <http://
www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol17/iss3/art20/>.
Tompkins, EL & Adger, WN 2005, ‘Defining response capacity to enhance climate change policy’,
Environmental Science & Policy 8(6), pp. 562–71.
Vincent, K 2007, ‘Uncertainty in adaptive capacity and the importance of scale’, Global
Environmental Change-Human and Policy Dimensions, 17(1), pp. 12–24.
References
Adger, WN, Agrawala, S, Mirza, MMO, Conde, C, O’Brien, K, Pulhin, J, Pulwarty, R, Smit, B &
Takahashi, K 2007, ‘Assessment of adaptation practices, options, constraints and capacity’ in Parry,
ML, Canziani, OF, Palutikof, JP, van der Linden, PJ & Hanson, CE (eds) Climate Change 2007:
Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to the Fourth Assessment
Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,
UK: pp. 717–43.
Adger, WN, Arnett, N & Tompkins, E 2005, ‘Successful adaptation to climate change across scales’,
Global Environmental Change, 15, pp. 77–86.
Adger, WN, Dessai, S, Goulden, M, Hulme, M, Lorenzoni, I, Nelson, D, Naess, L, Wolf, J & Wreford.
A 2009, ‘Are there social limits to adaptation to climate change?’, Climatic Change, 93(3), pp.
335–54.
Barnett, J & O’Neill, S 2010, ‘Maladaptation’, Global Environmental Change, 20, pp. 211–13.
Bussey, M, Carter, RW, Keys, N, Carter, J, Mangoyana, R, Matthews, J, Nash, D, Oliver, J, Richards,
R, Roiko, A, Sano, M, Thomsen, DC, Weber, E & Smith, TF 2011, ‘Framing adaptive capacity
through a history–futures lens: Lessons from the South East Queensland Climate Adaptation
Research Initiative’, Futures, 44(4), pp. 385–97.
McCarthy, JJ, Canziani, OF, Leary, NA, Dokken, DJ & White, KS (eds) 2001, Climate change 2001:
impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to the Third Assessment
Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,
UK.
Darling Harbour, Sydney, Australia, 2012. © Tommaso Durante, The Visual Archive Project of the Global
Imaginary.
Nelson, DR, Adger, WN, & Brown, K 2007, ‘Adaptation to environmental change: contributions of a
resilience framework’, Annual Review of Environment and Resources, 32, pp. 395–419.
Smit, B, Burton, I, Klein, R & Street, R 1999, ‘The science of adaptation: A framework for
assessment’, Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change, 4, pp. 199–213.
42
43
Looking for Community in the City
Martin Mulligan
The relevance of community to modern life has been a hot topic of debate in western sociology
ever since Emile Durkheim took exception to the famous book on the topic by his contemporary
sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies (Aldous et al. 1972). Essentially Durkheim argued that Tönnies’
distinction between Gemeineschaft and Geselleschaft—roughly translated into English as
‘community’ and ‘society’—had been made irrelevant by the rapid urbanization that followed the
second Industrial Revolution in Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century. Instead of
looking for communities of an earlier age in new urban environments, Durkheim argued, we need
to focus on the formation of civil society and new forms of solidarity that can extend beyond faceto-face relationships and obligations. However, against Durkheim’s expectation—perhaps even
hope—the idea of community did not fade away. Indeed it became the key focus of the so-called
‘Chicago School’ of urban sociologists, which first took shape around scholars such as Robert Park
and Louis Wirth in the 1920s (Delanty 2003). The book by Tönnies continues to be cited regularly by
contemporary sociological researchers.
Again the idea of community came under attack by a range of sociologists and cultural historians
in the 1980s and 1990s, after Raymond Williams (1983, p. 76) had remarked, rather famously, that
the word community ‘never seems to be used unfavourably, and never to be given any positive
opposing or distinguishing term’. Richard Sennett (1986, p. 306), for example, wrote that community
only exists through ‘a continual hyping up of emotions’, while Eric Hobsbawm (1994, p. 428)
suggested that the word has never ‘been used more indiscriminately or emptily than in the decades
when [it] in the sociological sense became hard to find’. Perhaps the sharpest criticism of the
continuing search for community came from the feminist sociologist Iris Marion Young (1990, p. 302)
who suggested that the ‘desire for community rests on the same desire for social wholeness and
identification that underlies racism and chauvinism on the one hand and political sectarianism on the
other’. By the middle of the 1990s it was widely assumed that globalization was finally digging the
grave into which the coffin of community might finally be lowered, at least as far as the global north
was concerned.
Still the idea of community refused to die and, indeed, many sociologists, such as Zygmunt Bauman
(2001), noticed that the desire for a sense of belonging to community was getting stronger in the
context of globalization and the onset of what he called ‘liquid modernity’. By 2001 Bauman had
softened his earlier antagonism to the desire for community (Bauman 1993) but others continued to
express deep ambivalence about it. In Australia, for example, a pioneer of community development
practice in the field of social work, Martin Mowbray (Bryson & Mowbray 1981, p. 255; Mowbray
2005), has long argued that within government discourse the term community has become a sort
of ‘spray-on solution’ for all the ills of society and Jim Walmsley (2006, p. 5) has suggested that the
word had come to have a ‘high level of use but a low level of meaning’.
As the critics of community have commonly noted, the word can mean very different things to
different people and it can be easily misused or deliberately abused either as a distraction or as
a spurious claim for legitimacy. This helps to explain some of the ambivalence about the ongoing
desire for community. Yet, as argued in the mid 1980s by anthropologist Antony Cohen (1985), the
desire for community is a phenomenon we should be striving to understand rather than decry.
Community has Symbolic and Material Relevance
It is worth noting that it was this same anthropologist Anthony Cohen who turned attention to the
symbolic importance of community. In doing so, he drew on the earlier work of Victor Turner (1969)
who went back to the notion of communitas to suggest that a conception of community is common
to all human societies, across the ages. Cohen (1985) suggested that shared symbols play a bigger
role than ‘boundaries’ in creating a sense of belonging. Boundaries are secondary in that they are
‘constituted by people in interaction’ and are not as fixed as people often imagine (Cohen 1985, p.
44
74). This way of thinking about community was subsequently picked up by Michel Maffesoli (1996),
when he suggested that dreams are as important as material circumstances in enabling people to
create a sense of community. This was elaborated in much more detail by Gerard Delanty (2003)
to stress that community should be seen as an aspiration or norm rather than a social structure. A
number of French writers, such as Geroges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot and Jean-Luc Nancy, have
made the point that, as an aspiration, community can be fully achieved. In this sense, community
can be seen as an eternal desire that always remains tantalisingly beyond fulfilment. Delanty (2003,
p. 193) adds that rising global uncertainties are increasing the desire to find community.
As Delanty (2003, p. 10) has put it, this way of thinking about community helps to explain why it has
been a ‘powerful of belonging in every age’, but it does not mean that the search for community is
disconnected from material circumstances. This point has been emphasised by Jeremy Brent, who
spent 25 years as a youth worker in a public housing estate in Bristol before undertaking his PhD on
the endless search for community. Reflecting on his experiences as an urban community worker,
Brent (2009, p. 230) noted that: ‘I have been very aware of the aesthetic and non-utilitarian aspects
of community, [but] there are always also related to the material context’. He went on to suggest that
community often emerges as a ‘form of resistance, within asymmetrical relations of power’ or as a
form of solidarity in trying to improve material circumstances (Brent 2009, p. 261).
Community has its Dark Side
We have already noted that the aspiration for community can easily be misused or abused and, in
many parts of the world, communalism has led to violent conflict in countries ranging from Rwanda
to India and from Bosnia to Sri Lanka. Indeed communal riots broke out in cities across England
in August 2011 and Australia had its own experience with the infamous Cronulla riots of 2005.
This reminds us that community is a rather fraught idea. In part, this can be explained by the fact
that experiences of community are often fleeting and impartial, and can mean different things to
different people. Furthermore, ideas about how to achieve community can also vary markedly and
be hotly contested. At a time when local communities are being constantly reconstituted through
mobility and migration, it is as likely that the desire for community will be expressed in parochial
and nostalgic terms as in terms that embrace what Doreen Massey (1996, p. 291) has called
‘coexisting multiplicity’. Narrow and outdated notions of community identities can cause exclusions,
marginalization and internal divisions.
So ‘community’ often provokes a very emotional discourse. The reason for this has probably been
best explained by Roberto Esposito (2010) who went further than Victor Turner in digging back into
the etymology of the notion of communitas (as expressed in Latin). According to the analysis by
Esposito (2010, p. 6), the munus that comes to be shared publicly is not a ‘property’ or ‘possession’
but rather ‘a debt, a pledge, a gift that is to be given’. In other words it is about a lack or obligation
as much as it is about what already exists. He went on to suggest that ‘community isn’t only to
be identified with the rea publica, which is the common “thing”, but rather it is the hole into which
the common thing continually risks falling’ (Esposito 2010, p. 8). Perhaps we can add that the hole
appears to be getting bigger in the context of increasing global uncertainties and hence the fear
of the fall is also increasing. Community is no longer the ‘given’ it may have been in earlier times.
Indeed Nikolas Rose (1999, p. 196) has suggested that it only now exists to the extent that it is
‘imagined’ and ‘enacted’. Hence, the gap between the strong desire for community and the difficulty
involved in finding it may explain why projections of community are being hotly contested.
Arguments for Engagement
Whereas some sociologists have concluded that the very idea of community has outlived its utility,
the analysis presented above suggests that it has become increasingly important to contest narrow
and divisive conceptions of community. This, in turn, suggests that community development
as a field of practice—which has emerged most strongly in the UK, USA and Australia (Kenny
2007)—warrants even more attention than it has received to date. Community development is an
obvious mode of operation for a host of community-based organisations but it has also become
an increasing responsibility for government agencies, especially at the level of local government.
45
As a tool of government there is always the danger that community will be presented as a ‘sprayon solution’—as Bryson and Mowbray suggested way back in 1981. However, there is also the
possibility that engaging with community can make local government more relevant. According to
Nikolas Rose (2008, p. 93), ‘community is not simply the territory of government but a means of
government’.
Despite what he said about the dark side of community Roberto Esposito (2010, p. 8) also
concluded that ‘communitas is the most suitable, indeed the sole dimension [of our] co-living’.
In rather more prosaic terms, Jeremy Brent (2009, p. 261) ended his reflections on community
formation and community development work by concluding: ‘Engaging with community is a practice
full of ambivalence, but always one full of hope’. Sadly, Jeremy Brent passed away before his PhD
had been turned into a book but, thankfully, his community of friends and associates made sure this
task was completed so that his thoughts would endure.
References
Aldous, J, Durkheim, E & Tönnies, F 1972, ‘An exchange between Durkheim and Tönnies on the
nature of social relations with an Introduction by Joan Aldous’, American Journal of Sociology, 77(6),
pp. 1191–1200.
Bauman, Z 2001, Community: Seeking safety in an insecure world, Polity Press, Cambridge, UK.
Bauman, Z 1993, Postmodern ethics, Blackwell, Oxford.
Brent, J 2009, Searching for community: Representation, power and action on an urban housing
estate, Polity Press, Bristol, UK.
Bryson, L & Mowbray, M 1981, ‘Community: The spray-on solution’, Australian Journal of Social
Issues, 16(4): pp. 255–67.
Cohen, A 1985, The symbolic construction of community, Tavistock, London
Delanty, G 2003, Community, Routledge, London/New York City.
Esposito, R 2010, Communitas: The origin and destiny of community, Stanford University Press,
Stanford, California.
Hobsbawm, E 1994, The age of extremes; The short history of the twentieth century, 1914–1991,
Michael Joseph, London.
Kenny, S 2007 (3rd edn), Developing communities for the future, Thomson, Melbourne.
Maffesoli, M 1996, The time of the tribes: The decline of individualism in mass society, Sage
Publications, London.
Massey D 1996 ‘Spaces of Politics’ in Massey, D, Allen, J & Sarre, P (eds) Human Geography
Today, Polity Press, Cambridge, UK, pp. 279–94.
Social Innovation and the City
Ian McShane
The significance of cities as sites of innovation has been recognized for at least four centuries
(Johnson 2008). Cities are not merely innovation hubs (Marceau 2008) but, on Glaeser’s (2011)
account, humankind’s greatest innovation. The physical and social characteristics of urban
environments—population density and diversity, information flows, scale economies—are viewed as
the building blocks of innovation in a rapidly expanding literature (Fagerberg 2005).
Much of this thinking has rested on a conceptualization of innovation as a dynamic element of
capitalist market economies. The work of Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter (1939) has been
highly influential in framing innovation as an entrepreneurial process that brings existing resources
into new combinations. Schumpeter saw innovation as a process of adoption and diffusion,
distinguishing it from invention, or the original occurrence of an idea. Innovation, according to
Schumpeter, was spurred by clustering—physically in cities and temporally in certain historical
periods.
The decline of Western industrial economies in the late twentieth century broadened critical and
policy focus away from innovation as business entrepreneurship, to examine the institutional and
sociological contexts of innovation. The concept of a national innovation system was theorized
in the 1980s to emphasize the wider institutional and political settings in which innovation
occurred (Edquist 2005). Several innovation analysts, though, have questioned the relevance
of national polities and national boundaries in a globalized world, pointing to cities as centres of
global competition, habitation, economic output, consumption and energy use. While this view
is open to challenge on some counts (for example, national regulation of intellectual property and
communications is critical in knowledge economies), it does draw attention to cities as the locus
of major social and environmental challenges in the twenty-first century. Such challenges are
sometimes described as ‘wicked problems’ in recognition of their persistent and multidimensional
character (Rittel & Webber 1973). It is in this arena that the concept of social innovation (SI) has
emerged as a powerful, if imprecise, influence on social theory, civic activism and policy reform.
This essay discusses SI as a theoretical and policy construct, and explores its connection to cities.
I focus the discussion around an SI that I argue has increasing significance for the social and
environmental sustainability of cities—broadband and the internet.
Defining Social Innovation
Rose, N 1999, Powers of freedom: Reframing political thought, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, UK.
SI is such an appealing—or elusive—concept that it has been ‘reinvented’ within its relatively short
lifespan (Phills et al. 2008). The catalogue of SIs is substantial and increasing with further recognition
of the concept: Kickstarter, Wikipedia, fair trade, Freecycle, micro-financing, mutual societies,
subscription libraries, street lighting and many more. A strong historical thread in the SI literature
suggests that novel ideas, processes and institutional alignments are not necessarily recognized at
the point of their inception (Mumford 2002).
Rose, N 2008, ‘The death of the social?: Re-figuring the territory of government’ in Miller, P & Rose,
N (eds), Governing the present: Administering economic, social and personal life, Polity Press,
Cambridge, UK, pp. 84–113.
The many definitions of SI in circulation agree on two features: firstly, the existence of a problem or
unmet demand; and, secondly, the social rather than individual benefits returned by the innovation.
The much cited passage of Phills et al. (2008, p. 36) captures these characteristics succinctly:
Sennett, R 1986, The fall of public man, Faber & Faber, London.
Social innovation is a novel solution to a social problem that is more effective, efficient, sustainable,
or just than existing solutions and for which the value accrues primarily to society as a whole rather
than private individuals.
Mowbray, M 2005, ‘Community capacity building or state opportunism?’ Community Development
Journal, 40(3), pp. 255–264.
Turner, V 1969, The ritual process: Structure and anti-structure, Routledge, London.
Walmsley, J 2006, ‘Putting community in place’, Dialogue, 25(1), pp. 5–12.
Williams, R 1983, Keywords: A vocabulary of culture and society, Flamingo, London.
Young, IM 1990, ‘The ideal of community and the politics of difference’ in Nicholson LJ (ed.)
Feminism/Postmodernism, Routledge, New York City.
46
These writers, who are connected with Stanford University’s school of business, are agnostic on
whether SI necessarily involves civic or social action, or precludes business entrepreneurship. SI’s
business school connection is also seen in the UK, through prominent SI thinker Geoff Mulgan’s
association with Oxford University’s Said College of Business. Mulgan et al. (2007) argue that the
sources of innovation can be individuals, social movements, market dynamics or organizational
47
incentives. This discussion points to a ‘post-ideological’ strand of SI analysis. Phills et al. (2008)
argue that SI’s neutral point of view facilitates new partnerships between the state, business and
community sectors to tackle endemic problems. This stance indicates the blurred boundaries in
advanced liberal societies between social innovation, social entrepreneurship, network governance,
partnerships and corporate social responsibility.
However, Moulaert et al. (2005) describe an alternative lineage of SI, generated in the community
struggles and social movements of the 1960s. They introduce the concept of territorial innovation,
which is typically focused on driving changes within neighbourhoods and cities, and typically
generated by or within social movements. In this framing, SI is highly contextual, emerging in
particular times, places and institutional settings. What is an innovation in one place, argue these
authors, may not be elsewhere. Moulaert et al. (2005, p. 67) argue that the defining characteristics of
SI as follows:
•
It contributes to satisfying human needs not otherwise considered or satisfied;
•
It increases access rights (e.g. by political inclusiveness, redistributive policies etc.);
•
It enhances human capabilities (e.g. by empowering particular social groups, increasing social
capital etc.).
SI, in this formulation, may also be short-lived but, in Westley and Antadze’s (2010, p. 2) view, SI
involves systemic change that is durable and has broad impact. At stake here is a question of
whether SI should be imagined exclusively in terms of replication and scale, or whether local-level
creativity and adaptation, perhaps tactical and arising from conflict and exclusion, forms part of a
wider landscape of SI.
Mulgan et al. (2007) observe that SI has been the subject of little systematic inquiry, indicative
perhaps of a dynamic and evolving field of theory and practice. What of its future? Is the concept a
fleeting academic and policy fashion or is it cut from more durable cloth? Mulgan et al. (2007) argue
the latter, suggesting that the scale of challenges presented by processes, such as climate change
and ageing populations, are beyond the capacity of governments or markets to confront, and can
only be overcome through SI.
However, Mulgan et al. (2007), von Hippel (2005) and Pratt & Jeffcutt (2009) remind us to look
beyond a problem-centred world, to see in the transition from industrial to service economies, and
in the growth of the cultural sector, new opportunities for SI in co-creation, personalization and
creativity. Indeed, the linking of SI and creativity—clustering around what might be considered the
major SI of the twentieth century, the internet—represents an important development in SI theory
and practice.
Cities, Networks and Social Innovation
Cities occupy an ambivalent place in the SI literature. Some analysts are critical of the limited
attention to cities’ built environment in wider discussion of innovation, sensing lost opportunities
to contribute to problems such as greenhouse gas abatement (Pinnegar, Marceau & Randolph
2008). However, this criticism highlights a further gap in the literature: a conception of ‘the city’ that
substantially ignores suburban and peri-urban regions. Typical of urban formations in North America
and Australasia, these locations are characteristically derided as environmentally wasteful, creatively
dormant and socially disconnected, gobbling prime agricultural land in their outward march. Given
the substantial suburban populations in both of these continents, this view offers a bleak outlook
indeed for suburbs—and suburbanites—as sites of SI.
While ageing suburban ‘greyfields’, characterized by low-quality tract housing, poor social
infrastructure and limited local employment, present an increasingly urgent policy challenge (Newton
et al. 2011), suburban or peri-urban regions have also generated some of our most far-reaching SIs.
Sprawling Palo Alto in southern California, the locus of Silicon Valley, is a frequently cited example.
Indeed, the developers and conduits of the communication technologies that underpin much
of our economic, social and creative life proudly traded on domesticity, suburbia and creativity,
evident in epithets such as the Homebrew Club and the garage, associated with early do-it-yourself
computing. The decisive factor in promoting innovation, in the account by Glaeser (2011), was the
48
presence of Stanford University, itself an SI by virtue of its establishment through a philanthropic
grant.
An exclusive focus on the built form, then, masks the institutional, infrastructural and knowledge
networks that constitute cities. These networks are conceptually linked to the idea of ‘smart cities’.
This term encompasses an active and diverse field of innovation inquiry and practice increasingly
focussed on the availability of fast ubiquitous broadband. The rubric of smart cities might be seen
as an unabashed marketing exercise, particularly for regeneration areas, although Campbell (2012)
points to a record of intercity cooperation and learning around urban problems that rivals competitive
pressures.
Significant policy and practice learning has taken place around investment in municipal or city
broadband networks. This is an SI that combines technological advances with new partnerships
between the government, market and civic sectors to promote the economic and social welfare of
urban populations. Aggregating various listings of local-level broadband networks suggests there
are in excess of one thousand such networks around the globe. The wide range of technological
platforms, institutional arrangements (combining public, public–private, and civic provision), financing
and terms of access, and uses points to a dynamic and experimental field that encompasses
city management, governance, economic life and civil society activity. It is also a field where citylevel action has been thwarted by litigation and regulatory moves by private telecoms and higher
governments, especially in the United States. At stake is a tussle over whether broadband is a public
good—whether it can be imagined as essential city infrastructure or ‘fourth utility’ accessible to all
residents—or whether it is a private and marketed commodity. Of course, there is no guarantee that
investment is necessarily grounded in a wide conception of the public good. There are documented
cases where the primary investment argument was security and monitoring, the network serving a
narrow policing function rather than building civic capacity (Jassem 2010).
Some municipal governments have also supported community-based broadband networks, which
mostly use relatively cheap Wi-Fi ‘mesh’ technology in the unregulated part of the electro-magnetic
spectrum (EMS). City authorities have provided planning and sometimes infrastructural support,
for example, permitting installation of devices on utility poles. Community wireless networks have
interesting links to traditions of co-operative telephony, amateur radio (as suggested by the Berlin
network’s name freifunk) and computer tinkering. A libertarian strand in this activism seeks to reclaim
the internet and use of EMS from government and markets. As recent analysis of regime control of
telecommunications demonstrates, internet service providers are now a major choke point for the
internet, contrary to the network’s original conception. Mesh technology, by contrast, is more selforganizing or ‘self-healing’.
The question of who provides broadband returns us to the issue of where innovation takes place.
Australian evidence suggests that a period of broadband experimentation by urban and rural local
governments—seeking to address local needs, capabilities and spatial characteristics—has come
to an end with the rollout by the national government of a countrywide broadband network (Molony
2006). Whether the relatively costly national broadband network will spur further local provision is
an open question. Balancing top-down and bottom-up initiatives, universality and local provision,
is a key challenge of liberal societies. I am not suggesting here that city governments should
automatically set up as broadband providers. However, I argue that they are in a prime position to
advocate local-level experimentation, community engagement and further innovation in this field.
Conclusion
SI’s imprecision and malleability can mean that every social development or adaptation is seen
through its lens, effectively emptying the concept of meaning. However, there is little dispute that the
inception of the internet, and subsequent development of mobile and social media, headlines the SI
catalogue. There is also little dispute that the social and economic significance of the internet, and its
increasing use as a public service portal, brings new concerns over digital exclusion. If, as Mulgan et
al. (2007) argue, the scale of social and urban problems that we confront in the twenty-first century
is not matched by a similar scale of solutions then innovation in the digital domain will be increasingly
important in expanding our repertoire.
49
References
Campbell, T 2012, Beyond smart cities: How cities network, learn and innovate, Earthscan, London.
Edquist, C 2005, ‘Systems of innovation: perspectives and challenges’, in Fagerberg et al.,
pp. 81–208.
Sustainable Entrepreneurship
Julian Waters-Lynch
Fagerberg, J 2005, ‘Innovation—A guide to the literature’, in Fagerberg et al.: pp. 1–26.
Fagerberg, J, Mowery, D & Nelson R (eds), The Oxford handbook of innovation, Oxford University
Press, Oxford and New York City.
Glaeser, E 2011, Triumph of the city: How our greatest invention makes us richer, smarter, greener,
healthier and happier, Penguin, New York City.
Howard, P, Agarwal S & Hussain, M 2010, When do states disconnect their digital networks?
Regime responses to the political uses of social media, Department of Communications, University
of Washington, viewed 25 July 2012 at <http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_
id=1907191>.
Jassem, H 2010, ‘Municipal wi fi: the coda’, Journal of Urban Technology, 17(2): pp. 3–20.
Johnson, B 2008, ‘Cities, systems of innovation and economic development’, Innovation:
Management, Policy and Practice, 10(2/3), pp. 146–155.
Marceau, J 2008, ‘Innovation in the city and innovative Cities’, Innovation: Management, Policy and
Practice, 10(2/3), pp. 136–45.
Molony, R 2006, Innovative uses of broadband by local government in Australia, Australian Local
Government Association, Canberra.
Moulaert, F, Swyngedouw, E, Haussermann, H, Healey, P, Vicari Haddock, S, Cavola, L, Novy, A &
Morgan, K 2005, Social innovation, governance and community building, European Commission,
Brussels.
Mulgan, G, Tucker, S, Ali, R & Sanders, B 2007, Social innovation: What it is, why it matters, and
how it can be accelerated, The Young Foundation, London.
Mumford, M 2002, ‘Social innovation—Ten cases from Benjamin Franklin’, Creativity Research
Journal, 14(2), pp. 253–66.
Newton, P, Murray, S, Wakefield, R, Murphy, C, Khor, L & Morgan, T 2011, Towards a new model
for housing regeneration in greyfields residential precincts, AHURI Final Report No. 171, Australian
Housing and Urban Research Institute, Melbourne.
Phills, J, Deiglmeier K & Miller, D 2008, ‘Rediscovering social innovation’, Stanford Social Innovation
Review, 6(4), pp. 34–43.
Pinnegar, S, Marceau J & Randolph, B 2008, ‘Innovation for a carbon constrained city: challenges
for the built environment’, Innovation: Management, Policy and Practice, 10(2/3), pp. 303–15.
Pratt, A & Jeffcutt, P (eds) 2009, Creativity, innovation and the cultural economy, Routledge,
Abingdon.
Rittel, H & Webber, M 1973, ‘Dilemmas in a general theory of planning’, Policy Sciences, 4, pp.
155–69.
Schumpeter, J 1939, Business cycles: A theoretical, historical and statistical analysis of the capitalist
process, McGraw Hill, New York City.
von Hippel, E 2005, Democratizing innovation, MIT Press, Cambridge MA.
Westley, F & Antadze, N 2010, ‘Making a difference: Strategies for scaling social innovation for
greater impact’, The Innovation Journal, 15, Article 2, pp. 1–19.
This essay will examine the concept of sustainable entrepreneurship as a potentially critical
dimension of urban sustainability. It will consider the origins of the term in light of some historically
significant moments in understanding sustainability and entrepreneurship and offer an overview of
the way the term ‘sustainable development’ is used in the scholarly literature. This discussion of the
term will be supplemented with some examples of sustainable entrepreneurs as discussed in the
literature. The essay concludes by suggesting that further research into the types, motivations and
conditions that enable sustainable entrepreneurship could proffer much value in building the new
kind of economy required for a sustainable future.
Origins and Meanings
For some ‘sustainable entrepreneurship’ seems like an oxymoron. The collectivist and preservationist
orientation of environmentalism and the individualist, profit-seeking orientation of entrepreneurship
have often been framed as irreconcilable (Anderson 1998; Walley & Taylor 2002). Interestingly, both
terms share a similar historical trajectory in their recognition as distinct areas of academic inquiry.
Although the term ‘entrepreneur’ can be dated back to its French origins in the eighteenth century
(Hoselitz 1951; Brewer 1992), recorded use goes back to the Middle Ages. Richard Cantillon’s
(1755) Essay on the nature of commerce and Jean-Baptiste Say’s (1803) Treatise on political
economy are generally credited with the development of the word in its sense of the risk-bearing
individual who brings together land, labour and capital to create new ventures. The economist
Joseph Schumpeter (1934; 1950) did much to popularize the term in his vision of capitalism’s
cycles of creation and destruction. Schumpeter saw capitalist entrepreneurs, or wild spirits
(Unternehmergeist), as unlocking innovation and shattering the status quo of social and economic
practices (Anderson 1998).
From the 1960s, the management literature continued to discuss entrepreneurs as moderate
risk takers searching for change and exploiting opportunities (McClelland 1961; Drucker 1964).
It was only in the late 1970s and early 1980s that entrepreneurship itself became recognized as
an independent field of scholarly inquiry, drawing from elements of the established economics,
management, psychological and sociological traditions (Schaper 2005). A testament to this, some
languages do not yet have a word for entrepreneurship. In Spanish the word entrepreneur is
empresario, but there is no widely recognized word for entrepreneurship. Walley and Taylor (2002,
p. 32) note that the ‘diversity of (sometimes contradictory) theories of entrepreneurship is perhaps
attributable to their having been developed in different academic disciplines’.
In many ways ‘sustainable entrepreneurship’ seeks to include further disciplinary traditions. There
are several terms used in the literature from ‘sustainable’, ‘environmental’, ‘ecological’ and ‘green’
entrepreneurs, not to mention much discussion of ‘social’ entrepreneurship. Sometimes these terms
are used interchangeably. Occasionally small distinctions are drawn between ‘eco-entrepreneurship’
and ‘sustainable entrepreneurship’, the latter including a social and human focus not always present
in the former. For the purposes of this paper sustainable entrepreneurship will be used to include
both aspects.
The science of ecology itself is another relatively recent arrival to the natural sciences, as distinct
from Indigenous knowledge, the classical taxonomy of Aristotle, the natural history of the Middle
Ages and even the modern biology of the nineteenth century. Although Alexander Humboldt is
considered the founder of ecology as a discipline it only became widely accepted in the second half
of the twentieth century.
It was only in the mid-twentieth century that Manhattan Project and Rachel Carson’s (1962)
influential publication Silent Spring imprinted in the public imagination the destructive potential
of industrial modernity on the natural environmental. Although the realization of the apocalyptical
50
51
potential of atomic technology was relatively uncontested, acceptance that the global commons
and ecosystem services that support human life had real and expendable limits came up against
significant resistance (Costanza et al. 1997).
Nevertheless, the 1970s saw notions of sustainability filter through various cultural modalities: from
the foundation of non-government organizations such as Greenpeace in 1971 to the first United
Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm in 1972; from the publication of key
texts outlining the unsustainability of contemporary trajectories such as Limits to Growth (Meadows
et al. 1972) and Small is Beautiful (Schumacher 1973) to the rise of alternative developmental
pathways such as permaculture (Mollison & Holmgren 1978).
It took another ten years for the 1987 Brundtland Commission Report to popularize the oftcited definition of sustainable development as one that ‘meets the needs of the present without
compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ (World Commission on
Environment and Development 1987, p. 41). In their literature review of sustainable entrepreneurship
Levinsohn and Brundin (2011) conclude that a majority of articles reference their definitions back to
the Brundtland Report, or the subsequent 1999 Our Common Journey report (Kates 1999).
The shared status of entrepreneurship and sustainability as new disciplines did not initially
translate into mutual interest or appreciation, and often mirrored public perception that ‘economic
development and environmental protection was viewed as a zero-sum game of social wealth’
(Cohan & Winn 2007, p. 33). Nevertheless, attempts to expand the definition of entrepreneurship
beyond the merely profit-seeking motivations of neo-classical economics appear as early as 1971,
when an article in the Harvard Business Review postulates that ‘the ecology movement could
produce profitable new markets for business expansion’ (Quinn 1971, p. 120). Gradually notions of
environmental responsibility filtered into public and corporate culture — no doubt inspired by some
of the regulatory initiatives of newly established environmental protection authorities (EPAs). By the
mid-1980s Pinchot (1985) had coined the term ‘intrapreneur’ or corporate entrepreneur, highlighting
individuals who creatively envision and generate changes within existing large organizations.
on Venkataraman (1997), writing the ‘scholarly field’ of sustainable entrepreneurship ‘seeks to
understand how opportunities to bring into existence “future” goods and services are discovered,
created, and exploited, by whom, and with what economic, psychological, social and environmental
consequences’.
Dean and McMullen (2007) further elaborate the field’s engagement with market failure, summarizing
five examples of such failure discussed in the literature: public goods, externalities, monopoly power,
inappropriate intervention and imperfect information. Dean and McMullen 2007, p. 71) suggest that
five types of entrepreneurs ‘discover, evaluate and exploit’ opportunities in these market failures.
‘Coasian entrepreneurs’, according to Dean and McMullen (2007, p. 60) ‘translate public goods
(where tragedy of commons scenarios are leading to environmental degradation) into excludable
private ones through both political and technological mechanisms’. ‘Institutional entrepreneurs’
establish or modify institutions to reduce transaction costs. ‘Market appropriating entrepreneurs’
break up existing monopolies of incumbent firms by self-interested actors. ‘Political entrepreneurs’
motivate changes to subsidies or other government incentive structures to pursue their own
interests. Finally, ‘informational entrepreneurs’ exploit opportunities that result from the discovery of
knowledge regarding market supply or demand conditions.
Walley and Taylor (2002) offer a simpler typology based around four primary motivations and
influences with sustainable entrepreneurs characterized as: innovative opportunists, visionary
champions’, ‘ethical mavericks’ or ‘ad hoc enviropreneurs’ (see Figure 1).
Figure 1. A Typology of Sustainable Entrepreneurs
Source: Walley & Taylor (2002, p. 40).
Bill Drayton (2002) reflected on the merits and weaknesses of his experience working in the EPA
of the US Carter administration and the management consulting firm McKinsey & Company.
Attempting to bring the best of both skill-sets together, in 1980 he founded the non-profit
organization Ashoka, which seeks out and offers support to social entrepreneurs, including
financial support. Drayton (2002) greatly contributed to the popularization of the term ‘social
entrepreneurship’ too. British sociologist and pioneer of social innovation Michael Young played a
similar role in the UK spawning multiple hybrid examples through his Institute of Community Studies,
including the School for Social Entrepreneurs.
As Fukuyama (1992) published his end of history thesis in the same year as the first Earth Summit
met in Rio De Janeiro, a host of publications looking to reconcile and integrate profit seeking
and ecological goals appeared: from The green capitalists (Elkington & Burke 1989), The green
entrepreneur: Business opportunities that can save the earth and make you money (Blue 1990)
and Ecopreneuring: the complete guide to small business opportunities from the environmental
revolution (Bennett 1991), to Enviro-capitalists: Doing good while doing well (Anderson & Leal 1997).
However, what the field of entrepreneurship had to offer the environmental sustainability movement
was not clarified. The Journal of Business Venturing dedicated several volumes to sustainable
entrepreneurship, including Volume 22, Issue 1 (2007) and Volume 25, Issue 5 (2010). Contributors
claimed that while the environmental and welfare economics literature saw ecological degradation
as the product of market failure, entrepreneurs found opportunities in such environmental damage
to develop new technologies and business models (Cohan & Winn 2007; Dean & McMullen
2007). New ventures in biomass, fuel cells and e-waste reduction offered examples combining
entrepreneurial rents with ecological improvement.
Whilst this may be true, peer-reviewed literature continues to contain competing definitions and
typologies that can pose challenges for research design and comparison. As Schaper (2005, p. 4)
acknowledges, ‘an entrepreneur is easy to recognize and hard to define ... entrepreneurship easy to
conceptualize but hard to explain’ (Schaper 2005, p. 4). Mixing ecological and social sustainability
together only compounds the difficulty. Cohan and Winn (2007, p. 35) offer an attempt, drawing
52
Others suggest that the conceptual separation of public, private and non-profit sectors might be
part of the problem in understanding the practices of sustainability. Anderson (1998) argues that the
motivations of individuals should be examined rather than the structure within which they operate,
whether this be public, private or non-profit. Robinson (2002, pp. 278, 382) concurs, writing that:
‘in addition to integrating across fields, sustainability must also be integrated across sectors or
interests’, and that ‘sustainability is itself the emergent property of a conversation about what kind of
world we collectively want to live in now and in the future’. We find anecdotal evidence of this notion
amongst some business leaders, for example Tex Gunning (2005, p. 2), who claims that
the paradigm that divides the world into the social sector, the private sector, and the
governmental sector is not working. It creates artificial barriers. We are each a constituent of the
problem, so we have to combine our forces, our efforts, and our competencies.
Amatucci et al. (2011, p. 1) argue that sustainability requires a ‘paradigmatic shift away from
traditional theories, concepts and models in entrepreneurship education’. They see the primary
53
discipline of entrepreneurship needing to evolve to accommodate the three components of
sustainability outlined in Figure 2.
The late Anita Roddick, celebrated founder of the Body Shop, is recognized for both her company’s
influence on phasing out animal testing and her individual campaigning on environmental issues and
human rights (Isaak 1998; Walley & Taylor 2002).
Figure 2. The Evolution of Entrepreneurship
Larson (2000, p. 314) tracks the process of sustainable kayak design by Walden Paddlers
considering it a ‘case of Schumpeterian innovation, and thus lends itself to the analytic framework
provided by the literature on enterpreneurship’, and concludes that ‘the field findings confirm what
others have concluded, that sustainable business entrepreneurs need to consider the entire value
chain as a source of opportunity’.
Source: Amatucci et al. (2011, p. 9)
Traditional
Sustainable (SE)
Transitional
Social
Profit
Oriented
Profit
Oriented
SE
As others point out, successful cases studied are dwarfed by the volume of start ups that fail or
pass under the radar and receive little attention. Further academic engagement with these ‘failed’
start ups and entrepreneurs might increase understanding of the generative conditions that enable
nascent sustainable entrepreneurs to find success.
Eco
Conclusion
Profit
Social
Eco
Finally, although much of the literature focuses on the post-industrial contexts of the Global North,
Kansheiva (2010) consider sustainable entrepreneurship in its potential to revitalize depressed
rural economies of the newly independent European states. Pastakia (2002) discusses examples
of ‘ecoentrepreneurship’ in India, and Isaak (1998) refers to the Indian Honeybee Network, which
supports grassroots entrepreneurs in India, such as in patenting their innovations, as a leading
example of sustainable entrepreneurship in the Global South.
The general tenor of the sustainable entrepreneurship literature suggests that, when aligned with
an ecological and social understanding and driven by a wider sense of mission, entrepreneurs
offer great potential in challenging the status quo of business practices. Some authors even write
of a ‘second industrial revolution’ when business attention will increasingly focus on ecological
regeneration (Hawken et al. 1999; Braungart & McDonough, 2002). Others, such as Holocombe
(2003) who is involved with social entrepreneurship in Hub Melbourne, point to the importance
of the emerging structures that connect and enable sustainable entrepreneurs to further their
efforts. The field is still in its early days, both in terms of practice and inquiry. However, as Dean &
McMullen (2007) point out, when supported by ‘intelligent public policy’, it appears that sustainable
entrepreneurship has much to offer in building new business models and economy needed for a
sustainable future.
Examples and Case Studies
The field of sustainable entrepreneurship, although still embryonic, is undergoing a typical disciplinary
process of developing its key theoretical definitions and categories. Some prominent examples and
case studies that inform the field’s theoretical models follow.
Paul Hawken (1993; Hawken et al. 1999) is one of the most frequently cited in the sustainable
entrepreneurship literature (Walley & Taylor 2002; Choi & Gray 2008; Hockerts & Wüstenhagen
2010; Cohen & Winn 2007; Robinson 2004; Patterson 2011; Larson 2000). Hawken is widely
recognized as both a leading example of a sustainable entrepreneur and an authoritative voice in the
field. His early business experience in natural foods and garden supplies lent his writing an unusual
credibility in both business and environmental circles.
Choi and Gray (2008) identified twenty-one companies that are examples of sustainable
entrepreneurship ranging from commodities that people wear to biotech. These companies
included some well-known names, such as Interface Carpets, the Bodyshop, Stony Field Farm
and Patagonia, alongside relatively unknown enterprises. Choi and Gray (2008, p. 562) found that
most of the sustainable entrepreneurs identified ‘had little or no relevant business experience’ and
suggested that a traditional business education may have discouraged them from beginning their
enterprises.
Yvon Chouinard, author and founder of outdoor clothing company Patagonia, features as another
successful sustainable entrepreneur. In his memoirs (Chouinard 2005) has written about his
background and approach to business, including his concept of a ‘slow company’, and claimed to
have founded Patagonia largely as a proof of concept that a profitable company can have a positive
impact on the environment and society (Choi and Gray 2008).
Several authors mention William McDonough, environmental architect and co-author of Cradle to
cradle: Remaking the way we make things (Braungart & McDonough, 2002). McDonough offers
a compelling vision of the future of industrial design and manufacturing based on biomimicry, i.e.
design principles that imitate the organic life cycles of nature (Cohen & Winn 2007; Hockerts &
Wustenhagen 2010).
54
References
Amatucci, F, Pizarro, N & Friedlander, N 2011, ‘Sustainability: A paradigmatic shift in
entrepreneurship education’, paper for the 56th Annual International Council for Small Business
World Conference, viewed 30 July 2012 at <www.icsb2011.org/download/18.62efe22412f4113
2d41800012480/304.pdf>.
Anderson, A 1998, ‘Cultivating the Garden of Eden: environmental entrepreneuring’, Journal of
Organizational Change Management, 11(2), pp. 135–44.
Anderson, T & Leal, D, 1997, Enviro-capitalists: Doing good while doing well, Rowman & Littlefield,
Maryland.
Bennett, S 1991, Ecopreneuring: The complete guide to small business opportunities from the
environmental revolution, Wiley, New York City.
Blue, J 1990, Ecopreneuring: Managing for results, Scott Foresman, London.
Braungart M & McDonough, W 2002, Cradle to cradle: Remaking the way we make things, North
Point Press, New York City.
Brewer, A 1992, Richard Cantillon pioneer of economic theory, Routledge, London.
Cantillon, R 1755, Essay on the nature of commerce, Frank Cass, London.
Carson, R 1962, Silent spring, Houghton Miflin, Boston
Choi, D & Gray, E 2008, ‘The venture development processes of “sustainable” entrepreneurs’,
Management Research News, 31(8), pp. 558–69.
Chouinard, Y 2005, Let my people go surfing, Penguin Press, New York City.
Cohen, B & Winn, M 2007, ‘Market imperfections, opportunity and sustainable entrepreneurship’,
Journal of Business Venturing, 22(1), pp. 29–49.
55
Costanza, R, d’Arge, R, de Groot, R, Farber, S, Grasso, M, Hannon, B, Limburg, K, Naeem, S,
O’Neill, RV, Paruelo, J, Raskin, RG, Sutton, P & van den Belt, M 1997, ‘The value of the world’s
ecosystem services and natural capital’, Nature, 387, pp. 253–60.
Dean, T & McMullen, J 2007, ‘Towards a theory of sustainable entrepreneurship: Reducing
environmental degradation through entrepreneurial action’, Journal of Business Venturing, 22(1),
January, pp. 50–76.
Drayton, W 2002, ‘The citizen sector: becoming as entrepreneurial and competitive as business’,
California Management Review, 44(3), 120–33.
Drucker, P 1964, Managing for results, Harper and Row, New York City.
Elkington, J & Burke, T 1989, The green capitalists, Victor Gollancz, London.
Fukuyama, F 1992, The end of history and the last man standing, Free Press, New York City.
Gunning, T 2005, ‘I have no choice’, [interview] Enlightenment next magazine, 28, March–May,
viewed 30 July 2012 at <http://www.enlightennext.org/magazine/j28/gunning.asp?page=1>.
Hawken, P 1993, The ecology of commerce: a declaration of sustainability, HarperCollins
Publishers, New York City.
Robinson, J 2004, ‘Squaring the circle? Some thoughts on the idea of sustainable development’,
Ecological Economics, 48 (2004), pp. 369–84.
Say, J-B 2001[1803], Treatise on political economy, Batoche Books, Ontario.
Schaper, M (ed.) 2005, Making ecoentrepreneurs: Developing sustainable entrepreneurship,
Ashgate, Hampshire, UK.
Schumacher, E 1973, Small is beautiful: A study of economics as if people mattered, Blond &
Briggs, London.
Schumpeter, J 1950, Capitalism, socialism and democracy, Harper & Row, New York City.
Schumpeter, J 1934, The theory of economic development, Harvard University Press, Cambridge,
MA.
Viramgami, H 2007, Fundamentals of Entrepreneurship, APH Publishing Corporation, New Delhi.
Walley, L & Taylor, D 2002, ‘Opportunists, champions, mavericks ... ? A typology of green
entrepreneurs’, GMI 38 (Summer), pp. 31–43.
World Commission on Environment and Development 1987, Our common future, Oxford University
Press, Oxford.
Hawken, P, Lovins, A & Lovins, H 1997, Natural capitalism: Creating the next industrial revolution,
Little Brown and Company, New York City.
Hockerts, K & Wustenhagen, R 2010, ‘Greening goliaths versus emerging Davids—Theorizing
about the role of incumbents and new entrants in sustainable entrepreneurship’, Journal of Business
Venturing 25, pp. 481–92.
Hoselitz, B 1951, ‘The early history of entrepreneurial theory’, Explorations in Entrepreneurial History,
3, pp. 193–220.
Isaak, R 1998, Green logic: Ecopreneurship, theory and ethics, Greenleaf, Sheffield.
Kanshieva, A 2010, ‘Sustainable entrepreneurship enriching NIS rural economies: how to learn
from EU and evaluate the possibilities of transfer?’, in Environment, Innovation and Sustainable
Development, Session: Territorial trajectories and sustainable development, viewed 30 July 2012 at
<http://innovation.univ-littoral.fr/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/akanshieva.pdf>.
Kates, RW (with the National Research Council Board on Sustainable Development) 1999, Our
Common Journey: A transition towards sustainability, National Academy Press, Washington DC.
Larson, A 2000, ‘Sustainable innovation through an entrepreneurship lens’, Business Strategy and
the Environment, 9, pp. 304–17.
Levinsohn, D & Brundin, E 2011, ‘Beyond “shades of green”—opportunities for a renewed
conceptualisation of entrepreneurial sustainability in SMEs: a literature review’ presented to the
56th Annual ICSB World Conference: Back to the Future: Changes in Perspectives of Global
Entrepreneurship & Innovation, Stockholm, Sweden 15–18 June.
A new housing estate, Guangzhou, China, 2012.
McClelland, D 1961, The achieving society, Van Nostrand, Princeton NJ.
Meadows, D, Meadows, D, Randers, J & Behrens, W 1972, The limits to growth, Universe Books,
New York City.
Mollison, B & Holmgren, D 1978, Permaculture one: A perennial agriculture for human settlements,
Transworld, Melbourne.
Pastakia, A 2002, ‘Assessing ecopreneurship in the context of a developing country: the case of
India’, Greener Management International, 38 (Summer), pp. 93–108.
Patterson, R 2011, ‘Sustainable development-eco-revolutionary paradigms from binary to
continuum constructs’, Perspectives on Global Development and Technology, 10, pp. 60–72.
Pinchot, G 1985, Why you don’t have to leave the corporation to become an entrepreneur, Harper &
Row, New York City.
Quinn, JB 1971, ‘Next big industry: environmental improvement’, Harvard Business Review, 49(5),
September–October, pp. 120–31.
56
57
Co-working in the City
Tim Butcher
Questions of community prevail in contemporary social debate (Phillips et al. 2012). The very notion
of community and what it embodies is a central tenet of the human condition that offers morale and
a sense of belonging (Delanty 2010; Sennett 2012). Yet the reverberations of globalization give rise
to societal shifts that force communities to adapt or, if not, decline (Delanty 2010).
In the city, communities are endlessly in flux. The transient uses of the spaces that communities
inhabit create tensions and societal fragmentation (Delanty 2010). In defence of community, citizens
have begun to look beyond institutions to form social movements, which in turn afford opportunities
for old communities to persist and new communities to flourish (Castells 2010a; Delanty 2010).
The ‘habitus’ and discourse of community is the glue that can offer the societal cohesion that few
contemporary city-dwellers find on their doorsteps (Bourdieu, 2005). The language of community
is thus used and misused across cities to attract people who may not reside together but share
a habitus (Delanty 2010). This essay homes in on the contemporary urban phenomenon of coworking, which subscribes to the discourse of community. From the initial year of ethnographic
fieldwork within a Melbourne co-working space, I offer a narrative of how co-working can attract
like-minded individuals through discourse and habitus to foster a sense of community, cooperation
and belonging. In so doing I argue that co-working can espouse work life that is independent of
institutional and organizational conventions to offer possibilities to imagine and realize new and
sustainable work futures (Soja 1996).
Community and Habitus in the City
Today, more than ever, consciousness of belonging to a global community, the ‘global imaginary’,
in Western societies is growing. With the global imaginary has come interconnectedness and
interdependence. The ‘network society’ is becoming a reality (Castells 2010b). Communication
is key to communities as they spatially fragment and tend more towards the global than the local
(Delanty 2010).
Community fragmentation is a consequence of shifting cityscapes. As the uses of urban spaces
have changed, so have social spaces. Community in the city is not what it once was. Small
neighbourhoods bound by ethnicity are few and far between. In their stead are gentrified inner
suburbs, urban ghettos and gated communities on the edge of the city. Such fragmented
geographical spaces lead inevitably to social spaces and dispositions bound by fear of others
(Bourdieu 1990, 1998; Delanty 2010; Jørgensen 2010; Sennett 2012).
Political rhetoric such as the ‘Big Society’ of Conservative British Prime Minister David Cameron
today sets the tone. The restructuring of capitalism has led successive Western governments to
employ neoliberal policies that promote individualism and entrepreneurialism, all the while diminishing
state provisions for local communities in order to reduce public spending (Sennett 2012). Citizens
in the West have thus become detached from the institutions they once depended on. The
consequent agency afforded to citizens has given rise to social movements that fill that void and
seek to reconstitute community. Citizens are reattaching themselves to a new libertarian discourse of
community (Delanty 2010; Sennett 2012).
While the term ‘community’ is not in Bourdieu’s vocabulary, he affirms the human tendency to seek
out those of similar social dispositions. In so doing, spaces of dispositions or habitus, bind people
to afford them collective capital. Together such collectives perform rituals of cooperation played
out through shared practices that reinforce habitus and engender the discourse of community and
belonging together (Bourdieu 1998, 2005; Sennett 2012). So those contemporary social movements
that engender habitus can symbolise community.
58
Work Space in the City
The spirit of individualism and entrepreneurialism is embodied through small business and
freelancing. Detached from institutions and choosing to ‘go it alone’, such (free) agents tend to
work from home, to minimize operating costs (Harrison 2012). Yet the ‘work home’ brings with it
issues of spatial separation. Home life and work life become inseparable as such workers imagine
occupational identities within their homes. The ‘home space’ tends towards symbolising ‘work
space’, or vice versa, causing life space tensions (Holliss 2012).
As many such workers today need nothing more than a mobile computing device, low-cost
alternatives to the work home can be sought. One such solution is co-working, which might naïvely
be imagined or realized as a space where freelancers or small businesses can rent a desk with
possibly the use of any amenities provided. However, I seek here to illustrate that co-working and its
lead protagonists have ambitions far beyond mere ‘hot-desking’. Co-working might be conceived
of as a third space, a life space that offers a place of work where its members are empowered
to imagine and realize limitless possibilities for their individual and collective work (Soja 1996).
Through reflections of my own lived experiences of co-working in Melbourne, I offer a narration
of the cooperative rituals and practices of co-working to depict its habitus and cultural capital
(Golden-Biddle and Locke 1993; Emerson et al. 1995; Ellis 1997; Van Maanen 2011). I ask whether
its members’ discourse of community is real, imagined or in fact symbolizing a contemporary
phenomenon that can embrace traditional values to reimagine and realize the future of work.
Co-working as Community
My co-working introduction in July 2011 left me with more questions than answers but knowing it
offered a space in which I wanted to work. I had not chosen this particular co-working space, it was
chosen for me. I was invited by my head of school to take up part of a small-group membership.
He’d seen the benefits and thought I might too. He was not wrong.
The co-working space I’ve become immersed in since a year ago first opened its doors in March
2011. The space it occupies in Melbourne, both geographically and socially, were carefully selected
to fulfil its tagline of ‘driving innovation through collaboration’. Occupying the top floor of a heritagelisted building beside a major public transport hub, the space connects with city. It was, when I
joined, not four months old. It had a homemade quality, a feel that those who created the space
could work there too. It then occupied just a corner of the floor. Yet plans were already afoot to grow
the space. Membership was increasing and a $A550,000 investment was made in a co-created,
architecturally designed renovation of the whole floor that now accommodates more than 100
people a day from a 600-strong membership. Over a weekend in March 2012, members moved
fixtures, furniture and flora into a new 650 square metre space.
Being co-created, members were consulted throughout the design and build, and continue to
shape the space. The ‘space’, as I call it, is at first glance a high-ceilinged, open-plan office where
people sit side-by-side working on different and distinct projects. Venture further through, though,
and one can discover a variety of spaces created from the members’ original brief and shaped
through our use over the past five months. From a fully functioning kitchen, to a library, event spaces
and meeting pods, all spaces are flexible and can be reshaped to host events from workshops
to dinner parties. Whiteboards are filled with ideas germinated in client meetings on the couches,
conversations by the kettle, or debated after hours fuelled by a glass or two of red. The space‘s’ are
not just worked in but also lived in.
Amongst the members float a ‘host’ and a ‘connections catalyst’, with a ‘team enabler’ close at
hand. Like their CEO, they work alongside us, on projects of their own. Hosting and connecting
are key to co-working, if not a full-time job. Each of these roles function to make other members
welcome, create openings for new connections and maintain awareness of opportunities. They help
begin conversations and members keep them going. Another space of importance for this is the
social media space, where links are shared and conversations grown. Not all members feel that they
need to constantly use these distinct spaces. Few, in fact, permanently reside. Yet most weekdays
the spaces throng with activity. Other members come only to connect, via workshops, seminars,
meetings and celebrations. The people this space attracts cannot be placed in a pigeonhole. While
59
some co-working spaces entice architects and others appeal to IT professionals, the people in this
space are diverse in their work lives and home lives.
community afford morale and a shared sense of belonging, shallow definitions of community lead to
division and difference (Mulligan & Nadarajah 2012; Sennett 2012).
What binds us together is our openness to sharing ideas, talents and tea. While still a work-inprogress, the language of co-working subtly sets the scene. ‘Community’, ‘collaboration’, ‘cocreation’, ‘connecting’, ‘social capital’, ‘ecosystem’ and even ‘family’ are words heard frequently.
Weekly ‘mixed-bag lunches’ of often more than 30 members sharing ingredients to make
sandwiches and share progress on our projects bring the community together. So too do Friday
night ‘wine-downs’, ‘Town Hall meetings’, and ‘family’ barbeques. Such events introduce new
members to the rituals of working as community—planning, preparing, celebrating and cleaning up
together. Such collective rituals spill over in to our work. Challenges are shared, solutions offered and
opportunities to collaborate are discussed. Members who may never have seen or sought ways of
working together now do. Designers, programmers, retailers, consultants, artists and others share
ideas to create new ones.
Therefore, I see theoretical debates on such practical issues as essential to informing the
sustainability of co-working as community. Besides better describing the habitus of co-working, the
symbolic power of the dominant class and their discourse are worthy of further research. Through
my reflections, I am reminded of writings on the social architects of nineteenth century urban
America (Hayden 1973). Similarly, talk of eco-systems speaks to Lefevre’s urban reality of the ‘cityas-a-whole’ (Soja 1996). Co-working communities’ aspirations of collaboration and connectedness
embody the ideals of the network society. They can either be embraced or exploited. Properly
understood and explained, sustainable, creative and innovative co-working as a community in the
city might realize its full potential.
Meanwhile, amongst the collective, dispositions emerge. Friendships form and those with mutual
interests create social spaces where they can work and live together. Special interest groups
and invitation-only gatherings are common. Open (but small-group) events where, for example,
individuals ponder the co-working eco-system over dinner, and invitation-only meetings of
influencers come together to find ways to ‘grow the community’ and ‘gain value from it’. Their
discourse straddles social spaces and workspaces to construct community as they imagine it to
be. Symbols of community have thus emerged. As the community grows, we are reminded of
our obligations to it. From notices about how to switch on the dishwasher to branded t-shirts, we
confirm our commitment to community and our positions within it.
Bourdieu, P 1990, In other words: Essays towards a reflexive sociology, Stanford University Press,
Stanford.
Still in its infancy, this community is learning to stand on its own feet. Our host and connections
catalyst know their roles have a finite time remaining. Their (and our) mantra is ‘member-driven’. The
CEO’s is for members to become the hosts, the connectors. As I sit here today, that image is not
far from reality. With three of the four employees away on another project, their absence has hardly
been noticed. We carry on regardless. Those who have Wi-Fi connection issues ask other members
for help, and those who need a meeting space, find it themselves. Permission is not sought, nor is it
necessary. It would seem co-working, here at least, is becoming community.
Ellis, C 1997, ‘Evocative autoethnography: Writing about our lives’, in Tierney, WG & Lincoln, YS
(eds), Representation and the text: Re-framing the narrative voice, SUNY Press, New York City: pp.
115–42.
Community as the Future of Work
Harrison, S 2012, ‘The great co-working adventure’, Desktop 283, pp. 34–42.
My narrative represents just a fraction of what it is to work and live together in this particular coworking ‘space’. Indeed, this particular venture is one of more than 25 co-working spaces licensed
from a global network whose name and branding they adopt, with at least 50 more to imminently
emerge. Co-working is a global movement rooted in local narratives of community. The morale and
sense of belonging offered through co-working discourse, events, rituals and practices foster an
appealing habitus that fills a void in urban society. Without a sense of community on our doorsteps,
nor institutional support of our social and work lives, co-working as described can offer alternatives
to the workhome, the office and the neighbourhood.
Hayden, D 1973, ‘The “social architects” and their architecture of social change’, Journal of Applied
Behavioral Science, 9(2–3), pp.182–98.
I describe a community, whether imagined or real, that embraces traditional values and so attracts
diverse individuals. Their coming together sparks communications that may otherwise never occur.
From chats over lunch to late-night brainstorming sessions, creativity and innovation flourish.
Imagined as a third space, this co-working community offers collective potential rarely found
elsewhere. The value that this form of co-working offers has an allure to the business-minded. Social
capital is what entrepreneurs today want to drink in, and co-working is their holy grail. I believe that
this is why dispositions within the space are becoming manifest. I see those who view community as
opportunity positioned to reap its rewards. Likewise, large organisations that have lost (or may never
have had) their creative ‘mojo’ are becoming very interested in co-working. Positioning corporate
teams alongside community-minded collectives might bring interesting challenges to co-working.
And, more fundamentally, the melding of all members’ social lives and work lives might create
unforseen tensions the more crowded the space becomes. Such boundary issues are just three
dilemmas that the emerging dominant class must face as they lead our burgeoning community
towards sustainable forms of self-reliance and new work futures. While deep understandings of
60
References
Bourdieu, P 1998, Practical reason: On the theory of action, Polity Press, Cambridge, UK.
Bourdieu, P 2005, The logic of practice, Polity Press, Cambridge, UK.
Castells, M 2010a, The power of identity, 2nd edn, Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester, UK.
Castells, M 2010b, The rise of the network society, 2nd edn, Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford.
Delanty, G 2010, Community, Routledge, New York City.
Emerson, RM, Fretz, RI & Shaw, LL 1995, Writing ethnographic field notes, University of Chicago
Press, Chicago.
Golden-Biddle, K & Locke, K 1993, ‘Appealing work: An investigation of how ethnographic texts
convince’, Journal of Management Inquiry, 4(5), pp. 595–616.
Holliss, F 2012, ‘Space, buildings and the life worlds of home-based workers: Towards better
design’, Sociological Research Online, 17(2), viewed 8 October 2012 at <http://www.socresonline.
org.uk/17/2/24.html>.
Jørgensen, A 2010, ‘The sense of belonging in New Urban zones of transition’, Current Sociology,
58(1), pp. 3–23.
Mulligan, M & Nadarajah, Y 2012, Rebuilding local communities in the wake of disaster: Social
recovery in Sri Lanka and India, Taylor & Francis, Abingdon, UK.
Phillips, R, Chaplin, S, Fairbrother, P, Mees, B, Toh, K & Tyler, M 2012, ‘The question of “community”:
International debates and implications for bushfire research and policy in Australia’, Centre for
Sustainable Organisations and Work working paper series—Bushfire discussion paper edition, pp.
1–47.
Sennett, R 2012, Together: The rituals, pleasures and politics of cooperation, Allen Lane, London.
Soja, EW 1996, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and other real-and-imagined places,
Blackwell, Cambridge, Mass.
Van Maanen, J 2011, Tales of the field: On writing ethnography, 2nd edn, University of Chicago
Press, Chicago.
61
Greening Citizenship?
Andrew Scerri
Normative theories of green citizenship extrapolate from observations that a long-prevalent dualistic
understanding of society as completely subjecting nature is being displaced by growing support
for a holistic view of society as a participant in nature. Differences between ‘environmental’ and
‘ecological’ theories of green citizenship aside, normative approaches shared five critiques and
needs to: firstly, challenge nature/culture dualism; secondly, dissolve the division between public and
private spheres; undermine state-territorialism; fourthly, eschew social contractualism; and, fifthly,
ground justice in awareness of finite ecological space.
This essay suggests that new insights into the formation of contemporary discourses of equality and
inequality can be gained by conceiving of green citizenship, not in normative terms, but as having
been partially realized. I argue that the types of social and political participation, contents of the
rights and duties and the institutional arrangements of ‘stakeholder citizenship’ normalize a holistic
representational grammar in which equality and inequality are cast as diffuse, whole-of-society
problems. The tendency of stakeholder citizenship to privilege holistic one-worldist discourses, rights
to wellbeing as individual security from risk, and duties to be self-responsible for exploiting a stake
in society, blurs distinctions between those advocating positive efforts to expand social equality and
those calling for hands-off negative freedoms based on a principle of desert.
In this view, it appears that aspirations, which some decades ago appeared as clearly emancipatory,
have come to assume far more ambiguous meanings in the twenty-first century.
Background
Contributing to a fragmentation of social citizenship amidst the legitimation crisis of the welfare
state, a certain greening of citizenship arose in the mid-1970s. This greening of citizenship was
propelled by popular counter-cultural, lifestyle, New Age and ‘new social’ movements, including
environmentalism, and sought to universalize expectations that life should be meaningful, grounded
in self-reflection rather than status-group expectations and conducted in harmony with nature. By
the 1980s, this shift challenged the mass-societal types of social and political participation central to
‘social’ citizenship, which had been maintained through the institutional arrangements of the welfare
state, and grounded the contents of citizenly rights and duties in full-time employment, military
service, the nuclear family and access to education, healthcare and mass-consumption (Turner
2001).
From the 1990s on, it was noted that this greening of citizenship signaled that long-prevalent
dualistic understandings of society as rightfully engaged in a collective effort to completely dominate
nature were being displaced by a holistic view of society as participating in nature (van Steenbergen
1994). Against the backdrop of post-industrialization and the rise of the ‘service economy’, declining
support for ‘old’ class-based social movements, the greening of citizenship was regarded as the
product of increasing demands that society, as opposed to ‘government’, address ‘subpolitical’
concerns with quality-of-life and ‘wellbeing’, concerns that were tied up with widespread awareness
of ‘risk’ (Beck 1995; Giddens 1991).
Observing these trends and seeking to ‘green’ classical political and social theoretical concepts,
normative theories of green citizenship ground this greening in five central critiques:
1.
To challenge nature/culture dualism;
2.
To dissolve the divide between the public and private spheres;
3.
To undermine state-territorialism;
4.
To eschew social contractualism; and
5.
to ground justice in awareness of the finiteness of ecological space.
(Dobson 2003; Barry 2006; Bell 2005; Wissenburg 1998)
62
Elsewhere, I examine these five critiques as directly challenging the Fordist, industrial, state-centric
politics of the bureaucratic welfare state by challenging: ideological dualism as a condition of
being ‘alienated’ from nature; mass-produced commodities as sources of inauthenticity; full-time
employment and welfarism as stifling personal spontaneity and creativity; and, the nation-state as
failing to justly redistribute the spoils of industrial exploitation of the ecosphere (Scerri 2009; 2012).
I began to notice in this work is that, in the early twenty-first century, the types, arrangements and
contents of what might be regarded as ‘stakeholder’ citizenship partially put into practice the five
critiques. Yet, while the post-Fordist, post-industrial state ‘downloads services’ and promotes
‘workfare not welfare’, ‘social entrepreneurship’, ‘triple bottom-line corporations’ and ‘ecomodernization policy’, inequality has increased. This is not to argue that the greening of citizenship
has led to increased inequality. Rather, my suspicion is that the five critiques central to the normative
theories might be for another time.
We’re all Green Citizens Now
Recognizing the partial realization of the five critiques highlights what, for Luc Boltanski and Eve
Chiapello (2005 [1999] p. 29), is a defining feature of political change over time:
The price paid by critique for being listened to, at least in part, is to see some of the values
it has mobilized to oppose the form taken by the accumulation process being placed at the
service of accumulation in accordance with a process of cultural assimilation.
That is, emerging in the 1990s as a product of the politics of the Third Way and more recent Big
Society initiatives, stakeholder citizenship brings with it types of social and political participation,
institutional arrangements and discourses of rights and responsibilities that in fact operationalize
holism, non-contractualism, deterritorialization, eschewal of the division between the public and
private spheres, and raised subjective awareness of the finiteness of ecological space.
My point is that the major parties and business corporations began in the 1990s to underplay what
appeals to citizens as the bearers of ‘social’, ‘political’ and ‘civil’ rights and duties in the welfare
state. Rather, they embraced new holistic discourses that go ‘beyond Left and Right’ to appeal
to ‘stakeholder’ citizens as the bearers of rights to wellbeing and security from risk and duties to
be self-responsible for taking-up opportunities to exploit ‘stakes’ held in society, often through
horizontal consensus-driven governance arrangements (Giddens 2000; Scott 2010). Its proponents
define stakeholder citizenship as ‘the ethical and human capital development of the self organized
around the possession of stakes’ in society (Prabhakar 2003, p. 347). Policymaking channels
the ‘trickle-down’ of individual opportunities, often with great public fanfare and simultaneously
managing the transition to a globally competitive green economy. The key premise is that improving
the economic and social capabilities of citizens will produce a more efficient and productive,
cohesive and inclusive, socially and environmentally sustainable, globally competitive society that is
geared to supplying ‘existential’ needs, such as ‘wellbeing’.
Stakeholder citizens needing to access social services are called upon to demonstrate their
willingness to act as self-responsible individuals. Yet, as stakeholders in a firm, employees are
called upon to deal with employers on a one-to-one basis. This eschewal of social contractualism
is demonstrated most clearly in the ‘downloading’ and deregulation of employment markets that
extended across the West, beginning in the United States and Britain in the late 1980s. This is not to
argue that ‘welfare’ is completely dissolved but rather, that ‘claims upon the state [are now] linked to
judgements of individual behaviour’ (Rosanvallon, 2000 [1995], p. 211).
The embrace by the state of the global corporate social and environmental responsibility movement
and the ideals of ‘triple-bottom-line capitalism’ has been closely associated with this shift (Scerri
2003; Banerjee 2008). Indeed, many global businesses and all of the major independent global
corporate social and environmental responsibility reporting initiatives (such as the Standards
International Accountability Standard, the Global Reporting Initiative, the International Standards
Association and the United Nations Global Compact) refer to their signatories’ embrace of horizontal
negotiations with stakeholders. Such discourses represent a combination of high-technology
development and ever-further rounds of marketization and privatization as dragging society out of a
depressing, dirty, polluted, uninspiring, socially homogenous, class-hatred ridden, heavy-industrial
63
past that failed to compete in globalized markets and offered few opportunities to innovative and
creative stakeholder citizens. They refer explicitly to the failed dualisms of industrial society and
advocate a benign holism that promotes an image of corporations as voluntary collectives whose
members share the same values and aspirations, and hold in common reciprocal obligations that
do not depend on rules and discipline but on consensus and shared responsibilities to deliver
‘excellence’ (Salmon 2007). Both the Third Way and Big Society policy platforms promote social and
political participation based on private choices, for example, to work for ‘ethical’ firms or consume
with ‘green’ discrimination, but do not provide an adequate regulatory framework for ensuring that
remuneration or employment conditions are in keeping with community standards or that the claims
of ‘ethical’, ‘green’ or ‘fair’ producers are verifiable or should be responsive to political obligations.
In this view contemporary citizens are neither the self-interested social atoms of Randian
conservatism nor are they the agents of social solidarity championed by progressives in industrial
society. Rather, contemporary citizens are enlightened and articulate, self-responsible and deeply
individualistic holders of ‘stakes’ in local communities and inhabitants of an ambiguously ‘greening’
eco-state that competes on the global stage by reducing societal ‘on-costs’ (Supiot 2006).
‘Stakeholderism’ emerges when it no longer makes sense to situate or orient one according to an
assumed collective viewpoint (Gauchet 1997 [1985]), where what defines politics is a shared belief in
the veracity of self-realization and personal authenticity as the final arbiters of ethico-moral duties and
political obligations. ‘Social’ citizenship had been anchored in rights to a ‘fair share’ of the spoils of
industrial despoliation of the ecosphere and duties to serve in the armed forces, reproduce offspring
and reject ‘communism’ (Turner 2001). Stakeholder citizenship is anchored by rights and duties that
build upon a normalizing of the subpolitics of risk (Beck 2001), where inequality is defined in terms of
low levels of wellbeing, an absence of security from risk, or lack of opportunities for self-responsible
participation in decision-making on ‘existential’ issues, such as ‘liveability’. However, such
‘existential’ rights and duties make it difficult to claim that wellness extends beyond personal health
or wealth, or that the provision of personal choice and local action themselves do not necessarily
constitute steps towards ensuring social equality. Moreover, emphases on subjective wellbeing,
and self-responsibility for it make it difficult to delineate clearly between discourses and actions that
have as their objective private ends, such as profitability, or social ends, such as environmental
reparations or social equality.
64
Conclusion
If there is an advantage to conceiving of things in stakeholderist terms, it may be that it sheds light
on the reframing of discourses of equality and inequality away from a dualist frame, wherein social
classes challenged each other in a Manichean struggle to divide the spoils of industrial subjection of
nature, and towards one in which citizens act collaboratively across a local-global frame of reference
to ‘steer’ the social development trajectory within the systemic constraints of the ecosphere. That
is, stakeholder citizenship normalizes a holistic representational grammar, one in which equality
and inequality appear as diffuse whole-of-society problems and where the distinction between the
bearers of rights and of responsibilities is blurred.
In contrast with views that it is no longer possible to clearly delineate between reactionary and
progressive positions, recognizing the partial assimilation of the five critiques listed above amplifies
divisions between the two. The progressive’s task—enunciating claims that the presence of social
inequality is an injustice—has become more complex, while the conservative’s position—that
inequality is inevitable, and that justice is a by-product of policy that enforces a principle of desert—is
somewhat simplified.
On the one hand, whereas reactionary politics had long sought to ‘conserve’ structures of privilege
based in particular rather than universal principles of desert, and sought to justify this through claims
to be upholding tradition, fact over utopia or essentialism over contingency, such indirectness seems
no longer necessary. Contemporary calls to preserve social privilege demand the ‘unburdening’ of
individuals and communities, as with calls to privatize insurance against risk or pursue wellbeing
through consumption. Ever-expanding negative freedoms to realize an unbounded selfhood are
central. Such post-dualist conservatism is expressed by the United States’ Tea Party but also
emerges, for example, in the Netherlands, Australia and Britain. The Dutch politician Geert Wilders
and the Cronulla Beach rioters make clear that what is at stake is not so much the need for tradition,
strong leaders or exclusive ethnicity but the perceived threat to a relatively affluent quality-of-life.
Similarly, for the British National Party/English Defence League, ultra-libertarian interpretations of
freedom support a kind of untrammelled consumer philistinism.
On the other hand, whereas progressivism had sought to universalize freedom through economic
redistribution—within a state that is committed to subjugating nature—the industrial solidarity
underpinning such claims is no longer available. Stakeholder citizenship implies a rethinking of
the idea of employment or, indeed, of the nexus of employment with equality: income, as well as
access to life-long education and professional training and independence, mobility, inclusion and
participation are all demanded. Wellbeing itself emerges as a social problem of the provision of
capabilities and capacities to confront risk in ways that respect future generations and the capacity
of the ecosphere to support society at a global scale. Moreover, no longer can a single group in
society—white male industrial workers—monopolize citizenship to the deliberate or accidental
exclusion of others. The progressive political position is bound to support political institutions
that redistribute rights to ecological space fairly. Similarly this position must recognize all social
participants as equals and provide transparent representation or participation, while delineating the
territorial reach of the political community of citizens against global aspirations to remain within the
capacity of the ecosphere to provide for present and future generations (Schlosberg 2007). In the
words of Fraser (2009, p. 11), ‘it is not only the substance of justice, but also the frame, that is in
dispute’.
65
References
Banerjee, SB 2008, ‘Corporate social responsibility: The good, the bad and the ugly’, Critical
Sociology, 34(1), pp. 51–79.
Barry, J 2006, ‘Resistance is fertile: From environmental to sustainability citizenship’ in Dobson A &
Bell D (eds), Environmental citizenship, MIT, Cambridge, pp. 21–48.
Beck, U 2001, ‘Freedom’s children’ in Beck U & Beck-Gernsheim E (eds) Individualization, Sage,
London: pp. 156–72.
Beck, U 1995, Ecological politics in an age of risk, Polity, Cambridge
Ethical Consumption
Tania Lewis
This essay considers what we mean by the term ‘ethical consumption’, offers the context for the rise
of the associated movement, discusses ethical consumer practices, and analyses the political limits
and potential of ethical consumption.
Bell, DR 2005, ‘Liberal environmental citizenship’, Environmental Politics, 14(2), pp. 179–94.
What does ‘Ethical Consumption’ Mean?
Boltanski L & Chiapello, E 2005 [1999], The new spirit of capitalism, Verso, London.
During the past couple of decades, the concept of ethical consumption has gained increasing
prominence in wealthy capitalist nations around the world (Lewis & Potter 2011), more recently
attaining mainstream appeal. A 2009 issue of Time magazine ran with the banner ‘The rise of the
ethical consumer’ and featured ‘The responsibility revolution’ article reporting that, in their poll of
1003 Americans, ‘[n]early 40% said they purchased a product in 2009 because they liked the
social or political values of the company that produced it’ (Stengle 2009, p. 24). No longer purely
associated with fringe politics or hippie lifestyles, terms such as ‘responsible’ and ‘conscience
consumption’, are increasingly entering into the everyday language and practices of so-called
‘ordinary’ consumers. Whether through injunctions to buy ‘guilt-free’ Fair Trade chocolate, to
minimize the consumption of energy and water on behalf of the planet, or to recycle or swap goods
as a means of reducing consumption overall, mainstream consumer choice is increasingly marked
by questions of ‘care, solidarity and collective concern’ (Barnett et al. 2005a, p. 45).
Dobson, A 2003, Citizenship and the environment, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Fraser, N 2009, Scales of justice, Columbia University Press, New York.
Gauchet, M 1997 [1985], The disenchantment of the world, Princeton University Press, Princeton.
Giddens, A 2000, The Third Way and its critics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Giddens, A 1991, Modernity and self identity, Polity, Cambridge.
Prabhakar, R 2003, ‘Stakeholding: Does it possess a stable core?’, Political Ideologies, 8(3) pp.
347–63.
Rosanvallon, P 2000 [1995], The new social question, Princeton University Press, Princeton.
Salmon, A 2007, La tentation éthique du capitalism, La Découverte, Paris.
Scerri, A 2012, Greening citizenship: Sustainable development, the state and ideology, Palgrave,
Basingstoke.
Scerri, A 2009, ‘Paradoxes of increased individuation and public awareness of environmental
issues’, Environmental Politics, 18(4), pp. 467–85.
Scerri, A 2003, ‘Triple bottom-line capitalism and the 3rd place’ Arena, pp. 56–67.
Schlosberg, D 2007, Defining environmental justice, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Scott, M 2010, ‘Reflections on the Big Society’, Community Development, 46(1), pp. 132–37.
Supiot, A 2006, ‘A world market of norms?’, New Left Review, 2(39), pp. 109–21.
Turner, BS 2001, ‘The erosion of citizenship’, Sociology, 52(2), pp. 189–209.
van Steenbergen, B 1994, The condition of citizenship, Sage, London.
Wissenburg, M 1998, Green liberalism: The free and the green society, UCL Press, London.
As both Littler (2011) and Humphery (2011) have noted, however, the term ‘ethical consumption’
does not refer to a clearly defined set of practices, but rather has become a convenient catch-all
phrase for a range of tendencies within contemporary consumer economies. In popular and marketbased usage, ethical consumption has become an umbrella term covering a wide range of concerns
from animal welfare, labour standards and human rights to questions of health and wellbeing and
environmental and community sustainability.
This broadly ethical turn, of course, is not necessarily marked by a coherent set of shared politics
or values; nor have most ethical products made significant inroads into the capitalist marketplace.
Practices that might be labelled as forms of ethical consumption range widely. On the one hand,
certain modes of ‘ethical’ and ‘green’ purchasing, such as those advocated by popular self-help
books, like Green Chic: Saving the Earth in Style (Matheson 2008), can be seen to operate primarily
within the logics of consumer culture in its drive to forge and colonize ever new and untapped
markets. On the other hand, the ethical turn in consumer culture has also legitimated more radical
forms of intervention into free market capitalism. The prime example is the Fair Trade Federation,
which seeks to challenge a purely individualist, consumer-driven approach by linking the shopping
practices of consumers from the global North to a broader ‘global fair trade movement’ and to the
political and economic rights of producers in the South.
If the field of ethical consumption is diverse in terms of the concerns it encompasses, one point
of commonality is the emphasis placed on the politicization of life and lifestyle practices. This shift
has seen political consumerism no longer limited to the classical sphere of the polis, as defined in
contrast to the oikos or household, but broadened to the everyday lives and lifestyles of ‘ordinary’
consumers.
Contextualizing the Ethical Turn
While this reconfiguration of consumption in terms of personal and lifestyle politics is a reasonably
recent phenomenon, which can be linked to a range of longer-term struggles around consumer
politics. As Humphery (2011) argues, the mass market has long been the subject of political and
cultural critique by Marxist, liberal and conservative critics alike. Likewise, consumer culture has been
marked by active political struggles since its beginnings, with early consumer initiatives including the
US White Label Campaign of 1899, in which activists attached positive ‘white’ labels to the products
of factories with good working conditions.
66
67
Negative modes of campaigning such as boycotts also emerged in the nineteenth century and
continued through into the twentieth, with ‘Don’t buy where you can’t work’ campaigns for black
civil rights impacting on the hiring practices of firms like Woolworths in the USA during the 1920s
through to the 1940s. As Naomi Klein (2000, p. 336) points out, one of the more recent boycotts
and the first case of global brand-based activism was the targeting of Nestlé (1974–84) by various
consumer, church and action groups in response to their marketing of infant formula in Africa and
Asia. As a highly visible corporation promoted along the lines of ‘family values’, what the Nestlé case
signaled was the shift towards a different kind of political activism around consumerism.
One of the central arguments Klein (2000) makes in her book, No Logo, is that the mainstreaming
of political consumerism today is integrally connected to the centrality of brand culture. While
contemporary branding has enabled corporations to seamlessly integrate themselves into spheres
of life that were once relatively free of market logics, as Klein argues, the flip side of brand strategies
that position corporations as good citizens is that they are increasingly being held to account
for their social responsibilities to customers and the community at large. Thus the culturally and
socially immanent nature of the brand today is at once both the strength and the Achilles heel of the
contemporary corporation.
Another important context for the ethical turn in mainstream consumer markets has been the
increased focus within popular media culture on the impacts and risks of capitalist modernity,
particularly in relation to the environment (Lewis 2008). The global success and impact of An
Inconvenient Truth (2006), alongside youth-oriented ‘green’ entertainment spectacles such as
Live Earth, has seen a growing coverage of green issues by popular media. Closely linked and
overlapping with environmental critiques of modern living, a range of critical commentaries on
materialism and ‘affluenza’ in wealthy developed nations have made their presence felt in the
mainstream cultural landscape (De Graaf et al. 2005)—from media interest in anti-consumerist
activism around corporate practices, particularly the targeting of major transnational corporations like
Nike and McDonald’s, to popular cultural critiques of overconsumption, such as the film Super Size
Me (2004).
Ethical Consumption in Practice
The rise of ethical consumption thus connects to a broader popular critique focused on a range
of concerns around environmentalism, anti-materialism, and unsustainable lifestyles. Despite the
growing popular currency of the concept, there have been relatively few large-scale academic
studies of ethical consumption though, perhaps not surprisingly, a number of large national and
international surveys have been undertaken in the field of marketing. For instance, a poll by Global
Market Insite (GMI 2005) across 17 countries, including the USA, Australia, Japan, China, India and
various European countries, found that 54 per cent of online consumers would be prepared to pay
more for organic, environmentally friendly, or Fair Trade products.
Various in-depth qualitative studies have also begun to emerge on specific aspects of ethical
consumption, including Fair Trade products, food and fashion (Gibson & Stanes 2011; Curran 2009;
Fridell 2007; Scrase 2011; Figueroa & Waitt 2011; Varul 2009) while a number of geographers
have conducted research on commodity ‘chains’ or ‘networks’, situating consumption globally
and articulating ethical consumption within the politics of production, and marketing and retail
practices and policies. In terms of broader studies of ethical consumption, Swedish political scientist
Michele Micheletti has conducted extensive research on ‘virtuous’ shopping as a form of political
participation in Scandinavia (Micheletti 2003, Micheletti & Follesdal 2007, Micheletti & Stolle 2007),
while consumption studies scholar Kim Humphery (1998; 2010) has undertaken in-depth research
on anti-consumerist practices in Australian households and elsewhere. The largest empirical
study on ethical consumption to date in the UK has been conducted by a team of British cultural
geographers led by Clive Barnett (Barnett et al. 2005b). Focusing on the city of Bristol, they used
case studies, focus groups, in-depth interviews and discourse analysis of promotional material
to look at the way in which ordinary people deal with the complexities and dilemmas of everyday
consumption.
68
My recent research with colleague Dr Rowan Wilken on household curbside ‘waste’ reuse likewise
suggests complexities in everyday decision-making and habitual practices around household
consumption, and the growing ‘ethicalization’ of everyday personal conduct around consumption
and lifestyle ‘choices’. The curbside placement and reuse of ‘hard rubbish’ items, such as furniture,
is common practice in many Australian cities, with recent surveys of Melbourne households
indicating that 35–40 per cent of respondents had gleaned items from hard rubbish for household
reuse (Lane et al. 2009). This is a practice that has become more regulated and formalized as part of
council strategies for waste management and sustainability, with some councils holding designated
collection weeks. In our in-depth video-based study of 15 socio-economically diverse Melbourne
households, we documented and analyzed informal household practices and economies around
thrift and reuse. Most of the householders in our study were active gleaners of hard rubbish and
often purchased much of their furniture and clothing from ‘alternative’ shopping spaces such as thrift
and ‘opportunity’ shops, and garage sales.
While questions of thrift often arose, most participants’ motivations were far from purely economic
or utilitarian but were characterized by a complex range of interests. Many participants saw their
participation in hard rubbish practices as a form of political or ethical consumption, often linking
their practices to a broader interest in self-sufficiency, anti-consumerism, environmentalism and
waste minimization, as well as to issues of social justice. However, in speaking of ‘politics’ here,
people’s ethical practices were often tied to personal and lifestyle issues involving networks of
reciprocal sharing and caring with local community and familial and friendship groups. Furthermore,
the drive to consume differently and reuse material items, rather than purchase new commodities,
was frequently tied to questions of pleasure and aesthetics, people often describing the ‘thrill’
of ‘discovering’ sought-after items on the curbside and taking them home. Here, many of our
participants invoked a kind of romantic ethic of consumption in their discussion of gleaned goods—
talking of the authenticity and enchantment associated with older material objects and their histories
of ownership, in contrast to the perceived alienation of purchasing new commodities.
In our study, the embedded nature of consumer practices in people’s everyday lives and their
connection to a range of values and habits meant that, despite ethical and political motivations, such
practices were often marked by complexity and contradiction. A number of participants, particularly
those with children, discussed the significant time and labour involved in consuming ethically. They
reported purchasing new items when doing so was quicker and easier. Householders with homes
furnished largely with second-hand and gleaned items, then, would often point guiltily to their one
Ikea purchase as a highly conspicuous symbol of time-pressured lives and the convenience of onestop shopping.
The Politics of Consuming Ethically: Possibilities and Limitations
Such paradoxical practices point to the gap between people’s professed values and beliefs and the
realities of their everyday life routines and habits. They also suggest the limitations on placing too
much emphasis on individual ethical purchases as a panacea for over-consumption. As numerous
critics have pointed out, one of the central problems is that a focus on ethical consumption at a
solely personalized level tends to displace responsibility from governments and corporations to
individuals while effacing the political and economic determinants that structure people’s daily lifestyle
‘choices’. In this context, making lifestyle choices more ethical can be seen to reinforce a ‘doctrine
of personal responsibility’ (Miller 2007, p. 120), an ethos that fits well with dominant neoliberal trends
towards devolved and deregulated governance and trade, in which civic responsibility is framed in
terms of individual choice, ‘self-realization’ and the ‘stakeholder society’ (Pringle & Thompson 1999,
p. 267), at the expense of state care and conventional understandings of civic participation and
citizenship. Others have pointed to the socio-economic dimensions of ethical consumption and the
need to recognize that not all consumers have access to the symbolic and economic resources
required to shop virtuously. Conscience consumption, such as buying organic food and/or Fair
Trade products, is increasingly associated with social distinction, and expensive green products have
acquired a degree of social cache amongst a growing urban class of ‘bourgeois bohemians’ (Littler
2009).
69
Finally, and most crucially, critics point to the limitations of a politics defined by and through the
logics of the market. For instance, the UK environmental commentator George Monbiot (2007)
has little time for what he sees as the superficial platitudes of ethical consumption which, to his
mind, encourages people to continue consuming while simply replacing less ‘caring’ products with
others. Advocacy of conscience consumption thus raises fundamental questions about the ethical
capacities of market-driven societies and whether it is possible to develop a sustainable consumer
culture.
Littler, J 2009, Radical consumption: Shopping for change in contemporary culture, Berkshire, UK,
Open University Press.
Nevertheless, where ethical consumption becomes potentially much more interesting and
challenging as a cultural force is not through its ability to challenge market culture but the questions
it poses more broadly around ways of living and the fashioning of new ethico-political realities. As
such, I would suggest that our obligation to consume ethically should not be glossed over as a mere
marketing ploy or status trend for the progressive middle classes. Instead, it asks to be approached
through a broader political frame linked to key questions around the ongoing sustainability of existing
social and economic structures in the global North. Can we live ‘the good life’ within a narrowly
materialist culture? As Joel Bakan (2004, p. 31) puts it, can capitalism have a conscience? What the
practices and politics of ethical consumption, at its most radical, can engender is a questioning and
a rethinking of the ‘good life’ and of the logics of consumer culture itself.
Micheletti, M & Follesdal, A 2007, ‘Shopping for human rights: An introduction to the special issue’,
Journal of Consumer Policy, 30(3), pp. 167–75.
References
Bakan, J 2004, The corporation: The pathological pursuit of profit and power, Constable and
Robinson, London.
Barnett, C, Clarke, N, Cloke P & Malpass, A 2005a, ‘The political ethics of consumerism’, Consumer
Policy Review, 15(2), pp. 45–51.
Barnett, C, Clarke, N, Cloke P & Malpass, A 2005b, ‘Consuming ethics: Articulating the subjects
and spaces of ethical consumption’, Antipode, 37, pp. 23–45.
Littler, J 2011, ‘What’s wrong with ethical consumption?’, in Lewis & Potter (eds): pp. 27–39.
Matheson, C 2008, Green chic: Saving the earth in style, Source Publishers, Illinois.
Micheletti, M 2003, Political virtue and shopping: Individuals, consumerism, and collective action,
Palgrave Macmillan, New York.
Micheletti M & Stolle, D 2007, ‘Mobilizing consumers to take responsibility for global social justice’,
Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 611, pp. 157–75.
Miller, T 2007, Cultural citizenship: Cosmopolitanism, consumerism and television in a neoliberal age,
Temple University Press, Philadelphia.
Monbiot, G 2007, ‘Environmental feedback: A reply to Clive Hamilton’, New Left Review, 45 (May–
June), viewed 15 February 2009 at <http://www.newleftreview.org/?view=2672>.
Pringle H & Thompson, H 1999, Brand spirit: How cause related marketing builds brands, John
Wiley & Sons, Chichester UK.
Scrase, T 2011, ‘Fair trade in cyberspace: The commodification of poverty and the marketing of
crafts on the Internet’, in Lewis & Potter (eds), 2011: pp. 54–70.
Super size me 2004, Spurlock, M (director), Kathbur Pictures.
Stengle, R 2009, ‘The responsibility revolution’, Time, 174, pp. 24–7.
Varul, M 2009, ‘Ethical selving in cultural contexts: Fairtrade consumption as an everyday ethical
practice in the UK and Germany’, International Journal of Consumer Studies, 33(2), pp. 183–89.
Curran, SR 2009, The global governance of food, Routledge, London.
De Graaf, J, Naylor TH & Wann, D 2005, Affluenza: The all-consuming epidemic, Berrett-Koehler,
San Francisco.
Figueroa RM & Waitt, G 2011, ‘The moral terrains of ecotourism and the ethics of consumption’, in
Lewis & Potter (eds): pp. 260–74.
Fridell, G 2007, Fair trade coffee: The prospects and pitfalls of market-driven social justice, University
of Toronto Press, Toronto.
Gibson, C & Stanes, E 2011, ‘Is green the new black? Exploring ethical fashion consumption’, in
Lewis & Potter (eds): pp. 169–85.
GMI 2005, ‘GMI poll finds doing good is good for business’, viewed 12/2/2012 at <http://www.gmimr.com/about-us/news/archive.php?p=20050919>.
Humphery, K 2011, ‘The simple and the good: Ethical consumption as anti-consumerism’, in Lewis
& Potter (eds): pp. 40–53.
Humphery, K 2010, Excess: Anti-consumerism in the West, Polity Press, Cambridge.
Humphery, K 1998, Shelf life: Supermarkets and the changing cultures of consumption, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge.
An Inconvenient Truth 2006, Guggenheim D (director), LB Productions.
Curbside gardening in the inner suburbs of Melbourne, Australia, 2012. Photo: Tania Lewis.
Klein, N 2000, No logo: No space, no choice, no jobs. Taking aim at the brand bullies, Flamingo,
London.
Lane, R Horne, R & Bicknell, J 2009, ‘Routes of reuse of second-hand goods in Melbourne
households’, Australian Geographer, 40(2), pp. 151–68.
Lewis, T 2008, ‘Transforming citizens: Green politics and ethical consumption on lifestyle television’,
Continuum, 2(2), pp. 227–40.
Lewis T & Potter E (eds) 2011, Ethical consumption: A critical introduction, Routledge, London.
70
71
Urban Children and Sustainability:
UNICEF’s Child-Friendly Cities Initiative
Karen Malone
This essay explores urban sustainability from the perspective of the United Nations concept of a
child-friendly city, examines the background to the child-friendly cities program and child-friendly
communities initiative, analyses the associated policy framework, and considers how these
developments are to be monitored and evaluated.
Background to UNICEF Child-Friendly Cities and Communities
The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) identifies a child’s wellbeing and
quality of life as the ultimate indicator of a healthy environment, good governance, and sustainable
development (UNICEF 1996, 1997). According to UNICEF (2004, p. 1), ‘A Child-Friendly City is a
local system of good governance committed to fulfilling children’s rights’. The city does this by being
actively engaged in fulfilling the right of every young person to:
•
Influence decisions about their city
•
Express their opinion on the city they want
•
Participate in family, community and social life
•
Receive basic services such as health care and education
•
Drink safe water and have access to proper sanitation
•
Be protected from exploitation, violence and abuse
•
Walk safely in the streets on their own
•
Meet friends and play
•
Have green spaces for plants and animals
•
Live in an unpolluted environment
•
Participate in cultural and social events
•
Be an equal citizen of their city with access to every service, regardless of ethnic origin, religion,
income, gender or disability.
UNICEF (2004, p. 1)
Using this criterion, many cities rate poorly in terms of their child-friendly status with this generation
of children growing up with the least amount of opportunity for independence, free play and
community engagement (Malone 2007). Research continues to reveal large sections of cities
are effectively out of bounds for children, whose freedom to explore or participate in their urban
environments is limited by a lack of child-friendly places and transport, pollutants and risks to their
safety. There also continues to be significant evidence that one of the key issues for children in urban
environments around the globe is poverty and disadvantage, with its long lasting impact on their
quality of life. The UNICEF (2012, p. 75) State of the World’s Children 2012 Report stated:
Equity must be the guiding principle in efforts for all children in urban areas. The children
of slums—born into and raised under some of the most challenging conditions of poverty
and disadvantage—will require particular attention. But this must not come at the expense
of children elsewhere. The larger goal must remain in focus: fairer, more nurturing cities and
societies for all people—starting with children.
In the fast-urbanizing majority world countries of the Asia Pacific region, for example, many
governments continue to struggle to provide equity in the provision of basic services to improve
infant mortality rates and children’s health. Children in many majority world countries face serious
72
danger from pollutants and pathogens in the air, water, soil or food. The millions of street children are
especially vulnerable to a lack of health services, the danger of traffic accidents, child-trafficking and
abuse.
The concluding statements in UNICEF’s Asia Pacific 2008 report on the analysis of data across the
region stated:
The analysis has also revealed some clear similarities in the challenges that many of the
countries of the region face in improving maternal and child health. Common impediments to
better health outcomes include widespread gender discrimination and inequities, as well as
disparities in primary health-care interventions across geographical locations, between rich and
poor, and among ethnic and other social groups. (UNICEF 2008a, p. 44)
In the region’s higher-income countries, however, the problems can be very different with fear,
anxiety, depression and stress becoming increasingly significant issue for many children. UNICEF
(2007) reported that many children feel awkward and out of place in their community. The most
striking results were the 30 per cent of Japanese children who said they felt lonely—three times
higher than any other country (UNICEF 2007:40)—and the high suicide rates, higher than any other
OECD country. While troubling in itself, this also has equally troubling implications: Palmer (2007, p.
2) believes that the ‘knock-on effects of this epidemic is the increase in drug and substance abuse
among teenagers along with binge-drinking, eating disorders, self-harm and suicide’.
Ongoing research continues to support that less than a generation ago, children were far more
likely to play independently in their own neighbourhood. When asked to reflect on their childhood,
parents usually remember having far more freedom than their own children have today (Malone
2007). This is due partly to young people’s having less time than in the past for free play, as they
are often engaged in more indoor and adult-organized activities such as sport, music, homework
or tutoring, but it is due in part also to the poor quality of many city environments. The erosion and
pollution of natural or wild spaces, the loss of parks and playgrounds because of the increasing
need of land for housing or industry, increased car traffic, fear of ‘stranger danger’ and lack of public
transport, all contribute to young people’s limited engagement with the urban environment. Evidence
reveals that this lack of active engagement with their city has detrimental impacts on children’s longterm physical and mental health, and has the prospect of limiting young people’s environmental
competence, sense of connectedness to the community and, ultimately, their capacity to take on
the role of environmental stewards. These are all qualities critical to a population who we seek to
take up the responsibilities of urban sustainability in the present and the future.
Child-Friendly Cities and Urban Sustainability: A Policy Framework
The principles of sustainable development clearly demand that the simultaneous achievement
of environmental, social and economic goals meet the needs of the present generation without
compromising those of future generations. The goals of sustainability require that national
governments maintain the integrity of the social, economic and environment fabric of their global
and local environments through processes that are participatory and equitable. The principles of the
Convention of the Rights of the Child (CRC) reinforces these goals when it challenges governments
to uphold the child’s right to live in a safe, clean and healthy environment and to engage in free play,
leisure and recreation in the environment. Children have a special interest in these goals, as one of
the most vulnerable groups in our community to the detrimental impacts of urbanization, so if the
goals of sustainability are not achieved then it will affect children more profoundly. There has clearly
been a history of a convergence and in many ways a symbiotic relationship between the principles
of sustainable development and children’s rights (Malone 2006).
The connection between children’s rights and sustainable development has been formally articulated
in a number of global declarations and documents emerging from intergovernmental summits
and meetings. Some of the most significant documents for stimulating discussions on children
and sustainable development include The Plan for Action that resulted from the World Summit for
Children and the Rio Declaration and the action plan of Agenda 21 were both endorsed at the Earth
Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. Principle 21 of the Rio declaration clearly reinforces the role of
youth in sustainable development:
73
Principle 21. The creativity, ideals and courage of the youth of the world should be mobilised
to forge a global partnership in order to achieve sustainable development and ensure a better
future for all. (United Nations 1992)
As did the introduction and the entire content of Chapter 25:
Chapter 25.1. Youth compromise nearly 30 per cent of the world’s population. The involvement
of today’s youth in environment and development decision-making and in the implementation
of programmes is critical to the long-term success of Agenda 21. (United Nations 1992)
This growing focus on urbanization and children gave rise to the children’s rights and habitat report
presented by UNICEF representatives at the United Nations Conference on Human Settlements
at Istanbul in 1996. The document drew attention to the important role children had in sustainable
development:
Children have a special interest in the creation of sustainable human settlements that will
support long and fulfilling lives for themselves and future generations. They require opportunities
to participate and contribute to a sustainable urban future. (UNICEF 1997, p. 28)
It was from this meeting that the Child-Friendly Cities Initiative (CFCI) fully emerged.
At this time the local goals of sustainable development and children’s rights were being expressed
through Local Agenda 21, the action plan for local governments, communities and all stakeholders
to promote and implement sustainable development. This allowed the UNICEF CFCI to have
a strong focus on encouraging mayors and community organizations to involve children in
partnerships around environmental decision-making to improve the quality of cities.
Building on the work developed from the launch of the CFCI in the late 1990s, the program was
recognized as critical for supporting the document resulting from the UN General Assembly’s Special
Session on Children in May 2002, A World Fit for Children. This document identified the importance
of local government and authorities in partnerships to promote and protect the rights of children and
the significance of building on the child-friendly cities initiatives, so that
local governments and authorities can ensure that children are at the centre of agendas for
development. By building on ongoing initiatives such as child-friendly communities and cities
without slums, mayors and local leaders can significantly improve the lives of children.
(UNICEF 2002a, p. 8)
In a media release from the UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre, where the International Secretariat
for the CFCI is based, at the launch of the report ‘Poverty and Exclusion among Urban Children’
(UNICEF 2002b) on 7 February 2003, UNICEF Deputy Director Kul Gautam confirmed the program’s
significance in addressing children’s specific needs:
The tens of millions of urban children who are denied basic social services—such as education
and health care—are living proof that the world has systematically failed to protect them. These
children deserve to live in a protective environment—one that safeguards them from abuse and
exploitation. This was the commitment reaffirmed by the Heads of State and Government in
2002, at the Special Session on Children, and we need to take it seriously and translate it into
action.
(UNICEF 2003)
Child-friendly cities also featured widely in other documents emerging from UNICEF around this time,
including the Partnerships to Create Child-Friendly Cities (UNICEF 2001) and Poverty and Exclusion
among Urban Children (UNICEF 2002b). The CFCI was also advanced at this time through its
partnership with the International Union of Local Authorities (IULA) who, with UNICEF, shared a
common interest in the importance of supporting children and women in local contexts throughout
the world. IULA was a key stakeholder in the CFCI program as many local governments carried the
final responsibility for the very elements that have the greatest impact on children’s wellbeing and
quality of life: education, health, housing, environmental protection, recreation, and transport, to
name a few. As ways were being devised to make cities more child-friendly, it was important to value
and respect children (especially young children) as active participants and decision-makers in those
design processes. Research on children in cities throughout the world showed that, despite diversity
74
of place, children value similar qualities in urban environments and that these principles or indicators
of child-friendliness align very closely with core principles of ecological and social sustainability
(Malone 2001, UNICEF 1997).
Most recently CFCI has been instrumental as a key strategy of the United Nations for supporting
and monitoring progress toward the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). An example of this
is the Nepalese Child-Friendly Local Governance (CFLG) program. CFLG is defined as a strategic
framework that places children at the core of the development agenda of local bodies, government
line agencies and civil society, promoting child rights through good governance at the local level.
CFLG is considered by the Government of Nepal to be an important means for mainstreaming child
rights in local governance and ensuring that the country can achieve its MDGs, particularly those
related to children and women. CFLG guidelines provide districts and municipalities with practical
strategic direction and guidance on introducing and mainstreaming CFLG into their annual planning
and monitoring processes. The guidelines stipulate that children must be involved in the process
of collecting information for the child profile and must be part of the planning committees making
decisions on how funds are spent. Although still at an early stage in Nepal, they believe localized
planning has resulted in a noticeable improvement in MDG indicators aimed at bettering children’s
lives.
Monitoring and Evaluating Child-Friendliness
The most recent state of the world’s children (UNICEF 2012) report, with its focus on urbanization,
recognizes the significant role CFC has played and will continue to play in the future of planning for
alleviating the impacts of urbanization on communities. It recognizes the value of providing rigorous
evaluation and monitoring programs connected with cities receiving status as child friendly:
The international Child-Friendly Cities Initiative has succeeded in putting child rights on the
urban agenda. To be awarded child-friendly status, a city must show that it fosters child
participation and pursues child rights through its strategy, legislation, budgeting, impact
assessments and public awareness programmes. The scheme has great potential for
expansion, particularly in rapidly growing, rapidly urbanizing middle-income countries.
(UNICEF 2012, p. 74)
There is no single definition of what a child-friendly city is or ought to be. In fact the documents go
to great length to say that you can never achieve child-friendly status because cities will always be
transforming and responding to the changing local and global context. In some cities, especially in
high-income nations, emphasis tends to be on environmental and physical issues such as improving
recreational spaces, green spaces, young people’s alienation and controlling traffic to make streets
safe for young citizens. In low-income nations, the focus is frequently on increasing access to basic
services and alleviating the impacts of rapid urbanization, especially addressing pollution, poverty
and population growth.
The UNICEF CFCI Secretariat developed a toolkit to support cities to work towards achieving
child-friendly status. The key component of this tool kit was the nine building blocks that served to
act as the structures and activities by which governments would make the political commitments
to implementing sustainable actions for ongoing improvement of urban quality. The nine key
components or building blocks include: children’s participation; a child friendly legal framework; a
city-wide Children’s Rights Strategy; a children’s rights unit coordinating mechanism; child impact
assessment and evaluation; a children’s budget; a regular State of the City’s Children report; making
children’s rights known; and independent advocacy for children (UNICEF 2004).
For cities wanting recognition as achieving child-friendly status many countries have devised
accreditation programs. To support these initiatives there has been an emphasis on the value of
strengthening data collection and monitoring with children and the desire to construct community
based assessment tools. UNICEF’s 2008 report on the Asia Pacific region stated that ‘often, national
averages conceal the adverse health conditions disproportionately experienced by the poor, and
a lack of reliable statistical data disaggregated by geography and socio-economic groups makes
analysis of the Asia-Pacific region difficult’ (UNICEF 2008a, p. 55).
75
It is clear that decisions on what actions need to be taken should be made using data that reflect
the realities and diversities of children’s lives. Therefore, developing more fine-grained bottom-up
data from a cross-section of society, including children and youth, was the model used for the
self-assessment initiative. A UNICEF CFC research advisory board devised and piloted a set of
indicators and self-assessment tools to support cities to monitor progress over time and make their
accreditation programs more rigorous (UNICEF 2008b).
These assessment tools have been designed for use by parents, community service professionals
and children. Because of their graphic qualities they can be used and interpreted by people with a
wide range of ages and degrees of literacy. The data they provide are suitable for immediate visual
analysis and interpretation by the community and can be quantified in simple ways and used by
the municipality for neighbourhood planning. The primary intention is for communities to be able to
collectively identify priorities as the basis for a local plan of action and for advocacy and dialogue
with local authorities. The tools have been piloted in a number of diverse countries to ensure they
are culturally appropriate and have been shown to be easily adapted to reflect the specificity of the
local context. The UNICEF child-friendly cities community assessment tools have had an important
role to play in the development of data that have contributed to new recognition or accreditation
programs emerging in many countries to encourage cities to monitor and evaluate the sustainability
of programs over time and build on their successes in tracking improvements associated with the
MDGs (UNICEF 2008b).
Conclusion
UNICEF 2008a, The state of Asia-Pacific’s children 2008, United Nations Children’s Fund, New York
City.
UNICEF 2008b, The child friendly cities research program, United Nations Children’s Fund, New
York City.
UNICEF 2007, An overview of child well-being in rich countries, United Nations Children’s Fund, New
York City.
UNICEF 2004, Building child friendly cities: A framework for action, United Nations Children’s Fund
Innocenti Centre, Florence.
UNICEF 2002a, World fit for children, United Nations Children’s Fund, New York City.
UNICEF 2002b, Poverty and exclusion among urban children, United Nations Children’s Fund
Innocenti Centre, Florence.
UNICEF 2003 UNICEF report reveals millions of urban children in poverty—press release, accessed
5 October 2012, <http://www.unicef.org/media/media_7554.html>.
UNICEF 2001, Partnerships to create child-friendly cities: Programming for child rights with local
authorities, United Nations Children’s Fund & International Union of Local Authorities, New York City.
UNICEF 1997, Children’s rights and habitat: Working towards child-friendly cities, United Nations
Children’s Fund, New York City.
UNICEF 1996, Towards child-friendly cities, United Nations Children’s Fund, New York City.
As more child-friendly cities programs emerge across the world, particularly in minority world
countries, their main focus will unfortunately still be on ensuring that children survive to their fifth
birthday and beyond. But outside of these fundamental questions of poverty and survival, there is a
need to appreciate that some aspects of life for children in the crowded cities of the majority world
countries, in contrast to their peers in very affluent cities, can potentially better equip children with
the resilience and competency to cope with and contribute to a sustainable future. Therefore stories
of sustainability and child-friendliness can cross many diverse cultural and economic boundaries and
contribute substantially to a dialogue around how to create a more just, equitable and sustainable
future for all.
The international UNICEF CFCI has devoted special attention to the needs of children, environmental
sustainability and participatory action over the past 16 years. This will further expand with UNICEF’s
Medium Term Strategic Plan (MTSP), now extended to 2013, and with it a strengthening of
partnerships with local authorities and municipalities through the further implementation of CFCI
to ensure a systematic response to the needs of children in underserved urban areas. With
thousands of cities and over 60 countries involved in CFCI it is a key program in the progress of
urban sustainability and the support for children to be both recipients and protagonists in achieving a
sustainable future.
References
Malone, K 2007, ‘The bubblewrap generation: children growing up in walled gardens’, Environmental
Education Researcher, 13(4), pp. 517–25.
Malone, K 2006, ‘United Nations: A key player in a global movement for child friendly cities’, in
Gleeson, B and Spike, N (eds) Creating child friendly cities: Reinstating kids in the city, Routledge,
Abingdon, UK: pp. 13–32.
School in Port Moresby supporting disabled children. Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, 2011.
Malone, K 2001, ‘Children, youth and sustainable cities’, Local Environment, 6(1), pp. 5–12.
Palmer, S 2007, Toxic childhood: How the modern world is damaging our children and what we can
do about it, Orion Books, London.
United Nations 1992, Agenda 21: The Rio Declaration and Statement of Forest Principles, United
Nations Publications, New York City.
UNICEF 2012, State of the world’s children 2012: Children in an urban world, United Nations
Children’s Fund, New York City.
76
77
Indigeneity and the City:
Australian Indigenous Youth and their Strategies
of Cultural Survival through Hip Hop
Chiara Minestrelli
This essay explores issues of Indigenous resilience in the city. Primarily I am looking at the ways
in which young Indigenous people’s discourses—understood in a Foucauldian perspective—can
be inscribed into wider discussions on cultural continuity across the generations. In particular, I
will examine how Indigenous youth in south-eastern and eastern Australia make sense of their
surrounding reality through rap music. In what way are young Indigenous rap artists who live in
urban areas reshaping the socio-cultural geography of Australian society and its sustainability? The
Brundtland Commission (WCED 1987) has defined sustainability as that ‘practice’ that envisages
and encompasses the participation of various social actors, principally within urban environments.
According to this view, together with demographic shifts showing significant growth in the
Indigenous section of the population, notions of urban and cultural sustainability have become
extremely relevant. In this regard, some considerations need to be made.
Despite growing Indigenous agency in discourse production within the Australian public sphere,
Indigenous people living in urban areas have suffered from a lack of attention on the part of
researchers and bureaucrats. This contrasts sharply with Canada as the only reality under scrutiny.
In his study on citizen participation in Canada, with a focus on the Vancouver area, Kennedy Stewart
(2006) has pointed out that sustainability, in its fullest sense, can only be achieved through the active
participation of Aboriginal people in politics, through respect for land claims and self-governance
and the incorporation of their cultural assets into mainstream society. The same political ideals ought
to be applied to Australia in view of a sustainable future. Indeed, Indigenous epistemologies, with
their systems of mores and ethics, attention and respect for the land and its biodiversity can provide
the ideal terrain for modern discussions about sustainability, thus informing strategies and views on
ethical practices.
Agyeman et al. (2002, p. 78) have defined sustainability as ‘the need to ensure a better quality of
life for all, now and into the future, in a just and equitable manner, whilst living within the limits of
supporting ecosystems’. Drawing on such a definition as well as the notion of equity—as discussed
in other scholarship on sustainability (see Agyeman et al. 2003; Schnarch 2004; Stewart 2006; TauliCorpuz 2005)—here I will investigate the strategies employed by the new generations of Indigenous
Australians to carve out autonomous spaces for reflection and socio-political activism through Hip
Hop music. By focusing on two case studies, namely the Newcastle-based Hip Hop group The
Last Kinection and the Melbourne-based Hip Hop group the Yung Warriors, I will demonstrate that
these Indigenous artists are contributing to discussions of sustainability and citizenship through their
interest in their culture and involvement in social activities. A close observation of their music will
provide further insights into the complex question of who and what is ‘authentically’ Aboriginal, thus
also reframing the Western dichotomy urban-versus-rural and contemporary-versus-traditional.
Music and Urban Sustainability
As mentioned earlier, the literature on urban sustainability has largely demonstrated the critical
role played by Aboriginal ‘actors’ in creating a more sustainable environment. Indeed, cultural
diversity may inform such issues, providing ethical imprints within Australia’s sustainability projects
(Ulluwishewa 1993; Wall & Masayesva 2004). Nathan Cardinal (2006, p. 218) has explained the
benefits deriving from the encounter between urban sustainability and Indigenous knowledge in the
Canadian context in the light of the Native’s understanding of the land and its delicate eco-systems:
Aboriginal people are the original inhabitants of the area and provide a cultural link to the region’s
past social, economic, and environmental history. And unlike other subpopulations in the region,
such historic links have translated into modern land claims and treaty negotiations, which are
currently being pursued by existing First Nation groups in the region and will ultimately affect the
future development, ownership, and subsequently, the sustainability of the region.
Hence, to be able to move towards an ethic of equity, Australia’s colonial history needs to be
investigated from the ‘Indigenist’ perspective, following Rigney (2006), who employs the term
‘Indigenism’ to acknowledge the recent academic improvements in depicting the variety of the
Indigenous experience. Here the notion of ‘Indigenism’ promotes the creation of frameworks
that can be moulded around the Indigenous reality/ies, in a way that coalesces with Western
methodologies and their epistemes.
Indigenous Australians have suffered from a lack of recognition of historical and political agency and
self-determination. The many Indigenous communities around Australia have been striving to get
their voices heard and their rights recognized, not only as human beings, but also as human beings
who evolve and change in a globalized world. Considering that a third of the Australian Indigenous
population is distributed in urban areas, it is pivotal to take into consideration the impact of their
presence on the territory. Contrary to conservative assumptions about an idyllic state of immutability,
Indigenous cultures have been constantly evolving and re-shaping the external appearance of their
cultures.
Although the colonial encounter has largely been imagined as one of the prominent factors in
promoting transformation within Indigenous communities, the changes undergone by many
communities after the colonial experience have little to do with that particular historical moment.
Ethnographers like Sutton (1987, p. 78) for instance, argue that change is part of a ‘dialectical
tension between power and autonomy, and between order and disorder’, thus demonstrating that
change is an integral feature of Indigenous societies, in the words of Clunies Ross (1987, p. 7):
D-Boy (Yung Warriors). Photo: James Henry.
Not only does the ideology of Dreamtime authority act as a control on change and a preserver
of the wholeness of Aboriginal religious life, but it can be seen to have provided for its
adherents a number of means by which the discrepancies between theory and practice can be
accommodated.
In arguing the same point, Wild (1987, p. 106) also demonstrates the relevance of music as an
index of change, ‘the authority of song texts is both a conservative force and a means of legitimizing
change’.
78
79
Changes to the cultural and social structure of Indigenous people have occurred within broader
societal systems, adapting to and modifying the surrounding environment. The idea of the colonial
frontier as ‘fatal impact’, popularized by Alan Moorehead’s (1966) book, is still partially functioning as
an erroneous parameter to measure cultural survival. In fact, not only are Indigenous epistemologies
still operating within an Indigenous terrain, but they are also influencing the dominant culture
in a way that could be of primary importance if used to inform sustainable ways of organizing
space and life. Contrary to general assumptions, globalization has not been accepted passively,
but it has engendered an active act of maintenance and change, where modifications have
discriminated between productive, hence dynamic, and less-productive cultural elements. Taking
into consideration Wild’s reflections on music across Indigenous communities, I would argue that,
as globalizing tendencies become significant at the level of global communications, the insertion of
Indigenous culture into discourses that occur on a global scale also happens through songs’ text.
In order to understand the methods employed by Indigenous youth in articulating strategies of
cultural survival or, as Clunies Ross (1986) puts it, ‘holding strategies’, it is crucial to understand
their efforts as a product of the socio-historical milieu wherein social phenomena like Hip Hop
are grounded. In this respect, Aboriginal Hip Hop is located within a tradition of cultural continuity
and survival, thus providing a portal for elaborating and experimenting with viable identities and
disrupting crystallized representations of ‘Indigeneity’. Certainly, one of the most striking features
of this process is characterized by a stronger Indigenous agency, in particular with reference to
participation in the socio-political debate in Australia. Hip Hop groups like The Last Kinection (TLK)
and Yung Warriors (YW), for instance, engage in discussions of social justice in songs like ‘Worth
marching for’ (TLK, 2008) or ‘Black deaths in custody’ (YW).
As the titles suggest, ‘Worth marching for’ and ‘Black deaths in custody’ tackle issues of social
justice in a way that is overtly critical of Australia’s colonial practices and their persistent imperialistic
claims. For example, the words of ‘Worth marching for’ chant:
What do we want? Respect!
When do we want it? Now!
What do we want? Justice!
What do we want? Rights!
(TLK 2008)
The urgent questions addressed by TLK resonate in the YW (2012a) ‘Black deaths in custody’ lyrics
dealing with police violence against Aboriginal people:
What do you know about Black deaths in custody?
Another Black man in cuffs …
What do you know about this bashing in the jail’s cells?
Police power tripping what these brothers screaming out…
What do you know about this? A Black fellow in the back of a wagon
It’s hard to tell
He’s dehydrating as well, no water, no food, imagining how his family felt when they heard the
news…
First we fight for our culture, fight for our rights, fight for our lives.
[emphasis added]
80
As we can easily infer from these excerpts, rap music has been employed by young Indigenous
people to discuss their issues and express their needs, amongst others. This cultural music form
has been utilized to carry out various tasks, ranging from socially engaged topics to less engaged
and sophisticated ones. Focusing on political themes and identity issues it is possible to place
these discussions along a continuum of cultural transmission. In addition, cross-cultural influences,
together with the appropriation of elements belonging to different cultural traditions, like the African
American, have been characterizing Indigenous arts/performances for over two hundred years
both as a strategy of cultural survival and as an incentive to implement Indigenous discourses, thus
enhancing their agency in a time of intensified globalization.
Culture constitutes the perfect terrain to discuss rights and politics, and assert a value system
based on the Indigenous way of living. As we can infer from the content of these groups’ music,
values like spirituality, kinship and a deep connection with the land are still enduring in the voices of
young artists like the YW. The Melbourne-based Hip Hop group formed by Tjimba Possum-Burns
and his cousin Danny D-boy Ramzan, for example, embody and promote what they perceive to
be fundamental aspects of their tradition. In the YW (2012b) song ‘Hold on’, Aboriginal Elder and
singer Kutcha Edwards introduces the lyrics of the two rappers, who have dedicated the song to
their grandfather Clifford Possum Tjapaltjari—an Indigenous painter of International fame—saying:
‘We live culture, we live arts, we live dancing, and we live spirituality, we live our dreaming’. Kutcha
Edwards’s words embody the confluence of old and new and clearly express the idea of cultural
continuity within Indigenous music, as well as the crucial role played by elders in leading the
way. Both the physical presence of an elder, Uncle Kutcha and the act of paying homage to their
grandfather, Clifford Possum, constitute a highly symbolic gesture, whereby cultural values are of
primary importance for the YW (2012b), who rap ‘We came from a family of kinship values and
obtained the wisdom that our elders taught us/ and songlines go on for ever and ever and a family
tree that we’ll always remember’.
The YW, as well as TLK, create their narratives based on the centrality of family, weaving personal
stories into the wider social fabric of Aboriginal Australia, as witnessed by songs like ‘Hold on’ (YW),
‘Family love’ (YW) or ‘Find a way’ (TLK). Once more, The Last Kinection have reinforced such an idea
by saying that their last album ‘Next of Kin was really about our responsibility on taking in those roles
that our elders have placed upon us’ (Gadigal Radio/Information, 2011).
Conclusion
Australian Aboriginal Hip Hop, like Reggae music in the 1980s (see Bennett 2001) and other
Western genres before, has provided young Indigenous people with an avenue through which their
voice is asserted and can be heard. Further, Hip Hop has been rearticulated by the new generations,
mainly to negotiate their identity and Western stereotypes around it, to discuss issues of social
justice and to voice their concerns about the inequalities within Australian society. In particular, these
new generations experiment and create viable discourses where the culture and value system of
their elders mingle with the demands of a globalized era. Thanks to the adaptability and fluidity of rap
music, Aboriginal youth have been able to express themselves according to new aesthetics, paving
the way to new cultural trajectories that challenge static notions of ‘Aboriginality’ and authenticity,
and carry on their ancestors’ cultural heritage. This brief overview on strategies of Indigenous
cultural reconfigurations through Hip Hop provides tangible examples of the Indigenous presence
and involvement in the Australian territory and public sphere, thus implying that plans of urban
sustainability cannot be conceived without consulting the Indigenous counterpart.
81
References
Agyeman, JR, Bullard, R & Evans, B 2002, ‘Exploring the nexus: bringing together sustainability,
environmental justice and equity’, Space and Polity, 6(1), pp. 77–90.
Agyeman, JR, Bullard, R & Evans, B (eds) 2003, Just sustainabilities: Development in an unequal
world, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
Bennett, A 2001, Cultures of popular music, Open University Press, Buckingham, Philadelphia.
Cardinal, N 2006, ‘The exclusive city: Identifying, measuring, and drawing attention to Aboriginal and
Indigenous experiences in an urban context’, Cities, 23(3), pp. 217–28.
Clunies Ross, M 1987, ‘Research into Aboriginal songs: the state of the art’, in Clunies Ross et al.
(eds): pp. 1–13.
Clunies Ross, M 1986, ‘Australian Aboriginal Oral Traditions’, Oral Tradition, 1(2), pp. 231–71.
Clunies Ross, M, Donaldson, T & Wild, S A (eds), Songs of Aboriginal Australia, University of Sydney,
Sydney.
Gadigal Radio/Information 2011, The Last Kinection interviewed, 8 November, Koori Radio
93.7fm, Surry Hills, NSW, viewed 8 November 2011, <http://www.gadigal.org.au/KooriRadio/
ProgramDetails.aspx?Id=2>
Moorehead, A 1987 (rev. edn) [1986], The fatal impact: The invasion of the South Pacific 1767–
1840, Hamish Hamilton, London.
Rigney, LI 2006, ‘Indigenous Australian views on knowledge production and Indigenist Research’,
in Kunnie, JE & Goduka, NI (eds), Indigenous peoples’ wisdom and power: Affirming our knowledge
through narratives, Ashgate Publishing Limited, Hampshire, UK and Burlington, USA: pp. 32–49.
Schnarch, B 2004, ‘Ownership, control, access, and possession (OCAP) or self-determination
applied to research, a critical analysis of contemporary First Nations research and some options for
First Nations communities’, Journal of Aboriginal Health, 1(1), pp. 80–95.
Stewart, K 2006, ‘Designing good urban governance indicators: The importance of citizen
participation and its evaluation in Greater Vancouver’, Cities, 23(3), pp. 196–204.
Sutton, P 1987, ‘Mystery and change’, in Clunies Ross et al. (eds), pp.77–96.
Tauli-Corpuz, V 2005, Indigenous peoples and the Millennium Development Goals, Tebtebba,
Baguio City.
TLK, 2008, ‘Worth marching for’, Nutches, The Last Kinection, Shock Records, Kew, Victoria.
Ulluwishewa, R 1993, ‘Indigenous knowledge, national IK resource centres and sustainable
development’, Indigenous Knowledge and Development Monitor, 1(3), pp. 11–13.
Wall D & Masayesva, V 2004, ‘People of the corn: Teachings in Hopi traditional agriculture,
spirituality, and sustainability’, American Indian Quarterly, 28(3&4), pp. 435–53.
Wild, SA 1987, ‘Recreating the Jukurrpa: Adaptation and innovation of songs and ceremonies in
Walpiri society’, in Clunies Ross et al. (eds), pp. 97–120.
WCED, 1987, Our common future, World Commission of Environment and Development, Oxford,
Oxford University Press.
YW, 2012a, ‘Black deaths in custody’, Standing Strong, Yung Warriors, Payback Records,
Melbourne.
YW, 2012b, ‘Hold on’, Standing Strong, Yung Warriors, Payback Records, Melbourne.
The Healthy City
Cecily Maller
The notion of the ‘healthy city’ is not a new idea. Power and politics aside, from their emergence,
both eastern and western civilisations designed and built cities to service basic human requirements
of shelter, water, food and culture—all of which, arguably, improved the lives and health of many.
The history of public health has been closely tied to the conception of the healthy city. It was
in the mid-nineteenth century, at a time of rapid city-based industrialization, that the first public
health movement was established (Ashton et al. 1986; Petersen & Lupton 1996). However, the
term ‘healthy city’ was not coined until the mid-1980s. Although it is not easy to pinpoint the
exact moment of its first use, it was largely popularized through what has been called by some
the ‘international healthy cities movement’, initially discussed in 1984 at the Healthy Toronto
2000: Beyond Health Care international public health symposium organized by the World Health
Organization (WHO) (Ashton et al. 1986; Duhl & Hancock 1997). Evermore popular in discussions
of the global city, ‘the healthy city’ concept is now used widely with little critique or reflection. This
essay reviews the origins and definitions of ‘the healthy city’ and highlights some key criticisms. It
aims to prompt further discussion and potential redefinition of this increasingly applied, yet potentially
watered-down, ideal.
At the time of Healthy Toronto 2000 there was growing recognition of the impact of urban design
and city living conditions on health outcomes (Kenzer 1999). Furthermore, it was recognized that
better public health policies were needed to avoid ‘victim-blaming lifestyle approaches to health
promotion’, which had become common in many countries (Ashton et al. 1986, p. 319). In 1986,
the first international conference on health promotion was held in Ottawa, Canada, which culminated
in the signing of the Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion (WHO 1986). In health promotion, ‘health’
is seen as a resource for everyday life, not the objective of living or simply the absence of disease.
The Ottawa Charter was designed to instigate action required to achieve health for all by the year
2000 (Baum et al. 2006) and advocated that health promotion is not only the responsibility of the
health sector but also encompasses all sectors of society (WHO 2012a). The prerequisite conditions
for health listed in the charter include peace, shelter, education, food, income, a stable eco-system,
sustainable resources, social justice and equity (WHO 2012a).
WHO’s Regional Office for Europe launched the Healthy Cities Programme1 in 1986 with the
participation of 10–12 European cities as signatories (Ashton et al. 1986; Duhl & Hancock 1997).
It was to be a long-term development project, ‘to place health on the agenda of cities around the
world, and to build a constituency of support for public health at the local level’ (WHO 1998, p. 13).
Importantly, processes, not outcomes, have defined healthy cities. WHO (2012b) defines a ‘healthy
city’ as ‘one that continually creates and improves its physical and social environments and expands
the community resources that enable people to mutually support each other in performing all the
functions of life and developing to their maximum potential’.
Since then, the Healthy Cities Programme has grown to include thousands of cities worldwide and
the scope has expanded such that ‘Healthy “Cities”’ now include islands, villages, communities,
towns, municipalities, cities and megacities. Aside from formal signatories to the WHO programme,
various individuals, institutions and networks have adopted the WHO idea of Healthy Cities and
the concept has influenced or instigated many other related initiatives (Kenzer 1999). Due to this
wider influence, it is often referred to as the Healthy Cities ‘movement’ rather than the Healthy Cities
‘programme’ (Kenzer 1999, p. 201), although its claims to be a social movement have been called
into question because it operates ‘within a bureaucratic logic that stresses consensual, incremental
change’ (Baum 1993, p. 32).
Much of the definition of the modern conception of the healthy city can be attributed to Leonard
Duhl and Trevor Hancock (1997) who were involved at the start of the Healthy Cities Programme.
1 Throughout this article capitalization is used to distinguish the WHO Healthy Cities Programme and formal Healthy Cities
Projects from more generic usage of the term ‘the healthy city’.
82
83
Duhl (1986) has likened cities to organisms or ecosystems as a way of emphasizing the interaction
and interdependence between the various parts, and their potential for self-regulation and
adaptation to maximise functionality. However, this view of cities has been criticised as mechanistic,
with no acknowledgement of conflict, social inequality or power (Petersen & Lupton 1996). Defining
cities and other social arrangements as organic implies they are in some way ‘natural’, which can
mean inequalities between men and women, classes and different ethnic and cultural groups
are justified or ignored (Petersen & Lupton 1996). In contrast, advocates of the Healthy Cities
Programme argue that a healthy city functions to reduce inequalities, distribute power and create
health for all. This outcome is to be achieved through dynamic processes and relationships between
citizens and governments and collective action from all sectors working together for a common
purpose (Duhl & Hancock 1997).
these cities was Noarlunga, an outer suburban area of Adelaide, South Australia with a population,
in 1988, of 77,000 (Baum et al. 2006). ‘Healthy Cities Noarlunga’ (HCN) was based in the Noarlunga
Health Services, a new primary health-care service integrated with a new community hospital funded
by the South Australian State Government. Following the steps set by WHO for establishing a
Healthy City, HCN established a reference committee as well as a management committee, which
comprised of senior agency staff and community and organizational representatives from various
sectors. Drawing on a needs assessment and community consultation, a vision for the project was
established and was put into action through a series of initiatives. Three of those initiatives were the
Noarlunga Towards a Safe Community Programme, the Noarlunga Community Action on Drugs,
and the Onkaparinga Collaborative Approach for the Prevention of Domestic Violence. To determine
its effectiveness, HCN was subject to evaluation.
A related criticism is that conceiving a city as an organism with a particular state of health leads to
its ‘medicalization’ and subsequent reliance on specialist knowledge to make it more functional
or adaptive as a whole (Petersen & Lupton 1996). Relying on specialist knowledge is also said to
reinforce a ‘techno-rational and instrumentalist orientation of ecological and social systems’, with
faith placed in the ability of science to define, resolve, manage and ultimately control populations and
associated social problems (Petersen & Lupton 1996, pp 125–26).
Healthy Cities Projects are not suitable for conventional evaluations based on traditional medical
techniques, such as randomized controlled trials. Instead, WHO (2000) recommends a range of
alternative methods from epidemiology and social sciences, which account for the complexity and
long-term nature of Healthy Cities Projects. One of these methods is the use of indicators. Indicators
are used to measure health and those factors that influence health. WHO (2000) considers both
qualitative and quantitative indicator data important for planning and evaluating a Healthy Cities
Project. There is no standard set of indicators recommended for evaluation; each project is expected
to determine its own set of indicators according to local circumstances and project priorities.
Other ways that populations can be controlled is through architecture and planning. Control of
urban populations through the design of cities, to segregate and hierarchically arrange space, and
the recording, monitoring and intervening in the public’s health can be traced back to the years
following the Enlightenment period (Foucault 1984a; Lupton 1995). In the nineteenth century urban
environments were perceived as a threat to health due to the high incidence of disease and the
potential for revolution (Lupton 1995; Petersen & Lupton 1996). This narrative was prompted by
cholera epidemics (1830–80) and a series of urban revolts in Europe (Foucault 1984b). Governments
came under pressure to instigate social and health reforms through economic-rationalist techniques,
including limited state involvement, planning, the application of science and professional knowledge
to problems and education of the population (Lupton 1995; Petersen & Lupton 1996). From these
beginnings the means to achieve ‘a healthy city’ were based on the idea that the health of the city
organism could be achieved through design and rational administration (Petersen & Lupton 1996).
Beyond these early conceptions, the popularity and widespread nature of the WHO Healthy
Cities Programme has meant that the forms, processes and definitions of what now constitutes
‘a healthy city’ are widely interpreted and applied—from cities to islands, and from programmes
to conferences. This diversity has led some to caution that the Healthy Cities Programme may be
a victim of its own success and that ‘eagerness to sell the concept has led to a tendency to see
Healthy Cities as anything the customer wants … so long as they call it “Healthy Cities”’ (Baum
1993, p. 32). However, WHO has produced several procedural guidelines for developing a Healthy
Cities project, drawing on experiences from different parts of the world. Although there is no
universal model applicable to all cases, there are a number of common steps spread across three
key phases: ‘getting started, getting organized, [and] taking action’ (WHO 2000; Baum et al. 2006,
p. 260).
The first phase involves raising awareness and establishing an inter-sectoral task force including local
government; the second phase is essentially preparing the elements necessary to do the project,
developing an organizational structure for the task force and culminating in a plan of action; the
third phase is to implement the plan and establish the project (WHO 2000). More revealing are the
‘key features’ of a Healthy Cities Project which are said to include: high level political commitment;
periodic monitoring and evaluation; participatory research and analyses; information sharing;
involvement of the media; incorporation of views from all groups within the community; mechanisms
for sustainability; and national and international networking (WHO 2000). Furthermore, two widely
held assumptions that underpin the ideal of a Healthy Cities Project are ‘equity between inhabitants’
and recognition that ‘individual health is dependent on the quality of the environment’ (Baum 1993,
p. 32).
Baum et al. (2006) reports that when the WHO Healthy Cities Programme was launched in Europe,
the Australian Government funded three cities in Australia to join the Programme as a pilot. One of
84
The pilot phase for HCN ran for 3 years (1987–89) followed by a funded network project (1990–92)
and both were evaluated. In 2005, HCN had initiated 25 projects, and had plans for more. Due to
local government changes, in 2008 HCN became ‘Healthy Cities Onkaparinga’ (HCO). In 2012,
HCO celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary. Recognizing that it is difficult to demonstrate a direct
causal link between a Healthy Cities Project and health outcomes, the project’s sustainability was the
focus of an evaluation conducted in 1993. The evaluators reported that Noarlunga’s Healthy Cities
project relied on nine key drivers:
(i) Social health vision; (ii) Leadership; (iii) Model adapted to local conditions; (iv) Juggling
competing demands; (v) Strongly supported community involvement; (vi) Recognized as
‘neutral gameboard’ [having bi-partisan support]; (vii) University links and research focus; (viii)
International links and WHO leadership; (ix) Transition from project to approach.
(Baum et al. 2006, p. 261)
Overall, the evaluators found that the project had had strong support from community members,
local politicians and services, and that intersectoral collaboration had become ‘a taken-for-granted
mode of operation’ in the city (Baum et al. 2006, p. 264). Furthermore, although no direct health
outcomes could be attributed to the project, indirect and long-lasting benefits were reported by
the community, such as, having access to safer environments (e.g. the restoration of the local river
estuary) and positive social outcomes from increased support networks.
In the twenty-first century, the quest for ‘the healthy city’ has never been more popular. In Australia,
conferences broadly titled ‘healthy cities’ began in the early 1990s and, despite waning for a few
years, re-emerged in the ‘Healthy Cities: Making Cities Liveable’ conference, which has been held
annually since 2008. These conferences aim to bring together delegates from government, industry
and research to discuss causes, effects and solutions that relate to the creation of ‘the healthy city’.
To sum up, despite its versatility and widespread use, current understandings of ‘the healthy city’
can generally be attributed to the WHO Healthy Cities Programme. Although a large number of
cities and other types of social configurations where people live together have formally signed up
to this global initiative, the term ‘healthy city’ has, arguably, also developed a currency of its own.
As a result ‘the healthy city’ may be in danger of becoming a meaningless catch-cry for any effort
attempting to rectify urban ills. However, its widespread saliency also represents an opportunity to
redefine or reclaim anew the healthy city concept so that the idea of ‘the city’ could be reinvented
or more creatively conceptualized. Indeed, some time ago, Baum (1993, p. 38) indicated that, in
order to achieve the aims of the Ottawa Charter, the outcomes and processes necessary to bring
about the healthy city would require ‘far-reaching changes’ challenging the ‘economic rationalism,
individualism and professionalism’ that, however, still dominate city agendas.
85
Ashton, J, Grey, P & Barnard, K 1986, ‘Healthy cities—WHO’s new public health initiative’, Health
Promotion International, 1(3), pp. 319–24.
Learning-City Regions, or City-Regional
Learning
Baum, F 1993, ‘Healthy cities and change: Social movement or bureaucratic tool?’, Health
Promotion International, 8(1), pp. 31–40.
Bruce Wilson
References
Baum, F, Jolley, G, Hicks, R, Saint, K & Parker, S 2006, ‘What makes for sustainable healthy cities
initiatives?—a review of the evidence from Noarlunga, Australia after 18 years’, Health Promotion
International, 21(4), pp. 259–265.
Duhl, L 1986, ‘The healthy city: Its function and its future’, Health Promotion, 1(1), pp. 55–60.
Duhl, L & Hancock, T 1997, ‘Industrialized countries: Healthy cities, healthy children’, in The
progress of nations, UNICEF, Geneva: pp. 59–61.
Foucault, M 1984a, ‘The politics of health in the eighteenth century’, in P Rabinow (ed.), Foucault
Reader, Pantheon Books, New York City: pp. 273–89.
Foucault 1984b, ‘Space, knowledge and power’, in P Rabinow (ed.), Foucault reader, Pantheon
Books, New York: pp. 239–56.
Kenzer, M 1999, ‘Healthy cities: A guide to the literature’, Environment and Urbanization, 11(1), pp.
201–220.
Lupton, D 1995, The imperative of health: Public health and the regulated body, Sage, London.
Petersen, A & Lupton, D 1996, The new public health: Health and self in the age of risk, Sage
WHO 2012a, The Ottawa charter for health promotion, World Health Organization, viewed 1 August
2012, at <http://www.who.int/healthpromotion/conferences/previous/ottawa/en/>.
WHO 2012b, What is a healthy city, World Health Organization Europe, viewed 9 August 2012
at <http://www.euro.who.int/en/what-we-do/health-topics/environment-and-health/urban-health/
activities/healthy-cities/who-european-healthy-cities-network/what-is-a-healthy-city>.
WHO 2000, Regional guidelines for developing a Healthy Cities project, World Health Organization
Regional Office for the Western Pacific, Manila.
WHO 1998, Health promotion glossary, World Health Organization, Geneva.
WHO 1986, Ottawa charter for health promotion, World Health Organization, Health and Welfare
Canada, Canadian Public Health Association, Ottawa.
Learning cities, learning regions, learning towns, learning communities—sometimes linked with
knowledge cities and regions—are all concepts, perhaps best regarded as programs, which
can be found in policies and programs across the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development (OECD) countries over the past two decades. In an economic and social environment
in which new information and communications technologies have become more and more
pervasive, debates about the importance of lifelong learning have evolved in recognition that growth
in human capital and skills application is critical to maximizing the capability of cities and regions to
participate in the new economic environment.
Castells (1997) understood the importance of lifelong learning as a result of the distinctive character
of the role of knowledge in this era. He argued that information assumes extra significance because
it ‘mobilizes the generation of new knowledge as the key source of productivity through its impact on
the other elements of the production process and on their relationships’ (Castells 1989, p. 10). This
is demonstrated through the way in which diverse new technologies become integrated and rapidly
diffused, themselves dependent on the recent advances in the ability to store, retrieve, analyse and
communicate information.
While focused initially in individual learning and the capacity of cities and regions to support both
formal and informal learning, the language of learning has extended to encompass various forms
of collective learning. While the role of universities has been the key thread in these discussions,
much of the attention has focused on the roles of city and regional authorities in promoting policies,
networks and programs to support informal learning.
Both the European Union (EU) and the OECD have committed major resources to trialling various
kinds of projects designed to understand the meaning of ‘learning’ city-regions, and their potential
to contribute to economic, social and environment development. The OECD (2012) has conducted
three iterations of its ‘Higher education in regional and city development’ project.
The EU, in turn, has sponsored a series of projects such as TELS (Towards a European Learning
Society, 1998–2001), PALLACE (Promoting Active Lifelong Learning Links between Australia,
Canada, China and Europe, 2003–05) and LILARA (Learning in Local and Regional Authorities,
2005–07), each of them exploring how inter-organizational and individual learning occurs, and
trying to understand the kinds of leadership, infrastructure and resources necessary to deliver the
anticipated benefits.
Norman Longworth (2006, p. 23), a key driver in much of this work, has captured the essence of the
approach in this observation:
The learning region goes beyond its statutory duty to provide education, and training for those
who require it, and instead creates a vibrant, participative, culturally aware and economically
buoyant human environment through the provision / justification and active promotion of
learning opportunities to enhance the potential of all its citizens.
Longworth and Mike Osborne (2007, p. 243) have summarized the importance of leadership from
key local and regional authorities:
Placing learning at the forefront of a city’s or region’s strategies and policies can engender
a qualitative progression, but it entails much more than adjusting educational opportunities.
Learning should pervade every aspect of local and regional government practice using the
lifelong learning tools and techniques that help to stimulate people to develop their own
potential to the full.
National and state governments have been instrumental in linking initiatives to promote informal and
86
87
public learning with place. Victoria initiated its ‘Learning Towns’ initiative, while the UK Government’s
Department of Education and Skills hosted a network of learning towns and cities. Perhaps the
most significant initiative at this level has been the German Government, which launched its program
on ‘Learning Regions—Providing Support for Networks’ in 2001. It aimed to facilitate structural
progress in lifelong learning networks.
However, progress has been uneven, and while new initiatives appear constantly, others fade away.
Many of the more than 50 cities and regions that identified as ‘learning’ in 1998 no longer continue
their activities in this field, nor do they use this language. At the same time, continuing interest in
the importance of knowledge and application of learning drives new initiatives. Much of this work
has focused on the application of new technologies themselves in pursuit of solving major urban
and regional problems. In Europe in particular, the concept of ‘smart’ cities has become more
common. Most recently, their ‘Initiative on Smart Cities’ is aiming at using new technologies to better
implement more efficient energy and transport systems. Lim (2010) proposes more thought about
how agricultural practices can be reintroduced to urban environments.
The various threads in perspective on learning processes and place have been brought together
recently by Tim Campbell. Drawing on a range of case studies Campbell (2012) has brought
together much of thinking about learning in an organizational, city and regional context. He draws
the clear conclusion that cities where collective learning occurs effectively benefit from a planned
institutional approach that supports collaborative spaces and networks. He explores varying learning
styles that have been developed in different cities, and how they have emerged under specific
conditions. He concludes that while new technologies are deeply enabling in terms of their capacity
to understand city-region processes, effective city-regional learning depends on a social milieu that
facilitates cross-sectoral networking and collaboration:
One of the chief aims of this book is to bring this learning side of urban development into
the open... Proactive learning cities have a much thicker and better-connected institutional
character. Gathering and managing new knowledge in this way is an important aspect of urban
development which has been largely overlooked.
(Campbell 2012, p. 183)
The UNECSO Institute for Lifelong Learning (UIL) aims to launch a global network of ‘learning cities’
in Beijing in October 2013. It is supported in this by the PASCAL International Exchange (PIE) project
(see <http://pie.pascalobservatory.org>), which aims to link cities and communities with a specific
mission to lifelong learning and innovative learning processes. Fourteen cities, from Africa and Asia,
as well as Europe and Canada have shared ‘stimulus papers’ which outline each city’s approach
to being a learning city, and indicates the challenges which they are facing. A series of discussion
papers explores various themes arising from the stimulus papers.
Issues or further Work
Much of the writing on place and collective learning reflects diverse if not confused approaches.
Furthermore, there is something of a gap between policy initiatives, which are undertaken in relation
to formal educational activities (investment in vocational skills formation, for example), and the
learning initiatives that are emphasized in relation to industrial clusters and regional development, let
alone community networks.
to contribute to improved economic or social outcomes. While there is recognition that knowledge
transfer and application is critical to the innovation process, and that there can be an important
spatial, regional context for this, both policy and resource allocation continue to give priority to
programs which focus on specific constituencies and narrow agendas, rather than bringing
collective learning to the fore. While the discussion about learning and innovation often presumes an
industrial or otherwise competitive context, it is applicable also to community settings.
Similarly, the notion of place itself generates ambiguity. While there is widespread recognition,
particularly through the research on industrial clusters (Silicon Valley being the most famous), that
proximity has significant implications for collaborative action and collective learning, understanding
about the processes themselves remains wrapped in an extensive series of case studies rather than
well-elaborated theory. Place matters, is the main conclusion. Yet, as was listed at the beginning of
this essay, place might be conceptualized as learning community, town, city, region or city-region.
Are the collective learning processes similar, irrespective of the scale of place? How does cityregional learning differ from rural regional learning? These questions remain to be explored more fully.
In either context, the evidence suggests that local government, either alone or with others, can be
very important in supporting regionally-based networks of organizations and residents who share
interests in a particular issue or sector. Networks do not form easily, and can be very demanding
of time and resources. Across quite different kinds of political settings, local government can
make a significant contribution to the viability of networking, to supporting its contribution to policy
development, and to facilitating grounded action to implement new initiatives, including sponsoring
new innovations. Given the importance of place, the emphasis on informal learning, the associated
relationships and the less formal aspects of networks, there is more to be done to explore the role of
local government and its potential importance.
References
Campbell, T 2012, Beyond smart cities: How cities network, learn and innovate, Earthscan, London.
Castells, M 1997, The rise of the network society, Blackwell, Oxford.
Castells, M1989, The informational city: Information technology, economic restructuring and the
urban-regional process, Blackwell, Oxford.
Lim, CJ 2010, Smartcities and eco-warriors, Routledge, New York City.
Longworth, N 2006, Learning cities, learning regions, learning communities—lifelong learning and
local government, Taylor and Francis, London.
Longworth, N & Osborne, M (eds) 2007, Perspectives on learning cities and regions: policy, practice
and participation, NIACE, London.
OECD 2012, Higher education in regional and city development, Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, viewed 20 September 2012 at <http://www.oecd.org/edu/imhe/higher
educationinregionalandcitydevelopment.htm>
This reflects also some ambiguity in the language of ‘learning’, in the different kinds of knowledge
and practice that are emphasized, and in the relationships amongst formal institutions and
enterprises and communities which aspire to build city-regional learning. Castells’ insights continue
to be important in making sense of this: knowledge takes on extra significance because of its role
in generating new knowledge which has impact not only on productivity, but also on the renewal
and elaboration of the production, service and governance processes themselves. How is this
kind of knowledge best conceptualized and understood? One of the difficulties is that this kind of
knowledge is ‘abstract’ and can be difficult to recognize without systematic reflection and analysis.
Policy-makers have demonstrated relatively little understanding of or support for collective learning,
or of the processes through which learning is entwined with innovation and can be seen genuinely
88
89
Communicating Sustainability in the City
or rational choice model of agency to assume that rationalities are not underpinned by a universal
and singular rationality or reason, and thus foregrounds the importance of the discursive means
available to actors (Hindess 1989).
Cathy Greenfield
Starting from people’s material discursive resources and their sense-making activity around
sustainability in the city is somewhat different from tackling a ‘communications problem’ in the sense
of getting a message through. One starts with the conditions of those messages. Communication,
as sense-making and constitutive, is as much about the formation of interests, problems and
policies as informing audiences about them. This perspective pays more attention to the materiality
and weight of the cultural practices and inscriptions within which certain forms of behaviour are
made to make sense, be thinkable or unthinkable.
What exactly is at stake in communicating sustainability in the city? Are we describing all the
ways sustainability is communicated to urban populations? Are we preparing a typology of
representational forms that deal with a socially and politically urgent concern? Or, are we confronting
a ‘communications problem’ that demands a communications solution and a consultant to deliver
it? The latter seems the obvious way to approach ‘communicating sustainability’. Surely we need
tools to change people’s behaviour, our practices, given that finding a way to sustainable futures
relies on the Local Governments for Sustainability (ICLEI 2011, p. 1) goals of increasing resourceefficiency, becoming bio-diverse cities, moving towards climate neutrality, creating resilient
communities, greening the infrastructure, transitioning to green urban economies, and establishing
healthy and happy communities.
Seen this way, as a ‘communications problem’, communicating sustainability routinely revolves
around a concept of communication as the instrumental provision of information to achieve an
immediate change in the behaviour of individuals. Certain assumptions underpin this approach:
that communication can be equated with information—what Latour (2003, p. 146), referring to the
ubiquity of an information technology framework, has called ‘double click communication’—that
people are best understood as rational autonomous individuals, and that change is what happens
immediately or in the short-term and at the individual level.
Within communication scholarship the limitations of these assumptions are well established,
especially in the criticism of the media effects tradition. Nevertheless, Australian government bodies
and solar energy companies, for instance, routinely use this information-deficit model, with its
abstracted, normative individual, to frame people as consumers of fossil fuel generated electricity.
Government and business people think that, if individuals are provided with information about
climate change and coal-fired power stations, then they will stop buying such products or services
that contribute to carbon emissions, thereby producing a market signal for change. When, as
is routinely the case, information does not produce the desired behaviour change such failure is
generally interpreted in psychological terms as meaning that individuals are irrational. Thus, the writer
of very successful material for UNEP (2005, p. 13), the UK-based sustainability communications
agency Futura, lists the notion of the rational individual as one of a number of myths about
communicating sustainability. Replacing this misconception with the insights of psychology and
marketing, they cite emotional engagement and relationship building, which have been developed by
branding experts, as the more effective tactics for sustainability communication aimed at behaviour
change.
Communication expert Futerra’s caution against starting with the notion of rational individuals is
welcome, much as behavioural economics’ challenge to orthodox economics homo economicus—
the very same rational, autonomous individual—is welcome, not least because of its implication in
the so-called ‘tragedy of the commons’. But, just as behavioural economics revises rather than
necessarily breaks with orthodox economics and its objective of exponential growth, acknowledging
the more complex psychology of the targets of sustainability communications may be useful in
improving the effectiveness of communication campaigns without removing the risk of locating
change primarily at the level of an individual and their social interactions.
There are, however, broader social, political and cultural ways to rethink the assumptions of inherent
rationality. These ways characterize a different kind of approach to communicating sustainability
that is concerned with socially and historically formed rationalities—plural, different, overlapping
or contesting rationalities—used by people to make sense of their everyday realities. Using the
rationalities, rhetorical or discursive resources available to them, people assess their situations,
formulate their interests, take decisions and, depending on the forms of action available to them,
conduct themselves in particular ways and not in others. The terminology here is not crucial and
could include ‘framing’; the particularity of a rationalities approach is that it breaks with the portfolio
90
Cottle (2009, pp. 506–7), for instance, has considered the use of a visual environmental rhetoric
across the news landscape: images of the globe connoting a shared planet and ‘visually arresting
images’ of the ‘full force and threat’ of global warming, through which ‘the abstract science of
climate change is rendered culturally meaningful and environmentally consequential; geographically
remote spaces become literally perceptible, “knowable”, places of possible concern’. Such globalist
visual rhetoric may provide counter resources for the formation of a cosmopolitan citizenship, though
it competes with the entrenched national pull of news reporting (Cottle 2009, p. 509).
For a longer view of how contemporary news imagery—an apparently aesthetic concern, perhaps
‘infotainment’ driven and diminishing of more salient rational argumentation—can be consequential,
we look to an earlier scholar’s concern with how sustainability has been communicated. Writing in
a pamphlet for the Socialist Environmental and Resources Association in 1982, the Welsh historian
of communication and culture Raymond Williams noted how, from the middle of the nineteenth
century, the socialist response to the ecological challenge of industrial capitalism was stymied by
a reductive assumption underpinned by a pervasive metaphor. The reduction was that ‘the central
problem of modern society was poverty, and that the solution to poverty was production, and
more production’ (Williams 1982, p. 6), and the metaphor of conquest was communicated in the
ubiquitous phrases ‘conquest of nature’ and ‘mastery of nature’. These attitudes were associated
‘not just with mastering the earth, or natural substances, or making water do what you wanted, but
with pushing other people around, with going wherever there were things which you wanted, and
subjugating and conquering’ (Williams 1982, p. 7). The result was a disposition towards intensified
industrial production as a generalized ‘good’, and towards conquest, very much alive in policy
solutions to the world’s ecological problems.
Rationalities involved in communicating sustainability have been identified by: scholars concerned
with regulatory reform in Finland (Sairinen); media representations of climate change in the public
sphere in Europe, Britain and the USA (Carvalho 2005; Carvalho & Burgess 2005); and the
handling of sustainability issues throughout the 2007 Australian Federal election campaign and
its role in an ongoing education of populations around sustainability (Greenfield & Williams 2008).
These ‘ecological rationalities’ are the sets of assumptions and techniques entailed in ecological
governing—formulating, implementing and assessing environmental policy and forming the conduct
and capacities of populations connected to the resources, problems and concerns addressed by
such policy.
Sairinen distinguishes between the governmental rationalities of ecological modernization and
free-market environmentalism. What is implied by ‘sustainability’ varies between them. Freemarket environmentalism is characterized by policy instruments inhibiting the ‘“market efficient
behaviour” of economic actors as little as possible’ and is geared to the ‘optimal levels’ of resource
allocation or of pollution reduction that consumers agree to pay when ‘the full costs of negative
externalities are reflected in market price’ (Sairinen n.d., p. 2). In other words, the rationality of freemarket environmentalism deals with environmental problems using a wholly economically defined
sustainability. Ecological modernization, a rationality in which market dynamics are also the preferred
means to address ecological problems, proposes ‘win-win’ solutions where environmental problems
are converted into economic opportunities and delivered by techno-scientific solutions (Carvalho
2005, pp. 9–10).
91
Examples appeared in the lengthy 2007 Australian Federal election campaign, when the then Prime
Minister John Howard (2007) presented himself as a ‘climate change realist’, enunciated free-market
environmentalism. He used his Australia Day speech and the government’s ten point plan for the
Murray-Darling Basin to inscribe the notion of ‘water security’ in terms of the problem of ‘some
changes in the weather’, Australia’s climate since ‘time immemorial’, and over-allocation of water
by parochial Australian Labor Party (ALP) state and territory governments. In terms of solutions,
he stressed the need for ‘strong efficient markets’, ‘competitiveness’, ‘prudent investment’, and
‘sensible pricing’ as distinct from interventionist water restrictions.
In contrast, the then Shadow Minister for the Environment Peter Garrett enunciated a ‘left’
position within ecological modernization, insistent on the interconnectedness and paired goals
of economy and ecology but able to name sustaining the environment as a goal in its own right.
Meanwhile, Howard’s Minister for Environment and Water Resources, Malcolm Turnbull, straddled
both a ‘centre-right’ position within ecological modernization and a free-market environmentalist
position, with economic priorities uppermost and environmental problems translated into security
issues. Greenfield & Williams (2008) portray Turnbull’s security-based position as real, and really
acknowledged, but requiring attention through market mechanisms and technological solutions for
the purpose of safeguarding the Australian economy.
In their heavily reported speeches and media appearances, these three politicians repeated these
ecological rationalities for diverse audiences, relayed through the attendant journalism, cartoons, and
editorializing, stretching from the op-ed pages of the serious press to the studio banter of breakfast
television and FM radio.
A third rationality, a low-growth ecological sustainability adopting broad ecological and social
priorities, was iterated through the same period by leaders and spokespeople from the Australian
Greens, the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF), the Climate Institute, and Greenpeace. This
rationality was mainly evident in media presentations and coverage of the campaign, as well as in
the Coalition’s tactics of trying to paint Shadow Minister Garrett as either a fanatic or a hypocrite,
obliquely in a ‘deep green’ or ‘watermelon green’ spectre, or probing for a story angle around threats
to the jobs of traditional ALP constituents, such as coal miners. Garrett’s previous role as President
of the ACF made the sincerity with which he could adopt ecological modernization a point of
scrutiny.
Throughout 2007 these ecological rationalities were emphatically and consistently ascribed
newsworthiness, density of media relay and repetition. This constituted an opportunity for forming
public knowledge about sustainability along the lines of the various rationalities in constant play.
In 2012 the apparent success of a virulent anti-carbon tax campaign speaks of a free-market
environmentalism as a familiar rationality, easy to mobilize and make sense of the only kind of
change to current arrangements that will be countenanced—change of the most limited kind and
with limited commitment to environmental priorities. But this free-market environmental rationality
doesn’t hold the floor alone. It is constantly ‘answering back’ to ecological modernization,
while the consensual, integrative nature of ecological modernization and its ‘win-win’ rhetoric
sees it displace more radical environmental discourses and mobilizations, such as low-growth
ecological sustainability (Carvalho 2005, p. 10). The communicating sustainability field is marked
by such contesting rationalities, including climate change denial. The more specific messages
of communication campaigns around sustainability issues need to be located within these
contestations to guard against the tactical mistake of assuming that what ‘sustainability’ means is a
settled matter.
One other instance of communicating sustainability to urban populations completes this brief
consideration of some of the different activities and thinking contributing to communicating
sustainability in the city. The Australian researcher and artist Paul Carter (n.d.) has written about
the ‘great democratic resource [that] public space offers’ and devised an explicit strategy of
communication that ‘renders human … terrifying facts and transforms them into sources of
collective energy and civic purpose’. His plan for a sculpture, Hamlet’s Mill, described in Potter and
Ostler (2008) would help bring into being a public for sustainability. Two floats or buoys would ride
the waters of the Thames, deriving data from local, regional and global sea level change monitoring
92
agencies. The sculpture would, thereby, provide a visualization of scientific data, complemented by
an interactive web site for exchange of information and views about climate change.
Even though it appears never to have been brought to fruition, what is notable about this design,
is its strategy for helping the formation of a public, rather than privatized, agency. While addressing
individuals, it proposes an orientation of those individuals to public matters, rather than to simply
privatized, domestic consumer or lifestyle concerns. At the same time, rather than presenting climate
change as something ‘out there’, in a separate natural world, to be represented to us, rising sea
levels of warming oceans are shown as matters of concern in which we are already entangled.
Forming communities of concern through public art or particular uses of social media can cut
across a predominant privatizing of responsibility for climate change (MacTier 2008). What might
be communicated in its stead is what Amin (2005, p. 629) referred to as a renewed sense of a
‘society of commitments and connections’, appropriate for a large, rather than straitened, sense of
sustainability.
References
Amin, A 2005, ‘Local community on trial’, Economy & Society, 34(4), pp. 612–33.
Carter, P n.d. ‘Hamlet’s mill: To be or to become—Measuring climate change in London’, viewed 31
July 2012 at <http://www.hamletsmill.info/>.
Carvalho, A 2005, ‘“Governmentality” of climate change and the public sphere’, in Scientific Proofs
and International Justice: the Future for Scientific Standards in Global Environmental Protection and
International Trade, Braga, Nucleo de Estudos em Sociologia, Universidade do Minhho, Portugal,
viewed 31 July 2012 at <https://repositorium.sdum.uminho.pt/handle/1822/3070>.
Carvalho, A & Burgess, J 2005, ‘Cultural circuits of climate change in UK broadsheet newspapers,
1985–2003’, Risk Analysis, 25(6), pp. 1457–69.
Cottle, S 2009, ‘Global crises in the news: Staging new wars, disasters and climate change’,
International Journal of Communication, 3, pp. 494–516.
Greenfield, C & Williams, P 2008, ‘Communicating sustainability: the limits and possibilities of
ecological campaigns in a federal election year’, Communication, Politics & Culture, 41(1), pp.
142–66.
Hindess, B 1989, Political choice & social structure: An analysis of actors, interests and rationality,
Edward Elgar, Aldershot.
Howard, J 2007, Australia Day speech, National Press Club, ABC TV, 25 January.
ICLEI (2011), ICLEI submission to RIO+20 Compilation Document for Zero draft, 31 October 2011,
viewed 31 July 2012 at <http://local2012.iclei.org/fileadmin/files/ICLEI_Submission_for_Rio_20_
Zero_Draft_20111031_01.pdf>.
Latour, B 2003, ‘What if we talked politics a little?’, Contemporary Political Theory, 2, pp.143–64.
MacTier, C. 2008, ‘Who online cares? Web 2.0, social capital and the self-responsibilisation of
environmental impact’, Communication, Politics & Culture, 41(1), pp. 99–113.
Potter, E. & Ostler, C 2008, ‘Communicating climate change: public responsiveness and matters of
concern’, Media International Australia, incorporating Culture & Policy, 127, pp. 116–26.
Sairinen, R n.d. [c.2000], ‘Environmental governmentality as a basis for regulatory reform: the
adaptation of new policy instruments in Finland’, viewed 12 January 2008 at <www.essex.ac.uk/
ecpr/events/jointsessions/paperarchive/grenoble/ws1/sairinen.pdf>.
UNEP, 2005, ‘Communicating sustainability: how to produce effective public campaigns’, viewed 29
July 2012 <http://www.futerra.co.uk/>.
Williams, R 1982, Socialism and ecology, SERA (Socialist Environment and Resources Association),
London.
93
Sustainable Urban Tourism
Chris Hudson
While the age of mass tourism began in the mid-nineteenth century with Thomas Cook’s first
inclusive ‘package tours’, the second half of the twentieth century saw a staggering growth in
international tourist activities (Urry 2007, p.14). In 1950 there were 25 million international arrivals; by
2010, this figure had grown to 940 million tourist arrivals worldwide (UNTWO 2012, p. 2). Travel and
tourism now constitute the largest industry in the world, generating some $6.4 trillion and indirectly
accounting for 8.7 per cent of the world employment and 10.3 per cent of world GDP (2007, p. 4).
With travel and tourism playing such a significant role in the everyday lives of those who travel for
work, education, business, medical tourism, asylum-seeking, immigration or leisure, it is no surprise
that so much theoretical attention has been paid to the question of mobilities. Sheller and Urry
(2006) and Urry (2007) have examined the growing volume of people in constant movement. For
them, ‘mobilities’ is the new paradigm for the social sciences, encompassing both the increasing
movement of social actors and a concomitant expansion in interconnections and new forms of
proximity of people with other people, and of people with places. One obvious consequence of this
is environmental impact and the threat to sustainable futures arising from increasing concentrations
of people in popular urban and rural destinations, and the forms of transport they use to get there.
Air pollution from transport emissions, pressure on resources, littering, damage to wildlife habitats,
aesthetic pollution and destruction of world heritage sites are just some of the myriad threats to
sustainability as a consequence of mass tourism.
Sustainable tourism began attracting serious interest from the 1980s. With the refocus on
sustainable development in fora such as the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, sustainable tourism emerged
as both a principle and an objective of the tourist business (Gössling et al. 2009, p. 3). Some
have argued that ‘sustainable tourism’ is an oxymoron, given the issues of peak oil (Disley 2012).
Moscardo (2008) takes the view that there is no such thing as sustainable tourism, only a number of
new ways of thinking about the role of tourism in sustainable development. ‘Tourism sustainability’
confounds easy definition and remains a contested term. While it is clear that sustainable tourism is
intimately linked to sustainable development, there appears to be no consensus about, nor definitive
description of, sustainable tourism. Butler (1999, p. 10) provides a table of definitions, the salient
feature of which is that tourism should sustain local economies without damaging the environment.
The terms ‘responsible’, ‘future’, ‘communities’, ‘economic activity’, ‘capacities for regeneration’,
‘protecting’ and ‘the environment’ figure in the definitions. In addition to these allusions to the
sustaining of local environments, tourism also wants to sustain itself. One definition of sustainable
tourism is: ‘tourism which is in a form which can maintain its viability in an area for an indefinite
period of time’ (Butler 1999, p. 29).
Harris et al. (2002, p. 7) point out that there is a dichotomy in thinking about sustainable tourism.
They ask if it should create the conditions in which tourism can flourish long term, or if it should be
directed towards becoming part of a strategy for sustainable development. Butler (1999, p. 19)
argues that the inability to define it is a key problem; while others see this flexibility as an advantage
if solutions to the problems of slums in Mumbai, Manila or Sao Paulo, for example, and issues
around the melting of the polar ice caps, may be predicated on the same assumptions (Gössling et
al., 2009, p. 3). Perhaps the most succinct and useful definition that encompasses the needs of the
economy and a sustainable future is that sustainable tourism encompasses the ‘management of all
resources in such a way that we can fulfil economic, social and aesthetic needs while maintaining
cultural integrity, essential ecological processes, biological diversity and life support systems’
(Murphy 1995, p. 279).
Sustainable tourism should be distinguished from ‘ecotourism’, which is broadly defined as
tourism that engages in a non-detrimental and responsible way with nature. It is commonly used
to describe tourism that focuses on wildlife, wilderness or anything that may be marketed as an
experience in which the tourist interacts with nature. The proliferation of adventure tours, jungle
94
treks, nature discovery tours such as the orangutan tours of Borneo, and so on, are an indication
that ecotourism is big business. Ecotourism is one area in which environmental sustainability and
private interests overlap. ‘Eco’ can be a powerful marketing tool. Websites and advertising material
use eco as a prefix to denote some indisputably positive value, and to make the consumers think
they are contributing to a serious effort to save the gorillas, the rainforests, the orangutans, and
even the planet. Given the increasing awareness of global warming and other detrimental effects
of development it is very much in the interests of tour operators to establish and maintain what is
now commonly known as the ‘triple bottom line,’ that is, a balance between profits, people and the
planet. It is difficult to avoid acknowledging the imperatives of key performance indicators and other
business drivers when it comes to applauding activities that help sustain the environment. Whatever
their overriding motives, it is clearly not in the interests of ecotourism operators to jeopardize their
livelihoods by damaging environments.
If ecotourism is about an embodied experience of nature, another, more prevalent form of interaction
with the tourist destination is visual consumption, now widely known as the ‘tourist gaze’ (Urry
1990). Urry (1992) has argued that the raising of an environmental consciousness and the growth
in tourism are both effects of the increased importance of visual consumption. Tourist practices,
especially in cities, can be examined in the context of the developments in the global economy,
which saw the shift from mass production to post-Fordist flexible production, and the transition
from mass consumption to specialized consumption. Some forms of urban tourism can be seen
as specialized in this way. They are often characterized by the dominance of non-material forms
of production, located in an economy of signs and space in which use value has been usurped
by symbolic value and the consumption of signs rather than material goods (Lash & Urry 1994).
Central to this is the aestheticization of everyday life (Featherstone 2007). In this economic regime,
the production and consumption of place through tourism practices is accompanied by the search
for symbolic values, such as ‘natural beauty’ and ‘sustainability’. One site where the imperatives
of sustainability can collaborate with the profit-driven demands of the tourist industry is in the
deployment of nature as aesthetic capital. A compelling example of this can be found in the
Singapore.
Over the last decades Singapore has evolved from a postcolonial labour-intensive industrial
economy to what is now widely acknowledged as a culture of consumption (Chua 2003). The
city-state has an enduring reputation as a paradise of shopping and eating, and at least during
the 1980s many tourists could not have imagined there was any other reason to visit Singapore.
The ‘greening’ of Singapore, however, is a lesser-known development that has made a significant
contribution to the aetheticization of the urban landscape. While high-rise office and housing blocks
dominate much of the cityscape, and shopping malls border on the ubiquitous, the island is, for the
most part, a dazzling, hyperaestheticized space. Orchard Road—Singapore’s foremost shopping
street—differs from other high-end shopping districts in Asia such as Tokyo’s Ginza, Shanghai’s
Huaihai Road, or Hong Kong’s Nathan Road, in its dissolving of the boundaries between the urban
and rural and the incorporation of nature into the cityscape. The greening of Singapore was begun
when the first Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew, planted the first tree of the Tree Planting Program in
Holland Road Circus in 1963. Lee said of the role of greening in the agenda to transform a thirdworld colony into a vibrant modern economy in which every citizen would be involved:
No other project has brought richer rewards to the region. Our neighbours have tried to outgreen and out-bloom each other. Greening was positive competition that benefitted everyone—
it was good for morale, for tourism, and for investors.
(Lee 2000, p. 177)
Singapore now styles itself as the ‘Garden City’. Recently, the Ministry for National Development and
the National Parks Board have begun to make the transition from ‘Garden City’ to ‘City in a Garden’
to create an even more pervasive green aesthetic and to distinguish Singapore from the many
other cities around the world that claim ‘Garden City’ status. The ‘City in a Garden’ will enhance the
aesthetic values of the city and ensure the embedding of the rural into the urban by incorporating
101 hectares of garden around the Marina Bay area, a commercial district at the mouth of the
Singapore River (Ministry of National Development n.d., p. 35).
95
The continued greening of Singapore is a key feature of this hyper-aestheticized landscape where
the consumption of nature coincides with the material culture of Singapore to create the tourist
experience. Referring to the three gardens at Marina South, Marina East and Marina Central, the
Ministry links knowledge of sustainability and aesthetic values with entertainment:
the Gardens by the Bay will provide a new dimension to Singapore, encapsulating our City in a
Garden theme. These gardens will provide colour, vibrancy and green space in which the best
of our garden craftsmanship, horticultural displays and plant-based edutainment will be offered.
It will capture the essence of Singapore as the premier garden city.
(Ministry of National Development, n.d., p. 35 [emphasis added])
Augmented by the Ministry’s ‘Community in Bloom’ program (part of a global movement promoting
green spaces in urban communities), tourism is given a fillip by annual nature-oriented events
that attract both locals and tourists, such as the Singapore Garden Festival and the World Orchid
Show—internationally recognized as ‘the Olympics of Orchids’.
The National Parks Board has contributed significantly to the mobilization of nature for the ‘tourist
gaze’ in urban space. The national daily, The Straits Times, reported on the observations of Lee
when he visited the Gardens on the Bay project in 2011. He noted that a beautiful, green and
sustainable city is also an economic asset with a competitive advantage:
Lee, KL 2000, From third world to first: The Singapore story: 1965–2000, HarperCollins, New York.
Ministry of National Development, no date, From garden city to city in a garden, Singapore.
Moscardo, G 2008, ‘Sustainable tourism innovation: challenging basic assumptions’, Tourism and
hospitality research, 8(1), pp. 4–13.
Murphy, PF 1995, ‘Tourism and sustainable development’, in WF Theobald (ed.), Global tourism: the
next decade, Butterworth Heinemann, Oxford, pp. 167–93.
Sheller, M & Urry, J 2006, ‘The new mobilities paradigm’, Environment and Planning A, 38(2), pp.
207–26.
UNTWO, 2012, UNWTO Tourism Highlights, World Tourism Organization, Madrid.
Urry, J 2007, Mobilities, Polity, Cambridge, UK.
Urry, J 1990, The tourist gaze, Sage, London.
Urry, J, 1992, ‘The tourist gaze and the “environment”’, Theory, culture & society, 9, pp. 1–26.
Wong, T 15 November 2011, ‘Mr. Lee takes in blooms at Gardens by the Bay’, The Straits Times,
Singapore.
Mr Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s former prime minister, gave his nod of approval yesterday as
he took in the bountiful blooms in the Flower Dome, one of three sections in the Gardens by
the Bay complex being developed by the National Parks Board …The journey to building this
‘world-class garden’ by the bay can be traced back almost 50 years, recalled Mr Lee. ‘It was
to make Singapore green’, ... Cities of concrete buildings, tarmac and pavements would be
depressing and unpleasant to live in, he said. ‘You need to balance that with trees and flowers.’
Almost half of Singapore is covered with greenery, he noted, adding that ‘this has become an
economic value to us’ … But many countries also plant trees now and call themselves garden
cities, he said, and to remain competitive, Singapore has a new vision: City in a Garden.
(Wong, 2011)
The promotion of tourism in Singapore may be predicated on understanding nature as a marketable
commodity, but that does not diminish the 50-year greening of Singapore as a strategy for the longterm sustainability of the island. Consistent action to green Singapore has established a tropical/
urban ecosystem, mitigated the effects of the urban heat island, and created sustainable livability in a
densely populated space. Tourism is a business and cannot fail to prioritize profit for tour companies,
local economies, airlines and others involved in the industry, even if it subscribes to the triple bottom
line. This does not, however, prevent the industry from playing a real role in a sustainable future.
References
Butler, RW 1999, ‘Sustainable tourism: a state-of-the-art review’, Tourism geographies: an
international journal of tourism space, place and environment, 1(1), pp. 7–15.
Chua, BH 2003, Life is not complete without shopping: consumption culture in Singapore,
Singapore University Press, Singapore.
Disley, H 2012, ‘Can sustainable tourism include flying?’ Greenpeace UK, 2 April 2012, viewed 15
August 2012 at <http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/groups/preston-lancashire/blog/can-sustainabletourism-include-flying>.
Featherstone, M 2007, Consumer culture and postmodernism, 2nd edn, Sage, London.
Gössling, S, Hall CM & Weaver, DB 2009, ‘Perspectives on systems, restructuring and innovations’,
in Gössling, S, Hall CM & Weaver, DB (eds), Sustainable tourism futures, Routledge, New York &
Oxon, pp. 1–18.
Supertree at the Gardens by the Bay, Singapore. Supertrees are vertical gardens 25,030 metres tall that
provide shade during the day and come alive with sound and light at night. Photo: Fergus Hudson.
Harris, R, Griffin, T & Williams, P 2002, Sustainable Tourism: a global perspective, Elsevier
Butterworth Heinemann, Oxford.
Lash, S & Urry, J 1994, Economies of signs and space, Sage, London.
96
97
Urban Sustainability:
The Aesthetics of Change, Material Process and
the Social Imaginary
of political theory, because of their embedded power of aesthetic negotiation, here I am using visual
images in their own right. The goal of my exploration is to offer a snapshot, a taste of the urban
sustainability/resilience dynamics in Melbourne urban social fabric at the dawn of the twenty-first
century.
Tommaso Durante
References
Benjamin, W 2002 [1982], The Arcades Project, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
Cambridge, MA, and London.
The purpose of this visual essay is to expand an understanding of urban sustainability from the
aesthetics of change perspective. Aesthetic transformations affect both material culture and social
imaginary, and Melbourne displays this phenomenon at the local-global scale with contradictory
spatial-symbolic indicators. Through a collection of visual images—digital still pictures, this enquiry
explores the relations between social processes and the city’s spatial forms to better understand
urban sustainability in Melbourne.
This ‘subjective’ interpretative approach to urban sustainability as a visual phenomenon aims
to contribute to the debate and the pertinent literature on the subject. The visual exploration is
carried out through pictures that are a limited, subjective and selective representation of aesthetic
transformations occurring in the urban social fabric of Melbourne; in this sense they are not
unproblematic. However, they are concrete tracks and ideological markers of social change, history.
The visual state-of-the-art of urban sustainability in Melbourne shows spatial-symbolic heterogeneity
and, as a consequence, a fragmented ideological urban landscape.
City of Sydney 2011, Sydney 2030/Green/Global/Connected, viewed 13 August 2012 at <http://
www.sydney2030.com.au/>
City of Melbourne 2012, ‘Melbourne’s sustainability journey’, viewed 13 August at <http://www.
melbourne.vic.gov.au/Sustainability/Pages/Overview.aspx>.
James, P (ed.) 2011, ‘Engaged theory’, Global Cities Annual Review, Global City Research Institute,
RMIT University, Melbourne.
Steger, BM 2008, The rise of the global imaginary: Political ideologies from the French Revolution to
the global war on terror, Oxford University Press, New York City.
United Nations (2010) Shanghai manual–A guide for sustainable urban development in the 21st
century, viewed 18 August at <http://www.un.org/esa/dsd/susdevtopics/sdt_pdfs/shanghaimanual/
shanghaimanual.pdf>.
The Sustainable Sydney 2030 city plan promises to transform Sydney into a green, global and
connected city by the year 2030 (City of Sydney 2011) In the meantime Melbourne hopes to set
new records by re-inventing itself and becoming one of the world’s most sustainable cities by 2020
(City of Melbourne 2012) But, beyond ideological claims and a rising lucrative business, what can
we understand today with the term urban sustainability? In the perspective of one of the major
transnational institutional players, the United Nations, ‘harmony’ seems to be a key word to structure
sustainable cities, as clearly stated in their Shanghai manual on the subject:
We aspire to build cities that establish harmony between diverse people, between development
and environment, between cultural legacies and future innovations ... Cities and their citizens
should join together to create sustainable lifestyles and an ecological civilization in which people
and environment co-exist in harmony.
(United Nations 2010, p. 13)
These guidelines clearly suggest a new shifting public consciousness, that one of being-in-aglobal-interconnected-world, the ‘global imaginary’ (Steger, 2008). In this investigation I assume
that urban sustainability is gradually permeating the social global imaginary and constitute an
important thinking-tool to access the material process of social change in the urbanized planet
earth of the global age. Thus, I approach urban sustainability/resilience in Melbourne through the
analytical framework of aesthetics of change (Benjamin, 2002 [1982]). More precisely, with the
term ‘aesthetics’ I mean what the ancient Greeks called aesthesis: the feeling, experience of the
subjective phenomenological perception of the world.
In this essay I use visual images as critical research tools to expand and better understand urban
sustainability in Melbourne (James 2011, pp. 34-45). I also consider that, in the social fabric, change
embodies spatial-symbolic forms of resistance too. Those forms of resistance are not separated
from the urban social body. Rather, they are very much intimately articulated with the sustainability/
resilience process itself and are a substantial part of the urban sustainability symbolic trinity: people +
city + technology.
The aim of my investigation is to depict the urban sustainability theme in Melbourne social fabric
through ten images that constitute a visual essay. In doing that I assume that what we see and how
we see it are acts of interpretation and, as a consequence, constitutive of the social theory itself.
Hence, although I do not disregard to critically analyze and interpret visual images through the lens
98
Security camera on RMIT Design Hub on the corner of Victoria and Swanston Streets, Melbourne CBD,
Australia, 2012. © Tommaso Durante, The Visual Archive Project of the Global Imaginary.
99
‘Butt in Here’, Drewery Lane, Melbourne CBD, Australia, 2012.
100
101
Balcombe Place, Melbourne CBD, Australia, 2011.
102
103
The City as Curated Space
Tammy Hulbert
The City as a Curated Space project initiated in the Global Cities Institute, RMIT University,
Melbourne (2008–2011) investigated the relationship between urban public spaces and visual
artistic activity, and how artists contribute to sustainable urban cultural environments. The project
investigated the configuration of visual arts in public spaces as an alternative to the institutional
model of gallery-based exhibitions. In considering the theme of urban sustainability, the project
researched how the process of urban curation involved a community conceptualized as an
interdependent ‘ecosystem’ of key agents in the process of creating public art. The key agents
identified included artists, curators, urban planners, architects, urban authorities and public
audiences. For the curated city’s artistic ecosystem to function, these key agents must navigate the
complexity of systems and processes.
Since the 1990s, there has been an increase in public urban visual arts activity in Australian city
centres involving artists who occupy urban spaces and from local government authorities. This
increasing interest in public art has occurred for various reasons and represents a shift in attitude
from both local authorities and artists who want to engage in urban environments. This essay
considers the context of artists working in the urban public sphere and discusses two case studies,
in central Melbourne and central Sydney, Australia.
The Urban Condition of the Twenty-First Century
In 2008, the United Nations (UN News Centre 2008) announced that more than half of the world’s
population live in urbanized areas. This shows that most individuals’ daily experience is through an
urban lens. As the populations of cities continue to increase, urban authorities need to consider the
planning of social and cultural aspects of cities. In Australia, this is particularly relevant as, according
to the federal government’s Major Cities Unit, Australia is one of the most urbanized countries in the
world, most of our population living in the major five capital cities of Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane,
Perth and Adelaide (Australian Government 2010). In the global age, Australian cities have become
increasingly pressured by population demands, due to the wide-ranging cultural backgrounds
of urban communities, a result of rapid intergenerational migration. The term ‘culture’ commonly
refers to the shared attitudes, values, goals and practices of a particular social group. Culture, in the
context of today’s globalized cities, is a complex concept, as urban participation requires skills to
navigate and engage with many attitudes, values, goals and practices of diverse cultural groups.
As cities increasingly become sites for multiple perspectives of diverse communities, we live in an era
where social exclusion is recognized as a growing urban problem, although the multifaceted cultural
nature of our society could be viewed as a positive trait. Urbanist Charles Landry (2008) comments
that, as we enter the age of interculturalism where multiple cultural perspectives are seen as an
advantage, we have access to more channels of knowledge. He argues that creative processes,
which are interpretative, can offer us the skills of improved understanding between individuals and
thus help build socially and culturally sustainable communities in cities.
Access to Culture and Community Development
From a local government perspective, a major reason for a renewed interest in public art, is to
strengthen relationships between rising and diverse cultural populations. Participatory public artistic
processes have been viewed as a method for strengthening relationships within local communities.
This process requires multiple participants to create a common goal involving self-reflection and
interpretation. Jon Hawkes (2001) has argued that accessibility to culture at the local level is a
necessity, as access to cultural production promotes cultural diversity, intercultural dialogue and a
participatory democracy. Hawkes’ (2001) response to Agenda 21, an action plan for sustainable
urban development launched by the UN in 1992, was published by the Melbourne-based Cultural
Development Network, an organization attached to the City of Melbourne. Agenda 21 recognized
104
Forgotten Songs, Michael T. Hill, Richard Major, David Towey and Richard Wong, Laneways By George!, The recordings of the
sound of extinct species of birds were played alongside these empty birdcages highlighting the destruction of natural habitats in
our urban environment. Sydney, Australia, 2009. Photo: Tammy Hulbert.
105
the three pillars of sustainable development: social, economic and environmental. Hawkes’ (2001)
argued that culture must be considered the fourth pillar of sustainable urban development and,
since his publication was released, the UN has adopted culture as the fourth pillar of sustainability. In
2012 the Agenda 21 summit focused on culture’s role in the sustainable development of cities of the
twenty-first century.
Contemporary Artists Working in the Public Sphere
As local government authorities are becoming more aware of the benefits of engaging artists
as community activators and cultural ambassadors, contemporary artists have also become
increasingly interested in experimenting with new ways of interpreting, activating and relating to
public urban spaces. Art critic Suzi Gablik (1991, p. 22) has argued that the new role of artists as
creators lies in a more holistic ‘notion of being interconnected with an understanding of the organic
and unified character of the universe’. Gablik’s comment refers to how the artist as an individual
creator has shifted towards a more socially responsible role in an increasingly urbanized society.
In considering how the role of artist has changed in relation to a contemporary postmodern urban
society, artists have been influenced by several theoretical positions, some discussed here.
New Genre Public Art
As discussed by Lacy (1995), new genre public art distinguishes itself from earlier public art
practices, which focused on the medium of the work and treated the public environment as
a gallery. From the 1960s onwards, global, social and political changes influenced the current
generation, and artists became more socially conscious, expressing their concerns through artistic
interventions in public urban spaces, where their ideas could be exposed to large urban populations.
As a result, artists from this generation became much more engaged with the social context and
meaning of place and how they could creatively use these spaces to challenge the public’s social
perceptions.
Site-Specific Artistic Practices
Miwon Kwon (2002) recognized a new model of artistic practice influenced by the globalizing state of
cities. Artists who attempt to create ‘site-specific’ works do so as a way of ‘belonging in transience’
and bringing their own ideas and interpretations to a pre-existing site (Kwon 2002, p.8). The impact
of the free movement of increased numbers of individuals across national borders has allowed artists
to reflect on their relationship between themselves, and new and unfamiliar sites.
Relational Aesthetics and Participatory Art Approaches
Often attributed to Nicolas Bourriard (2009), relational aesthetics and participatory art focuses on the
recontexualization of artistic activity and regards the audience as a participant. In relational aesthetic
processes, the artist invites the audience to interact and experience an artist’s concept. This is an
artist’s method of revealing the realm of human interactions through audience participation in a
practice based on a concept initiated by the artist. Bourriard attributes the advent of contemporary
art practices as a participatory experience to artists’ renewed conditions of urbanization and the
commodification of space.
Street Art Approaches
Street art originated in a global urban graffiti movement born in disadvantaged minority communities
in large US cities in the late 1960s to the early 1970s (Young et al. 2010). The practice of graffiti
since the late 1960s to the early 1970s has occurred with the modernization and increased scale of
urban spaces in growing cities. As graffiti street culture has become a global urban phenomenon,
evidence of this expression can be seen in many cities beyond the USA, becoming a popular mode
of expression with other minority youth groups. Its origins as a form of territorial marking through
the inscription of an artist’s name in public spaces, graffiti has transformed to become street art to
include many types of artforms of differing media, often with content focused on political satire.
106
Case Studies: Melbourne and Sydney
Considering the role of urban curation in relation to the sustainable cultural development of cities,
central Melbourne and central Sydney were investigated to understand the social, cultural, political
and economic formation of the city as a curated space. In developing these case studies we
considered the foundations of each of city, how artists interact with urban public spaces, how
museological curatorial practices play out in the city, how creativity in urbanism is interpreted, and
how existing public art practices are planned and implemented. Summaries of some of the findings
of the case studies follow.
Central Melbourne
A study of central Melbourne revealed collaborative action, since the 1980s, between local and state
governments (City of Melbourne and Victorian government) and their local communities to create a
curated city on a participatory model. Melbourne suffered from the impact of the national recession
(1989–92), leaving the central city area less occupied and thus provided an opportunity for artists
to occupy central city spaces for artistic production. This occupation led to an increase in public art
in dormant urban laneway spaces. It was recognized as an asset by local government authorities
in plans such as Grids and greenery (City of Melbourne 1987), which encouraged such activities,
seeing them as beneficial to the city in creating activity and a sense of community in the abandoned
city centre. The laneways of the city centre became popular sites for street art interventions.
The 1990s the Kennett state government (1992–99) further consolidated encouragement of arts
activity through its Capital Cities Policy (Government of Victoria 1993), investing in the city’s major
arts infrastructure, which encouraged broader local audience participation in the arts and initiated
moves to attract cultural tourism to Melbourne. This foundation, together with ongoing public art
programs, has encouraged a culture of art in public spaces, where artists are able to participate in
cultural activities in multiple ways in the urban public sphere.
In 2002 the City of Melbourne initiated the ‘Laneways Commissions’ (2002–12) to further encourage
a wide range of artists to become engaged with the central city environment and to complement the
unsanctioned street art activity. The commission was a discrete program focusing on small-scale
site-specific artistic commissions created by emerging artists in dormant laneway spaces. It was a
program designed to create intrigue and wonder in unexplored spaces of the central area.
Central Sydney
The central Sydney case study was selected as a contrast to Melbourne as a curated city. Since the
1970s Central Sydney has focused on creating a modern corporate urban centre including major
construction. A site analysis in the City of Sydney (1993) ‘Policy for the Management of Laneways
in Central Sydney’ revealed that Sydney’s ambition to modernize its built environment, removed
sold or amalgamated many lanes of the central Sydney area for new developments from the 1970s
onwards. Since then, public artistic activity has revolved around new urban developments and have
involved the commissioning of professional artists to create public artworks suitable for corporate
foyers and squares.
Sydney made major investments on large-scale permanent public art leading up to the deadline of
the Sydney 2000 Olympics, which represented its ambition to be recognized as a global city through
the hosting of a major international event.
As inner city living has been encouraged and has increased in popularity since the 1990s, a larger
population now occupies the city centre as residents. They have created awareness that the city
centre lacks a diversity of cultural activity involving these new communities and have highlighted
the need for more accessible forms of public culture, such as the commissioning of temporary art
in public space artworks. These issues of creating an environment that is more culturally accessible
was recognized by the City of Sydney (2007) and led to a citywide forum ‘Creative Futures—Cultural
Life in Sydney’. As a result of these discussions, the City of Sydney (2011) has been more proactive
in developing a city art strategy, which encourages arts and cultural activity throughout the central
city area. In particular, programs such as ‘Laneways By George!’ have been influenced by programs
such as the ‘Laneways Commissions’ developed by the City of Melbourne to activate urban laneway
spaces through temporary public art activity and social businesses, with the aim of creating more
107
active, socially inclusive and potentially safer urban sites for local communities.
Environmental Art and Urban Sustainability
The Sydney case study demonstrates how an initial neglect of planning for cultural aspects of urban
centre development led to the need to incorporate public art in planning later.
Linda Williams
Conclusion
Curation of urban public spaces is encouraged as the development of public artistic outcomes can
lead to sustainable urban cultural environments. As we examine the complexities of the twenty-first
century global city, we come to understand that public cultural activities in urban communities have
the potential to help urban dwellers to navigate the diverse cultural influences available in urban
centres. The case studies of central Melbourne and central Sydney demonstrate two contrasting
Australian capital cities’ approaches to the curated city and how this has affected the cultural
sustainability of each city.
References
Australian Government 2010, Major cities unit—Infrastructure Australia—State of Australian cities,
viewed 20 July 2012, <http://www.infrastructureaustralia.gov.au/mcu.aspx>
Bourriaud, N 2009, Relational aesthetics (Esthétique Relationnelle), 3rd edn, Les Presses du Reel,
Dijon.
City of Melbourne 1987, Grids and greenery, City of Melbourne, Melbourne.
City of Sydney 2011, ‘City art’, viewed 15 July 2012 at <http://www.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au/
cityart/>
City of Sydney 2007, Creative futures—cultural life in Sydney 2030, viewed 26 September 2012 at
<http://www.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au/podcasts/citytalks/Creative-Futures.asp>.
City of Sydney 1993, ‘Policy for the management of laneways in central Sydney’, viewed 14 July
2012 at <http://cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au/development/Documents/PlansAndPolicies/Pol icies/
ManagementOfLaneways.pdf>.
Gablik, S 1991, The Re-enchantment of art, Thames and Hudson, London.
Government of Victoria 1993, Capital cities policy, Government of Victoria, Melbourne.
Hawkes, J 2001, The fourth pillar of sustainability—Culture’s essential role in public planning,
Common Ground Publishing, Melbourne.
Kwon, M 2002, One place after another: Site-specific art and locational identity, MIT Press,
Cambridge, Mass.
Lacy, S 1995, Mapping the terrain: New genre public art, Bay Press, Seattle.
Landry, C 2008, The creative city: A toolkit for urban innovators, 2nd edn, Earthscan Publications,
London.
Young, A (with Ghostpatrol, Smits M, & Smits T) 2010, Street |Studio: The place of street art in
Melbourne, Thames and Hudson, Melbourne.
UN News Centre 2008, ‘Half of global population will live in cities by the end of this year,
predicts UN’, United Nations, viewed 16 July 2012 at <http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.
asp?NewsID=2576>.
In a letter to Oskar Pollak sent early last century, on 27 January 1904, the great novelist Franz Kafka
(1977, p. 16) remarked that art should act ‘like an axe, to break up the frozen sea inside us’. Kafka’s
proposal was shaped by the legacy of romanticism in which the arts are regarded as powerful social
agents with the capacity to transform hearts and minds. By the late twentieth century, however, the
general critical consensus was that such views were essentially obsolete. Although discussions of
art—especially critiques of contemporary visual art—were in something of a postmodern cul-de-sac,
in which the idea of art as an agent of social change was seen as essentially naïve in the context of
late capitalism and the age of mass media, it is ironic that Kafka’s own works were being reassessed
at the time for their ethical and political qualities (Deleuze & Guattari 1975). Nonetheless, there were
exceptions to this dominant critical position, not least in the emergence of environmental art from
the late 1960s and early 1970s that prepared the ground for contemporary art responding to global
climate change and the erosion of biodiversity that are, arguably, the most salient questions of our
age.
Of course artists have long responded to the non-human world; from the cave images of prehistory,
and across most global cultures, including early modern Europe when landscape painting emerged
in the art of the seventeenth century secular baroque and continued in romanticism and nineteenth
century impressionism. One of the things that differentiates environmental art from this tradition,
however, is the way it seeks to erode conventional distinctions between the city and whatever lay
beyond it. Hence the traditional spatial model that first arose in western classical antiquity - in which
the city as a civilizational core was defined in distinction from a peripheral world outside- has been
held up to scrutiny by environmental art in ways that have contributed to a wider, nascent cultural
shift in how the world might be conceived as an interdependent global system incorporating both
human and non-human ecologies.
Though the cultural origins of environmental critique predate romanticism, the emergence of
something like an environmental social movement was consolidated in the context of late nineteenth
century romanticism, particularly in England, Germany and America. During the twentieth century
environmentalism gradually gained social momentum, especially in America and Europe from
the 1960s. And, if the sociogenetic origins of the environmental movement are complex, it is
nonetheless clear that by the sixties and seventies especially, environmental art was a significant
cultural agent in the broader process of the environmental movement gaining a more central public
role in the early twenty-first century.
Yet environmental art itself was a nascent art movement subject to its own internal tensions,
particularly between the idea that art could be used as a proselytizing tool to raise political
awareness about environmental and ecological issues, and an idea of art similar to the one
proposed by Kafka—in which a poetic aesthetic forged most essentially in the language of art
itself has an unparalleled capacity to transform thought and feeling. Like the old tensions between
an essentially urban model of culture defined against a peripheral model of nature, such aesthetic
tensions continue to trouble contemporary environmental art, and have become more acute with
the awareness of the anthropogenic causes of global climate change and an emerging crisis in
biodiversity unparalleled in human history.
The Emergence of Environmental Art
In America the new land art was often constructed in deserts or old quarries a long way from urban
centres, yet came to the attention of people in big cities as artists presented their work through
photo-documentation in galleries or publications. An example of such artists and one of the most
prominent of the time, Robert Smithson, saw art as a way of reminding people of what he called ‘the
more infernal regions’ on which the cities depended, and hence a way of undermining the old notion
of the urban as something arising in isolation from an uncivilised rural periphery. The ‘slag heaps,
108
109
strip mines, and polluted rivers’, thought Smithson (in Holt 1979, p. 30), were invisible to people in
the cities because of
the great tendency toward idealism, both pure and abstract, society is confused as to what to
do with such places. Nobody wants to go on a vacation to a garbage dump. Our land ethic,
especially in that never-never land called the “art world” has become clouded with abstractions
and concepts.
Perhaps the leading European example of an environmental artist from this early period was the
German artist Joseph Beuys, a highly influential pioneer of environmental and ecological art who
extended the idea of the transformative power of the arts into what he called ‘social sculpture’, an
emphasis on the kind of personal engagement with art that could, and should, reconfigure the social
and political realms. Despite his view of art as a performative instrument of social transformation,
however, there can be little doubt that Beuys’ work became influential through its own peculiarly
eloquent form of poetry that spoke most persuasively to artists and the cultural elite rather than the
masses. Nonetheless, the notion of art as a process of social transformation was also an important
premise of postwar European art movements such as Arte Povera and Fluxus, and continued
sporadically in the 1980s, and even into the 1990s, when the critical persuasion that art was at best
a fairly self-contained system of cultural appropriation was at its height.
In Australia there were several pioneering environmental artists, working from the late 1970s with
varied artistic strategies to convey a concern with the developing threats to Australian environments
and ecologies. Some, such as Peter Dombrovskis, chose landscape photography as a means to
remind a largely urban Australian population of the forests and rivers most of them had never seen,
and which were now often at risk. In particular, Dombrovskis’ iconic photograph Rock Island Bend,
associated with the saving of the Tasmanian Franklin River campaign, was used to great strategic
effect by the environmentalist movement. This campaign succeeded in preventing the damming of
the river by the Tasmanian Hydro-Electric Commission (now Hydro Tasmania) and Dombrovskis’
photo became a symbolic image prompting a change to federal government to protect the
environment.
If Dombrovskis’ work was unusual insofar as it played a direct role in a campaign for a political
change, the work of other Australian artists such as Bonita Ely are still working their way slowly into
the public imagination. In 1980 Ely performed Murray River Punch, a deliberately ‘homely’ cooking
demonstration in a city gallery, where she boiled up a brew of the polluted components of water
from the Murray-Darling Basin and asked her audience to try it. Although none of her audience did
taste the stinking concoction, the central point about the risks to a river system crucial to millions
of Australians was clear. Nearly three decades later Ely returned to photograph the Murray-Darling
Basin, and then exhibited the images of its palpable deterioration and, in some instances, frightening
imagery of almost complete ecological collapse. While Ely’s photographs may not have contributed
directly to the revaluation of a river system, which has been largely invisible to city dwellers, they do
indicate how people in the cities have been slow to respond to its deterioration. Ely’s pioneering early
works were exhibited alongside her recent works in HEAT: Art & climate change at RMIT Gallery in
2008, in the first major international exhibition of its kind in Australia which contributed to the current
focus on environmental art.
Other Australian environmental artists of this early period, such as Jill Orr and John Wolseley, went
beyond the cities to engage imaginatively with the land, and returned to exhibit their responses in
the city. Griffiths and King (2008) show that museums are rated very highly as institutions evoking
public trust and, in the case of environmental art, museums and galleries have been essential as
conduits of conveying the kind of poetic art that is less suited to urban space. The photographs
of Orr’s Bleeding Trees performances, or Wolseley’s fragile works on paper that he had allowed to
blow around and interact with the arid region of the Malley are major works in the public realm, but
they are not public art as such. They are early examples of what contemporary ecocriticism refers
to as works of the ‘ontopoetic’ imagination, a kind of ‘slow art’. Although often intensely affective,
such work has a less immediate and less traceable impact than environmental public art, which is
unequivocally clear in its aims. These two major forms of contemporary environmental art raise a
number of aesthetic issues about what actually constitutes effective environmental art. On the one
110
hand, there is the kind of public art that speaks clearly to a wide range of people, but is subject to
didacticism or well-intentioned banality. On the other, there are more aesthetically sophisticated
works of the ontopoetic imagination, which elide the ethical imperatives of publicly communicating
the findings of science in an age of heightened environmental risk.
Contemporary Environmental Art
There are certainly recent examples of art where environmental didacticism and a fairly formulaic
approach to the ‘communication’ of science can be effective, such as Harrison Studio’s Greenhouse
Britain, the American Watershed exhibition and Green Patriot Posters, an online space for posters to
support the climate change campaign.
Perhaps the most outstanding recent example of simple, yet effective public environmental artwork
was Nuage Vert at the Salmisaari urban coal burning power plant in Helsinki by French artists He
He, Helen Evans and Heiko Hansen (Anon. 2009). During February 2008 these artists illuminated
the toxic vapour cloud from the Helsinki plant with a powerful, bright green laser that intensified and
expanded as it tracked how the public responded by decreasing their electricity consumption and
participated in ‘growing’ the green cloud. The unusual location of the plant in Helsinki’s urban centre
meant that the public response to the artwork was highly visible, providing an active conduit to
public imagination. Eventually, it contributed to a more environmentally responsive approach by the
energy company running the plant; Helsingin Energia is now at the forefront of energy companies
responding to environmental concerns by providing updates about energy consumption on-line.
Other public artworks, such as those appearing in the 350° video gallery Art for the Sky (2012)
project—which could hardly be described as great art—still manage to engage thousands of people
round the world in effective community arts action to raise awareness about global climate change.
If more sophisticated environmental artworks remain largely in the relatively exclusive social domains
of contemporary art galleries, from the early twenty-first century there has been a number of major
exhibitions that have gradually drawn greater public attention to what could be called the slow
art of imaginative persuasion. That is to say, art that is perhaps slow to reach a wider public, yet
resonates for some time in the mind and feelings, and hence may have longer and deeper effects.
Though this kind of art tends to leave illustrative or didactic responses to environment and ecology
far behind, it has stimulated a more serious body of ecocritical reflections and cultural critique.
Published responses to a growing number of significant exhibitions of environmental art have arisen
in recent years. In America major exhibitions were held in Cincinnati (2002), Chicago (2005) and
Colorado (2007). In Europe a similar exhibition was held in Oslo in 2007 and, in London, in 2009 the
Barbicon Gallery showed Radical nature: Art and architecture for a changing planet 1969–2009,
shortly followed by Earth at London’s Royal Academy, where the Cape Farewell project was
considered to be the most innovative international collaborative project (Buckland et al. 2006). In
Norway RETHINK: Contemporary art and climate change was exhibited to coincide with the 2009
international climate summit in Copenhagen. In Australia, HEAT: Art and climate change at RMIT
Gallery in 2008 had a significant public impact, shortly followed by The ecologies project exhibition
at Monash University that same year. In 2010 In the balance: Art for a changing world showed at
the MCA in Sydney with considerable public impact, the same year that a number of environmental
issues were raised in major Asian exhibitions, such as Talks Between Trees in Shenzen, Going Green
in Taiwan and Sensing Nature in Tokyo.
As this brief survey of the development of recent environmental art indicates, by the second decade
of the twenty-first century environmental art has developed significant global momentum as an
effective cultural response to increasingly urgent issues such as global climate change and loss of
biodiversity. Perhaps one of the next significant challenges for environmental artists is to address
how best to reach a global public without compromising what Kafka recognized as the capacity of
art to transform the way we see the world. Most of us now live in cities, including massive global
cities that continue to inflict substantial damage on regional and global ecologies, in turn pushing
populations closer to crises in accessing natural ‘resources’. Hence another significant challenge for
environmental art lies in whether artists might find pathways through the deep cultural misconception
that human cities, like humans themselves, may flourish as something that is somehow independent
of complex global ecologies. As David Harvey (2006) is surely correct to observe, there is now
111
nowhere in global space that is not subject to the regimes of late capitalism so, in this sense,
environmental art is at the cutting edge of that crucial social space where the kind of quotidian shifts
in subjectivity shaped by cultural values meet the politics of social change.
The Role of Public Participation in Urban
Sustainability Planning
References
Anon. 2009, ‘Green cloud, city-scale energy consumption light installation’, Gravitymax in Transition,
viewed 26 September 2012 at <http://gravitymax.wordpress.com/2009/03/18/green-cloud-cityscale-energy-consumption-light-installation/>.
Art for the Sky 2012, online exhibition, viewed 26 September 2012 at
<http://www.inconcertwithnature.com/htm/video.htm>.
Buckland, D, McEwan, I, Gromley, A, Whiteread, R, Eastley, M, Edwards, N, Erlich, G, Harvery, D
2006, Burning ice: Art and climate change, Cape Farewell, London.
Deleuze, G & Guattari, F 1975, Kafka: Towards a minor literature, University of Minnesota Press,
Minneapolis.
Green Patriot Posters, viewed 26 September 2012 at <http://www.greenpatriotposters.org/>
Greenhouse Britain online exhibition, viewed 26 September 2012 at <http://greenhousebritain.
greenmuseum.org/>.
Griffiths J & King, D 2008, InterConnections: The IMLS national study on the use of libraries,
museums and the internet—Conclusions overview, viewed 1 August 2012 at <http://www.
interconnectionsreport.org>.
Harvey, D 2006, Spaces of global capitalism, Verso, London/New York City.
Holt, N (ed.) 1979, The writings of Robert Smithson, New York University Press, New York City.
Kafka, F 1977, Letters to family, friends, and editors, Schocken Books, New York.
Watershed: Art, activism and community engagement online exhibition, viewed 26 September 2012
at <http://watershedmke.wordpress.com/exhibition/>.
Judy Burnside-Lawry and Carolyne Lee
The most attractive future is not the one you have, I have, or anyone has in mind, but the one we
openly make together.
(Deetz 1997, p. 134)
In this essay we draw upon a diverse range of scholars from social and political science,
anthropology, media, communication and management to explore the origins and multiple meanings
of the concept ‘public participation’. Contributing to the Global Cities Institute’s aim to develop
a better understanding of the capacities of cities and communities in addressing processes of
globalization and climate change, the essay continues with an explication of how the concept of
public participation is used in relation to planning and development of urban sustainability. The desire
to study public participation reflects our belief in the transformative potential of citizen participation in
seeking solutions to major problems, including solutions to issues of sustainable development.
The Origins of Public Participation
As geographical regions, countries and cities seek sustainable solutions to social, environmental
and economic challenges collaboration has increased between individual citizens, representatives of
business corporations, governments and/or civil society. Although gathering momentum recently,
the concept of ‘public participation’ is not new, and its role in decision-making can be traced to
the 1960s and 70s when critical social movements questioned hierarchical authority and called for
increased participation of individual citizens and citizen groups in social development policy. Within
the context of public health policy development, the Healthy Cities/Healthy Communities project
launched in 1977 by the World Health Organization is a concrete example of attempts to encourage
citizen participation.
A review of literature within a variety of fields, including management, politics, community
development and communication found a multiplicity of terms used to describe public participation.
Some of the most frequently used include: ‘community consultation’, ‘citizen engagement’,
‘stakeholder engagement’, ‘community engagement’ and ‘democratic participation’. In spite of
the variety of definitions and terms used, the central premise retains a belief in the transformative
potential of citizen participation in governance and a view that engaging citizens in policy making
is not only beneficial but essential in seeking solutions to major problems, including issues of
sustainable development. Sustainable development is understood as ‘development that meets the
needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’
(Brundtland 1987).
Participatory Democracy and Governance: Public Participation
Green Patriot Posters website (http://www.greenpatriotposters.org), screen print, November 2012.
112
The need for democratic empowerment of citizens in decision-making on environmental matters
was the subject of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development held in
1992, also known as the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit. This summit formalized Principle 10 of
the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, which states the need for participation
of all concerned citizens and the imperative of providing them with access to information, and
judicial and administrative proceedings (UNDESA 1992, Principle 10). In a globalized era, with no
government to take the lead in the implementation of the Rio Declaration’s Principle 10, a variety
of international standards, at global, regional, national and state levels emerged. We now see a
plethora of multi-lateral environmental agreements, treaties, conventions, and voluntary accords.
Not only do laws vary greatly across nations, but also enforcement regimes, forms of government
and cultural priorities, with an associated variety of guidelines for engaging citizens in the planning of
environmental and development projects.
113
The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), of which Australia is a
member, also emphasizes the importance of citizen participation in governance and deliberative
democracy: ‘engaging citizens in policymaking is a sound investment and a core element of good
governance ... it contributes to building public trust in government, raising the quality of democracy
and strengthening civic capacity’ (OECD 2001, p. 11). The OECD suggestion of a three-stage
model of citizen participation in policy making is consistent with the view of scholars across multiple
disciplines who caution that the premise of citizen participation as beneficial to society is problematic
unless participatory practices are articulated with democracy, empowerment and equality, and a
distinction is made between access, interaction and participation (Carpentier & Dahlgren 2011).
Within the OECD model, the first stage of citizen participation is the provision of information to
citizens by organizations (whether government or business corporations). This is viewed as a oneway relationship covering both ‘passive’ access to information on request, and the ‘active’ measures
used by an organization to disseminate information. Stage two refers to the two-way relationship of
consultation, in which citizens are invited by the organization to provide feedback on specific issues.
This exchange, however, is based on the organization’s prior definition and framing of the issue and
the organization’s provision of background information. The third stage is the active participation of
citizens in policy-making based on a partnership relationship. It acknowledges equal standing for
citizens in setting the agenda, proposing policy options and shaping the policy dialogue—although
the responsibility for the final decision or policy formulation rests with organization (OECD 2001, p.
23).
But guidance from a governmental level is no longer sufficient, nor can it even be counted on. With
economic globalization, the balance of power between organizations and national governments has
shifted: as transnational organizations establish business units in multiple nation states and source
capital from any country in the world, governments’ power to regulate private sector activities has
waned (Boutilier 2009, p. 32). Above all, in the context of sustainable development, citizens and local
communities are becoming increasingly concerned about the role and conduct of all organizations—
government, corporations or not-for-profit entities. In recognition of this problem, one of the two core
themes for the recent UN Conference on Sustainable Development, also referred to as Rio+20, was
to develop an institutional framework for sustainable development and provide guidance/governance
at global, regional, national and local levels (UNCSD 2011). One study led by a small team of
French and Australian scholars aims to contribute to debate engendered by Rio+20, by comparing
the institutional frameworks established for sustainable development of rail projects in Australia,
France and Italy, to identify best practices and to recommend institutional frameworks for global
organization-citizen participation in sustainable development projects. Findings will be a valuable
resource not only within the respective nation states but also for governments and organizations
intending to conduct business across national boundaries (Burnside-Lawry et al., under review).
Public Participation, Participatory Democracy and Habermas
comprehensibility of a statement may be challenged. In such situations, ideal speech conditions
are necessary to allow ‘the holding of one’s own position while being open to the expression and
hearing of other positions’ (Pearce & Pearce 2004 in Weaver 2007, p. 96). Recent studies have
shown that it is possible to operationalize Habermas’s validity claims and ideal speech conditions
to evaluate the quality of public dialogue and to identify processes involved in effective listening to
gain an accurate perception of participants’ interests during communicative events (Burnside-Lawry
2010, 2011, 2012; Jacobson & Story 2004; Rui 2004).
Much research into listening assumes something to be listened to: either speech or ‘voice’. The
notion of voice has recently been taken up anew and regenerated by Couldry (2010), to aid us in
thinking about democracy and political/social change. Involving both speaking and listening, this
term ‘voice’ recognizes people’s capacities for social co-operation. Voice, as defined by Couldry
(2010, p. 9), can be individual or collective, but cannot happen without social support in the form,
for example, of adequate time, a comfortable physical meeting space and polite and empathic
listeners. Only then can speakers give accounts of themselves, ‘articulating the world [within which
they act] from a distinctive embodied position’, which could include what they believe will happen to
their house/street/community if certain decisions are made and certain actions taken (Couldry 2010,
p. 9). In the context of urban sustainability planning, it is necessary for organizations to put in place
processes to maximize the ongoing exchange of voices, including listening, and acting upon what
is listened to, in order to engage in democratic participation and collaborative decisions-making for
sustainable outcomes.
The Role of Public Participation in Management
Within the fields of management and organizational communication, recognition of the democratic
imperative of public participation in organizational practices is commonly termed ‘stakeholder
representation’ or ‘stakeholder engagement’. The traditional view of the corporation as an
entity expected to conform to existing laws and operate efficiently to maximize results for their
shareholders is replaced with a view of the corporation as a citizen, recognizing the mutuality
of interests and practices between society and business, between community members and
stakeholders of the organization. Stakeholder theory has developed as a response to growing
recognition that the survival of an organization may reside in the delicate relationship established with
those with a stake in the firm (Bendall 2003). The theory proposes that the organization exists at
the nexus of interdependent relationships involving groups that can affect or are affected by the firm
(Freeman 1984). Noting a growing shift in the conception of organizations from an ‘owner manager’
model to a ‘stakeholder’ model of organizations, Deetz (2001) developed a stakeholder model that
includes Freeman’s (1984) seminal definition of stakeholders as those affected by the activities of the
organization as well as recognition that the organization may have a diverse group of owners and,
therefore, widespread participation is required.
A definition of participatory democracy requires some exploration of the term ‘democracy’. Most
simply, democracy is the belief that people ought to rule themselves. Democracy may be enacted in
a variety of forms, for example through diverse forums within civil society and activities in the public
sphere that go beyond minimal forms of political representation and casting one’s vote at election
times. Provision of opportunities for citizens to make meaningful contributions to debates concerning
decisions in which they have a stake can be termed ‘democratic participation’. When such
opportunities and access are at optimum levels, this constitutes a form of participatory democracy.
The processes of public consultation and dialogue are essential flows between traditional
democratic channels (such as parliamentary mechanisms) and the non-institutional processes of
public opinion formation via media or social movements (Habermas 1984).
Organizational communication research commenced during the mid-to-late twentieth century, as
scholars and consultants tried to make sense of the new organizational forms emerging as a result
of the industrial revolution (Tompkins & Wanca-Thibault 2001, pp. xvii–xxxi). In the early twentyfirst century, as a result of globalization, more complex and dynamic organizational forms have
emerged, resulting in further academic study as organizational boundaries continue to be redefined
and members of organizations face an increasingly complex mix of challenges Organizational
communication scholars note that, although many organizations have implemented opportunities
for increased representation by stakeholders, the emphasis has been to increase stakeholder
loyalty and decrease dissent, rather than provide forums for genuine dialogue that involves two-way
symmetrical communication between an organization’s members and stakeholders (Conrad & Poole
2005; Deetz 2001; Tompkins & Wanca-Thibault 2001).
Understanding and analyzing the practice of dialogue during public participation can be enriched
with Habermas’s seminal theory of communicative action. This theory holds that every speech
act can function in communication by virtue of implicit presumptions (validity claims) made by
participants. The validity claims are: comprehensibility, asserting a knowledge position truthfully,
appropriateness, and sincerity (Habermas 1984; Deetz 2001; Jablin & Putnam 2001). Validity
claims may not be met in every instance of discourse, in which case the truth, appropriateness and
Critical theorists Putnam et al. (1996) conducted a review of organizational communication
research and theory that encompassed areas of study including power, marginalization of voices,
empowerment, legislation and unobtrusive control. The authors organized the different theoretical
conceptions and methodological preferences undertaken by organizational communication research
into seven metaphor clusters, two of which describe concepts of organizational communication
relevant to public participation research. They used the metaphor clusters of ‘linkage’ and ‘voice’ to
114
115
conceptualize an organization as consisting of intra and inter-networks of multiple relationships that
may be positively or negatively influenced by factors including culture, power and empowerment,
marginalization of voices, legislation and unobtrusive control (Tompkins & Wanca-Thibault 2001).
Studies by Deetz (1997; 2001) agree with this view, but suggest organizational communication
places too much emphasis on advocacy, at the expense of negotiation. In contrast, engagement
with stakeholders can sometimes result in initial conflict and misunderstandings. Critical theorists
call for more studies focusing on how to engage in communication so that more positions are
represented, with an emphasis on participation, negotiation and listening skills and dialogue (Deetz
1997, p. 128).
Public Participation in Disaster Resilience
In an era of change and uncertainty, policy makers recognize the need to engage community voices
to pave the way to develop shared strategies for creating even stronger communities. Recently,
public participation has been recognized as a vital component for establishing effective partnerships
to strengthen resilience within communities (Council of Australian Governments 2011, p. 8). The
term ‘resilience’ has been adopted by scientists and policy makers in an attempt to describe
the way in which they would like to reduce a nation’s susceptibility to major incidents of all kinds,
by reducing their probability of occurring and their likely effects, and by building institutions and
structures in such a way as to minimize any possible effects of disruption upon them. Community
resilience is described as ‘the ability to maintain, renew or reorganize’ (Varghese et al., 2006, p. 508),
‘the ability to accommodate abnormal or periodic threats and disruptive events’ (Amaratunga &
Haigh 2011, p. 7). There is increasing recognition that emergency and disaster preparedness will not
be effective without the engagement of vulnerable communities. The prime component is to involve
the vulnerable community in the mitigation and preparedness process. Building capacities in coping
mechanisms and involvement creates confidence within a community, paving the way for a selfreliant community. Hence, mitigation and preparedness have to be supported by public participation
in operational planning, education and training of vulnerable groups and related formal and informal
institutions (Amaratunga & Haigh 2011).
Strengthening community resilience sits at the core of current Australian national policy, as detailed
in the National Strategy for Disaster Resilience (2011), which embraces four key principles:
1.
Why disaster resilience in the Australian setting, and what does a disaster-resilient community
look like?;
2.
Disaster risk-reduction, communication and behaviour;
3.
Community resilience; and
4.
Infrastructure resilience.
Since its release in February 2011, the Australian National Strategy provides a framework to help
practitioners influence and shape future directions in this space. In response, a small team of UK and
Australian researchers from Salford and RMIT University respectively, are collaborating to examine
how different stakeholders in a community can be identified and engaged to address disaster risk.
The program will also look at the extent to which those responsible for the development of resilience
consult with stakeholders, typically diverse groups of residents, business leaders, local government
leaders, civic organizations, and technical experts.
Conclusion
As this essay has illustrated, the study of public participation is a multidisciplinary endeavour.
While we do not claim to have presented a definitive examination of the concept, we have briefly
summarized past, present and future studies contributing to the development of policies and
processes associated with citizen participation. We invite scholars to join us in this discussion,
contributing their knowledge of and expertise in public participation within a variety of contexts, the
aim being to optimize effective partnerships between local communities, cities and nations with the
end result being sustainable outcomes.
116
References
Amaratunga, D & Haigh, R 2011, ‘Introduction’, in Amaratunga, D & Haigh R (eds), Post-Disaster
Reconstruction of the Built Environment: Rebuilding for Resilience, Wiley-Blackwell, New Jersey: pp.
1–12.
Bendell J 2003, Terms for endearment, Greenleaf Publishing, Sheffield.
Boutilier, R 2009, Stakeholder politics: Social capital, sustainable development, and the corporation,
Stanford University Press, Stanford.
Brundtland, G (ed.) 1987, Our common future: The World Commission on Environment and
Development, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Burnside-Lawry J, Lee, C. & Rui, S. (under review) Narrowing the gap between policy and practice:
a case study of the role of Garants in French organisation-citizen engagement, Communication
Politics and Culture.
Burnside-Lawry, J 2012, ‘Listening and participatory communication: A model to assess
organisation listening competency’, International Journal of Listening, 26(2), pp. 102–21.
Burnside-Lawry, J 2011, ‘The dark side of stakeholder communication: Stakeholder perceptions of
ineffective organisational listening’, Australian Journal of Communication, 38(1), pp. 147–74.
Carpentier, N & Dahlgren, P 2011, ‘Introduction: Interrogating audiences-theoretical horizons of
participation, Communication Management Quarterly, 21, pp. 7–12.
Conrad, C & Poole, MS 2005, Strategic organizational communication: In a global economy (6th
ed.), Thomson Wadsworth, Belmont, CA.
Couldry, N 2010, Why voice matters: Culture and politics after neoliberalism, Sage London.
Council of Australian Governments, 2011, National strategy for disaster resilience: Building the
resilience of our nation to disasters, Commonwealth Copyright Administration, Attorney-General’s
Department, viewed 3 August 2012 at <http://www.dpc.vic.gov.au/images/documents/featured_
dpc/national%20strategy%20for%20disaster%20resilience.pdf>
Deetz, Stanley A, 1997, ‘Communication in the age of negotiation’, 1997 ICA Presidential
Address, Journal of Communication, 47(4) Autumn, pp. 118–35.
Deetz, S, 2001, ‘Conceptual foundations’, in Jablin & Putnam (eds): pp. 3–46.
Freeman, RE 1984, Strategic management: A stakeholder approach, Pitman, Boston.
Habermas, J 1984, The theory of communicative action: A critique of functionalist reason, Beacon
Press, Boston.
Jablin, FM & Putnam, L (eds), The new handbook of organizational communication: Advances in
theory, research, and methods, Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA.
Jacobson, TL & Storey, JD 2004, ‘Development communication and participation: Applying
Habermas to a case study of population programs in Nepal’, Communication Theory, 14(2), pp.
99–121.
Organisation for Economic Development, 2001, Citizens as partners. Information, consultation and
public participation in policy-making, OECD Publishing, Paris.
Putnam, LK, Phillips, N & Chapman, P 1996, ‘Metaphors of communication and organization’,
in Clegg, SR Hardy C & Nord, WR (eds), Handbook of organization studies, Sage, London: pp.
375–408.
Rui, S 2004, La démocratie en débat, Les citoyens face à l’action publique, Armand Colin, Paris.
Tompkins, PK & Wanca-Thibault, M 2001, ‘Organizational communication: Prelude and prospects’,
in Jablin & Putnam (eds): pp. xvii–xxxi.
UNCSD, 2011, the future we want, Rio +20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable
Development, (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, June 20–22), United Nations, New York City, viewed 2 October
2011 at <www.un.org/en/sustainablefuture/pdf/conf_brochure.pdf>.
117
UNDESA, 1992, Report of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, Annex
1 [aka Earth Summit, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 3–14 June], viewed 2 October 2011 at <http://www.
un.org/documents/ga/conf151/aconf15126-1annex1.htm>
Place-Making
Varghese, J, Krogman, NT, Beckley, TM, & Nadeau, S 2006, ‘Critical analysis of the relationship
between local ownership and community resiliency’, Rural Sociology, 71(3), pp. 505–27.
Beau B. Beza
Weaver, CK 2007, ‘Reinventing the public intellectual through communication dialogue civic capacity
building’, Management Communication Quarterly, 21(1), pp. 92–104.
Place-making can be understood, in broad terms, as the social and political process involved in
creating value and meaning in a particular spatial context (Adam 2011; Balch 2011; Hamdi 2010;
Heywood 2011). Rather than being a technocratic process concerned with models of project
development and delivery, place-making is a concept revolving around planning for the future
of an urban setting, its people and the role that the unique individual setting contributes to the
urban environment. Place-making, itself, may be argued to have commenced at various points
of time along our evolution. An anthropological perspective may select the time when people first
congregated with intent and meaning (McCurdy & Spradley 2008). The political scientist may regard
place-making as the point at which rulers began to understand the symbolic power of the city and
set out to ‘structure’ their urban settings, such as Napoleon III directing Haussman to reorganize
Paris. Alternatively, a medical or sociological point of view may regard place-making as having
emerged from a government’s concern that public health and morality were being undermined by
industrialization, such as the 1800 British sanitary and social reforms.
The common elements these three positions have are their focus on people, an (urban) setting and
a course of action that involves people or the wider community. All three also provide a contrast to
the development of an individual’s setting; such as meaningful ‘places’ created for the privileged
or personal indulgence of the ruling class (e.g. Versailles). However, the urban and, specifically, the
natural environment in the latter two examples above are designed to fulfil the functional objectives
of the authorities (McHarg 1969). The use of this physical determinist approach to place-making led
to the eradication of undesirable urban elements, such as Melbourne’s slums, and their replacement
with, at the time, positively perceived built features, such as the Atherton Gardens estate. The result
is that built form can dictate social outcomes and is strongly based in the field of design.
‘No One is Safe’, Mott Street, Manhattan’s Chinatown, New York City, USA, 2012. © Tommaso Durante,
The Visual Archive Project of the Global Imaginary.
Despite a long history of research and practice exploring the broad question of how to build and
create well-designed, diverse, vital and sustainable places, some argue that place-making still
remains a ‘relatively unexamined and under-researched area, encompassing a range of practices
and professional disciplines, including urban design, architecture, planning and engineering’ (Burton
& Woolcock 2010, p. 39). However, many approaches to place-making have been developed
over the years. For example, design-based approaches link the design of spaces with the positive
or negative outcomes (Botton 2006; Evans et al. 2011; Moughton 2003); an experiential (or,
alternatively, a value) focused approach relates spaces with one’s experience and/or cognition of
them (Bounds 2004; Chawla 2002; Freeman & Tranter 2011; Gleeson & Sipe 2006; Healey 2010);
while a community-development approach uses social infrastructure as a foundation in the creation
of places (e.g. Heywood 2011; Thompson-Fauwcett & Freeman 2006). Each of these approaches
has evolved from considered thought on the subject matter and is mostly a reflection of one’s
primary field of research or practice.
Instead of adhering to any one of the above approaches I prefer to ‘position’ place-making in
terms of collaboration between stakeholders where positive outcomes may be achieved through
engagement with the plurality of an environment. A movement that follows this positioning and,
importantly, puts people at the heart of place-making is the New York based Project for Public
Spaces (PPS). This organization’s work is used as a benchmark around the world because its
applied research has resulted in process-led outcomes that have improved existing places or the
design of new urban environments. One interpretation of the PPS approach to place-making is as
a process to realize good urban settings for people and as a process involving those same people.
Inferred within this process focus of place-making is the implementation of, firstly, the creation of a
vision for a setting and, secondly, a series of actions that lead to the realization of the place (PPS
2011a, 2011b, 2011c).
118
119
Place-Making as a Practice
Fundamental to place-making is that it
is not just the act of building or fixing up spaces, but a whole process that fosters the creation of
vital public destinations: the kind of places where people feel a strong stake in their communities
and a commitment to making things better. Simply put place-making capitalizes on a local
community’s assets, inspiration, and potential ultimately creating good public spaces that
promote people’s health, happiness and well-being.
(PC 2011)
Place-making is not simple and straightforward, as a project outcome depends on the parties
involved and their commitment to and understanding of the principles as well as the established
objectives that guide positive change.
The notion of place-making is inextricably linked to a sound understanding of what constitutes
a ‘great place’ and the most successful places are those that offer the most flexible spaces and
are most open to interpretation by those using them. Hence, understanding what makes a place
great to live and work in involves more than an analysis of urban design and built form; it also
involves understanding the experience of place from a range of perspectives and appreciating
the opportunities places can provide to improve the quality of people’s lives. A great place is also
about realizing what individuals and the community can contribute to this fluid process. My framing
of a great place, which follows and helps position this paper, was derived from research such as
Placemaking Chicago (PC 2011), PPS (2011a, 2011b, 2011c) and Reynolds (2008).
Great places are vibrant, mixed use and attractive settings that provide the opportunity for a diverse
range of experiences and activities. Great places improve the quality of life of all those who experience
and use them and foster the creation of sustainable communities.
This framing is explicitly connected with four key attributes of great places that work together with the
common goal of improving the quality of life of people through the places they engage with and use.
PPS (2011d) identify four attributes of great places:
•
Access and Linkages;
•
Uses and Activities;
•
Comfort and Image; and
•
Sociability
Each of these attributes can be further explained through a range of intangibles and measures. For
example, sociability comprises both intangible and tangible attributes. It can be understood in terms
of how diverse, neighbourly, friendly or interactive a place might be. In order to assess the sociability
of a place it may be possible to use measures such as those associated with social networks,
volunteerism, street-life, the number of women, children and elderly. Assessing what it is that makes
a great place can help identify the strengths and weaknesses of existing places and what needs to
be improved and, for new places, identify the central principles to guide their design. Thus, an early
step in any place-making process involves gathering a wide range of data to understand in detail the
strengths and weaknesses of each of the four attributes of place. During this data collection process,
both quantitative and qualitative data need to be acquired to provide a complete picture of what place
means to a range of different people, including understanding how they experience place, how they
use it, perceive it, value it or might change or renew it.
The four attributes of great places are related to a set of physical features, which can constitute the
built form of a place. A useful synthesis of the core physical elements of great places can be drawn
from the UK national strategy for improving quality of place, which identified the following as essential
for high quality places:
•
Good range and mix of homes, services and amenities;
•
Well designed and maintained buildings and spaces;
•
Ample, high quality green space and green infrastructure; and
•
Sensitive treatment of historic buildings and places.
(Cabinet Office Strategy Unit 2009)
120
All four elements are necessary to the creation of ‘vibrant, mixed use and attractive’ neighbourhoods
and relate to the social, economic and environmental benefits gained from creating highquality places. Table 1 illustrates a discussion of these benefits with the four elements of quality
placed alongside the previously mentioned attributes and measures to create a framework for
understanding what constitutes a great place. This approach to framing great places may be used
to assess places, identify strengths and weaknesses of existing places, and assist in developing
objectives for renewing or redeveloping a place. Place-making requires that those involved in urban
design and development processes regularly reflect on and ensure that the goals and objectives
underpinning a vision or plan for a place or precinct are working towards these characteristics of a
great place for all those who will use it.
Table 1: Defining Great Places
Source: Adapted from PC (2011); PPS (2011a, 2011b, 2011c); Cabinet Office Strategy Unit (2009);
Reynolds 2008
Great places
Great places are vibrant, mixed use and attractive neighbourhoods that provide the opportunity
for a diverse range of experiences and activities. Great places improve the quality of life of all those
who experience and use them and foster the creation of sustainable communities.
Physical elements
Good range and mix of homes, services and amenities
Well-designed and maintained buildings and spaces
Ample, high quality green space and green infrastructure
Sensitive treatment of historic buildings and places
Attributes
Access and linkages
Uses and activities
Comfort and image
Sociability
Continuity
Proximity
Connected
Readable
Walkable
Convenient
Accessible
Fun
Active
Vital
Special
Real
Useful
Indigenous
Celebratory
Sustainable
Safe
Clean
Green
Walkable
Sitable
Spiritual
Charming
Attractive
Historic
Diverse
Stewardship
Co-operative
Neighbourly
Pride
Friendly
Interactive
Welcoming
Local business ownership
Land-use patterns
Property values
Rent levels
Retail sales
Crime statistics
Sanitation rating
Building conditions
Environmental data
Number of women,
children and elderly
Social networks
Volunteerism
Evening use
Street life
Measures
Traffic data
Mode splits
Transit usage
Pedestrian activity
Parking usage patterns
Synthesizing this material points to a number of principles and processes in place-making. Central to
these is the importance of discussing plans with people and engagement with the community. There
are also intangible qualities such as vitality and diversity that are established over time and through
a variety of mechanisms (i.e. programs, activities and built features) that support place-making
efforts. These intangible qualities, however, can be made tangible through a number of measures,
all of which may be guided by a series of overarching principles. In this sense we can think of placemaking principles as guiding ‘the requirements and obligations of right conduct’ (Dictionary.com
2012) for those involved in creating and delivering places.
121
For example, in his review of place-making Hebbert (2009) argues that developing a set of principles
is one of the three essential components of putting place-making into practice. The other two
components involve, firstly, developing a set of procedures and, secondly, appraising practice
critically. Place-making principles, however, need to make clear what is required to guide ‘right
conduct’ in place assessing the value or credibility of planning and design choices in the process of
place-making. There are multiple lists of place-making principles but not all are useful in guiding ‘right
conduct’. That is, many are written at a very high level (i.e. too little description), which can leave a
wider range of audiences with a great deal of room for ambiguity and discretion in decision-making.
Not all of these decisions can lead to the types of outcomes the principles may have intended. Thus,
the set of principles recommended here makes clear the values, goals and objectives being aspired
to, and includes procedures to implement them and processes to critically assess progress.
I have developed a set of twelve place-making principles to guide one’s decision-making processes
(see Table 2). The principles are grouped under four themes as pillars of successful place-making
goals and processes. These four themes embody the elements of a great place and the processes
for creating great places:
1.
Places for people (principles 1–3)
2.
Vitality and diversity (principles 4 and 5)
3.
Nature, place and environmental sustainability (principles 6 and 7)
4.
Collaborative and participatory governance (principles 8–12).
Table 2. Place-Making Principles
Places for People
Principle 1: Give priority to the qualities necessary to envision good places for
people
Principle 2: Provide accessible, active and vibrant places that prioritize pedestrian movement and activity
Principle 3: Provide appropriate, well-designed and active public spaces
In conclusion, while a set of twelve principles has been developed along with a skill set to guide
place-making, the establishment of this groundwork does not necessarily outline what it means to
put place-making into practice. Place-making encapsulates the entire process involved in creating
great places including how we plan, design, create, manage and monitor them. Thus, place-making
is about creating the conditions to enable and foster a range of experiences and activities. Creating
places is a collaborative and participatory process. It takes time and involves a range of different
people, stakeholders and organizations over the duration. Managing the place-making process is
ultimately about strategically navigating a course through the design, development and management
stages guided by the principles of place-making.
Furthermore, employing the above 12 principles to help guide one’s conduct, however, does not
ensure the realization of great places. What is needed is commitment and a strategy to regularly
implement these principles. The first step in realizing this is to bring people together to work as a
team in any place-making activity. The skills needed within this team are:
•
An understanding and commitment to place-making principles;
•
Leadership to actively engage all people and organisations involved in the process;
•
Experience in realising place-making principles;
•
Skills in public speaking, writing, design, community engagement and facilitation, and research
and evaluation;
•
Expertise and qualifications in the above skills as well as sustainability, marketing and/or
community development.
(Farr 2008)
Creating great places requires more than one profession, skill set or expertise. It is a collective
process that requires long-term vision and commitment. The skills, expertise and composition of the
place-making team are critical to achieving outcomes although only the people who use the place/s
will acknowledge these outcomes.
Acknowledgements
Principle 4: Prioritize spaces to provide opportunities for diversity in people,
uses and activities
The ‘VicUrban/RMIT University Urban Design and Placemaking in Melbourne Initiative’ made this
essay possible. Findings from the initiative appear in two unpublished reports. The research team
was: Dr Susie Moloney, Dr Beau Beza, Professor John Fien, Professor Colin Fudge, Dr Prem
Chhetri, Amy Brown and David Trainham.
Principle 5: Create places that can reflect and accommodate a range of business, community and cultural interests and needs
References
Vitality and Diversity
Nature, Place and Environmental Sustainability
Principle 6: Respect, nurture and appraise the natural environment when creating places
Principle 7: Adopt the highest standards and measures to achieve environmental sustainability across all aspects and stages of a project
Collaborative and Participatory Governance
Adam, R 2011, ‘The globalism of place’ in Evans et al.: pp. 36–45.
Balch, C 2011, ‘Great cities don’t just happen: they are made!’ in Evans et al.: pp. 12–35.
Bounds, M 2004, Urban social theory: City, self and society, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Botton, A de 2006, The architecture of happiness: The secret art of furnishing your life, Penguin
Books, London.
Principle 8: Prioritize inclusive and participatory processes in creating a shared
vision
Principle 9: Make informed and evidence based decisions based on strong
research, analysis, and inquiry
Principle 10: Establish and implement policies, processes and measures that
enable and implement the successful delivery of places
Principle 11: Establish long-term, ongoing dialogue between different social
groups so that variety, rather than uniformity, can be sustained
Dictionary.com 2012, Definition of principle. Dictionary.com, viewed 18 January 2012 at
< http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/principle?s=t>
Principle 12: Develop ongoing evaluation measures to monitor the long-term
social, economic and environmental consequences of decisions.
Evans, B, McDonald, F and Rudlin, D 2011, ‘Urban identity’ in Evans et al.
Burton, P & Woolcock, G 2010, Green Star communities information paper, (report prepared for the
Green Building Council of Australia), Urban Research Program, Griffith University, Brisbane.
Cabinet Office Strategic Unit 2009, Quality of place: Improving the planning and design of the built
environment. An analysis of the issues and opportunities, Cabinet Office Strategic Unit, London.
Chawla, L 2002, Growing up in an urbanising world, UNESCO, Paris.
Evans, B, McDonald, F and Rudlin (eds) 2011, Urban identity, Routledge, London.
Farr, D 2008, Sustainable urbanism: Urban design with nature, John Wiley and Sons, New Jersey,
USA.
122
123
Freeman, C & Tranter, P 2011, Children and their urban environment, Earthscan, London.
Gleeson, B & Sipe, NG 2006, Creating child friendly cities: reinstating kids in the city, Routledge, New
York City.
Hamdi, N 2010, The Placemaker’s guide to building community, Earthscan, London/Washington DC.
Healey, P 2010, Making better places: The planning project in the twenty-first century, Palgrave
Macmillan, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire/New York City.
Hebbert. M 2009, ‘The three P’s of placemaking for climate change’, Town Planning Review, 80(4–5),
pp. 359–70.
Heywood, P 2011, Community planning: Integrating social and physical environments, WileyBlackwell, West Sussex.
McCurdy, DW & Spradley, JP (eds.) 2008, Conformity and conflict: Readings in cultural anthropology,
Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River.
McHarg, IL 1969, Design with nature, The American Museum of Natural History, Doubleday/Natural
History Press, New York City.
Moughton, C 2003, Urban design: Street and square, Architectural Press, Oxford.
PC 2011, A guide to placemaking in Chicago, Placemaking Chicago, Metropolitan Planning Council,
Chicago.
PPS 2011a, What is placemaking, Project for Public Spaces, viewed 23 October 2011 at
<http://www.pps.org/articles/what_is_placemaking/>.
PPS 2011b, Eleven principles for creating great community places, Project for Public Spaces, viewed
23 October 2011 at <http://www.pps.org/articles/11steps/>.
PPS 2011c, The power of 10, Project for Public Spaces, viewed 23 October 2011 at
<http://www.pps.org/articles/the-power-of-10/>.
PPS 2011d, What makes a successful place, Project for Public Spaces, viewed November 11 2011
at <http://www.pps.org/articles/grplacefeat/>.
Reynolds, P 2008, ‘Do you speak placemaking’, in O’Rourke, J, Tennyson, L, Kochan, B & Cowan, R
(eds), Placemaking: Celebrating quality and innovation in urban life, RUDI Ltd, London, pp. 60–61.
Thompson-Fauwcett, M & Freeman, C 2006, Living together: Towards inclusive communities in New
Zealand, Otago University Press, Dunedin.
The Peri-Urban Fringe
Michael Buxton
Peri-urban regions are areas on the urban periphery into which cities expand (Burnley & Murphy
1995; Budds & Minaya 1999) or which cities influence (Houston 2005). All outer urban land
development thus occurs initially on peri-urban land, whether new suburban construction, low
density rural-residential housing or diverse other forms of development. Peri-urban regions are the
fastest growing regions in many countries and hold high strategic, spatial, social, economic and
environmental significance. Their extent is changing constantly as the influence of cities on their
hinterlands increases. They are sites for significant agricultural activity, food production and natural
resources, and provide ecosystem services, landscape and other environmental values, often
containing significant reserves of habitat and biological diversity. They usually include urban water
catchments and storages. Many are important recreational and tourist areas, and may contain
essential infrastructure such as airports or waste disposal facilities. Peri-urban areas also fulfil
important personal and social needs, allowing urban dwellers to continue to relate to countryside,
and receive preventative health benefits and other social services.
Peri-Urban Perspectives
A peri-urban area can be defined in relation to a nearby metropolitan area on its inner boundary, a
rural area on its outer boundary, or as the land in between. An urban perspective will define periurban areas in relation to the influence of a nearby metropolitan area, concentrating on the influence
of the expanding inner, metropolitan boundary. This perspective will concentrate on the interactions
between the city and its peri-urban region. The city expands into agricultural areas and habitat,
populating rural areas and providing employment and entertainment opportunities for the peri-urban
population. Peri-urban areas also satisfy urban needs by providing land and resources (Houston
2005; Nelson 1999). Often non-urban areas are considered to be in an impermanent state as the
means to satisfy urban needs by providing a bank of land and resources (Friedberger 2000).
Proximity to urban markets creates pressures for change (Barr 2005). Most commonly, metropolitan
influences mean that change is the dominant peri-urban characteristic (Nelson 1999; Argent 2002).
Change can be regarded as orderly or chaotic, threatening or opportune. There is considerable
disagreement about this process of peri-urban change from two competing typologies. The first,
illustrated by Nelson (1990), Hart (1991) and Conzen (1969), uses hierarchical, concentric urban
rings to describe the structure of monocentric cities based on distance from the city centre,
exploring in particular, urban expansion, zonal structure, income segregation, commuting and
mixed income housing on the urban-rural periphery. Burnley and Murphy (1995) propose that
these concentric rings are orderly and predictable. Rather than a model of rings of decreasing land
use intensity, whereas Sinclair (1967) proposed rings of increasing intensity. Hart proposed that
metropolitan bow waves operated so that the outer edge of the peri-urban zone is pushed outward
into rural land, and the inner edge similarly moved constantly outward. This bow wave, he proposed,
could not be halted.
In contrast, others emphasize the disorderly nature of peri-urban land uses. Daniels (1990) argues
that peri-urban areas are characterized by haphazard and heterogeneous development coexisting
with traditional rural activities including agricultural practice, not by homogenous land uses extending
in an orderly gradation. He concludes that the discontinuous nature of land use in peri-urban
areas renders the model of clear concentric rings obsolete. Allen (2003 pp. 136–7) also points to a
multi-functional land use pattern and concludes that ‘the peri-urban interface can be characterized
as a heterogeneous mosaic of “natural” ecosystems, “productive” … ecosystems, and “urban”
ecosystems’. The depiction of the peri-urban as a mosaic conveys the dynamism of peri-urban
landscapes. Nelson (1999, p. 137) argues that the ex-urban area is ‘a polyglot of landscapes’ and
Audirac (1999, p. 13) similarly describes ‘a jumble of rural, urban and suburban landscapes’. Recent
Australian studies have likewise noted a blurred transitional zone of temporary mixes of urban and
124
125
rural activities and functions with no apparent order, where the resulting peri-urban land use activities
exhibit a high degree of heterogeneity, continual change and conflicting values (Low Choy et al.
2007).
A rural perspective, in contrast, looks to the outer rural boundary and concentrates on the needs of
rural peri-urban areas and their resilience. It regards urban expansion as a threat and, by introducing
new income and skills into areas outside cities, as an opportunity (Bunce & Walker 1992). Peri-urban
areas may be considered as the ‘invaded countryside’ (Walker 1987, cited in Bourne et al. 2003),
with the underlying cause of change in peri-urban areas being declining returns from agricultural
activity (Bunce & Walker 1992). Many peri-urban areas, such as regulated rural green belts on the
fringes of cities, are relatively stable and show high resistance to change and resilience to threats.
Many stable peri-urban landscapes are protected for long periods through such techniques as the
purchase or transfer of property development rights or through rural or agricultural zoning. This
stability is based on a clear delineation between urban and rural uses usually expressed through the
use of an urban growth boundary.
and townships extending in an arc around Melbourne. An even broader peri-urban zone has been
identified by researchers such as McKenzie (1996) and Barr (2003). McKenzie (1996) defined the
peri-urban area as the area within daily commuting distance of a city extending to a distance of over
100 km from the central business district (CBD). This would include the regional cities of Geelong,
Ballarat, Bendigo and the western Latrobe Valley. Melbourne’s peri-urban area can be regarded
as a region sharing common characteristics, problems and opportunities not recognized by many
existing policies.
Figure 1: Inner and Outer Peri-Urban Melbourne
Source: Adapted from Vicmap 2007
The third definition, of landscapes situated between suburbs and the truly rural hinterland, suggests
a distinct settlement pattern, neither urban nor rural but an interface, a transitional zone (Audirac
1999). Peri-urban areas are commonly regarded as a new and distinct form of settlement (Ford
1999; Nelson & Dueker 1990), their interface nature implying that they are neither urban nor rural.
On this analysis, peri-urban places are an identifiable ‘middle landscape’ between the boundary of
an urban area and rural pursuits (Davis et al. 1994, p. 46). Peri-urban areas are ‘not quite urban but
not quite rural’, in contrast to truly rural areas which are situated well beyond reasonable commuting
range of urban areas and isolated from urban markets (Nelson 1999, p. 138).
The dynamic nature of many peri-urban areas suggests that they are transitional. It may be difficult
to identify the characteristics and both the inner and outer boundaries of the peri-urban zone as
the space between urban and rural land, or bands or sectors within this zone. Dynamic rural periurban areas are the focus of significant non-metropolitan growth, both in Australia and internationally
(Bunker & Houston 2003; Nelson 1999). Whether peri-urban areas are regarded as interface areas
depends largely on whether change is occurring, the rate of change and the types of coexisting land
uses. At some point, even rural zones that are characterized by a mosaic of uses will become so
dynamic that they will pass into an interface phase, then become largely urban or rural residential.
These contrasting perspectives on peri-urban regions and growth underpin much debate on periurban issues, for example, between advocates of separating cities from rural hinterlands and those
who desire rural-urban unification. These underlying views constantly affect debate over policies of
urban dispersal or containment, regional protection or development and the use of market-based
and regulatory planning measures.
Their location, importance and the rapidity of change make peri-urban regions among the most
contested areas on earth (Walker 1999; Nelson 1999; Furuseth & Lapping 1999). Most cities have
been constructed on or close to coastal or riverine locations, usually on productive soils and in
environmentally significant areas. Conflict between land uses is a product of the varying significance
of peri-urban locations and assets, differing values and expectations among land users, and a
range of existing and potential incompatible uses. Many social and economic issues arise from the
development of peri-urban regions. Few countries have adequately analysed future needs and the
threats from the development of their peri-urban regions, established clear and enforceable aims,
and put in place adequate institutional and governance structures, policies and planning tools to
achieve the long term integrated planning and management of land and the peri-urban resource
base.
Melbourne’s Peri-Urban Region
Melbourne’s peri-urban area consists of inner and outer peri-urban zones (see Figure 1).
The inner zone is a conventional green belt extending between a legislated urban growth boundary
(UGB) at the metropolitan edge and the rural boundaries of 17 fringe area municipalities covering
8829 km2. The outer zone consists of the next belt of eight rural councils and their regional cities
126
!
Melbourne’s green belt (or inner peri-urban area) was officially established in the 1971 Melbourne
strategic plan, Planning Policies for the Melbourne Metropolitan Region (MMBW 1971). This was
Melbourne’s first regional plan and included non-urban areas, such as nine green wedges, covering
2400 km2 or half of the Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works (MMBW) planning area. This
region corresponds generally with the Port Phillip and Westernport region. In 2001 it was the second
highest producer of agricultural products in Victoria, with a gross production of $A890 million from
4010 farms, although some suggest that the true value may be closer to double this figure (Gardner
2002; Langworthy & Hackett 2000 cited in Parbery et al. 2008). PPWCMA (2004) estimates that
this area’s agricultural output per hectare is the highest in Victoria, at least three times greater than
any other region in the state and four times the state average. Further, in 2004, agricultural activities
occurred on 64 per cent of land in Melbourne’s green wedges. Five municipalities in Melbourne’s
outer peri-urban belt contributed over 5 per cent, or $390 million, of Victoria’s $7.5 billion farm
business turnover in 2006, an increase from the region’s share of 4.1 per cent in 1997. This outer
belt contains almost 2,500 farm businesses, or 7.6 per cent of the total farm businesses in the state,
an increasing proportion, largely a product of growth in small farm numbers.
Research by RMIT’s Environment and Planning program has shown that the greatest threat to the
extended Melbourne peri-urban region is incremental land fragmentation and development (Buxton
et al. 2011; Buxton & Goodman 2002; Buxton & Haynes 2010). Extensive land fragmentation has
127
occurred. The Department of Infrastructure (DOI 2002) estimates that at least 50,000 undeveloped
lots exist in the inner peri-urban region. The outer peri-urban region contains about 25,000 further
lots without dwellings where a further 6881 lots could be created under existing planning schemes
through subdivision. New deregulated rural zones in Victoria will enable substantial commercial
development in rural areas (Buxton et al. 2011). Barr (2005) defines these as high amenity areas
because of their high landscape and coastal values.
Extensive suburbanization of the Melbourne inner green belt also has occurred since the early
1990s, fundamentally altering the original concept of a green belt developed by former premier
Sir Rupert Hamer and the MMBW. Further RMIT research has shown that, by the late 1990s,
long-standing metropolitan policy had been widely disregarded, with at least 4,000 hectares being
removed from the green wedges between 1996 and 2002 (Buxton & Goodman 2002). Only the
reintroduction of policy implemented under the Melbourne 2030 metropolitan plan prevented the
collapse of the green wedge policy. In particular, with the passing of the Green Wedges Protection
Act 2003, the government introduced a legislated urban growth boundary and regulatory non-urban
zones. Nevertheless, since then, this legislation has been amended four times removing over 50,000
hectares from the inner green belt.
RMIT research has demonstrated reciprocal impacts across sectors. Most small rural lots will be
developed by 2020. This, and further subdivision will have major impacts. In some catchments,
stock and domestic farm dams represent a substantial share of the overall water use within that
catchment, for example, at 47 per cent in South Gippsland, 35 per cent in Maribyrnong and 30
per cent in Otway Coast (DSE 2007). Construction of a further 16,252 dwellings on rural lots in 14
peri-urban catchments would increase stock and domestic dam capacity by 68,262 ML or 35 per
cent leading to major reduction in stream flows. Most remnant native vegetation is located on large
lots of 40 hectares or more comprising 28 per cent of the rural peri-urban area while 71 per cent of
vegetation with a bioregional conservation status is situated on lots greater than 40 hectare. Closer
settlement will lead inevitably to the loss of much of this vegetation (Buxton et al. 2011).
Increasing land fragmentation also increases the risk from bushfire to large numbers of people.
The lack of connections between land use planning and anticipatory risk management was
demonstrated by the Victorian bushfires of 7 February 2009. These led to the greatest loss of life
and property from a natural disaster in Australia’s recorded history: 173 lives lost, more than 2500
buildings destroyed and more than $A1.2 billion in insured losses (Buxton & Haynes 2010). This loss
occurred in Melbourne’s peri-urban area.
Fragmented land titles are one symptom of fragmented sectoral policy and management. Isolated
sectoral thinking, in turn, is a consequence of institutional fragmentation and inadequate policy. In
the outer peri-urban region, for example, land use planning tools have been commonly misapplied,
with 81 per cent of native vegetation on private land placed within the Farming Zone (225,800 ha),
while the environmental Rural Conservation Zone, is rarely used, and contains only 13 per cent
(35,140 ha) of native vegetation. Relatively high proportions of the remaining native vegetation on
private land have relatively little protection (Buxton et al. 2011). Horizontal institutional fragmentation
between government sectors and vertical fragmentation between federal, state, regional and local
government is the norm.
Since 1971, a considerable expansion of the Melbourne metropolitan area and growth in peri-urban
population has led to substantial changes in the appearance and function of many landscapes and
in the socio-economic character of many communities. Population and housing growth in the periurban region is far in excess of employment growth (ABS 2007), with the highest growth occurring in
areas containing attractive landscapes with the best access to Melbourne. Deregulated governance
arrangements now pose a renewed threat to the future productiveness, natural resources and
environmental attributes of this important region.
References
ABS 2007, Census of Population and Housing 2006, Australian Bureau of Statistics, Canberra.
Allen, A 2003, ‘Environmental planning and management of the peri-urban interface: perspectives
on an emerging field’, Environment & Urbanization, 15(1), pp. 135–47.
Argent, N 2002, ‘From pillar to post? In seach of the post-productivist countryside in Australia’,
Australian Geographer, 33(1), pp. 97–114.
Audirac, I 1999 ‘Unsettled views about the fringe: rural-urban or urban-rural frontiers?’ in Furuseth &
Lapping (eds): pp. 7–32.
Barr, N 2005, The changing social landscape of rural Victoria, Department of Primary Industries,
Tatura, Victoria.
Barr, N 2003, ‘Future agricultural landscapes’, Australian Planner, 40(2), pp. 123–27.
Bourne, L, Bunce, M, Taylor, L & Luka, N 2003, ‘Contested ground: The dynamics of peri-urban
growth in the Toronto region’, Canadian Journal of Regional Science, 26(2&3), pp. 251–70.
Budds, J & Minaya, A 1999, Overview of initiatives regarding the management of the peri-urban
interface, Strategic Environmental Planning and Management for the Peri-Urban Interface Research
Project, Development Planning Unit, University College London, London.
Bunce, M & Walker, G 1992, ‘The Transformation of Rural Life’, in Bowler, I Nellis BC & Nellis CM
(eds) Contemporary rural systems in transition: Vol. 2, Economy and Society, Redwood Press,
Melksham: pp. 49–61.
Bunker, R & Houston, P 2003, ‘Prospects for the rural-urban fringe in Australia: Observations from a
brief history of the landscapes around Sydney and Adelaide’, Australian Geographical Studies, 41,
pp. 233–47.
Burnley, I & Murphy, P 1995, ‘Exurban development in Australia and the United States: Through a
glass darkly’, Journal of Planning and Education Research, 14, pp. 245–54.
Buxton, M, Alvarez, A, Butt, A, Farrell, S, Densley, S, Pelican, M & O’Neill, D 2011, Scenario planning
for Melbourne’s peri-urban region, RMIT University, Melbourne.
Buxton, M & Goodman, R 2002, Maintaining Melbourne’s green wedges: Planning policy and
the future of Melbourne’s green belt, School of Social Science and Planning, RMIT University,
Melbourne.
Buxton, M & Haynes, R 2010, Land Use Planning for Bushfire Protection, Report prepared for the
2009 Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission, January, School of Global Studies, Social Science and
Planning, Melbourne.
Conzen, M 1969, Alnwick Northumberland: A study in town plan analysis, Institute of British
Geographers, London.
Daniels, T 1990, ‘Policies to preserve prime farmland in the USA: a comment’, Journal of Rural
Studies, 6(3), pp. 331–36.
Davis, JS, Nelson, AC & Dueker, KJ (1994) ‘The new burbs: The exburbs and their implications for
planning policy’, Journal of the American Planning Association, 60(1), pp. 45–59.
DOI 2002, Melbourne 2030: Planning for sustainable growth, Department of Infrastructure,
Melbourne.
Department of Sustainability and Environment 2007, State water report 2005–06: A statement of
Victorian water resources, DSE, Melbourne.
Ford, T 1999, ‘Understanding population growth in the peri-urban region’, International Journal of
Population Geography, 5, pp. 297–311.
Friedberger, M 2000, ‘The rural-urban fringe in the late twentieth century’, Agricultural History, 74(2),
pp. 502–14.
128
129
Furuseth, OJ & Lapping, MB (eds) 1999, Contested countryside: The rural urban fringe in North
America, Ashgate Publishing, Aldershot.
Gardner, B 2002, ‘Agriculture in the Port Phillip and Westernport catchment’, produced for the 2002
Regional Catchment Strategy of the Port Phillip and Westernport region, Department of Primary
Industries, Melbourne.
Hart, J 1991, ‘The perimetropolitan bow wave’, The Geographical Review, 81, pp. 35–51.
Houston, P 2005, ‘Revaluing the fringe: Some findings on the value of agricultural production in
Australia’s peri-urban regions’, Geographical Research, 43(2), pp. 209–223.
Langworthy, A & Hackett, T 2000, Farming real estate: Challenges and opportunities for
agribusiness on the urban fringe – Yarra Valley Region, Department of Employment, Workplace
Relations and Small Business, Commonwealth of Australia in conjunction with the Shire of Yarra
Ranges and the Shire of Nillumbik.
Low Choy, D, Sutherland, C, Scott, S, Rolley. K, Gleeson, B, Dodson, J & Sipe, N 2007, Change
and continuity in peri-urban Australia—Peri-urban Case Study: South East Queensland, Monograph
no. 3, Change and Continuity in Peri-Urban, Urban Research Program, Griffith University, Brisbane.
McKenzie, F 1996, Beyond the suburbs: Population change in the major exurban regions of
Australia, Bureau of Immigration Multicultural and Population Research, Australian Government
Publishing Service, Canberra.
MMBW 1971, Planning policies for the Melbourne Metropolitan Region, Melbourne and Melbourne
Board of Works, Melbourne
Nelson, A 1990, ‘Economic critique of prime farmland preservation policies in the United States’,
Journal of Rural Studies, 6, pp. 119–142.
Nelson, A 1999, ‘The exurban battleground’, in Furuseth & Lapping (eds), pp. 137–149.
Nelson, A & Dueker, KJ 1990, ‘The exurbanization of America and its planning policy implications’,
Journal of Planning and Education Research, 9(2), pp. 91–100.
Parbery, P, Wilkinson, R & Karunaratne, K 2008, Square pegs in green wedges: Landholders and
natural resource management in Melbourne’s rural hinterland, Department of Primary Industries,
Melbourne.
PPWCMA 2004, Port Phillip and Western Port regional catchment strategy 2004–2009, Port Phillip
and Westernport Catchment Management Authority, Frankston.
Sinclair, R 1967, ‘Von Thunen and urban sprawl’, Annals of the Association of American
Geographers 57, pp. 72–87.
Walker, G 1999, ‘Contesting the countryside and changing social composition in the greater Toronto
area’, in Furuseth & Lapping (eds): pp. 33–56.
Walker, G 1987, An invaded countryside: Structures of life on the Toronto fringe, Geographical
monograph no. 17, Atkinson College, York University, Toronto.
Developing Sustainability Strategies:
Double Diamond Method of Life Cycle and
Design Thinking
Stephen Clune
‘If every Australian household switched to renewable energy and stopped driving their cars
tomorrow,’ write Dey et al. (2007, p. 291), ‘total household emissions would decline by only about
18 per cent’. What accounts for the remaining 82 per cent of emissions? And, how can they
be strategically reduced? This essay introduces how streamlined Life Cycle Assessment (LCA)
techniques and design thinking may be used to develop context-specific sustainability strategies
that answer the questions above. This process is referred to by the RMIT Centre for Design (CfD) as
the ‘double diamond method’ of LCA and design thinking (see Figure 1). The approach draws on
LCA and design thinking which are briefly introduced prior to discussing a case study developing a
sustainability strategies plan for a major aged care organization, which illustrates the method.
Life cycle thinking is based heavily on the objective science of LCA, which attempts to estimate all
of the environmental impacts from the inputs (e.g. materials, land use and energy) and outputs (e.g.
pollutants, greenhouse gases and waste) of a studied product system or service across its life cycle.
LCA is predominantly used as an evaluative tool to assess what has been already constructed.
However, its greatest promise may be as a prescriptive tool that guides what could be.
Design thinking is a process for solving complex, or wicked, problems that originated in product
design and architectural processes. It involves the synthesis of various, often disparate, ideas
into multiple plausible solutions. Swann (2002, p. 51) describes the design synthesis process as
‘intuition, inspirational guesswork and holistic thinking’. Cross (1989) articulates the difference
between design and engineering by suggesting that designers solve complex problems though
synthesis in the generation of multiple solutions; many quick solutions are generated until one works.
This differs from scientific or engineering disciplines in which problems are solved through analysis.
The synthetic creative process is explained by Schön (1991, p. 68) as continuous on-the-fly
‘reflection in action’. Herbert Simon’s (1969, p. 129) notion of design is that it does not just create
new objects and artefacts but that designers attempt to ‘change existing situations into preferred
ones’. Design has a history of improving existing conditions. This understanding of design is
contrasted to the view of designers as merely stylists who produce user-friendly products to meet
‘what are generally taken to be pre-existing needs’ (Shove et al. 2007, p. 9).
An important addition to understanding ‘design as problem solving’ is that we are all designers:
The practice of design as a thing that people do predates professions. In fact, the practice of
design—making things with a useful goal in mind—actually predates the human race. Making
things is one of the attributes that made us human in the first place.
(Friedman 2000, p. 5)
If we acknowledge that we are all designers, then using a participatory approach to designing,
involving stakeholders, becomes logical. Participatory design aligns with the argument that ideas are
most powerful when developed from the inside out.
Case Study: Integrating Life Cycle and Design Thinking in the Double Diamond Method
A case study of a project completed in 2010 with a major Australian care provider, United Aged
Care, illustrates how life cycle and design thinking are integrated. The project outcome was a
sustainability opportunities plan that would theoretically reduce carbon dioxide equivalent emissions
(CO2e) by 54 per cent over a ten-year period. Streamlined LCA was used as a tool to identify major
environmental impacts, assisting to define the problem of unsustainability prior to focusing on more
articulate design solutions via design thinking, as shown in the divergent, convergent, divergent and
convergent model of the design process appropriated from the UK Design Council (2005)—see
130
131
Figure 1. The key challenge that this process attempts to address is the large gap between the
seemingly unsurmountable scale of unsustainability in initiatives employed by your average John
Smith to reduce their ecological impact. As mentioned, the key question is that, if it is correct that
the result of all Australians moving to renewable energy and refraining from driving their cars would
be just an 18 per cent decrease in total household emissions, what are the remaining 82 percent of
emissions attributable to? How LCA approaches this follows.
Figure 2. Drivers of Climate Change Impacts in United Aged Care Facilities
Source: Clune & Carre (2010, p. 59)
Figure 1. The Double Diamond Method of Life Cycle and Design Thinking
Source: Clune & Lockrey (2011)
Initially LCA drives a divergent mode of thinking, in that it seeks to identify all of the potential impacts
that could occur in the delivery of the product, system or service. Generally an inventory of all
materials used is made, or the expenditure related to the delivery of a particular product, system
or service is calculated. It is possible to attribute an impact to each dollar spent or each process
involved.
Convergent Problem Exploration: Practices and Processes
The streamlined analysis is then interpreted into key themes for discussion. The interpretation seeks
‘hotspots’ in the products system or service where the greatest environmental impacts occur. The
Pareto principle, or the 80:20 rule, can often be identified in this phase. Such insight allows strategic
focus on areas that appear to matter most. Discussion centres on themes relating to the largest
impacts. The interpretation of the LCA results is not as linear as simply identifying areas of largest
impact. Synthesis of results into meaningful themes characteristic of design thinking connects
disparate pieces of information into manageable chunks (Bacic 2007). What is the problem? What
are the most useful questions to ask at this stage?
The convergent interpretation of the LCA identified environmental impact hotspots in the United
Aged Care case study, highlighting a Pareto-like principle in that 25.2 per cent of the care provider’s
expenditure (electricity and meat consumption) account for 62 per cent of its global warming impact.
In the interpretation a move was made from scientific data to day-to-day practices, transitioning to
three themes:
1.
Capital-purchasing decisions—procurement of appliances and capital
2.
Thermal comfort—providing comfort through heating and cooling
3.
Food and diet—nutrition to menu planning and meal preparation
Divergence: Why and How are the Practices Completed? What are the Alternatives?
At this stage, we identified strategic problematic areas within the product, system or service,
which were menu planning, thermal comfort and procurement in this case. This second stage
of the double diamond process aims to understand why the product systems or service are as
they are. The investigation into everyday practice is often seen as disruptive, questioning standard
practice and presenting alternatives. Key stakeholders were engaged and included in divergent
co-development workshops (both on-site and remotely via video link). This stage is broken into two
phases: defining and designing.
Defining: A Problem Well Put is a Problem Half-Solved
A sound definition of the problem at hand will, by default, increase the likelihood that the designed
solution will be more satisfactory. The defining process generally involves an open discussion of
the streamlined LCA results and the synthesis of results into areas of highest strategic impact. We
are interested in gathering information on why the themes (processes, procedures and everyday
practices) exist as they do, who is responsible, and how are they planned and managed. In
many ways this problematizing acknowledges that the existing state is not 100 per cent stable or
preferred. In expanding on the problem it was possible to identify existing positive initiatives that
could be built upon or amplified, and initiatives that may have to be developed from scratch. In lay
terms we accentuate the positive, and eliminate the negative. Within this defining stage, examples
of best practice can be presented and discussed, sowing the seeds of possibility within influential
minds.
Initially the care provider’s key concerns were highly visual, such as paper use, disposable rubber
gloves or the high number of incontinent pads—accounting for 3 per cent of the total global
warming impact. LCA identified areas previously not considered, such as food, which had 40 per
cent of the global warming impact, a far greater impact. The process redirected the designers to
areas of most significant environmental importance, highlighted in Figure 2.
132
133
Designing: What are the Alternatives?
Conclusion
Once a sound problem definition is arrived at, we can move onto identifying potential solutions for
each theme through a large brainstorming and creativity session, encouraging exploration of all
ideas and tangents. Solutions are generated by prompts, identifying interventions at differing levels,
i.e. minor and major, no or low cost, short-term, long-term or ‘Factor Ten’ improvements. Ideas
and processes are recorded so that they can be critiqued at a later date. This process generated a
suite of alternative solutions to improve thermal comfort and reduce energy, strategically upgrade
and finance energy efficiency measures over time, and to reduce the CO2e intensity of the care
provider’s menus.
The time-span to respond to our global ecological crisis is relatively short. In this sense we do not
have time to invest significant time and resources studying or shifting practices that may not make
a difference. The ‘double diamond method’ of life cycle and design thinking presented in this
essay provides a process to identify practices that can be targeted with the highest impact based
on objective science, and uses design thinking to develop strategies to significantly reduce such
impacts in a participatory manner. In the case study presented this process enabled a theoretical 54
per cent reduction in global warming impacts in the provision of aged care over a ten-year time for
United Aged Care.
Convergence: Validating Alternatives and Sustainability Opportunities Plan
Acknowledgements
The final stage transforms the ideas generated into a well resolved environmental ‘sustainability
opportunities’ plan. In this case study, viable ideas generated offered a theoretical 54 per cent
reduction in global warming impacts in the provision of aged care over a ten-year time frame (as
illustrated in Figure 3). The plan included:
The authors would like to acknowledge and thank the following people for their contribution to the
project. For their valuable contribution in the participatory workshops, we thank members of the
Uniting Aged Care Steering Group committee: Carol Fountain, Robyn Batten, Melissa Nicholson,
Santhi Goode, Sally De Visser, Russell Purchase, Chris Wood, Marianne Zarb, Garry Knight, Yvonne
Wells, Kerry Whitlock and Aileen O’Rourke. We thank energy efficiency expert Alan Pears, for the
completion of the initial efficiency audit of Strathdon’s Aged Care facilities, and Chris Wood and John
Pidoto for their valuable time in enabling the audit. Finally, we thank Simon Lockrey and Andrew
Carre from the Centre for Design RMIT for writing earlier publications relating to this document,
and Tara Andrews from the University of Western Sydney for assistance facilitating the participatory
workshops.
•
Food related strategies: revised menu plans, reduced plate waste and trialling community
gardens, offering a forum to discuss food-related impacts, increase thermal comfort, health,
well-being, etc.
•
Energy related strategies: monitoring to identify areas of ‘wasted’ electricity, seasonally
adjusting temperatures, reducing the temperatures of unused spaces and increasing focus
on energy efficiency in the near term. Over the longer-term, energy generating fuel cells that
produced electricity, hot water and solar panels were mandated.
•
A financing strategy tied the plan together: scheduling implementation of individual strategies
across time; initiatives with lower capital cost and short return on investment were to be funded
first and savings from the efficiency improvements re-invested into future projects.
Figure 3. Sustainability Improvement Opportunities Plan
References
Bacic, M 2007, The central role of the designer’s appreciative system in socially situated design
activity, College of Fine Arts, Sydney, University of New South Wales. Masters [thesis] 171.
Clune, S & Lockrey S 2011, ‘Double diamond for sustainable strategy: Participatory LCA and design
thinking’, Core77, 8 December, viewed 20 September 2012 at <http://www.core77.com/blog/
case_study/double_diamond_for_sustainable_strategy_participatory_lca_and_design_thinking_by_
stephen_clune_and_simon_lockrey_21211.asp>
Clune, S and Carre A 2010, Identification of sustainability improvement opportunities for Uniting
Aged Care Victoria and Tasmania, Centre for Design, RMIT University, Melbourne.
Cross, N 1989, Engineering design methods, John Wiley, Chichester.
Design Council 2005, ‘The design process’, viewed 14 August 2011 at <http://www.designcouncil.
org.uk/about-design/How-designers-work/The-design-process/>.
Dey C, Berger C, Foran B, Foran M, Joske R, Lenzen M, & Wood R 2007, ‘Household
environmental pressure from consumption: an Australian environmental atlas’, in Birch, G (ed.)
Water, wind, art and debate: How environmental concerns impact on disciplinary research, Sydney
University Press, Sydney.
Friedman, K 2000, ‘Creating design knowledge: From research into practice’ paper presented to the
International Design and Technology Educational Research conference, Loughborough University,
viewed 3 October 2012 at <https://dspace.lboro.ac.uk/dspace-jspui/bitstream/2134/1360/1/
Friedman2000.pdf>.
Schön, D 1991, The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action, Ashgate, Aldershot.
Shove, E, Watson, M, Hand, M & Ingram, J 2007, The design of everyday life, Berg Publishers,
Oxford.
Simon, H 1969, The science of the artefact, MIT Press, Cambridge.
Swann, C 2002, ‘Action research and the practice of design’, Design Issues, 18(1), pp. 49–61.
134
135
The City of San Francisco leads the United States in many issues of sustainability, including dealing with the homeless. However, drug-abuse
and precarious living continue to be intractable issues in parts of the city. This photograph was taken not far from the theatre district in the
vicinity of the crack cocaine neighbourhoods of inner-city San Francisco. Interviews in May 2012 with street people suggested a culture
of closely networked poor communities and people who feel both extremes of pain and care. ‘I was a queen, a prom queen, and I am still
somebody’, said one old woman. ‘But nobody cares ... I only take drugs for the pain, crones disease. I am strong-willed. One small lump of
crack will last for a long time.’ An hour into the conversation she asked a passing old man for food. From his clothes he looked to be also a
street person. He unwrapped two cold chicken drumsticks from a plastic bag, which he had received from a city handout that morning and
gave them both to her. She took them and cried. ‘Nobody ever does anything like that for me’, she said contradictorily.
San Francisco, USA, 2012.
136
137
3. Researchers
Iftekhar Ahmed
School of Architecture & Design
David Forrest
School of Education
Yoko Akama
School of Media and Communication
Lisa French
Mary Myla Andamon
Centre for Design
Colin Fudge
College of Design and Social Context
Paula Arcari
Centre for Design
Hartmut Fünfgeld
School of Mathematical and Geospatial Sciences
Colin Arrowsmith
Stephen Gaunson
Sharif As-Saber
School of Management
Susana Gavidia-Payne
School of Health Sciences
Naomi Bailey
School of Global, Urban and Social Studies
Victor Gekara
School of Business IT and Logistics
Emma Barrow
Student Services
Lida Ghahremanloo
PHD Student
Ruth Barton
Vinita Godinho
Graduate School of Business and Law
Sarah Bekessy
Catherine Gomes
Mike Berry
Robin Goodman
Beau Beza
Ascelin Gordon
Karyn Bosomworth
Annette Gough
School of Education
Carlene Boucher
Damian Grenfell
Cathy Brigden
Elizabeth Grierson
School of Art
Tim Butcher
Jose Roberto Guevara
Michael Buxton
Olivia Guntarik
Anuja Cabraal
John Handmer
George Cairns
Vandra Harris
Robin Cameron
Peter Hayes
Iain Campbell
David Hayward
Andrew Carre
Centre for Design
Kathryn Hegarty
Chris Chamberlain
Georgina Heydon
Esther Charlesworth
School of Architecture and Design
Sarah Hickmott
School of Computer Science and Information Technologies
Guosheng Chen
Larissa Hjorth
France Cheong
Ralph Horne
Centre for Design
Prem Chhetri
Peter Horsfield
Stephen Clune
Centre for Design
Heather Horst
Bronwyn Coate
School of Economics
Chris Hudson
Val Colic-Peisker
Tammy Hulbert
School of Art
Ngan Collins
Kim Humphery
Brian Corbitt
Shae Hunter
Centre for Design
Enda Crossin
Centre for Design
Joe Hurley
Tony Dalton
Usha Iyer-Raniga
School of Property Construction and Project Management
Hepu Deng
John Jackson
Heather Douglas
Margaret Jackson
Paul James
Research and Innovation
Tim Butcher
Robin Cameron
John Fien
Robin Goodman
Tommaso Durante
Peter Fairbrother
Muhammad Saleem Janjua
Nautilus Institute
Jeff Fang
School of Economics, Finance and Marketing
Gaya Jayatilleke
John Fien
Guy Johnson
138
Damian Grenfell
John Handmer
Ralph Horne
Chris Hudson
139
Martyn Jones
Anitra Nelson
Sandra Jones
Berenice Nyland
School of Education
Barry Judd
Mandy Oakham
Elizabeth Kath
Lin Padgham
Sun Ke
Sharon Parkinson
Adriana Keating
Christine Peacock
Shahadat Khan
Alan Pears
Danielle Kirby
Simon Perry
School of Art
Daniel Kong
School of Civil, Environmental and Chemical Engineering
Peter Phipps
Julie Lawson
Nattavud Pimpa
Jeff Lewis
Siddhi Pittayachawan
Tania Lewis
Shams Rahman
Helen Lewis
Centre for Design
Andreana Reale
Simon Lockrey
Centre for Design
Dominic Redfern
School of Art
Liam Magee
Karin Reinke
Cecily Maller
Shanthi Robertson
Andrew Martel
Centre for Design
Felicity Roddick
Jennifer Martin
Patricia Rogers
Judith Rogers
Paul James
Jeff Lewis
Marietta Martinovic
Jan Matthews
School of Health Sciences
Rob Roggema
Centre for Design
Jock McCulloch
James Rowe
Darryn McEvoy
Angelina Russo
Blythe McLennan
Selver B. Sahin
Adela McMurray
Andrew Scerri
Anne McNevin
David Scerri
Ian McShane
Jan Scheurer
Paul Mees
Helen Scott
Bernard Mees
Sujeeva Setunge
David Mercer
Kristen Sharp
School of Art
Denise Meredyth
Elizabeth Shi
Pavla Miller
Mohini Singh
Sophie Millin
Supriya Singh
Alemayehu Molla
Dhirendara Singh
Susie Moloney
Joseph Siracusa
Tom Molyneaux
Marianne Sison
Brian Morris
Judith Smart
John Morrissey
Darryn Snell
Nuttawuth Muenjohn
Nevzat Soguk
Jane Mullett
Victoria Stead
Martin Mulligan
Manfred Steger
Yasothara Nadarajah
Nikki Stephenson
140
Liam Magee
Darryn McEvoy
Jane Mullett
Yaso Nadarajah
Lin Padgham
Andy Scerri
141
Kaye Stevens
Yolande Strengers
Research and Innovation
Jo Tacchi
Richard Tanter
Nautilus Institute
Elizabeth Taylor
James Thom
Ian Thomas
Keith Toh
Ly Thi Tran
School of Education
Anna Trembath
Alexei Trundle
Karli Verghese
Centre for Design
Yoland Wadsworth
Ron Wakefield
School of Property Construction and Project Management
Mayra Walsh
PHD Student
Julia Werner
Leone Wheeler
School of Education
Joshua Whittaker
Nilmini Wickramasinghe
Nicola Willand
Linda Williams
School of Art
Bradley Wilson
Bruce Wilson
European Union Centre at RMIT
Chris Wilson
James Wong
Centre for Design
Gavin Wood
Leslie Young
Fabio Zambetta
Kevin Zhang
Supriya Singh
Manfred Steger
Nevzat Soguk
Page 143: If there is a forgotten history of Los Angeles it is the history of its indigenous peoples. That does not mean that one cannot
find images of Indians. This photograph is of the shopfront of a tobacco shop in Westlake. The display depicts all the usual clichés of
old tobacco stores: images of the Wild West, bags of gold and wooden statues of brave Indian warriors. In 1964, Theodora Kroeber
published a book called Ishi: Last of His Tribe. It was one of the last of the major writings interested in the history and active present of
Indigenous people in Los Angeles. Los Angeles, USA, 2012.
142
143
The two boys shown in the photograph are from a favella (slum settlement) on the outskirts of the city, once a
poor rural community. They attend a preschool in Vila de Cava supported by World Vision. Researchers from
the Global Cities Institute visited the preschool with colleagues from World Vision as part of a larger project on
children’s wellbeing. The school is inspiring. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2012.
144
145
4. Administrative Structure
Administrative Team
Affiliated Research Centre Directors
Paul James
Director
Chris Chamberlain
Centre for Applied Social Research
Nevzat Soguk
Deputy Director
Peter Fairbrother
Centre for Sustainable Organizations and Work
Frank Yardley
Manager
Damian Grenfell
Globalism Research Centre
Melissa Postma
Communications and Events
Robin Goodman
Australian Housing and Urban Research Insitute (AHURI)
Liam Magee
Chief Technical Officer
Ralph Horne
Centre for Design
College Reference Group
(Deputy Pro-Vice Chancellors of Research and Innovation)
Denise Meredyth
Felicity Roddick
College of Science, Engineering and Health
Geoffrey Stokes
College of Business
Research Leaders and Managers
School Executive Members
Robin Goodman
School of Global Studies, Social Science and Planning
John Handmer
Lin Padgham
School of Computer Science and Information Technology
Felicity Roddick
Supriya Singh
Jo Tacchi
School of Media and Communications
Tim Butcher
Program Manager, Global Indigeneity and Reconciliation
Robin Cameron
Program Manager, Human Security and Disasters
John Fien
Co-Program Leader, Sustainable Urban and Regional Futures
John Handmer
Co-Program Leader, Human Security and Disasters
Ralph Horne
Co-Program Leader, Sustainable Urban and Regional Futures
Chris Hudson
Co-Program Leader, Globalization and Culture
Barry Judd
Program Leader, Global Indigeneity and Reconciliation
Jeff Lewis
Co-Program Leader, Human Security and Disasters
Professor Eugenie Birch
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia
Darryn McEvoy
Program Leader, Climate Change Adaptation
Professor Terrell Carver
University of Bristol, Bristol
Jane Mullett
Program Manager, Climate Change Adaptation
Sir Peter Hall
University College, London
Yaso Nadarajah
Co-Program Leader, Community Sustainability
Associate Professor Meg Holden Simon Fraser University, Vancouver
Lin Padgham
Program Leader, Urban Decision-Making and Complex Systems
Professor Jyoti Hosagrahar
Columbia University, New York; SSADT, Bangalore
Liz Ryan
Director of Operations, Global Compact Cities Programme
Professor Om Prakash Mathur National Institute of Urban Affairs, New Delhi
Supriya Singh
Co-Program Leader, Community Sustainability
Professor Saskia Sassen
Columbia University, New York
Manfred Steger
Co-Program Leader, Globalization and Culture
Professor Oren Yiftachel
Ben Gurion University, Be’er Sheva
146
PhD Representatives
Tommaso Durante
Tim Strom
Global Advisors
147
This image forms part of the background to conversations involving members of the Indigenous and broader Australian
communities about community-based responses to health-care issues, with specific reference to the recommendations of the
Ampe Akelyernemane Meke Mekarle Report (The Little Children are Sacred). In the photograph Bryan Stirling points to a mural
on the wall in the front entrance of the Ingkintja men’s building. Viewing the mural are a delegation from the Middle East, together
with Melbourne researchers-practitioners, who visited Alice Springs and remote communities in Central Australia in July 2011.
Alice Springs, Australia, 2011.
148
149
5. Visiting Scholars
Fellows and Distinguished Visitors 2012
Fellows and Distinguished Visitors 2007–2011
Dr Ivan Alseshkovsky, Lomosonow Moscow State University
Ibrahim G Aoudé, University of Hawai’i (2009) • Clyde Barrow, University of Massachusetts-
Dr Bart Barendregt, Leiden University
Dartmouth (2008) • Roland Benedikter, University of Vienna (2008) • Stephen Berry, DEWHA (2009)
Geoff Barker, Director of PM+D Architects
• Roland Bleiker, University of Queensland (2008) • Sofie Bouteligier, University of Leuven (2010)
Dr Istvan Benczes, Faculty of Economics, Corvinus University of Budapest
• Neil Brenner, New York University (2008) • Michaela Bruel, City of Copenhagen (2008)
Professor Edward J Blakely, University of Sydney
• Harriet Bulkeley, Durham University (2008) • Dr Senad Burka, University of Sarajevo (2011)
Dr Volker Busch-Geertsema, European Observatory of Homelessness
• Faruk Caklovia, University of Sarajevo (2011) • Terrell Carver, University of Bristol (2008, 2009,
Professor Michael Christie, Charles Darwin University
2010, 2011) • Rick Clugston, Talloire Secretariat (2008, 2009) • Lee Coates, Sydney (2010)
Professor Changgang Guo, Shanghai University
• Peter Corcoran, Gulf Coast University (2007, 2008) • Bernard Crick (2008) • Lane Crothers,
Leloy Claudio, Ateneo de Manila University
Illinois State University (2007) • Simon Dalby, Carleton University (2008) • Hans de Moel, Vrije
Professor Dennis Culhane, University of Pennsylvania
Universiteit, Amsterdam (2011) • Jennifer Dixon, University of Auckland (2010) • John Doggart,
Professor Evelyn Davidheiser, University of Minnesota
Sustainable Energy Academy, UK (2009) • Miriam Glucksmann, University of Essex (2010) • Jon
Professor Ben Derudder, Ghent University
Professor Andy van den Dobbelsteen, Delft University of Technology
Professor Ulf Engel, University of Leipzig
Dr Victor Faessel, UC Santa Barbara
Professor Partha S. Ghosh, Jawaharlal Nehru University
Professor Debora Halbert, Head of Politics University of Hawaii
Professor David Held, Durham University
Professor Jyoti Hosagrahar, Architecture, Columbia University
Dr Anthony Jackson, Vice President, Education Partnership for Global Learning, Asia Society
Professor Mark Juergensmeyer, UC-Santa Barbara
Goldberg-Hiller, University of Hawai’i (2007) • James Goodman, UTS (2008, 2009, 2010) • Stephen
Gough, University of Bath (2008, 2010 2011) • Liah Greenfeld, Boston University (2011) • Kushil
Gunasekera (Foundation of Goodness (2007, 2010) • Michael Harloe, University of Salford (2009)
• Mark Harvey, University of Essex (2010) • Siri Hettige, University of Colombo (2008, 2009, 2010,
2011) • Robert Holton, Trinity College, Dublin (2007, 2009) • Helge Hveem, University of Oslo (2008)
• Mark Juergensmeyer, UC-Santa Barbara (2009) • Haider A. Khan, University of Denver (2010)
• Gordon Laxer, University of Alberta (2007) • Scott Leckie, Geneva (2010) • Gavin Killip, Oxford
University (2009) • Le Thanh Sang, Vietnamese Academy of Social Sciences (2008) • Le Vu Cuong,
Vietnam Green Building Council (2009) • Lijun Gou, Tianjin (2010) • Rupert Maclean, Hong Kong
Institute of Education (2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011) • Neville Mars, Rotterdam (2008) • Josse
Materu, UN Habitat, Nairobi (2008, 2009) • James Mittelman, American University (2009) • Daniela
Associate Professor Michael Kluth, University of Roskilde
Molinari, Milano Polytechnica (2010, 2011) • Laurence Murphy, University of Auckland (2010) • Rob
Professor Sankaran Krishna, University of Hawai’i
O’Donoghue, Rhodes University (2009) • John Postill, Sheffield Hallam University (2011) • Rencheng
Professor Patrick Manning, University of Pittsburgh
Jin, Tianjin (2010) • Santha Sheela Nair, New Delhi (2008) • Nguyen Duc Vinh, Vietnamese Academy
Professor Matthias Middell, University of Leipzig
of Social Sciences (2008) • Carmenesa Moniz Noronha, Timor-Leste (2008) • Helena Norberg-
Professor Jamal R. Nassar, California State University
Hodge, International Society for Ecology and Culture, UK (2008) • Deane Neubauer, University of
Assistant Professor Rohit Negi, Ambedkar University-Delhi
Hawai’I (2011) • Susan Ossman, University of California-Riverside (2008) • Susan Park, University of
Professor Dai Nomiya, Sophia University
Sydney (2008) • Chris Paris, University of Ulster (2007) • Phan Ngoc Thach, Vietnamese Academy
Professor Mervat Abou Ouf, American University of Cairo
of Social Sciences (2008) • Chris Radford, Fukuoka (2008) • Stephen Rosow, State University of
Dr Sebastian Plocinnek, University of Wrozlaw
New York-Oswego (2011) • Fazal Rizvi, University of Illinois (2009) • Zinail Abidin Sanusi, Universiti
Associate Professor Sang-Hyun Kim, Hanyang University
Sains Malaysia (2011) • Saskia Sassen, Columbia University (2008) • Hans Schattle, Yonsei
Graham Saunders, International Federation of Red Cross
University (2011) • Michael Shapiro, University of Hawai’i (2008) • Shibo Genh, Bejing (2010)
Associate Professor Andrew Scott, Deakin University
Professor Elizabeth Shove, Lancaster University
Dr Praveen Singh, Ambedkar University-Delhi
Professor Steve Smith, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Professor Hideaki Uemura, Keisen University
Professor David Wank, Sophia University
• Shigao Wang, Hai’an (2010) • Lisa Schipper, Stockholm Environment Institute (2010) • Elizabeth
Shove, Lancaster University (2009) • Nevzat Soguk, University of Hawai’i (2011) • James Spencer,
University of Hawai’i (2008) • Stephen Sterling, Plymouth University (2010) • Anna Tibaijuka, UN
Habitat, Nairobi (2009) • Lyman Tower-Sargent, University of Missouri (2008) • Martin Weber,
University of Queensland (2009) • Rebecca Whittle, Lancaster University (2011) • Frank Xinhua
Zhang, Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences (2007) • Zhihua Yao, Tianjin (2010)
Professor Oren Yiftachel, Ben-Gurion University
150
151
Sitting in Starbucks entails more than drinking coffee. The proliferation of commodified Third Places in cities across the Global
North has been accompanied by images evoking ethical consumption. Explicit links are made between offers of me-time
and social messages of corporate social responsibility. Of course, occasionally firms such as Starbucks are accused acts of
inconsistency—blocking an attempt by Ethiopia’s farmers to copyright coffee bean types and thereby denying them potential
earnings of up to USD$90 million a year—but, overall, the effective depoliticization of consumption through ‘ethical’ and ‘green’
consumerism rules the day. Honolulu, USA, 2012.
152
153
6. Research Programs
Description of Program
Climate Change Adaptation
Research Leader:
Darryn McEvoy
Research Manager: Jane Mullett
Senior Advisor: Felicity Roddick
Research Team:
Ifte Ahmed, Karyn Bosomworth, George Cairns, Guoshen Chen,
Prem Chhetri, Brian Corbitt, Jonathan Corcoran (University of Queensland),
Hartmut Fünfgeld, Victor Gekara, Peter Hayes, Saleem Janjua,
Gaya Jayatilleke, Daniel Kong, Sophie Millin, Tom Molyneaux,
Izabela Ratajczak, Helen Scott, Sujeeva Setunge, Alexei Trundle,
Julia Werner, Nilmini Wickramasinghe and Kevin Zhang
Whilst adaptation of the urban environment is the centre of research attention, the Program
applies an analytical prism that enables research questions to be tackled according to different
hazards, sectors, spatial scales and case-study locations. This allows us to gain wider insight into
the conceptual and applied understanding of risk, vulnerability and adaptation. The geographical
scope of the Program ranges from the local to the global, with the Asia-Pacific region a particularly
important international focus for the program. In pursuit of this multi-level agenda, strong
collaborative links are fostered both nationally and across the world.
Research Themes
1.
Conceptual Research: Critical Analysis of Adaptation Processes
This theme involves critical assessment of what is meant by adaptation in different arenas and
how decision-makers can support adaption in practice. Topics of interest include disciplinary
framings, the use of scenarios, linkages between adaptation and mitigation.
2.
This program seeks to understand future climate change risks and to explore how cities,
communities and individuals can best adapt to climate change in the context of complex socioecological stress.
Applied Research: Characterization and Assessment of Climate-Related Risks and
Evaluation of Potential Adaptation Options
Here ‘systems’ analysis of cities, towns, and communities is central; as well as more detailed
analyses of different ‘elements at risk’ in the urban environment including infrastructure,
buildings, the space between buildings, and people.
Research Focus
3.
Institutional Dimensions of Adaptation
Consideration of structural driving forces (political, economic, cultural and ecological) are crucial
to understanding institutional adaptive management, as is understanding the barriers to (and
opportunities for) change, and the importance of adaptation as a learning process. Of particular
interest is the interaction and ’fit’ of bottom-up approaches (e.g., local narratives, equity
considerations, and the building of adaptive capacity) with top-down structures and processes
(e.g., international agreements and national strategies).
4.
Bridging the Science/Policy Interface
This theme focuses on the translation of conceptual and applied understanding of adaptation
into best-practice guidance for a range of different policy and practitioner end-users. The theme
distils knowledge from Research Themes 1 to 3 and integrates it with governance and urbanmanagement processes to promote more strategic pathways to climate-resilient communities.
Innovative aspects are also being explored—for instance, new ways of communicating climate
change, cities as laboratories of innovation etc.
5.
Capacity Strengthening in the Asia-Pacific Region
Here, we are interested in a combination of research activity and shared learning about
adaptation and sustainable urban development in the Asia-Pacific region. We actively
promote the sharing of knowledge and associated methodologies in order to contribute to the
strengthening of local adaptive capacity. Special emphasis is placed on collaborative activities
in Vietnam, Bangladesh and the Pacific Island nations
How can cities and communities best plan for climate
change?
The Climate Change Adaptation Program (CCAP) focuses on how cities and communities might
best respond to the complexity of global environmental change and adapt to the on-the-ground
issues associated with a changing climate. The approach of the Program is based on the integration
of quantitative, qualitative, and participatory methodologies. Its activity is deliberately multidisciplinary, cutting across academic schools and disciplines, as well as being shaped by new forms
of engagement between scientific, policy, and wider stakeholder communities.
Seaports in Australia have been working with the Climate Change Adaptation Program to identify how best
to respond to a changing climate. Port Botany, Australia, 2012. Photo: Jane Mullett.
154
155
Key Research Projects for 2012
Framing Adaptation Responses in the Victorian Context
Researchers: Darryn McEvoy and Hartmut Fünfgeld
Funding Provider: Victorian Centre for Climate Change Adaptation Research (VCCCAR)
This project is co-ordinated by the Victorian Government Department of Sustainability and
Environment (DSE) and aims to develop and test an operational framing of climate change
adaptation, which will act as a decision-making ‘roadmap’ to better inform policy and practice
by Victorian authorities at the local and regional levels. This project seeks to translate scientific
and conceptual discourse on adaptation into a language more accessible to end-users, such as
state and local decision-makers, to effectively support adaptation activity and the building of local
adaptive capacity. Four areas of inquiry will address the following framing issues: 1. development
of an overarching framework for adaptation (the ‘roadmap’); 2. economic impact assessment and
preliminary costing of climate change for vulnerable sectors in Victoria; 3. iterative testing of the
adaptation framework in selected case study locations; and 4. perceptions, attitudes and local
narratives on climate-related risks and the management of uncertainty. Project partners include:
DSE, the Municipal Association of Victoria (MAV), CSIRO, the National Climate Change Adaptation
Research Facility (NCCARF) and local governments in the case study locations (Port Fairy, City of
Melbourne, and Bendigo).
Implementing Tools to Increase Adaptive Capacity in the Community and Natural Resource
Management Sectors
Researchers: Darryn McEvoy and Hartmut Fünfgeld
The project analyses the climate-change adaptation needs of three types of government service
providers and funded agencies. It facilitates the implementation and testing of a number of
adaptation tools, including an adaptation evaluation matrix to guide future decision-making and to
ensure they are ‘fit for purpose’.
Enhancing the Resilience of Seaports to a Changing Climate
Researchers: Darryn McEvoy, Jane Mullett, Sujeeva Setunge, Tom Molyneaux, David Law, Prem
Chhetri, Victor Gekara, Nilmini Wickramasinghe, Kevin Zhang, Daniel Kong and Brian Corbitt
Funding Provider: National Climate Change and Adaptation Research Facility (NCCARF)
The aim of the project is to better understand the vulnerability of critical port infrastructure (structural
and functional), and to develop new knowledge and assessment methodologies for enhancing port
resilience to future climate change. This project has four research objectives: 1. to gain a better
understanding of the complex mix of climate and non-climate drivers that are likely to affect future
port operations; 2. to assess the vulnerability of core port infrastructure, and identify appropriate
adaptation options; 3. to assess the vulnerability of other elements at risk in the wider port environs
and identify appropriate adaptation options; and 4. to synthesize the findings and explore the
implications for policy and practice, and create an integrated decision support toolkit. Case study
partners include Sydney Ports Corporation, Port Kembla Port Corporation, and Gladstone Ports
Corporation.
Lessons for Adaptation from Improved Disaster-Management Policies and Planning
Researchers: Karyn Bosomworth
Responding to the Urban Heat Island: Optimizing the Implementation of Green Infrastructure
Researchers: Darryn McEvoy and Karyn Bosomworth
This project aims to assess the effectiveness of different green infrastructure systems for urban
cooling and to develop a systematic approach for urban land-managers to optimize the selection
and implementation of green infrastructure options. The CCAP team are working on analysing the
institutional opportunities and barriers to implementation, as well as assisting in the development
of a systematic approach for selecting and implementing green infrastructure that considers the
more vulnerable sections of society, heat exposure ‘hot spots’ and the local context. The project
will translate the scientific findings into user-friendly guidance material for use by policy-makers and
practitioners. Active partners include University of Melbourne, Monash University, DPCD, DSE, City
of Melbourne, City of Port Phillip, City West Water and the Bureau of Meteorology.
RMIT University: Climate Change Risk Assessment
Researchers: Darryn McEvoy, Karyn Bosomworth, Ifte Ahmed, Craig Stagoll, Katherine O’Neill,
Graham Bell, Linda Stevenson and Craig Allen
Funding Provider: RMIT Sustainability Committee
This project aims to assess RMIT’s climate change risks and develop an adaptation response for
the university. The concept of adaptation as a ‘learning process’ underpins the approach, which
will draw on and collaborate with different scientific disciplines and other areas of expertise across
the RMIT community. The work seeks to: 1. understand how recent extreme events have affected
the operation of the university; 2. assess the risks that a changing climate might bring; 3. identify
vulnerability ‘hotspots’ on various RMIT campuses; and 4. use the ‘hotspots’ as case studies in
order to assess different adaptation options that will enhance the future resilience of university
infrastructure and institutional arrangements. Findings will be mainstreamed into different university
strategic policies.
Climate Change Toolkits for Secondary Cities in Bangladesh and Vietnam
Researchers: Darryn McEvoy and Alexei Trundle
Funding Provider: Asia Pacific Network (APN)
This project is developing a methodology for the assessment of climate risks in the context of
secondary cities of vulnerable regions in Bangladesh and Vietnam. The research draws on local
knowledge, and is designed to promote links between governmental and non-governmental
organisations, facilitate local capacity building, as well as South-to-South learning. The project
outcomes will be disseminated through partner networks to better inform local and national policy
and practice.
AdaptNet
Researchers: Saleem Janjua, Darryn McEvoy, Peter Hayes and Jane Mullett
Funding provider: CCAP
A fortnightly bulletin of information and research related to urban adaption is produced, which
aims to create common knowledge and reference points for readers and to support creative thinking
in relation to climate change adaptation. It is currently published in English and Vietnamese.
Partners include the Nautilus Institute of Security and Sustainability and the Vietnam Green Building
Council.
Funding Provider: National Climate Change and Adaptation Research Facility (NCCARF)
In partnership with Griffith University, this project aims to reconceptualize the framing of climate
change adaptation and disaster risk-reduction to identify possible modifications to existing policy
and planning tools. Involves a comparative analysis of four case studies: Queensland floods,
Victorian bushfires, Perth bushfires and state-wide risk profiles.
156
157
Research Leaders: Supriya Singh and Yaso Nadarajah
Research Team: Sharif As-Saber, Naomi Bailey, Anuja Cabraal, Chris Chamberlain,
France Cheong, Val Colic-Peisker, Ngan Collins, Heather Douglas, Jeff Fang,
Susana Gavidia-Payne, David Hayward, Kim Humphery, Margaret Jackson,
Paul James, Guy Johnson, Shahadat Khan, Liam Magee, Jan Matthews,
Alemayehu Molla, Martin Mulligan, Siddhi Pittayachawan, Shanthi Robertson,
Judy Rogers, Patricia Rogers, James Rowe, Andy Scerri, Mohini Singh,
Kaye Stevens and Yoland Wadsworth
The program offers an important opportunity to rethink the question of community sustainability at
local, national and international levels from multi-disciplinary perspectives; and aims to establish
new theoretical and methodological agendas for addressing the social challenges of city from the
perspective of the Global North as well as the Global South.
Research Themes
1.
This theme’s foci is on studying localities around the globe, seeking to determine if, why and
how communities are negotiating transformations across the complex layers of social life from
the local to the global. It addresses questions of the theoretical framing of cosmopolitanism,
community or locally embedded social interaction, transnationalism and indicators of
community sustainability. The research is engaged with multiple communities, ranging from
the urban to the rural, and from those embedded in face-to-face communities to those which
are closely integrated into global flows of exchange and information. Research sites include
Melbourne and regional Victoria, nationally around Australia and globally, with a particular
emphasis on the Asia-Pacific Region.
How do communities shape, and how are they shaped
by, processes of globalization and the use of information
and communication technologies?
This program translates research into more effective theory and policies around community
sustainability, and develops policy tools for measuring indices of community sustainability across cities.
2.
Research Focus
The study of communities is vital to understanding how cities can sustain themselves, given their
unprecedented global growth. It is critical to think of community as a constant process of formation
and reformation in response to ever-changing local and global conditions. We are increasingly
interested in diasporic communities in the Asia-Pacific region and their influence on national identities
and the changing nature of citizenship. The focus on communities connects lived urban experience
and the traditional study of urbanisation which draws on demography, urban planning, infrastructure
and development, transportation and affordable housing, environmental politics and citizenship. By
reinvigorating the study of community formation and adaptation within changing city environments,
particularly in the Global South, we aim to establish a new theoretical and methodological agenda for
addressing the big social challenges of city-life.
Negotiating the Local Global
Building Communities
In recent literature, there is a noticeable ‘turn’ to community in the context of global flux and
uncertainty. Yet the word ‘community’ is often abused and it is often impossible to translate
into languages other than English. This theme addresses the need for a more dynamic and
normative conception of what the search for community represents. A foregrounding of the
search for community in conditions of systemic uncertainty can help to challenge parochial and
divisive claims about the character and identity of any particular local community and this, in
turn, can give substance to rhetoric about ‘social inclusion’. This theme seeks to examine and
contribute to understand contemporary and alternate ways of thinking about the formation of
urban communities in the context of globalization.
3.
Globalization, Money and Community
This theme recognises the transnational dimensions of community and the importance of
personal and community remittances to the lived experience of migrants in cities. Key projects
in this area address theoretical and methodological perspectives that link the macro-study of
economic globalization with its lived experience at the community and personal levels; and
examine the importance of transnational personal and community ties in global cities that coexist with these relationships in the host country.
4.
Civic Repair
This area deals with questions related to community wellbeing and governance from local to
national levels and the intractable problem of homelessness in Australia. Projects in this area
includes fault lines of violence, homelessness, planning and social impacts of local natural and
built environments and urban inequalities and marginalization.
Locals gather to dance at Next Age Mall before opening hours, Pudong, Shanghai, China, November 2012.
158
159
Key Research Projects
Breaking the Cycle: The Role of Housing and Support in Resolving Chronic Homelessness
Researchers: Chris Chamberlain, Guy Johnson and Naomi Bailey
Funding Provider and Partner: Australian Research Council and Sacred Heart Mission
This is a longitudinal study of formerly chronically homeless people who reside in a supportive
housing facility in inner Melbourne. It will interview 40 residents twice over a 12-month period,
analysing what factors enable people who have been chronically homeless to maintain their housing.
The project will provide vital information on the best ways to assist chronically homeless people
to remain housed and to address their social exclusion. It will enable policy-makers and serviceproviders to identify appropriate housing configurations and to develop support programs that better
assist the chronically homeless.
On the Margins: Caravan-Park Dwellers and Boarding-House Residents
Researchers: Chris Chamberlain and David MacKenzie (Swinburne University)
Funding Provider: Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs
This study investigates the social characteristics and housing situation of people living in caravan
parks and boarding houses. The study involves a telephone survey of all caravan parks across
Victoria, a review of the data available through the Victorian Boarding House Inspectorate, and field
visits to boarding houses and caravan parks in 50 localities. The research will provide up-to-date
information on changes in boarding houses and caravan parks across Victoria and investigate the
feasibility of a national study.
Regenerating Community: Arts, Community and Governance
Researchers: Martin Mulligan
Community Sustainability Indicators
Funding Provider: Australia Council for the Arts, Arts Victoria, Arts NSW and Arts Queensland
Researchers: Paul James, Andy Scerri and Liam Magee
This project examines the role of community art projects in enhancing local government in Australia.
It tracks the development of the national ‘Generations Project’ in five local government areas across
Victoria, NSW and Queensland and resulted in both a national conference—held at RMIT—and a
research report to be circulated nationally by the Australia Council for the Arts. Researchers worked
closely with the Melbourne-based Cultural Development Network to complete the research and
communicate its key findings within the local government sector nationally. The project report titled
Art, Governance and the Turn to Community was completed in 2010 and a paper on the project
was published in the international Journal of Arts and Communities. The project report was used as
key foundation for a successful ARC Linkage Grant application prepared by Dr Lachlan McDowell
of the Centre for Cultural Partnerships at the University of Melbourne and Martin Mulligan has
joined Lachlan and the director of the Community Partnerships program at the Australia Council,
Frank Panucci, as a chief investigator on this new research project. This new project is focusing on
developing better ways to evaluate the impacts of community-engaged art.
Funding Providers and Partners: Australian Research Council, City of Melbourne, Fuji Xerox
Australia, Cambridge International College-Melbourne, Common Ground Publishing, Microsoft
Corporation, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver City Council, and Cambridge Western
College-Vancouver
This project is developing a set of tools for integrating quantitative with qualitative methods of
assessing and monitoring community sustainability. Framed by sociological accounts of public
deliberation and participation in science, the project is developing a web-based software tool using
agent-based decision-support modelling. This tool provides an immediately visible dashboard that
measures changes in key indices of community sustainability across the key global cities. This
project will contribute to policy and theory, building on the detailed empirical work across the sites.
The research uses critical social theory to examine some of the issues that arise when setting out to
develop and implement qualitative indicators of sustainability that incorporate quantitative metrics.
Community Engagement in Adaptation to Climate Change in Australia
Researchers: Martin Mulligan, Lesley Duxbury and Andy Scerri
Martin Mulligan and Lesley Duxbury came together to work on the topic of cultural adaptation to
climate change in Australia and they have continued to work together on the topic in 2012. Lesley
Duxbury contributed a paper to a special edition of RMIT’s Local-Global edited by Martin Mulligan
and Andy Scerri. The ongoing project has a particular interest in affective relationships between
people, climates and places in the world and Mulligan has a particular interest in the extent to which
a focus on affect might engage local communities more effectively in thinking about adaptation to
climate change.
Resettlement and the Urban Poor in Malaysia
Researcher: Yaso Nadarajah
Funding Provider: RMIT Research Support
How do we understand the process, meaning and experience of resettlement for increasing
groups of urban poor within national development strategies? This project examples the impact of
marginalization and the resettlement issues of 7000 squatter community-members in the epicentre
of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Investigating how the studying of community, along with contemporary
community analysis can contribute to better understanding of community responses, resilience to
sustainability and state driven development strategies and policies.
160
Migration and Mobility Research Network
Researchers: Val-Colic Peisker, Supriya Singh, Margaret Johnston, Anuja Cabraal
The Migration and Mobility Research Network (MMRN) aims to bring together academics together
with policymakers, people from NGOs and others interested in themes of migration and mobility.
MMRN was launched in January 2009 and meets monthly.
The Role of the Street to Home Program in Providing Pathways out of Homelessness for Adult
Rough Sleepers
Researchers: Chris Chamberlain and Guy Johnson
Funding Providers: Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs,
the Salvation Army Crisis Services and HomeGround Services
One of the headline goals in the Australian Government’s White paper, The Road Home, is to
offer supported accommodation to all rough sleepers who want it by 2020. The Streets to Home
program is being implemented in each jurisdiction in order to advance this objective. The program
is designed to assist people who have been sleeping rough to make the transition to sustainable
supported housing. In Victoria, a consortium consisting of HomeGround Services, The Salvation
Army Adult Services and The Salvation Army Crisis Services have been funded for three years to
assist approximately 300 chronically homeless people into stable, sustainable housing. This project
will undertake the evaluation of the Streets to Home initiative in Victoria.
161
A Biography of Money Flows in the Indian Diaspora in Australia and Community
Researchers: Supriya Singh, Anuja Cabraal
Funding Provider: Co-operative Research Centre
This project studies the personal, family and community dimensions of the two-way flow of money
between India and Australia among the Indian diaspora in Australia. It will illustrate the economic
impact of migration, thus informing public discussion and policy on migration and multiculturalism.
City and Community: Melbourne to Delhi
Researchers: Supriya Singh, Yaso Nadarajah, Martin Mulligan, Chris Chamberlain, Val-Colic Peisker,
Peter Phipps, Catherine Gomes, Guy Johnston with Partha Ghosh (Jawaharlal Nehru University,
New Delhi) and Siri Hettige (University of Colombo)
Funding Provider: Community Sustainability Program
This project brings together new theoretical and methodological approaches for the study of
communities in cities. It complements the study of the city in terms of the built environment, design
and planning, financial and knowledge networks by emphasising the ‘soft’ side of the concept of
‘urbanization’ within the framework of globalization. The project builds on research on people’s lived
experience of cities ranging from Melbourne to Delhi – and is currently being developed as an edited
collection for publication in 2013.
Page 163: In Indian cities, traditional images of cosmological life intermesh with modern consumer culture. Here a boy wears the signs of
global fetishism as he stands reverently in the shade of a Muslim mosque. Qutub Minar Islamic precinct, New Delhi, India, 2012.
162
163
Research Leaders: Manfred Steger and Chris Hudson
Research Team: Colin Arrowsmith, Sarah Bekessy, Carlene Boucher, Bronwyn Coate,
Tommaso Durante, Stephen Gaunson, Catherine Gomes, Larissa Hjorth,
Peter Horsfield, Heather Horst, Paul James, Danielle Kirby, Tania Lewis,
Jenny Martin, Marietta Martinovic, Jock McCulloch, Anne McNevin, Pavla Miller,
Brian Morris, Nuttawuth Muenjohn, Mandy Oakham, Christine Peacock,
Simon Perry, Peter Phipps, Dominic Redfern, Angelina Russo, Kristen Sharp,
Elizabeth Shi, Marianne Sison, Nevzat Soguk, Jo Tacchi, Linda Williams,
Bradley Wilson and Tony Wilson (Universiti Malaysia Sarawak)
Culture is understood broadly as shared webs of meaning through which we experience and
interpret the world around us. Culture manifests in symbolic acts, everyday routines, identities and
desires. It shapes our social relations, built environments, and relations with the non-human world.
The program investigates culture through a range of social phenomena, institutions and symbolic
expressions.
Research Themes
1.
Transforming Identities and Subjectivities
This theme concerns the transformation of identities in Asian-Pacific cities through processes
of globalization. Cities are nodes in vast global networks of people, governance, ideas and
industry as well as distinctly local places that generate diverse responses to globalization. As
the world becomes increasingly urbanized, city-life shapes our sense of self in new ways. As
we move between cities, we experience new modes of trans-local belonging. Accordingly, we
ask how various global processes such as migration, economic development, or technological
change manifest in cities and impact upon our subjectivities. This theme addresses the means
through which identities are shaped and contested, from modes of governmentality to forms of
artistic expression. The ideologically induced transformation of citizens into neoliberal subjects
constitutes one potential area of inquiry. Of equal interest are the social movements and cultural
currents that resist subordination to hegemonic norms and enact alternative subjectivities.
How can we understand the intensification and
expansion of cultural flows through globalizing cities
and their regions?
This program investigates cultural aspects of globalization in its local and global forms in cities across
the world.
Research Focus
This program examines the tensions and complexities of transnational cultural flows in terms of
homogenization, fragmentation, hybridity and commodification. Analysis is focused on urban arenas
for cultural contestation and ideological dissent. The program envisages creative solutions to global
challenges by encouraging long-term thinking and designing alternative global futures. This approach
enables research in such areas as ethical global visions, global governance, and imaginaries of
hope. It brings together theoretical enquiry with empirically grounded and socially engaged research.
Program members use diverse methodologies in order to understand how globalization impacts
upon cultural expression and how culture manifests in urban settings.
2.
Culture and Ideology
Key questions in this research theme include: what is the relationship between globalization,
culture and ideology? How do social imaginaries, narratives, metaphors, symbols and myths
contribute to ideological change? How do language and space intersect in the cultural milieus
of Asian-Pacific cities? Hierarchies based on sharp distinctions between local, national, regional
and global scales no longer hold in the global age. Established boundaries are defended,
erased, or redrawn. Consequently, we investigate the transformation of our conventional
cultural-spatial frameworks into multi-directional constellations and multi-nodal networks. The
shifting grounds of discourse emerging in advance of clearly articulated ideological platforms
are also key sites of inquiry. This theme recognizes cities as principal hubs for the construction,
dissemination and contestation of cultural and ideological discourse.
3.
Material Cultures
This theme approaches material culture as an expression of the critical disputes and tensions
characterizing globalization and global cities. We investigate the conditions for the creation of
new cultural spaces and the role of technology in cultural production. How do text and image,
art and performance, media and communication combine to construct new cultural forms?
Potential areas of investigation include critical analyses of artworks, urban screens, advertising,
global-branding, media representations and alternative forms of communication.
Indigenous art meshes with a global consumption item. Vancouver, Canada, 2012.
164
165
Globalization: The Career of a Key Concept
The Role of Lifestyle Television in Transforming Culture, Citizenship and Selfhood: Australia,
China, Taiwan, Singapore and India
Researchers: Paul James and Manfred Steger
Researchers: Tania Lewis with Fran Martin (University of Melbourne), Wanning Sun (UTS),
Ramaswami Harindranath (University of Melbourne) and John Sinclair (University of Melbourne)
Funding Provider: Australian Research Council
This project is assembling the first comprehensive history of the concept ‘globalization’, one of the
most important keywords of our time. Examining relevant texts and conducting interviews with the
most prominent experts on the subject from professional communities of practice in the Englishspeaking world, this research will shed light on which meanings of ‘globalization’ became dominant
in public and academic discourse, and how these understandings shape the heated debates on
globalization. Thus, this project will go a long way toward explaining how people around the world
came to be in thrall with this powerful keyword.
Over the past decade or so, TV schedules around the world have undergone something of a
lifestyle revolution on prime-time television with advice television increasingly directed towards
a broader prime-time audience. This study uses lifestyle programming as a lens through which
to examine broader social changes in Asia. Seeing such programs as etiquette manuals for the
twenty-first century, we are interested in what the rise of such programing might tell us about a
range of broader shifts in Asian societies in relation to identity, culture and citizenship. Furthermore,
we are concerned with the cultural and political roles played by television and lifestyle media more
generally in shaping and legitimating particular kinds of lifestyle and consumer practices, values and
identities. If the rise of lifestyle TV in the West can be linked to broader political and cultural shifts in
the nature of late modernity, to what extent can these developments be applied to other contexts
such as Asia? What are the potentials and limits of using concepts such as ‘neoliberalism’, or indeed
terms such as the ‘middle class’, ‘lifestyle’, ‘reflexive individualization’, and ‘consumer-citizenship’,
in the context of Asia, given that such concepts and concerns emerge out of a specifically AngloEuropean sociological tradition and temporal mapping of modernity and industrial capitalism? This
study addresses these complex questions through a large-scale comparative study of lifestyle
programming in China, India, Taiwan and Singapore. The project applies a three-pronged approach
at each national site, focusing on industry, textual and audience analysis.
Mapping Justice Globalism: Reassessing the Ideological Landscape of the Twenty-First Century
Researchers: Manfred Steger and James Goodman
This project investigates and assesses the ideological status of justice globalism—the political
ideas and public policy vision associated with the global justice movement. Through qualitative
textual analysis and in-depth interviews, the project scrutinizes key documents of justice globalism
generated by the 150 civil society organizations associated with the World Social Forum. The
outcome of this research will be a detailed conceptual mapping and policy analysis of justice
globalism that furthers our understanding of the ideas, values, and policy proposals behind one of
the major global political forces shaping the twenty-first century.
Online@Asia-Pacific: Social Networking Systems and Online Communities in the Region
Researcher: Larissa Hjorth
One way to investigate the emerging forms of sociality, creativity and politics within networked media
is through the relationship between emerging and remediated forms of user-created content and the
social networking systems. Through the lens of localized notions of online communities (and their
relationship to offline life), Online@AsiaPacific explores the material and symbolic practices of media
literacy, creativity and new politics. Drawing from six locations—Manila, Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore,
Shanghai and Melbourne—Online@AsiaPacific analyses and brings new insights into localized and
regional online communities that are, like the Internet, dynamic and ever-evolving.
Theatre in the Asia-Pacific: Regional Culture in a Modern Global Context
Researchers: Chris Hudson with Denise Varney (University of Melbourne) Peter Eckersall (University
of Melbourne) and Barbara Hatley (University of Tasmania)
Focusing on the region’s diverse traditions of theatre and performance, ranging from customary
to postmodern forms, this study offers a multi-regional perspective on contemporary culture in the
Asia-Pacific region. An enabling premise is that theatre and performance are significant cultural
sites charged with both preserving ancient and customary modes of performance, and also with
displaying the vibrancy of contemporary arts practice. Changes in theatre practice are motivated
by historical, philosophical and other social transformations. Theatre is not an autonomous
aesthetic sphere but part of the social and material world. The project’s case studies explore theatre
practice in Australia, Indonesia, Japan and Singapore and show how theatre bears witness to
transformations at the level of the global, the national and the local.
Mobilizing Media for Sustainable Outcomes in the Pacific
Researchers: Heather Horst, Jo Tacchi and Domenic Friguglietti (ABC International Development)
Mobiles, Migrants and Money: A Study of Mobility in Haiti and the Dominican Republic
Researchers: Heather Horst and Erin B. Taylor (University of Lisbon)
Almost 25 per cent of Australia’s total Aid budget will be spent in Pacific Island counties this year. In
collaboration with the ABC we will research the use of media and communication for development
in the Pacific to increase our understanding of the region and inform practices that will improve the
development outcomes from this $1.6 billion spend. Funding Provider: Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion
166
This project investigates the use of mobile phones and mobile money among people living and
moving within Haiti and between the border of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. It seeks to
understand how mobiles phones shape the experience and capacity for mobility among domestic
and cross-border migrants and how enhanced access to information and communication may
enable workers to maintain and develop social relationships and store economic and symbolic forms
of value as they travel across regional and national zones. 167
PACMAS Baseline Study
Researchers: Jo Tacchi, Heather Horst, Evangelia Papoutsaki (UNITEC, New Zealand), Verena
Thomas (University of Goroka) and Joys Eggins (University of Goroka)
Funding Provider: ABC International Development
The Pacific Media Assistance Scheme (PACMAS) Baseline Study is providing baseline measures on
the key evaluation questions for PACMAS across its four components—media capacity-building,
media policy and legislation, media systems and media content—through research undertaken
across 14 countries in the Pacific Region.
The Visual Archive Project of the Global Imaginary
Researcher: Tommaso Durante
This project involves collecting visual images and investigating the local-global articulation of images
of the global in twenty-first century urban social settings—as well as in the rural areas currently
subject to globalization processes. The project is characterized by a phenomenological interpretative
approach to globalization as a visual phenomenon. The collected visual images are used to explore
the symbolic construction of the global imaginary with a special focus on Asia-Pacific region. The
main outcome of this research project is a visual expansion and a deeper understanding of the
epochal processes of change and transformation.
Page 163: Mulberry Street, Little Italy, New York, 2012. © Tommaso Durante, The Visual Archive Project of the Global Imaginary.
168
169
Research Themes
1.
Research Leader: Barry Judd
Global indigeneity exists contemporaneous with the non-indigenous world and its claims to
‘modernity’, ‘post-colonialism’ and ‘globalism’. The program seeks to document the multiplicity
of ways that contemporary forms of global indigeneity engage with the non-indigenous cultural,
economic and political world in their struggles to maintain difference. The alterity embodied by
global indigeneity offers non-indigenous peoples different understandings of reality and different
systems to understand knowledge. The program is deeply committed to communicating
the value inherent in the alterity of global indigeneity and to explore ways that indigenous
entanglements with ‘modernity’, ‘post-colonialism’ and ‘globalism’ might produce productive
outcomes insofar as these uphold indigenous ‘tradition’ while also enhancing non-indigenous
understanding of the world.
Research Manager: Tim Butcher
Research Team: Damian Grenfell, Paul James, Elizabeth Kath, Jeff Lewis, Nevzat Soguk,
Emma Barrow, Lisa French, Vinita Godinho, Olivia Guntarik, Martyn Jones,
Peter Phipps, Nikki Stephenson and Gareth Andrews (Life Again)
How can we collaboratively understand and enact
forms of meaningful engagement across cultural
difference?
2.
Based upon a foundational ethic of reciprocity, this program investigates global and local indigeneity
in the context of a worldwide movement for social change.
The program aims to understand indigeneity through meaningful engagement with indigenous
peoples and others who relate to their lives. Our research therefore informs and is informed by those
whose lives we study. Secondly, our research is concerned with policy and practice that gives rise
to local and global processes of reconciliation—processes which improve the livelihoods, health and
wellbeing of those whose alternate ways of life are being fractured by globalizing change.
Aboriginal Youth and Sport
Sport is a high-profile area of Australian popular culture where Indigenous people have a long
and proud record of achieving excellence despite a history of socio-economic disadvantage
and political discrimination. Participation in sport creates opportunities for Aboriginal youth to
develop leadership skills and make positive contributions to their individual well being of that of
their communities. The program seeks to explore the ways in which grass-roots participation
in sport can empower Aboriginal youth to develop the skill-set that will enable them to assume
positions of leadership within their communities and beyond. The program is interested in
exploring how community-level sports in Aboriginal communities can create, extend and
enhance the breadth of life opportunities that are available to Aboriginal youth in achieving
improved outcomes in the areas of employment, education and training.
Research Focus
Our research is provoked by the narrow politicization of indigeneity and reconciliation, and the
violence it affects on customary cultures. We seek to unsettle dominant social praxis derived from
extant Western ideological preconceptions about Indigenous cultures and difference. Through
critically addressing contemporary issues of human rights, social justice and conservation, this
Program aims to evoke epistemological and ontological alternatives to those envisaged by current
dominant modern thought.
Indigeneity and Confronting Modern Change
3.
Reconciliation
The program supports local and global efforts to promote communication, dialogue and
enhanced understanding between indigenous and non-indigenous people worldwide.
Reconciliation in the context this program is fundamentally concerned with the building and
enhancement of meaningful research relationships in ways intended to improve the cultural,
political, economic and ecological wellbeing of indigenous peoples in their continued struggle to
maintain independent and unique identities in the face of global forces of change.
We view indigeneity and reconciliation through various theoretical and practical lenses, including
gender, health, sport, dance and cinema to undertake projects that afford new knowledge but
most importantly honour and respect those who invite us into their lives. Ethical considerations are
of paramount importance in the guiding principles of the program. As such, our research follows
the cultural practices of Ngapartji Ngapartji to forge long-standing, ongoing research partnerships
founded on principles of shared meanings and reciprocal exchange. From the Pitjantjatjara language
this term translates as ‘I give you something; you give me something’. The overarching direction of
the program is to create ethical relationships with indigenous peoples that impact their lives and the
well being of their communities through the achievement of positive research outcomes.
Football in the Northern Territory, Australia, 2012. Photo: Matty Day.
170
171
Globalizing Indigeneity
Researchers: Barry Judd, Tim Butcher, Paul James, Nevzat Soguk, Manfred Steger and Debora Halbert
(University of Hawaii)
This project supports the development of long-term strategic partnerships in the Pacific (The University
of Hawaii) and North America (The University of Victoria, Canada) to develop a network of scholars who
share a passion and commitment in the exploration of Indigeneity in both local and global contexts. This
project facilitates an improved awareness of issues that confront Indigenous populations in Australia,
the Pacific and North America and in doing so creates new opportunities for the development of shared
research initiatives that seek to make positive contributions in the areas that may include health, education,
sport, the arts, justice, the economy and environment. Critically this project enables local perspectives and
experience with Indigenous-focused research to be shared and enhanced through the building of global
networks of Indigeneity.
On Country: Australian Football and Youth Wellbeing in Papunya
Researchers: Barry Judd, Tim Butcher, Paul James, Elizabeth Kath and Bruce Hearn-McKinnon (Deakin
University)
This project supports the establishment of the Wilurarra Tjutaku Football League (WTFL). This League
is an initiative of the MacDonnell District Sporting and Social Club Aboriginal Corporation, an Aboriginalcontrolled organisation based at Papunya in the Northern Territory. This project investigates how
participation in Australian Football played ‘on country’ can improve the well being of the remote Aboriginal
community of Papunya in the Northern Territory. This project adopts a critical approach is assessing the
social, economic and political costs that arise when football teams representing remote communities
are required to participate in Alice Springs-based competition. Project findings will support the WTFL by
providing the Papunya community with data to empower them to build capacity via a sustainable sporting
organization that emphasises localized participation and promotes whole-of-community wellbeing.
Narrative Quest: Indigenous Peoples and Indigeneity in Australia and Canada
Researchers: Barry Judd, Emma Barrow, Tim Butcher and Tanya Harnett (University of Lethbridge,
Canada)
This project explores contemporary Indigeneity in Australia and Canada through the medium of the visual
arts. Supporting a parallel art exhibition of works representing Indigenous perspectives from Alberta,
Canada and Victoria Australia this project will host a joint Australia and Canada conference to dialogue
contemporary formations of Indigeneity and map the social and political responses of Indigenous people
in both hemispheres to a range of issues that impact of their status as first nations peoples. This project
will generate a quality scholarly publication as a permanent record of the conference and parallel arts
exhibitions.
Ancient Cultures, New Futures in Sri Lanka
Researchers: Paul James, Elizabeth Kath, Gareth Andrews (Life Again) and Paul Komesaroff (Monash
University)
Funding Provider: Global Reconciliation
Sri Lankan society has for many years been beset by conflict, the most destructive experience of which
occurred during the war from 1983 to 2009 in which many tens of thousands of people died. Despite
the formal end of hostilities the legacy of division, hostility and suspicion continues, in many areas
compounded by poverty and economic and political disadvantage. This project, which builds upon work
begun in 2009, is being conducted in collaboration with Global Reconciliation, an international foundation
based in Australia. In 2010 and 2011 the project involved AFL indigenous and other players in reconciliation
tours of critical areas in the country. In August 2012 the project ran the first globally connected, national
civil-society reconciliation conference in Sri Lanka since the war.
172
The banner for an indigenous exhibition at Vancouver Art Gallery comes into contention with imperial
lions of a British past. Vancouver, Canada, 2012.
173
Research Themes
Research Leaders: John Handmer and Jeff Lewis
Through its expertise on people-centred security and globalization, the program is undertaking
studies on:
Research Manager: Robin Cameron
1.
Local and global conditions that contribute to community vulnerability to conflict, crisis and
natural disasters;
2.
Human security approaches to conflict resolution, peace-building, and development;
3.
Disaster prevention, management, recovery and community resilience;
4.
Organized crime and criminal violence;
5.
Governance and political stability, particularly in crisis vulnerable locations and communities;
6.
The cultural and communications dimensions of conflict, disaster management and recovery;
7.
Health and sustainable development;
8.
Effective management of human and natural resources in post-disaster conditions;
9.
Disaster and conflict mitigation and prevention;
Research Team: Peter Chambers, Damian Grenfell, Vandra Harris, Georgina Heydon,
Paul James, Elizabeth Kath, Adriana Keating, Blythe McLennan,
Andreana Reale, Karin Reinke, Selver Sahin, Joseph Siracusa,
Victoria Stead, Richard Tanter, Anna Trembath, Mayra Walsh and
Joshua Whittaker
How can cities harness their immense resources to
cope with crises?
This program focuses on the pathways for recovering from conflict, for building resilience, and for
reducing disaster-vulnerability.
Research Focus
From the perspective taken by this program, security is human-centred. It focuses primarily on
communities and persons rather than only on abstracted understandings of state sovereignty,
military defence, or border security. Promotion of health, protection against violence and projection
of sustainable environmental and economic practices requires reflexive policies that effectively build
upon existing communal and political-cultural dynamics in order to foster resilience and harness
creative and productive responses to crises and conflict.
10. Justice, law and governance in post-conflict communities;
11. Reconciling cultural difference and other antagonisms that contribute to conflict and
vulnerability; and
12. The role of climate change and other environmental conditions that contribute to disaster and
conflict.
After the Apocalypse: The Mediasphere, Global Crisis and Violent Ecologies
Researchers: Jeff Lewis
The program applies a broad definition of human security based on United Nations’ models of
peace-building, development, community sustainability and resilience. The program conducts
research on conditions which contribute to community vulnerability to conflict, crisis and natural
disasters. The program also conducts research on emergency management, recovery and
community resilience. Focusing on both local and international sites, our research is designed to
contribute to public and scholarly discussion on human security and disasters, public policy, the
effectiveness of agencies who work in disaster and human security in both the government and
non-government sectors, and communities’ own capabilities, governance, peace-building, recovery
and resilience.
This project investigates the evolution of a crisis consciousness and the implication human desires
in the cultural politics of violence. It examines the ways in which the media shapes our thinking and
practices around crisis, focusing particularly on Australia’s participation in post-9/11 conflicts.
Analysing the Urban Renewal of Fener-Balat Districts from a Human Security Perspective
Researcher: Selver Sahin
This research looks at the human-security dimensions of a currently developed urban-renewal
program for Fener-Balat districts, located on the historical peninsula of Istanbul, Turkey.
Socializing Security: Making Space for People in Global Politics
Researchers: Robin Cameron and Peter Chambers
This project highlights the implication of people as subjects of security then locates this shaped
subjectivity as the site for conceptualising ethics and constructing a productive, more human
security. The innovation of this approach is its twofold intent; critical and normative. Critically,
‘Socializing Security’ seeks to problematize unreflexive and violent security practices through close
analytic attention to how security is incorporated into the identity, ethics, and operative paradigms
of invested states and individuals. Normatively, this project will move from the problems and
contradictions thrown up by this process to develop workable models for security’s re-socialization.
174
175
Human Security and Natural Disasters
Researchers: Robin Cameron, Paul Bacon (Waseda University) and Christopher Hobson (UN
University)
Land, Power and Change: Globalization and Customary Land Tenures in Papua New Guinea,
the Solomon Islands and Timor-Leste
Researcher: Victoria Stead
Funding Providers: Japan Foundation
Funding Provider: Australian Government
This project will explore the theoretical and practical implications of applying a human security
framework to natural disasters. In so doing, it engages with major critiques of the human security
approach, and questions its ‘value-added’. It began with a workshop examining recent cases
such as the 11 March earthquake and tsunami in Japan, the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami,
the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, the 2009 “Black Saturday” bushfires in Australia and the 2010
Haiti earthquake. Looking at these and other catastrophes, an edited collection considers the
geographical scope of human security and how it operates in different cultural contexts, as well as
the role of civil society and the protection needs of vulnerable people, including women, children,
elderly people and minorities. Through combining theoretical discussion with practical experiences
and insights, the project will make an important contribution to academic debates and develop
policy recommendations for actors engaged in disaster preparation and responses.
Employing a methodology which draws upon both social theory and ethnography, with empirical
research in three countries in the Pacific region—Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands
and Timor-Leste—the research addresses itself to the following question: Under conditions
of globalization, how are systems of customary land usage and tenure in the three countries
under consideration being transformed, and with what effect on structures and relationships of
power? Theoretically, the research is framed by attentiveness to the intersection of different social
formations—customary, traditional and modern—which provides a conceptual basis for theorizing
and making sense of the transformations which are underway. Philosophically, the research is driven
by a concern with questions of change, power, conflict and agency; particularly, with the ways in
which people and communities in politically marginalized parts of the world are impacted by, and in
turn respond to, conditions of massive social change.
Global Reconciliation
Living Down the Past: Criminal Record Checks and Access to Employment for Ex-offenders
Researchers: Damian Grenfell, Paul James, Elizabeth Kath, Martin Mulligan and Paul Komesaroff
(Monash University)
Researchers: Georgina Heydon with B. Naylor, M. Paterson and M. Pittard (Monash University)
Funding Providers: B2B Lawyers, Costa Foundation, Drapac
One of the aims of this project is to identify the current practices of employers Australia-wide. We are
inviting human resource managers and other employment decision-makers from various industries
to participate in a survey, and subsequently interviews and focus groups, in an endeavour to obtain
a clearer picture of the issues, policies, legislation and/or practices which are currently guiding the
use of criminal record checks in Australia. This research is motivated by the fact that employment is
considered to be essential to the rehabilitation of offenders, but the increased demand for criminal
record checks in pre-employment processes can have a negative impact on this population’s
employment prospects. At the same time, more and more employers are faced with weighing up the
significance of a criminal history and evaluating its predictive force as a risk management tool, whilst
negotiating privacy, anti-discrimination and spent convictions schemes
This series of projects is linked to Global Reconciliation—an Australian-initiated network of people
and organizations around the world seeking to promote reconciliation—that is, communication
and dialogue across national, cultural, religious and racial differences. Global Reconciliation is an
ambitious and innovative partnership that draws together the vast resources of communities in
Australia and elsewhere to establish specific, outcome-focused collaborative projects around the
world, particularly in the areas of health, education, sport, the arts, spirituality, livelihoods and money,
justice and ethics, and environment. Current projects are being conducted in Sri Lanka, Australia,
Palestine, Brazil and Papua New Guinea.
Sharing Responsibility
Researchers: Blythe McLennan and John Handmer
Funding Provider: Bushfire Co-operative Research Centre
The project is based on the premise that using multiple ways of framing underlying issues in
Australian disaster management is important for developing a more nuanced understanding of the
meaning of shared responsibility. It therefore aims to stimulate ‘frame-reflexive’ thinking, learning
and practice. The first, completed stage of the project involved a broad, interdisciplinary review
of the ways that underlying challenges for sharing responsibility in the context of risk are framed
conceptually in research studies. This was followed by a second stage that reviewed types of
interventions, activities and processes that have shaped the way responsibility for community
safety has been shared in practice in a range of sectors and settings. The current stage focuses
on analysing case studies of responsibility-sharing issues in the context of Australian disaster
management, including issues surrounding the Black Saturday bushfires. The results of each of
these stages will be used to inform and analyse a series of stakeholder workshops.
The Venerable Batapola Nanda Thero and Professor Suresh Sundram at the Colombo Reconciliation
forum, Colombo, Sri Lanka, August 2012.
176
177
Synthesis Study of Community Expectations of Emergency Management
Researchers: Joshua Whittaker and John Handmer
Funding Provider: Office of the Emergency Service Commissioner
This projects aims to establish an understanding of community expectations of emergency
management in Victoria and indicate what is being done to meet them. This project is being
undertaken for the Victorian Office of the Emergency Services Commissioner (OESC) to inform the
development of standards for emergency management.
insert full page image - PNG ?
Subjects of Security: The Domestic Role of Foreign Policy in the War on Terror
Researcher: Robin Cameron
‘Subjects of Security’ offers an in-depth treatment of how foreign policy regulates its own domestic
sphere. This book-length project develops an original framework that inverts the traditional analysis
of foreign in order to interpret the impact of ‘external’ foreign policy on ‘domestic’ individual
subjectivity and social order. This framework demonstrates how the subjectivity of citizens is shaped
by notions of security stemming from the pervasion of norms and stereotypes of foreign policy into
domestic politics. Furthermore, notions of security derived from foreign policy inform how liberty is
perceived and what it means to be free, constituting a vital part of social order. This book will show
that foreign policy is not limited solely to its intended external audience; indeed it has a profound
impact upon domestic audiences of the state in question. Foreign policy in the sense is not just
foreign.
The NGO-Military Interface in Post-Conflict and Post-Disaster Contexts
Researcher: Vandra Harris
Funding Provider: Australian Civil-Military Centre
This project examines the interaction, co-operation and co-ordination between the Australian
military and NGOs. It develops a more complex understanding of the nature of the relationship and
the barriers, attitudes and practices that underpin it. It will compare civil-military relations between
the same group of actors across three settings: post-conflict Timor-Leste; ongoing conflict in
Afghanistan; and a post-natural disaster site.
Page 179: A political demonstration in the streets of Tokyo in February 2012 brings out armed police. As protestors used loud-speakers
from a cavalcade of moving vans, roads were blocked for a half-kilometre radius. Tokyo, Japan, 2012.
178
179
Research Themes
1.
Research Leaders: John Fien and Ralph Horne
Studies of urban policy and planning include a focus on questions of urban governance
and political economy, development regulation, metropolitan strategic planning, peri-urban
development, the need for and conflicts around urban consolidation and urban renewal, urban
infrastructure and transport and urban mobility systems.
Research Coordinator: Gayle Seddon
Research Team: Iftekar Ahmed, Yoko Akama, Mary Myla Andamon, Paula Arcari, Sharif
As-Saber, Ruth Barton, Sarah Bekessy, Michael Berry, Beau Beza, Cathy
Brigden, Michael Buxton, George Cairns, Iain Campbell, Andrew Carre, Chris
Chamberlain, Esther Charlesworth, France Cheong, Prem Chhetri, Stephen
Clune, Val Colic-Peisker, Ngan Collins, Brian Corbitt, Enda Crossin, Tony
Dalton, Peter Fairbrother, David Forrest, Colin Fudge, Hartmut Fünfgeld,
Victor Gekara, Robin Goodman, Ascelin Gordon, Annette Gough, Elizabeth
Grierson, Jose Roberto Guevara, David Hayward, Kathryn Hegarty, Tammy
Hulbert, Joe Hurley, Usha Iyer-Raniga, John Jackson, Guy Johnson, Sandra
Jones, Julie Lawson, Helen Lewis, Simon Lockrey, Cecily Maller, Andrew
Martel, Adela McMurray, Ian McShane, Bernard Mees, Paul Mees, David
Mercer, Denise Meredyth, Susie Moloney, John Morrissey, Anitra Nelson,
Berenice Nyland, Sharon Parkinson, Alan Pears, Nattavud Pimpa, Shams
Rahman, Rob Roggema, Jan Scheurer, Judith Smart, Darryn Snell, Yolande
Strengers, Elizabeth Taylor, Ian Thomas, Keith Toh, Ly Thi Tran, Karli Verghese,
Ron Wakefield, Julia Werner, Leone Wheeler, Nicola Willand, Bruce Wilson,
Chris Wilson, James Wong, Gavin Wood and Leslie Young
2.
Research Focus
Cities and regional centres are the engines of economic and cultural growth. Some 80 per cent
of Australians live in them, contributing over 80 per cent of GDP and associated economic and
employment growth. However, this era of urban-based prosperity is being challenged by the sideeffects of success, including regional disparities resulting from unequal and uneven development, the
rising ecological footprints of cities, social unease, road congestion, resource scarcity and escalating
living costs.
3.
The Sustainable and Urban Regional Futures (SURF) program is multidisciplinary, bringing together
researchers from fields as diverse as geography, planning, cultural studies, sociology, business,
architecture, media studies, economics and education in the common quest for solutions to the
challenges facing cities, regional centres and communities. With an emphasis on the values of
sustainability, resilience appropriate development and social inclusion, research in the SURF program
is organised around 13 themes.
180
Environmental Management
This theme examines the diverse drivers of ecosystem change, particularly in urban and semirural environments. Its aim is to address the gap between conservation theory and real world
practice in complex planning environments. Research includes studies of biodiversity planning,
natural resource planning, water security and pollution control.
4.
Housing Studies
Research in this theme focuses on the areas of housing economics, housing policy,
homelessness, housing and particular demographic groups (such as immigrants, the aged,
etc.) and housing within the urban planning framework. Housing affordability is a critical focus
for research as ‘housing wealth’ is a major determinant of social and economic wellbeing and
governments are reducing the provision of public housing to only the most needy.
5.
Sustainable Built Environments
This theme develops strategies and tools for sustainable construction management and
procurement, environmental performance assessment and modelling of buildings, innovative
building materials and fabrication, retrofitting for climate change, and building life-cycle
assessment.
6.
Urban Metabolism and Low-Carbon Systems
Research towards advancing sustainable production and consumption systems includes:
closed-loop design, product stewardship, life-cycle assessment, eco-footprinting,
environmental assessment and modelling.
7.
Smart Cities
This theme recognises the growing importance of collaborative informal learning and its
contribution both to promoting balanced economic, social and environmental development
in city-regions, and addressing urban challenges. New information and communication
technologies are a particularly important resource in some Smart City initiatives.
The program advances the evidence base for policy, planning and decision-making for urban and
regional development in ways that enhance community resilience, promote social well-being and
increase productivity whilst conserving the natural resource base upon which all social and economic
development depends.
Place and Health
In response to the increasing importance of creating ‘healthy places’ in the planning and design
of new residential communities and revitalising established ones, this theme investigates the
production, experience and governance of health and wellbeing in urban environments in the
context of climate change adaptation, sustainability and social inclusion.
How can communities, cities and regions be planned to
support the transition towards sustainable futures?
With the goal of ensuring the productivity, liveability and sustainability of cities and regions, the
Program seeks to develop the evidence base for policies, strategies and tools for delivering planning
productive cities and regions that are diverse, vibrant and affordable and in which the social capital
and resilience fundamental to productivity are promoted.
Urban Policy and Planning
8.
Resilient Regions
Cities are reliant upon the regions that supply the resources necessary for human health,
social wellbeing and economic productivity. However, pressures from globalization, national
development strategies and global environmental climate change are undermining the capacity
of regions to contribute to supply the needs of cities. At the same time, other resourcerich regions are experiencing ‘boom’ conditions and the impacts of overly –fast, reactive
development. Policies and strategies that support sustainable regional development and build
resilience to the impacts of change are the focus of this research theme.
181
9.
Urban Education
Place-Making in Urban Renewal
Social learning is central to sustainable cities and regions. Research focuses on the processes
of learning that underpin the cultural changes required to support sustainable and resilient
communities and the importance of education and training in innovation and sustainability
systems. Key emphases include the roles of schools, colleges and universities, as well as adult
and community education, in building understanding and capacities in social inclusion, active
and informed citizenship, international understanding, sustainable lifestyles and green skills.
Researchers: Beau Beza, Prem Chhetri, John Fien, Colin Fudge and Susie Moloney
10. Social Change for Sustainability
The challenges of sustainability and climate change involve significant change in the ways that
we live, work and interact. This theme explores opportunities to facilitate social change that
move beyond the current focus on individual resource consumption and behaviour to consider
why and how people produce and consume from broader societal contexts. Sub-themes and
concepts include sharing economies, beyond behaviour change, sustainable consumption,
de-growth and affluenza.
11. Green Economy Transitions
This theme emphasizes equity and justice in regional transitions to a low-carbon economy. This
theme also focuses on the governance and management of transitions in social and economic
development infrastructure systems and the policies and practices required for an equitable,
just and low-carbon future.
12. Sustainable Business Practices
Sustainable logistics and supply chain management are fundamental to sustainable cities. This
theme investigates these and related issues such as sustainable procurement, sustainability
indicators and reporting, ethical governance and finance, corporate social responsibility, and
carbon accounting and management.
13. Social Innovation
The concept of social innovation describes a new approach to solving a shared problem
or unmet demand where the returns or benefits of the innovation are realised at the social
rather than individual level. Where the classic formulation of innovation focuses on business
entrepreneurship, social innovations involve new processes, technologies or institutional
partnerships that advance human needs and capabilities. Key Research Projects
Climate Change and the Sustainability Transition
Researchers: Peter Fairbrother, Darryn Snell, Larissa Bamberry, Meagan Tyler, George Cairns
and Linda Condon (Swinburne).
Funding Providers: Department of Regional Australia, Local Government, Arts and Sport
and Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (DEEWR)
This cluster of projects is investigating the historical and contemporary dimensions of climate change
and the social and economic transitions required to adapt to low-carbon futures. Research in the
La Trobe Valley is developing alternatives to the current reliance upon the brown coal and power
industries within the context of greening the economy and workforce. Complementing this focus is
an exploration of the ways in which communities as localities and neighbourhoods can organize and
adapt to the increasing number of severe events, such as bushfires and floods, brought about by
global warming.
182
Funding Provider: Places Victoria
This study is exploring the role of place-making in ensuring that urban renewal projects integrate
economic competitiveness, social inclusion and environmental sustainability, in different urban
settings (inner suburbs, middle-ring development, urban-fringe low density), but especially in relation
to urban renewal. The project is focusing also on the interrelationships between health, wellbeing
and liveability that can flow from privileging walking, cycling and public transport. Drawing on these
findings, the project will generate strategies through which place-making can be used in specific
urban settings confronting the Victorian Government’s urban renewal policies. Initial projects are in
the Docklands, Fisherman’s Bend, E-Gate, Richmond Station, and Maribyrnong.
Selandra Speaks: Evaluating the Health and Wellbeing Outcomes of a Master-Planned
Community
Researchers: Cecily Maller, Larissa Nicholls, Shae Hunter, and Ralph Horne
Funding Providers: VicHealth with support from Stockland, the Growth Areas Authority, the Planning
Institute of Australia, and the City of Casey
In order to explore how good planning at a neighbourhood scale can lead to better health and
wellbeing outcomes for residents, this project evaluates and measures the planned, emerging and
accidental health outcomes of Selandra Rise. Selandra is a demonstration residential development
in Cranbourne North in Melbourne’s south-east. In a social model of health, housing is recognized
as a key determinant of health and wellbeing. More specifically, the impact of place on health is well
established. It is widely acknowledged that unhealthy places can have long-term implications for
current residents and future generations. In the context of increasing demand for housing, issues of
housing affordability and climate change, the research is shedding light on how health and wellbeing
can be optimized and sustained for communities in new housing developments.
Housing on the Edge: Sustainable Housing Systems for Vulnerable Communities
Researchers: Esther Charlesworth and Iftekar Ahmed
Funding Provider: ARC Future Fellowship Program
This project is exploring Australian and international case studies that reflect ‘leading practice’ in
housing reconstruction following a natural disaster. These include: Victoria, Sri Lanka, Haiti, Japan,
New Orleans and Vietnam. A meta-analysis of these cases is being used to identify the ‘success’
factors that can facilitate the successful implementation of a sustainable housing design ‘system’ as
a community-wide rebuilding process.
The Impact of E-Government and E-Learning on Rural and Regional Communities
Researchers: Mohini Singh
Funding Provider: Rural Industries Research & Development Corporation (RIRDC)
This research examined the impact of e-government and e-learning initiatives on rural and regional
communities in Victoria and Queensland to determine a strategy for reducing the digital divide
between urban and rural Australia. It recommended strategic alliances with technology providers,
government agencies, trainers and community groups to augment the adoption of ICT-based
programs with rural communities.
183
Beyond Behaviour Change
Cost-Effective Methods for Evaluation of Neighbourhood-Renewal Programs
Researchers: Yolande Strengers, Cecily Maller, Ralph Horne, Susie Moloney, Stephen Clune, Paula
Arcari, Helaine Stanley, Larissa Nicholls, Shae Hunter, Katelyn Sampson and Ian Jones
Researchers: Gavin Wood and Melek Cigdem
Funding Providers: ANZ Bank, Ausgrid, Endeavour Energy and TransGrid,
This is a cluster of projects convened by Yolande Strengers and based on the application of social
practice theory to attempts by policy and program-makers and deliverers to alter household
practices towards low-carbon futures. Case studies to date include the use of design, interventions
in behaviour-change program design, and applications of social practice theory to household
‘greening’. Recent projects include:
Co-managing Home Energy Demand (Yolande Strengers). This project is investigating a range of
issues concerning home energy-demand, such as what practices are considered discretionary and
non-discretionary during peak times, and how householders are changing their practices (or likely to
change them) in response to various demand-management pricing and technology programs. The
project will inform demand management strategy and programs in NSW.
Lifestyle Audit (Larissa Nicholls). As part of the Australian Government’s Smart Grid, Smart
City demonstration project, Ausgrid engaged the Beyond Behaviour Change team to develop a
home energy audit for households that is focused on home energy use practices, such as clothes
washing, heating, cooling, and cooking. The service will provide tailored advice using information
from the home’s smart meter and the project will gather information about the significant benefits of
these technologies and services in Australia.
Airline Travel at ANZ Bank (Yolande Strengers and Helaine Stanley). The Beyond Behaviour Change
research team conducted research for ANZ to inform its corporate strategy to address greenhouse
gas emissions associated with business travel
Kildonan Uniting Care: Sustainable Families Project (Susie Moloney). The two-year project will assist
144 low-income families referred from Kildonan’s Family Services programs in reducing energy bills
and provide education and hands on support to vulnerable families about sustainable living practices
such as increasing energy efficiency, water saving and waste reduction. RMIT’s Beyond Behaviour
Change group is assisting Kildonan in developing a social practices approach to project design and
evaluation.
Funding provider: Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI)
The aim of this research project is to fill this existing void in the evidence base by using costeffective quantitative methods to measure the effectiveness of neighbourhood renewal in fulfilling
its objectives. According to urban economists, real estate values are significantly influenced by a
set of locational amenities and disamenities whose neighbourhood effects, whether adverse or
positive, ‘spill over’ into the property market and, in turn, affect house prices. An enormous number
of studies have used hedonic price models to provide strong empirical support for this proposition.
Based on this economic theory, we hypothesize that, if a renewal program is successful, the ensuing
enhancements in housing quality, neighbourhood amenities and improvements in the average level
of health and wellbeing will be capitalized into the selling price of property values within and in the
vicinity of a renewal site. This will lead to an increase in both the sales prices of properties that are
located within renewal site boundaries (direct effects) as well as proximate properties that lie outside
of the renewal site (indirect, spill over effects).
Design-Led Decision Support for Regional Climate Adaptation
Researchers: Ralph Horne, Julia Werner, Agnes Soh, Shae Hunter, Stephen Clune, John Martin (La
Trobe University) and Roger Jones (Victoria University)
Funding Provider: Victorian Climate Change Adaptation Research Centre (VCCCAR)
Given the fact that climate change will have an impact even if reducing carbon emissions is very
successful, designing regions in a way they become adaptive to climate change is necessary. This
project aims to bring together knowledge of different local stakeholders, council members, state
government representatives, science and the design community to develop future, climate adaptive,
visions for three localities. In two consecutive charrettes, a multi-day intensive design workshop,
these visions are designed. In between the two charrettes the results will be assessed, before being
elaborated in greater detail. The findings will be used by the individual councils and by policy makers
to stimulate a wider uptake of the method in other regions.
Housing Security: Consequences of Underemployment
Comparative Regional Policy: Europe, Asia, and Australia
Researchers: Iain Campbell, Sharon Parkinson and Gavin Wood
Researchers: Bruce Wilson, Colin Fudge and John Fien
Funding Provider: Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI)
Funding Provider: The European Union Centre at RMIT
This research project aims to provide a comprehensive population-wide analysis of the
consequences of time-related underemployment as it relates to different housing tenures and
household groups. Time-related underemployment can be measured in several ways. The simplest
definition refers to those working less than 35 hours in a given week who would prefer to work more
paid hours. Although underemployment is associated with substantial disadvantage and affects
large numbers in Australia, some 874,000 in August 2010, its precise impact on housing remains an
unjustly neglected area of study.
This project is drawing on a comparative study of Regional Policy in Europe and in selected Asian
countries to inform regional policy and program development in Australia. The project is focused in
the early stages on identifying the sources of data used for monitoring political, cultural, economic
and ecological status in European regions, and assessing the availability of similar sources in
Australia. The outcome of this first stage will be the mapping of the extent of ‘patchwork’ regional
development in Australia, and identifying more specific research questions which can be addressed
in the second phase. The project is led by the European Union Centre at RMIT which receives core
funding from the European Commission.
Housing Supply Bonds: A Suitable Instrument to Channel Investment towards Affordable
Housing in Australia?
Researchers: Julie Lawson, Vivienne Milligan (University of NSW) and Judith Yates (University of
NSW)
This research aims to develop a sustainable and low-cost private financing instrument, based on the
adaptation of Housing Construction Convertible Bonds, in order to expand the supply of affordable
rental housing and contribute towards Australian housing needs in the long term.
184
185
Homeless person in the centre of Sydney, Australia, February 2012.
J2SI Evaluation (Assisting the Chronically Homeless)
Researchers: Guy Johnson, Sharon Parkinson and Yi Ping Tseng (University of Melbourne)
Funding Provider: Sacred Heart Mission
This project will conduct a randomized control study of two different service intervention for the
chronically homeless with Industry partner, Melbourne Institute of Applied Social & Economic
Research.
NRCL Community Development Site
Researchers: Ralph Horne and Paula Arcari
Funding Provider: Natural Resources Conservation League
With the ultimate aim of realising an innovative new form of sustainable development on the fringe,
the Centre for Design at RMIT University was contracted by the Natural Resources Conservation
League (NRCL) to undertake research services to inform the development of a 31.5 hectare
greenfield site in Melbourne’s Cranbourne West. Following review of appropriate best-practice
climate-adaptive urban development and design approaches the project included the development
and delivery of a Design Charrette; Initial evaluation of baseline and options; and an indication of the
preferred development concept.
Objections and Appeals Against Planning Applications: Implications for Medium-Density and
Social Housing
Researchers: Val Colic-Peisker, Joe Hurley and Elizabeth Taylor
This project focuses on residents’ concerns about changing neighbourhoods. The context for the
research is democratic ethos of public participation in planning. Many jurisdictions provide thirdparty rights of objection and appeal to interested groups. These rights have the potential to influence
development approval processes and housing-market outcomes. They also have the capacity
to significantly affect, and potentially inhibit, the achievement of compact city and social housing
objectives. As debates around the merits of third-party objection and appeal attract increasing
attention in international planning communities, and the stakes for compact cities and affordable
housing outcomes are raised, an assessment of the efficacy and equity of third-party objection and
appeal rights is urgently required.
School-Community Learning Partnerships
Researchers: Jose Roberto Guevara, Annette Gough, John Fien, Jodi-Anne Smith, Leone Wheeler,
Jo Lang and Susan Elliott
School-community partnerships in peri-urban regions have the potential to contribute to the
‘community resilience trinity’ of social, human and natural capital. Eighteen case studies of
successful learning partnerships have been conducted in and around Melbourne, Brisbane, the
Sunshine Coast, Townsville and Cairns. Each case study has been written in three phases through
student, teacher and community workshops using the Most Significant Change Technique.
An analysis of the case studies is being undertaken: 1. to analyse patterns of approaches and
outcomes of the range of existing school-community learning partnerships for sustainability; 2. to
identify the factors that are facilitating and limiting the enhancement of educational as well as social
and natural capital outcomes of different approaches to school-community learning partnerships; 3.
to identify principles for the establishment and management of effective learning partnerships; 4. to
identify the capabilities required of the different stakeholders in building effective community learning
partnerships for sustainability; and 5. to identify the factors that influence the adoption of the lessons
learned about effective community learning partnerships for sustainability. The project is in its third
year and researchers presented findings at the World Environmental Educators Congress (2011) are
currently analysing the results, and drafting a guide-book of good practice.
186
187
Spatial Network Analysis for Multimodel Urban Transport Systems: Planning for Public Transport
Networks
Collecting Institutions, Cultural Diversity and the Making of Citizenship in Australia since the
1970s
Researchers: Paul Mees and Jan Scheurer and Kristen Bell
Researchers: Ian McShane, Andrea Witcomb (Deakin University), Kylie Message (Australian National
University), Simon Knell (Leicester University) and Arne Bugge Amundsen (University of Oslo)
Funding Provider: Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute
Through exploring the concept of accessibility in relation to best-practice public transport networks,
the research will contribute to the understanding of the effects of transport policies and programs on
the spatial distribution of housing.
Think Tank: Adapting Housing Aspirations and Expectations on the Coastal Suburban and
Regional Fringe
Researchers: Cecily Maller, Susie Moloney and Yolande Strengers
Funding Provider: Victorian Climate Change Adaptation Research Centre (VCCCAR)
The ‘Adapting Housing Aspirations and Expectations on the Coastal Suburban and Regional Fringe’
Think Tank was developed to establish a dialogue between local and state government, academics,
communities and the housing industry around the changing aspirations and expectations associated
with residential development, and their implications for climate change adaptation. In addition
the Think Tank aimed to explore actions required, potential collaborative relationships, the role of
government, and areas for further research.
Marginal Rental Housing and Marginal Renters: A Typology for Policy
Researchers: Robin Goodman, Tony Dalton, Anitra Nelson, Shae Hunter and Keith Jacobs
(University of Tasmania)
Funding provider: Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI)
This four-staged research project will gather and analyse evidence enabling analysis of 2011 Census
data. The analysis of dynamic trends, comparisons between state and territory approaches and
results, detailed typology reflecting the experiences and circumstances of marginal renters and
conditions of marginal rental housing will all offer a strong evidence base for policy-making, allowing
differentiated and appropriate treatments of the various forms of marginal rental housing and renters
and future monitoring of trends and conditions.
Evaluating Housing and Health Outcomes at Lakewood
Researchers: Robin Goodman, Cecily Maller and Peter Phibbs (University of Western Sydney)
The findings of recent Australian studies highlight the importance of housing precariousness as a
potential and real health determinant, but they also highlight the substantial gaps in knowledge within
the field, as well as about the Australian experience more specifically. This analysis emphasizes a
real need to further explore housing’s interaction with health, especially over time, and beyond the
limitations of existing data sources. The evaluation of the innovative housing initiative, Lakeside
Community, provides an important opportunity to fill this evidence gap with a good empirical study.
A community based approach is proposed to develop the health indicators in partnership with the
households in Lakeside.
Peer Review of Four Darebin Housing Reports
Researchers: Robin Goodman and Joe Hurley
Funding Provider: City of Darebin
Four housing reports peer reviewed to investigate and test the methodologies and approaches taken
by the City of Darebin, identifying any housing gaps, and provide recommendations for changes with
current housing trends and issues.
188
Funding Provider: ARC Discovery Grant
Australia is widely acknowledged as having played an influential role in the development of
multicultural policies internationally. Australian collecting institutions (museums, galleries, libraries,
archives) were instrumental in both enacting and shaping that policy through new collecting,
documentation and exhibition practices.This project will develop the first comprehensive history of
the Australian collecting sector’s engagement with cultural diversity. It aims to understand the role of
the sector in the management and promotion of culturally diverse societies, including the formation
of citizens, and to identify Australian innovation in this regard.
Opportunity Spaces: Community Engagement in the Planning, Use and Governance of Shared
School Facilities
Researchers: Denise Meredyth, Ian McShane and Jerry Watkins (University of Western Sydney)
Funding Provider: ARC Linkage Grant
Opportunity Spaces is a three-year project which will research the effective use of schools as
community hubs. Current investment by Australian governments in school facilities is a key aspect
of educational reform, local infrastructure provision and social policy. This project will focus on joint
school-community shared use facilities in Victoria, locating Victorian developments within wider
Australian and international policy and practice. The Victorian Department of Education and Early
Childhood Development is a research partner in the project.
Living Change: Adaptive Housing Responses to Climate Change in the Town Camps of Alice
Springs
Researchers: Ralph Horne, Andrew Martel, Paula Arcari and Denise Foster (Tangentyere Research
Hub, Alice Springs)
Funding Provider: National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility (NCCARF)
The project has three primary research objectives: 1. To identify current adaptive practices of
residents in newly provided or refurbished houses in three Alice Springs town camps in relation to
comfort control and healthy-living practices, and highlight resident vulnerabilities to extreme weather
events (particularly increased incidents of hot weather), and rising energy and water costs. 2. To
identify tenancy management practices that increase or reduce vulnerabilities to climate change
scenarios for town camp residents and promote the integration of sustainable living practices into
existing tenancy management and future public housing provision. 3. To build the existing research
capacity of the Tangentyere Research Hub to include energy and water use studies, and sustainable
design through technical and social practice research.
Urban Innovation: Healthy Productive Communities in Urban Australia
Researchers: Ralph Horne, Helaine Stanley, Paula Arcari and Cecily Maller
Funding Provider: Department of Innovation, Industry, Science, Research and Tertiary Education
This project will identify and support proposed new research to underpin new approaches to
engendering productivity, liveability, wellbeing and public health in cities and regional centres across
Australia. The intention is to review and identify current problems and gaps in knowledge that will
enable policy and practice to more actively foster healthy and productive communities in urban
Australia. Based on a comprehensive literature review and semi-structured interviews with a range
of key stakeholders, a Project Reference Committee (PRC) and an internal RMIT steering committee
will contribute to the design and development of a long-term plan of national, collaborative research
that rethinks the way we manage, design, service and value our urban spaces.
189
Research Themes
1.
Research Leaders: Lin Padgham
Agent-based simulation is a powerful tool for developing understanding of complex, multiscalar, multi-actor systems. We are exploring a range of issues that will make this technology
both more accessible to end users, and also more reliable and more transparent. In order
for government departments and other groups to be confident in using this technology, it
is important that they are able to understand the underlying models and re-use models or
systems that they already have and trust. It is also important to develop scientific understanding
of how to use simulations to systematically explore risks and vulnerabilities, to gain a nuanced
understanding of the system under consideration. It is impossible to explore all possible
scenarios—but it is important to explore both a sufficient number, and sufficient combinations
of key aspects. We are developing ways to support end-Uusers in obtaining a principled set of
simulations on which they can reliably base their understanding.
Research Team: Karyn Bosomworth, Hepu Deng, Colin Fudge, Sarah Hickmott, Ralph Horne,
Shae Hunter, Paul James, Liam Magee, Andy Scerri, David Scerri, Ke Sun,
Dhirendra Singh, James Thom and Fabio Zambetta
How can technology assist in decision-making
regarding such processes as urban planning and risk
analysis?
This cross-disciplinary program uses and develops advanced technologies in areas such as agentbased simulation to support urban decision-making.
2.
The program seeks to develop general approaches and tools that can be applied to a range of
urban decision-making issues and questions. This involves the development and exploration of
technologies and techniques to assist urban decision-makers in understanding the complex
systems in which they are developing policies and infrastructure. The program aims to take
specific questions and issues, and explore the use of leading-edge technology to contribute
to addressing these questions and issues, with a view to building strong expertise in the
interdisciplinary space between the social sciences and technology.
Participatory Modelling of Complex Systems
Any computational system is only as good as the underlying model upon which it is based. In
modelling complex systems it is crucial to identify the key components of the system and how
they interact. There is broad support for the idea that this is best done by actively involving the
end-users and the subjects being modelled. One of the research themes of the Program is how
to best support participatory modelling, using the skills of a multi-disciplinary team involving
both computer scientists and social scientists, as well as end-users of systems.
Research Focus
Many decisions in planning for our cities, involve an understanding of complex interactions between
different aspects of the city—from its infrastructure, its buildings to its inhabitants and culture. This
program focuses on leading-edge information technology and techniques, and how they can
be applied to specific questions and issues in urban decision-making. One specific focus of the
program is simulation, in particular agent-based simulation. There is a particular focus on developing
a platform that supports integration of separately developed simulation modules within a larger
whole, as well as re-usability of modules where possible.
Agent-Based Simulation to Support Risk Assessment, Policy and Planning
3.
Computational Models of Human Behaviour
One of the difficulties in agent-based modelling is that the approach to modelling humans and
their behaviours is very simplistic, and is essentially just one-off reactive rules. Social scientists
typically find this far too restrictive for believable modelling of humans, leading to lack of
confidence in simulation results. We are exploring integration of more sophisticated behaviour
modelling, incorporating pursuit of multiple goals over time. We are also looking at how social
science theories can be made sufficiently simple and precise (while still capturing essential
elements) for implementation in a computational system. We will then explore to what extent
this assists in facilitating the use of agent based simulation technology in policy and planning
situations.
Harbor Freeway and 6th Street, downtown Los Angeles, USA, February 2012.
190
191
Key Research Projects for 2012
Exploring Flood Responses in an Urban Municipality Using Agent-Based Simulation
Accounting for Sustainability: Developing an Integrated Approach for Sustainability Assessments
Researchers: Alice Godycki (State Emergency Services), Sarah Hickmott, Shae Hunter, Lin
Padgham, Lalitha Ramachandran (City of Port Phillip), David Scerri and Dhirendra Singh
Researchers: Paul James, Lin Padgham, James Thom, Andy Scerri, Liam Magee, Sarah Hickmott,
Ke Sun, Hepu Deng and Lida Ghahremanloo
Funding Provider and Partners: Australian Research Council with Fuji Xerox, Cambridge
International College, City of Melbourne, Common Ground Publishing, Augusta Systems, and
Microsoft.
This is a cross-disciplinary project involving social science and computer science. It aims to develop
a new approach to sustainability in our cities and organizations. Current approaches with a focus on
reporting against a proliferation of indicator sets, often result in cities and organizations losing sight
of the underlying sustainability goals, and in particular the local opportunities and issues. This project
will develop a new approach to defining sustainability in locally meaningful terms, while at the same
time linking this to global indicators. A leading edge software system will be developed to provide the
technological support to assist cities and organizations in management of their sustainability goals.
An Extensible Agent-Based Framework for Exploring Climate Change Adaptation
Researchers: Lin Padgham, Colin Fudge, Fabio Zambetta, Sarah Hickmott, David Scerri and
Dhirendra Singh
Funding Provider: Australia Research Council
The goal of this project is to facilitate exploration of possible climate-change-adaptation strategies
using an interactive platform incorporating multiple agent-based simulation modules. The aim is
to build up complex simulations by incrementally adding new agent-based models created by
members of a large distributed community, interested in the application area. Each module will
capture a different aspect of the situation, and could potentially be created independently by people
with expertise relating only to that aspect. We are thus developing an extensible, open-source
framework that allows individual modules, possibly pre-existing and implemented under different
paradigms, to be integrated in a common environment. This agent-based modelling approach
will be enhanced by our proposed inclusion of entities based on the Belief Desire Intention agentarchitecture, which facilitates more complex reasoning agents than are commonly used in ABM
modelling. These entities may include complex social organizations or groups as well as individuals.
The extension of ABM to an interactive platform builds on the technology developed for games,
using it in a manner similar that described as serious games. The project is a cross-disciplinary one,
involving both technical and social science challenges.
Developing Computational Models of Social Practice Theory
Researchers: Sarah Hickmott, Ralph Horne, Shae Hunter and Lin Padgham
There is a recent trend in the social sciences to view human behaviour as being driven primarily by
social practices, which are the key entities for understanding, rather than by individual decisions.
We are exploring how to incorporate these theories into a computational system in a way that
can provide insights for understanding and influencing practices. This is a challenging project that
has potential to contribute to social science theory development as well as to developing better
computational support tools for decision-making.
192
Funding Provider: National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility (NCCARF)
This project is working closely with State Emergency Services (SES) and City of Port Phillip (CoPP)
to explore flood management in their municipality. Flood events are predicted to increase in both
frequency and severity. With limited resources, councils must find ways to engage and assist
residents in responding to these events, including before, during and after a particular crisis. A multidisciplinary team is working closely with SES and CoPP, as well as residents of a selected suburb,
to explore specific options with respect to sandbagging in response to flood events. This project
lays the groundwork for understanding how to develop effective simulation support tools for local
governments, as well as providing an application that can be used to explore sandbagging in other
areas. A key aspect of the project is how to make tools usable and extensible, beyond the life of a
particular resourced project.
Methodology for Building Agent-Based Simulation in Multi-Disciplinary Teams
Researchers: Sarah Hickmott, Lin Padgham, David Scerri and Dhirendra Singh
Funding Provider: This project is partially supported by an ARC Discovery Grant
A long-term project is to develop a methodology and tools to assist planners, policy makers, and
social scientists, in using agent based simulation technology to better understand the complex
systems they work with. We plan to extend and modify the internationally used methodology we
have developed for software engineers, in building autonomous agent systems, to be applicable
to building agent based simulations, where design models are built primarily by social scientists
and domain experts. In order to support the development of this methodology we are developing a
number of applications, with different stakeholders.
Modelling Humans in Agent Based Simulation Systems
Researchers: Sarah Hickmott, Ralph Horne, Shae Hunter, Lin Padgham, David Scerri and Dhirendra
Singh
This project is exploring mechanisms for incorporating better models of humans into existing agent
based simulation toolkits. This includes technical work to integrate more sophisticated models,
and inter-disciplinary work to build the modelling tools and theories to be accessible to social
scientists. This latter aim of accessibility to social scientists involves developing models that use
the right concepts, and capture the dynamics of social science theories, as well as tools that are
technically accessible. This is a large and long-term project, with potentially high impact as it lays the
groundwork for more sophisticated collaboration as well as greater confidence in the technology.
Supporting Participatory Modelling
Researchers: Sarah Hickmott, Lin Padgham, David Scerri and Dhirendra Singh
We are exploring ways to support participatory modelling, that range from workshops with those
being modelled, to structured interviews with experts and subjects, and also tools to allow direct
feedback and manipulation of simulation models.
193
What can we say! This photo depicts a city built on sand. Dubai, United Arab Emirates, 2012.
194
195
7. Affiliated Research
Centres
Centre for Applied Social Research
AHURI Research Centre
The Centre for Applied Social Research is located in the School of Global, Urban and Social Studies.
The Centre conducts nationally significant research on key areas of social policy and social change.
Centre staff are committed to the idea that informed policy debates requires theoretically informed,
applied social research. The Centre’s work converges around four themes.
The Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI) is a national organization funded
through contributions from federal and state governments and ten participating universities. RMIT
has its own AHURI Research Centre located in the School of Global, Urban and Social Studies. This
is related to six other research centres around Australia which all have access to research grants
distributed annually. The RMIT Centre was established in 1999 under the direction of Professor Mike
Berry, foundation CEO of the national Institute (1993–1998). Associate Professor Robin Goodman
has been the Director since 2010. There are now three broad streams of research promoted by
the Centre: housing and homelessness; urban and regional planning; and sustainability and climate
change.
One theme is the changing character of paid work and employment relations. The main strands
of this research concern new forms of employment, labour-market restructuring, working time,
industrial relations, work-and-family balance issues; and quality part-time work. This research is also
concerned with mapping the connections between paid work and welfare.
Another theme focuses on the changing nature of welfare provision. Researchers working on this
area have particular expertise in the enumeration of the homeless population, pathways to and from
homelessness, issues related to domestic violence and related policy responses, life on welfare in
Australia, the history of the women’s refuge movement, and the experiences of people who grew up
in institutional care.
A third theme is concerned with evidence-based policy in health and wellbeing. Projects focus on
developing and applying evidence about complicated and complex interventions. This research
is undertaken with government and non-government organizations that address public health,
health promotion, occupational health and safety, international development, family and community
services, community development and natural-resource management.
The fourth theme is disability. Our expertise here lies around contemporary social policies and
practices, in particular human rights and individual funding. Researchers have experience of major
policy reform and measuring outcomes of new initiatives. They have been involved in innovative
research and evaluation directly affecting the structure and delivery of services and best practice in
professional services.
Protesters rally against funding cuts to the TAFE education system, Melbourne, Australia, 2012.
196
The Centre fosters opportunities for researchers to exchange information, work collectively and
publish locally, nationally and globally. The Centre is committed to strengthening the links between
teaching and research staff in the university and promoting a vibrant research culture. This is
achieved by bringing people together in joint activities such as the Centre’s seminar program,
by secondment of staff to the Centre for study leave, by involvement of Centre staff in teaching
(guest lectures, etc.), by joint publications and grant applications, and via the Centre’s Associate
Membership program (open to researchers in relevant fields).
The Centre specialises in applied research. Currently, the Centre has staff whose work focuses
on the links between housing and economics; on housing policy, both generally, and as it relates
to particular groups such as women, migrants and indigenous people; on urban planning and
issues around sustainable cities including transport and accessibility; on homelessness; and on
the intersections between housing and labour-market issues; and climate-change mitigation and
adaptation.
Inner-city housing development, Melbourne, Australia, 2012.
197
Globalism Research Centre
Centre for Sustainable Organisations and Work
The Globalism Research Centre was inaugurated at RMIT as the Globalism Institute in 2002 and
celebrated its tenth anniversary in 2012. Based within the School of Global, Urban and Social
Studies, the brief of the Globalism Research Centre is to understand long-term social change in a
period of intense globalization.
The Centre for Sustainable Organisations and Work brings together social-science research
expertise from across the RMIT College of Business and other areas of the University. The Centre
has an interdisciplinary focus, covering employment relations, organizational studies, industrial
relations, gender studies, globalization and logistics, business and labour history, political economy
and sociology, with particular attention given to the Asia-Pacific Region. It promotes and facilitates
social science research in these areas and encourages theoretically informed analyses that lay the
foundation for evidence-based policy and practice.
Research on a range of thematic areas—migration, conflict, development, education, citizenship
and governance—is undertaken in a range of sites through ethnographic field work as well as in
conjunction with the development of social policy. Working in local communities, as well as for
governments and non-government organisations, has been undertaken in a whole range of sites
around the globe, particularly in Australia, Papua New Guinea, East Timor, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, India,
and Latin America. The policy and ethnographic level of work by the GRC is linked together by being
situated within a broader theoretical framing that examines social transformation in terms of three
key themes: sustainability, ontologies and the emergence of a global imaginary.
Members of the Globalism Research Centre work closely with the Global Studies teaching program
and many play a significant role in teaching. The aim is to build research capacity in the School and
to provide an avenue for greater interconnection between teaching and research. The Centre has
17 full members and 33 RMIT and non-RMIT associate members. Dr Damian Grenfell is the current
GRC Director and the research co-ordinator is Michelle Farley.
The Centre publishes the Local Global: Identity, Security, Community journal and runs a series
of seminar series, including the ‘Global Studies Seminar Series’ as well as the annual Tom Nairn
Lecture.
Muri Riki Henao inspects a copy of the Globalism Research Centre’s journal Local-Global, PNG edition,
which includes a profile of his troubled village, Boera, and gives critical feedback, Boera, September 2010.
198
Research in the Centre is both theoretical and empirical, developing studies of people in the context
of social change, focusing upon significant economic and organizational change. In other words,
the Centre develops theoretically informed analyses that lay the foundation for evidence-based
policy and practice. This includes provision of advisory and consultancy services to public agencies,
corporations, labour organizations and non-governmental agencies.
A distinctive feature of this research program is its multidisciplinary, historical, sociological and
comparative approach, concerned with contemporary issues. For example, the Climate Change
and Sustainable Transitions research cluster in the Centre brings together teams of multidisciplinary
researchers to investigate the social dimensions of the transition to a more economically and
environmentally sustainable world. Complementing this focus is a concern to explore the ways in
which communities as localities and neighbourhoods organize and adapt to the severe events, such
as bushfires and floods. It examines the historical and contemporary dimensions of climate change
and transition. It fosters applied research to promote and facilitate informed debate and dialogue
about climate change and sustainable transitions.
The Centre for Sustainable Organisations and Work conducted the Effective Communication: Communities
and Bushfire Project in Dunsborough, Western Australia, 2012.
199
In China there has been a significant move towards white westernized weddings and away from traditional celebrations. Here a
couple celebrate their wedding on the banks of the Huangpu River in downtown Shanghai. They are standing on the Pudong financial
district side. It is a Saturday afternoon and many couples have come down to the river with friends and photographers.
Shanghai, China, 2012.
200
201
8. Publications
James, P & Szeman, I (eds), 2010, Globalization and culture: vol. 3, global-local consumption, Sage, London.
Books 2006–2011
James, P & Steger, MB (eds), 2010, Globalization and culture: vol. 4, ideologies of globalism, Sage, London.
James, P & Mandaville, P (eds), 2010, Globalization and culture: vol. 2, globalizing religions, Sage, London.
These are books published by researchers at the Global Cities Institute during their time as members of the Institute,
sometimes in collaboration with scholars at other universities. For more recent books see the following 2012 list.
Johnson, G, Gronda, H & Coutts, S 2008, On the outside: pathways in and out of homelessness, Australian Scholarly Publishing,
Melbourne.
Kath, E 2010, Social relations and the Cuban health miracle, Transaction Books, New Brunswick.
Babacan, A & Briskman, L (ed.), 2008, Asylum seekers: international perspectives on the interdiction and deterrence of asylum
seekers, Cambridge Scholars Press, Newcastle.
Lewis, J 2008, Bali: forbidden crisis, Rowman and Littlefield, Lanham.
Lewis, J 2008, Cultural studies, Second edition, Sage Publications, London.
Battersby, P & Siracusa, J 2009, Globalization and human security, Rowman and Littlefield, Lanham.
Lewis, J & Lewis, B 2009, Bali’s silent crisis: desire, tragedy and transition, Lexington Books, Lanham.
Battersby, P, Siracusa, J & Ripiloski, S 2011, Crime wars: the global intersection of crime, political violence and international law,
Praeger, Santa Barbara.
Lewis, J 2011, Crisis in the global mediasphere: desire, displeasure and cultural transformation, Palgrave-Macmillan, London.
Bessant, J, Watts, R, Dalton, T & Smyth, P (eds), 2007, Talking policy: Australian social policy, Allen and Unwin, Sydney.
Martin, J & Hawkins, L 2010, Information communication technologies for human services education and delivery: concepts and
cases, IGI Global, Hershey.
Besserman, P & Steger MB, 2011, Zen radicals, rebels and reformers, Wisdom Publications, Somerville.
Lewis, T & Potter, E (eds), 2011, Ethical consumption: a critical introduction, Routledge, London.
Buxton, M, Tieman, G, Bekessy, S, Budge T, Butt, A, Coote, M, Lechner, A, Mercer, D, O’Neill, D & Riddington, C 2007, Change
and continuity in peri-urban Australia, RMIT University Publishing, Melbourne.
McBurnie, G & Ziguras, C 2007, Transnational education: issues and trends in offshore higher education, Routledge, London.
Calame, J & Charlesworth, E 2009, Divided cities: Belfast, Beirut, Jerusalem, Mostar, and Nicosia, University of Pennsylvania Press,
Philadelphia.
Mees, P 2010, Transport for suburbia: beyond the automobile age, Earthscan, Abington.
McNevin, A 2011, Contesting citizenship: irregular migrants and new frontiers of the political, Columbia University Press, New York.
Chamberlain, C & MacKenzie, D 2008, Counting the homeless, Australian Bureau of Statistics, Canberra.
Mendes, P, Johnson, G & Moslehuddin, B 2011, Young people leaving state out-of-home care: a research-based study of Australian
policy and practice, Australian Scholary Publishing, Melbourne.
Colic-Peisker, V 2008, Migration, class and transnational identities: Croatians in Australia and America, Illinois University Press,
Urbana.
Muenjohn, N, Armstrong, A & Francis, R 2010, Leadership in Asia Pacific: readings and research, Cengage Learning, Melbourne.
Cope, B, Kalantzis, M & Magee, L 2011, Towards a semantic web: connecting knowledge in academic research, Chandos
Publishing, Oxford.
Mulligan, M & Nadarajah, Y 2011, Rebuilding local communities in the wake of disaster social recovery in Sri Lanka and India,
Routledge, New Delhi.
Elliott, M & Thomas, I 2009, Environmental impact assessment in Australia: theory and practice, Federation Press, Perth.
Nelson A (ed.), 2007, Steering sustainability in an urbanizing world: policy, practice and performance, Ashgate Publishing,
Hampshire.
Goodman, J & James, P (eds), 2007, Nationalism and global solidarities: alternative projections to neoliberal globalisation, Routledge,
London.
Nelson, A & Timmerman, F (eds) 2011, Life without money: building fair and sustainable economies, Pluto Press, London.
Graebner, N, Burns, R & Siracusa, J 2010, America and the cold war, 1941–1991: a realist iInterpretation, Praeger, Santa Barbara.
Grenfell, D & James, P (eds), 2009, Rethinking insecurity, war and violence: beyond savage globalization?, Routledge, London.
Patomäki, H 2007, Uusliberalismi Suomessa, Lyhyt historia ja tulevaisuuden vaihtoehdot (Neoliberalism in Finland. A short history and
future alternatives), WSOY, Helsinki.
Handmer, J & Dovers, S 2007, The handbook of disaster and emergency policy and institutions, Earthscan, London.
Patomäki, H 2008, The political economy of global security. War, future crises and changes in global governance, Routledge,
London.
Handmer, J & Haynes, K (eds), 2008, Community bushfire safety, CSIRO Publishing, Melbourne.
Peacock, C (ed.), 2011, GST in Australia: looking forward from the first decade, Thomson Reuters, Sydney.
Harris, V & Goldsmith, A (eds), 2011, Security, development and nation-building in Timor-Leste: cross-sectoral perspectives,
Routledge, London.
Siracusa, J 2008, Nuclear weapons: a very short introduction, Oxford University Press, London.
Hjorth, L 2011, Games and gaming: an introduction to new media, Berg, London.
Horne, R, Grant, T & Verghese, K 2009, Life-cycle assessment: principles, practice and prospects, CSIRO Publishing, Melbourne.
Humphery, K 2010, Excess: anti-consumerism in the west, Polity Press, Cambridge.
Siracusa, J & Burns, R (ed.), 2008, The politics of nuclear weaponry, Regina Books, Claremont.
Siracusa, J, Graebner, A & Burns, R, 2008, Reagan, Bush, Gorbachev: revisiting the end of the cold war, Praeger, Westport.
Siracusa, J 2010, Diplomacy: a very short introduction, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
James, P & Nairn, T (eds), 2006, Globalization and violence: vol. 1, globalizing empires, old and new, Sage Publications, London.
Steger, MB 2008, Globalization: a very short introduction, 2003, translated into Arabic, Latvian, Kurdish, Chinese and Greek, Oxford
University Press, Oxford.
James, P & Darby, P (eds), 2006, Globalization and violence: vol. 2, colonial and postcolonial globalizations, Sage Publications,
London.
Steger, MB 2008, The rise of the global imaginary: political ideologies from the French Revolution to the War on Terror, Oxford
University Press, Oxford.
James, P & Friedman, J (eds), 2006, Globalization and Violence: vol. 3, globalizing war and intervention, Sage Publications, London.
Steger, MB 2009, Globalisms: the great ideological struggle of the twenty-first century, Rowan and Littlefield, Lanham.
James, P & Sharma, RR (eds), 2006, Globalization and Violence: vol. 4, transnational conflict, Sage Publications, London.
Steger, MB 2009, Globalization: a very short introduction, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
James, P 2006, Globalism, nationalism tribalism: bringing theory back in, Sage Publications, London.
Steger, MB & Roy, R 2010, Neoliberalism: a very short introduction, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
James, P & Gills, B (eds), 2007, Globalization and economy: vol. 1, global markets and capitalism, Sage Publications, London.
Steger, MB & McNevin, A (eds), 2011, Global ideologies and urban landscapes, Routledge, London.
James, P & Patomäki, H (eds), 2007, Globalization and economy: vol. 2, global finance and the new global economy, Sage
Thomas, I, 2007, Environmental policy: Australian practice in the context of theory, Federation Press, Sydney.
James, P & Palan, R (eds), 2007, Globalization and economy: vol. 3, global economic regimes and institutions, Sage Publications,
London.
James, P & O’Brien, R (eds), 2007, Globalization and economy: vol. 4, globalizing labour, Sage Publications, London.
James, P & Tulloch, J (eds), 2010, Globalization and culture: vol. 1, globalizing communications, Sage, London.
202
Thomas, I & Murfitt, P 2011, Environmental management processes and practices for Australia, Federation Press, Annandale.
Verhoeven, D 2009, Jane Campion, Routledge, London.
Wadsworth, Y 2010, Building in research and evaluation, Allen and Unwin, Sydney.
Wilson, T 2009, Understanding media users, Wiley Interscience, Malden.
Wise, C, & James, P (eds), 2010, Being arab: arabism and the politics of recognition, Arena Publications, Melbourne.
203
Books 2012
Fairbrother, P, O’Brien, J, Junor, A, O’Donnell, M & Williams, G 2012, Unions and globalisation: governments, management and the
state at work, Routledge, London.
Hinkson, J, James, P, & Veracini, L 2012, Stolen lands, broken cultures: the settler colonial present, Arena Publications, Melbourne.
Jackson, M & Shelly, M 2012, Electronic information and the law, Thomson Reuters, Pyrmont.
James, P, Nadarajah, Y, Haive, K & Stead, V 2012, Sustainable communities, sustainable development: other paths for Papua New
Guinea, University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu.
Collins, N, Zhu, Y & Warner, M 2012, ‘HRM and Asian socialist economies in transition: China, Vietnam and North Korea’, in
Brewster, C & Mayrhofer, W (eds), Handbook of research in comparative human resource management, Edward Elgar Publishing,
United Kingdom.
Fitzpatrick, L, Lewis, H & Verghese, K 2012, ‘Implementing the strategy’, in Verghese, K, Lewis, H & Fitzpatrick, L (eds), Packaging
for Sustainability, Springer, London.
Fitzpatrick, L, Verghese, K & Lewis, H 2012, ‘Developing the strategy’, in Verghese, K, Lewis, H & Fitzpatrick, L (eds), Packaging for
Sustainability, Springer, London.
Kirby, D 2012, Fantasy and belief: alternative religions, popular narratives, and digital cultures, Equinox Publishing, Sheffield.
French, L 2012, ‘A view from the west: the cinema of Ana Kokkinos’, in Michell, N (ed.), World film locations: Melbourne, Intellect,
Bristol.
Mangan, J, Lalwani, C, Butcher, T & Javadpour, R 2012, Global logistics and supply chain management, John Wiley and Sons,
Chichester.
French, L 2012, ‘Through an Australian lens: explorations of India in Jane Campion’s Holy Smoke!’, in Hosking, R & Sarwal, A (eds),
Wanderings in India: Australian perceptions, Monash University Publishing, Melbourne.
Mulligan, M & Nadarajah, Y 2012, Rebuilding communities in the wake of disaster: social recovery in Sri Lanka and India, Routledge,
New Delhi.
French, L 2012, ‘Women in film: treading water but fit for the marathon’, in Carilli, T & Campbell, J (eds), Challenging Images of
women in the media: reinventing women’s lives, Lexington Books, Maryland.
Scerri, A 2012, Greening citizenship: sustainable development, the state and ideology, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke.
Fünfgeld, H, Webb, B & McEvoy, D 2012, ‘The significance of adaptation framing in local and regional climate change adaptation
planning initiatives in Australia’, in Otto-Zimmermann, K (ed.), Resilient cities: cities and adaptation to climate change - Proceedings
of the Global Forum 2011, Springer, Heidelberg.
Siracusa, J 2012, Encylopedia of the Kennedys: the people and event that shaped America, ABC-CLIO, Santa Barbara.
Steger, MB (ed.) 2012, Globalization and culture, vol. 1 & 2, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham.
Wickramasinghe, N, Corbitt, B & Belkain, M 2012, IT and pathology, Springer, New York.
Gonzalez, C & Wickramasinghe, N 2012, ‘Improving the process of healthcare delivery in an outpatient environment: the case of a
urology department’, in Wickramasinghe, N, Bali, R.K, Suomi, R & Kirn, S (eds), Critical issues for the development of sustainable
ehealth solutions, Springer, New York.
Book Chapters 2012
Hayward, D 2012, ‘Housing construction industry, competition and regulation’, in Smith, S, Elsinga, M, Fox-O’Mahony, L, Ong SE, &
Wachter, S (eds), The international encyclopedia of housing and home, Elsevier, Oxford.
Allpress, B, Barnacle, R, Duxbury, L & Grierson, E 2012, ‘Supervising practice-led research by project in art, creative writing,
architecture and design’, in Alpress, B, Barnacle, R, Duxbury, L, & Grierson, E (eds), Supervising practices for postgraduate research
in art, architecture and design, Sense Publishers, Rotterdam.
Horsfield, P 2012, ‘”A moderate diversity of books?” The challenge of new media to the practice of christian theology’, in Cheong,
P.C, Fischer-Nielsen, P, Gelfgren, S & Ess, C (eds), Digital religion, social media and culture: perspectives, practices and futures,
Peter Lang Publishing, New York.
Arham, A & Muenjohn, N 2012, ‘Leadership, entrepreneurial orientation and performance: the case of SMES in Malaysia’, in
Muenjohn, N (ed.), Organisational leadership: concepts, cases and research, Cengage Learning, Melbourne.
Horsfield, P 2012, ‘Media and communications, christian’, in Kurian, GT (ed.), The encyclopedia of christian civilization: vol III M-R,
Blackwell Publishing, Chichester.
Bakar, R, Cooke, F & Muenjohn, N 2012, ‘Conceptual link between personality and job engagement: the moderating influence
of empowering leadership’, in Muenjohn, N (ed.), Organisational leadership: concepts, cases and Research, Cengage Learning,
Melbourne.
James, P & McNevin, A 2012, ‘Would-be citizens and strong states: circles of security and insecurity, in Steiner, N, Mason, R &
Hayes, A (eds), Migration and insecurity: citizenship and social inclusion in a transnational era, Routledge, London.
Beilin, R & McLennan, B 2012, ‘Burning questions: researching the meaning of fire in the Australian landscape’, in Helena Bender
(ed.), Reshaping environments: an interdisciplinary approach to sustainability in a complex world, Cambridge University Press,
Melbourne.
Butcher, T & Grant, D 2012, ‘Identifying supply chain value using RFID-enabled distributed decision-making for food quality and
assurance’, in Hing KC, Lettice, F & Durowoju, OA (eds), Decision-making for supply chain integration, Springer, New York.
Buxton, M & Groenhart, L 2012, ‘Urban growth boundaries and housing supply’, in Smith, S, Elsinga, M, Fox-O’Mahony, L, Ong SE,
& Wachter, S (eds), The international encyclopedia of housing and home, Elsevier Science & Technology, Oxford.
Buxton, M 2012, ‘Water privatisation’, in Crowley, K & Walker, KJ (eds), Environmental policy failure: the Australian story, Tilde
University Press, Prahan.
Cairns, G 2012, ‘Designing for change with critical scenario method’, in Boje, D.M, Burnes, B & Hassard, J (eds), Routledge
companion to organizational change, Routledge, Abingdon.
Cairns, G 2012, ‘Philosophical contradictions in FM’, in Alexander, K & Price, I (eds), Managing organizational ecologies, Routledge,
New York.
Chamberlain, C 2012, ‘Homelessness: measurement questions’, in Smith, S (ed.), International encyclopedia of housing and home,
Elsevier, Oxford.
Charles, D & Wilson, B 2012, ‘Managing regional engagement, the role benchmarking’, in Pinheiro, R, Benneworth, P & Jones, GA
(eds), Universities and regional development, a critical assessment of tension and contradictions, Routledge, United States.
Charlesworth, E & Nelson, A 2012, ‘Reconstruction as exclusion: Beirut’, in Gregner, M & Ziino, B (eds), The heritage of war,
Routledge, London.
204
Johnson, G 2012, ‘Homeless people: youth in Australia’, in Smith, S, Elsinga, M, Fox-O’Mahony, L, Ong SE, & Wachter, S (eds), The
international encyclopedia of housing and home, Elsevier Science & Technology, Oxford.
Karunasena, A, Deng, H & Zhang, X 2012, ‘A web 2.0 based e-learning success model in higher education’, in Zhang, X & Zhou, M
(eds), Lecture notes in information technology Vol. 23-24, Information Engineering Research Institute, United States.
Kirby, D 2012, ‘Alternative worlds: metaphysical questing and virtual community amongst the otherkin’, in Possamai, A (ed.), The
handbook of hyperreal religions, Brill, Leiden.
Kirby, D 2012, ‘Occultural bricolage and popular culture: remix and art in discordianism, the church of the subgenius, the temple of
psychick youth’, in Possamai, A (ed.), The handbook of hyperreal religions, Brill, Leiden.
Lewis, H & Stanley, H 2012, ‘Marketing and communicating sustainability’, in Verghese, K, Lewis, H & Fitzpatrick, L (eds), Packaging
for sustainability, Springer, London.
Lewis, H 2012, ‘Complying with regulations’, in Verghese, K, Lewis, H & Fitzpatrick, L (eds), Packaging for sustainability, Springer,
London.
Lewis, H 2012, ‘Designing for sustainability’, in Verghese, K, Lewis, H & Fitzpatrick, L (eds), Packaging for sustainability, Springer,
London.
Martin, F & Lewis, T 2012, ‘Lifestyling women: emergent femininities on Singapore and Taiwan Television’, in Kim Y (ed.), The
precarious self: women and the media in Asia, Palgrave MacMillan, London.
McLennan, B & Moore, G 2012, ‘Why scale matters’, in Bender, H (ed.), Reshaping environments: an interdisciplinary approach to
sustainability in a complex world, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne.
McLennan, B 2012, ‘Costa Rica’s dry north-west: a region in transition’, in Bender, H (ed.), Reshaping environments: an
interdisciplinary approach to sustainability in a complex world, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne.
205
McNevin, A 2012, ‘Undocumented citizens? Shifting grounds of citizenship in Los Angeles’, in Nyers, P & Rygiel, K (eds) Citizenship,
migrant activism and the politics of movement, Routledge, New York and London.
Verghese, K & Carre, A 2012, ‘Applying life cycle assessment’, in Verghese, K, Lewis, H & Fitzpatrick, L (eds), Packaging for
sustainability, Springer, London.
Mees, P 2012, ‘Transport planning’, in Thompson, S & Maginn, PJ (eds), Planning Australia: an overview of urban and regional
planning, Cambridge University Press, Sydney.
Verghese, K & Lockrey, S 2012, ‘Selecting and applying tools’, in Verghese, K, Lewis, H & Fitzpatrick, L (eds), Packaging for
Meredyth, D 2012, ‘Youth media enterprise: ethos, administration and pastoral care’, in Pykett, J (ed.), Governing through pedagogy:
re-educating citizens, Routledge, Oxon.
Verghese, K, Crossin, E & Jollands, M 2012, ‘Packaging materials’, in Verghese, K, Lewis, H & Fitzpatrick, L (eds), Packaging for
Moghimi, F & Wickramasinghe, N 2012, ‘Improving e-performance management in healthcare using intelligent IT solutions’, in
Wickramasinghe, N, Bali, RK, Suomi, R & Kirn, S (eds), Critical issues for the development of sustainable ehealth solutions, Springer,
New York.
Verghese, K, Lockrey, S, Clune, S & Sivaraman, D 2012, ‘Life cycle assessment (LCA) of food and beverage packaging’, in Lee Yam
(Eds.), Emerging food packaging technologies: principles and practice, Woodhead Publishing, London.
Moghimi, F, Seif Zadeh, H & Wickramasinghe, N 2012, ‘An intelligence e-risk detection model to improve decision efficiency in
the context of the orthopaedic operating room’, in Wickramasinghe, N. Bali, RK , Suomi, R & Kirn, S (eds), Critical issues for the
development of sustainable ehealth solutions, Springer, New York.
Molla, A & Cooper, V 2012, ‘The nomological structure of green IT readiness’, in Murugesan, S & Gangadharan, G (eds), Harnessing
green IT: principles and practices, John Wiley Sons, West Sussex.
Muenjohn, N, Armstrong, A & Hoare, L 2012, ‘Leadership assessment: differences in a cross cultural setting’, in Muenjohn, N (ed.),
Organisational leadership: concepts, cases and research, Cengage Learning, Melbourne.
Muenjohn, N, Nankervis, A, Zhang, J & Huang, C 2012, ‘Leadership and national culture: an application of Hofstede’s framework’, in
Muenjohn, N (ed.), Organisational leadership: concepts, cases and research, Cengage Learning, Melbourne.
Mulligan, M 2012, ‘From inter-ethnic conflict to plural democracy in Sri Lanka’, in Dutt, S & Bansal, A (eds), South asian security: 21st
century discourses, Routledge, United Kingdom.
Nelson, A 2012, ‘Foreclosure prevention measures’, in Smith, S (ed.), International encyclopedia of housing and home, Elsevier,
Oxford.
Nelson, A 2012, ‘Education programs for home buyers and tenants’, in Smith, S (ed.), International encyclopedia of housing and
home, Elsevier, Oxford.
Nyland, B 2012, Images of infancy: research and social images, in Wyver, S & Whiteman, P (eds), Children and childhoods 2: images
of childhood, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle upon Tyne.
O’Brien, D & Ahmed, I 2012, ‘Resident initiated modification to reconstruction housing in Banda Aceh” in Blakely, E. et al
(eds) Managing disaster recovery: policy, planning, concepts and cases, Crisis Response Publications, Crowthorne.
Pimpa, N & Hooi, L 2012, ‘Comparative leadership in Singaporean and Thai organisational contexts’, in Muenjohn, N (ed.),
Organisational leadership: concepts, cases and research, Cengage Learning, Victoria.
Russo, A 2012, ‘The rise of the media museum: creating interactive cultural experiences through social media’, in Giaccardi, E (ed.),
Hertiage and social media: understanding heritage in a participatory culture, Routledge, London.
Wibowo, S & Deng, H 2012, ‘A decision support system approach for criteria weighting in ship evaluation and selection’, in Ao, S,
Hoi-shou Chan, A, Katagiri, H & Xu, Li (eds), IAENG transactions on engineering technologies volume 7, World Scientific Publishing,
Singapore.
Wibowo, S & Deng, H 2012, ‘A fuzzy multicriteria group decision making approach for hotel location evaluation and selection’, in He,
X, Hua, E & Lin, Y (eds), Computer, informatics, cybernetics and applications: proceedings of the CICA 2011, Springer, Netherlands.
Wickramasinghe, N 2012, ‘Section I: innovation and process considerations in the role of IS/IT in e-health’, in Wickramasinghe, N,
Bali, R, Kirn, S & Suomi, R (eds), Critical issues for the development of sustainable e-health solutions, Springer, New York.
Yang, C & Muenjohn, N 2012, ‘Leadership skills: Chinese international managers’, in Muenjohn, N (ed.), Organisational leadership:
concepts, cases and research, Cengage Learning, Melbourne.
Yun, Y, Huang, W, Seitz, J & Wickramasinghe, N 2012, ‘e-Health in China: an evaluation’, in Wickramasinghe, N, Bali, RB, Suomi, R
& Kirn, S (eds), Critical issues for the development of sustainable ehealth solutions, Springer, New York.
Zwicker, M, Seitz, J & Wickramasinghe, N 2012, ‘Adaptations for e-kiosk systems in Germany to develop barrier-free terminals for
handicapped persons’, in Wickramasinghe, N, Bali, RB, Suomi, R & Kirn, S (eds), Critical issues for the development of sustainable
ehealth solutions, Springer, New York.
Journal Articles 2012
Abareshi, A, Martin, W & Molla, A 2012, ‘The role of information and communication technologies in moving toward new forms of
organising’, International Journal of Business Information Systems, vol. 9, pp. 169-188.
Ahmed, I & O’Brien, D 2012, ‘Self-initiatives and transformations: post-tsunami housing in Aceh, Indonesia’, The International Journal
of the Constructed Environment, vol. 1, issue 4.
Alhazmi, A & Nyland, B 2012, ‘The Saudi Arabian international student experience: from a gender-segregated society to studying in a
mixed-gender environment’, Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, pp. 1-20.
Scerri, A 2012, ‘Livability index’ in, Encyclopaedia of Quality of Life Research, Michalos, A.C. (ed.), Springer, Heidelberg.
Alqhatani, M, Bajwa, S & Setunge, S 2012, ‘Impact of socioeconomic and land use on car ownership: a comparison of Riyadh,
Saudi Arabia and Melbourne, Australia’, Journal of Chongqing University (Natural Science), vol. 31, pp. 539-546.
Singhapong, M & Muenjohn, N 2012, ‘International leaders: investigation of work and personal related issues’, in Muenjohn, N (ed.),
Alqhatani, M, Bajwa, S & Setunge, S 2012, ‘Land-use transport interaction: a comparison of Melbourne, Riyadh’, Procedia: Social
and Behavioral Sciences, vol. 43, pp. 3-13.
Suconghaman, P & Muenjohn, N 2012, ‘Decision-making: the case of local and international leaders’, in Nuttawuth Muenjohn (ed.),
B. Sahin, S & Feaver, D 2012, ‘The politics of security sector reform in `fragile’ or `post-conflict’ settings: a critical review of the
experience in Timor-Leste’, Democratization, vol. 19, pp. 1-25.
Suliman, H & Wickramasinghe, N 2012, ‘Assimilation of healthcare information systems (HIS): an analysis and critique’, in
Wickramasinghe, N, Ball, RK , Suomi, R & Kirn, S (eds), Critical issues for the development of sustainable ehealth solutions,
Springer, New York, United States.
B. Sahin, S, Lewis, B & Lewis, J 2012, ‘Fractured futures: Indonesian political reform and West Timorese manganese mining’, Global
Change, Peace & Security, vol. 24, pp. 289-304.
Techapatimanond, P & Muenjohn, N 2012, ‘Leadership qualities: the study of female leaders’, in Muenjohn, N (ed.), Organisational
leadership: concepts, cases and research, Cengage Learning, Melbourne, Australia, pp. 239-258.
Teoh, S & Wickramasinghe, N 2012, ‘Healthcare information systems design: using a strategic improvisation model’, in
Wickramasinghe N, Bali , RK, Suomi, R & Kirn, S (eds), Critical issues for the development of sustainable ehealth solutions, Springer,
New York, United States.
Thanthri Waththage, K, Deng, H & Karunasena, A 2012, ‘Developments of e-government in Sri Lanka: opportunities and challenges’,
in Joseph, BK & Zulu, S (eds), Handbook of research on e-government in emerging economies: adoption, e-participation, and legal
frameworks, Information Science Reference (an imprint of IGI Global), Hershey PA.
206
Baskaran, V, Guergachi, A, Shah, B, Sidani, S, Bali, R, Naguib, R & Wickramasinghe, N 2012, ‘Information technology-initiated
interventions: a case study for the UK National Health Service Breast Screening Programme to improve screening attendance using
a new intervention research framework’, International Journal of Biomedical Engineering and Technology, vol. 8, pp. 1-17.
Baskaran, V, Nachiappan, S & Rahman, S 2012, ‘Indian textile suppliers’ sustainability evaluation using the grey approach’,
International Journal of Production Economics, vol. 135, pp. 647-658.
Brigden, C 2012, ‘Tracing and placing women trade union leaders: a study of the female confectioners union’, Journal of Industrial
Relations, vol. 54, pp. 238-255.
Brigden, C 2012, ‘Unions and collective bargaining in 2011’, Journal of Industrial Relations, vol. 54, pp. 361-376.
207
Ground Zero, the new Freedom Tower (known also as One World Trade Center) under construction, Lower Manhattan,
New York City, USA, February 2012. © Tommaso Durante, The Visual Archive Project of the Global Imaginary.
208
209
Cairns, G, Ahmed, K, Mullett, J & Wright, G 2012, ‘Scenario method and stakeholder engagement: critical reflections on a
climate change scenarios case study’, Technological Forecasting and Social Change, online, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.
techfore.2012.08.005
Campbell, I, Charlesworth, S & Malone, J 2012, ‘Part-time of what? Job quality and part-time employment in the legal profession in
Australia’, Journal of Sociology, vol. 48, pp. 149-166.
Chen, G, Zhang, G & Xie, Y 2012, ‘Cost management in project alliancing: an exploratory investigation’, Applied Mechanics and
Materials, vol. 174-177, pp. 2893-2897.
Chen, G, Zhang, G, Xie, Y & Jin, X 2012, ‘Overview of alliancing research and practice in the construction industry’, Architectural
Engineering and Design Management, vol. 8, pp. 103-119.
Cheong, C, Bruno, V & Cheong, F 2012, ‘Designing a mobile-app-based collaborative learning system’, The Journal of Information
Technology Education: Innovations in Practice, vol. 11, pp. 97-119.
Cheong, F, Cheong, C & Jie, F 2012, ‘Re-purposing google maps visualisation for teaching logistics systems’, Journal of Information
Technology Education: Innovations in Practice, vol. 11, pp. 159-177.
Colic-Peisker, V & Johnson, G 2012, ‘Liquid life, solid homes: young people, class and homeownership in Australia’, Sociology, vol.
46, pp. 728-743.
Cook, N, Taylor, E, Hurley, J & Colic-Peisker, V 2012, ‘Resident third party objections and appeals against planning applications:
implications for higher density and social housing’, AHURI Positioning Paper Series, vol. 145, pp. 1-45.
Cooke, B, Langford, W, Gordon, A & Bekessy, S 2012, ‘Social context and the role of collaborative policy making for private land
conservation’, Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, vol. 55, pp. 469-485.
Duan, X, Deng, H & Corbitt, B 2012, ‘Evaluating the critical determinants for adopting e-market in Australian small-and-medium
sized enterprises’, Management Research Review, vol. 35, pp. 289-308.
Eady, S, Carre, A & Grant, T 2012, ‘Life cycle assessment modelling of complex agricultural systems with multiple food and fibre coproducts’, Journal of Cleaner Production, vol. 28, pp. 143-149.
Feeny, S, Ong, R, Spong, H & Wood, G 2012, ‘The impact of housing assistance on the employment outcomes of labour market
programme participants in Australia’, Urban Studies: an international journal for research in urban studies, vol. 49, pp. 821-844.
Fehring, H & Nyland, B 2012, ‘Curriculum directions in Australia: has the new focus on literacy (english) and assessment narrowed
the education agenda?’, Literacy Learning the Middle Years, vol. 20, pp. 7-16.
Fien, J & Charlesworth, E 2012, ‘Why isn’t it solved? Factors affecting improvements in housing outcomes in remote indigenous
communities in Australia’, Habitat International, vol. 36, pp. 20-25.
Forrest, D & Watson, A 2012, ‘Music in essential learning frameworks in Australian schools’, International Journal of Music
Education, vol. 30, pp. 148-160.
Giallo, R, Gavidia-Payne, S, Minett, B & Kapoor, A 2012, ‘Sibling voices: the self-reported mental health of siblings of children with a
disability’, Clinical Psychologist, vol. 16, pp. 36-43.
Goldsmith, A & Harris, V 2012, ‘Trust, trustworthiness and trust-building in international policing missions’, Australian and New
Zealand Journal of Criminology, vol. 45, pp. 231-254.
Goodman, R & Coiacetto, E 2012, ‘Shopping streets or malls: changes in retail form in Melbourne and Brisbane’, Urban Policy and
Research, vol. 30, pp. 1-23.
Goodman, R, Dalton, T, Gabriel, M, Jacobs, K & Nelson, A 2012, ‘Marginal rental housing in Australia’, AHURI Positioning Paper
Series, vol. 148, pp. 1-41.
Gordon, A, Wintle, B, Bekessy, S, Pearce, J, Venier, L & Wilson, J 2012, ‘The use of dynamic landscape metapopulation models for
forest management: a case study of the red-backed salamander’, Canadian Journal of Forest Research, vol. 42, pp. 1091-1106.
Harris, V & Goldsmith, A 2012, ‘Police in the development space: Australia’s international police capacity builders’, Third World
Quarterly, vol. 33, pp. 1019-1036.
Henseler, J, Fassott, G, Dijkstra, T & Wilson, B 2012, ‘Analysing quadratic effects of formative constructs by means of variancebased structural equation modelling’, European Journal of Information Systems, vol. 21, pp. 99-112.
Hudson, C, 2012, ‘Life as theatre in Singapore’, ACCESS. Critical Perspectives on Communication, Cultural & Policy Studies, vol.
31(2), pp. 53-66.
210
Hudson, C & Varney, D 2012, ‘Transience and connection in Robert Lepage’s The Blue Dragon: China in the space of flows’,
Theatre Research International, vol. 37, pp. 134-147.
Iyer-Raniga, U & Wong, J 2012, ‘Evaluation of whole life cycle assessment for heritage buildings in Australia’, Building and
Environment, vol. 47, pp. 138-149.
Iyer-Raniga, U & Wong, J 2012, ‘Everlasting Shelters: life cycle energy assessment for heritage buildings’, Historic Environment, vol.
24, pp. 25-30.
Jackson, M & Shelly, M 2012, ‘Copyright and contracts: the use of electronic resources provided by university libraries’, Legal
Information Management, vol. 12, pp. 124-136.
James, P & Scerri, A 2012, ‘Globalizing consumption and the deferral of a politics of consequence’, Globalizations, vol. 9, pp. 225240.
Jin, X, Zhang, G & Yang, R 2012, ‘Factor analysis of partners’ commitment to risk management in public-private partnership
projects’, Construction Innovation, vol. 12, pp. 297-316.
Johnson, G, Parkinson, S & Parsell, C 2012, ‘Policy shift or program drift? Implementing Housing First in Australia’, AHURI Final
Report Series, pp. 1-21.
Judd, B 2012, ‘The quiet warrior: research reflections of Michael Long’, Journal of Australian Indigenous Issues, vol. 18, pp. 78-87.
Karunasena, K & Deng, H 2012, ‘Critical factors for evaluating the public value of e-government in Sri Lanka’, Government
Information Quarterly, vol. 29, pp. 76-84.
Kong, D, Setunge, S, Molyneaux, T, Zhang, G & Law, D 2012, ‘Australian seaport infrastructure resilience to climate change’,
Advanced Materials Research, vol. 238, pp. 350-357.
Kou, J, Wang, Z & Wickramasinghe, N 2012, ‘The impact of the networked global economy on Chinese public hospitals: a case
study of Jiangsu Province hospital’, International Journal of Networking and Virtual Organisations, vol. 11, pp. 95-106.
Kroen, A & Goodman, R 2012, ‘Implementing metropolitan strategies: lessons from Melbourne’, International Planning Studies, vol.
17, pp. 303-321.
Law, D, Adam, A, Molyneaux, T & Patnaikuni, I 2012, ‘Durability assessment of alkali activated slag (AAS) concrete’, Materials and
Structures, vol. 45, pp. 1425-1437.
Lechner, A, Langford, W, Jones, S, Bekessy, S & Gordon, A 2012, ‘Investigating species-environment relationships at multiple
scales: differentiating between intrinsic scale and the modifiable areal unit problem’, Ecological Complexity, vol. 11, pp. 91-102.
Leshinsky, R, Condliffe, P, Taylor, E & Goodman, R 2012, ‘What are they fighting about? Research into disputes in Victorian owners
corporations’, Australasian Dispute Resolution Journal, vol. 23, pp. 112-119.
Leshinsky, R, Douglas, K, Condliffe, P & Goodman, R 2012, ‘Dispute resolution under the Owners Corporation Act 2006 (Vic):
Engaging with conflict in communal living’, Property Law Review, vol. 2, pp. 39-63.
Lewis, T 2012, ‘’There grows the neighbourhood’: green citizenship, creativity and life politics on eco-TV’, International Journal of
Cultural Studies, vol. 15, pp. 315-326.
Lewis, T, Martin, F & Sun, W 2012, ‘Lifestyling Asia? Shaping modernity and selfhood on life advice programming’, International
Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 15, pp. 537-566.
Liu, K, Roddick, F & Fan, L 2012, ‘Impact of salinity and pH on the UVC/H2O2 treatment of reverse osmosis concentrate produced
from municipal wastewater reclamation’, Water Research, vol. 46, pp. 3229-3239.
Magee, L & Scerri, A 2012, ‘From issues to indicators: developing robust community sustainability measures’, Local Environment:
The International Journal of Justice and Sustainability, vol. 17, pp. 915-933.
Magee, L, Scerri, A & James, P 2012, ‘Measuring social sustainability: a community-centred approach’, Applied Research in Quality
of Life, vol. 7, pp. 239-261.
Magee, L, Scerri, A, James, P, Thom, J, Padgham, L, Hickmott, S, Deng, H & Cahill, F 2012, ‘Reframing social sustainability
reporting: towards an engaged approach’, Environment, Development and Sustainability: a multidisciplinary approach to the theory
and practice of sustainable development, online, http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10668-012-9384-2.
Maller, C, Horne, R & Dalton, T, 2012, ‘Green renovations: intersections of daily routines, housing aspirations and narratives of
environmental sustainability’, Housing, Theory and Society, vol. 29, pp. 255-275.
211
McEvoy, D, Ahmed, I & Mullett, J 2012, ‘The impact of the 2009 heatwave on Melbourne’s critical infrastructure’, Local Environment:
The International Journal of Justice and Sustainability, online, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13549839.2012.678320.
O’Neill, S & Handmer, J 2012, ‘Responding to bushfire risk: the need for transformative adaptation’, Environmental Research Letters,
vol. 7, pp. 1-8.
McLennan, B & Garvin, T 2012, ‘Increasing the salience of NRM research with innovative methodologies: the example of oriented
qualitative case study (OQCS)’, Society and Natural Resources, vol. 25, pp. 400-409.
Pimpa, N 2012, ‘Amazing Thailand: organizational culture in the Thai public sector’, International Business Research, vol. 5, pp. 3542.
McLennan, B & Handmer, J 2012, ‘Changing the rules of the game: mechanisms that shape responsibility-sharing from beyond
Australian fire and emergency management’, The Australian Journal of Emergency Management, vol. 27, pp. 7-13.
Piriyathanalai, W & Muenjohn, N 2012, ‘Is there a link? Employee satisfaction and service quality’, World Journal of Management, vol.
4, pp. 82-92.
McLennan, B & Handmer, J 2012, ‘Reframing responsibility-sharing for bushfire risk management in Australia after Black Saturday’,
Environmental Hazards: Human and Policy Dimensions, vol. 11, pp. 1-15.
Rajapaksha, R & Singh, M 2012, ‘Global business issues and implication for Sri Lanka’, Journal of Social Sciences - Sri Lanka; A
Quarterly Review, vol. 1, pp. 499-515.
McMurray, A, Islam, M, Sarros, J & Pirola-Merlo, A 2012, ‘The impact of leadership on workgroup climate and performance in a nonprofit organization’, Leadership and Organization Development Journal, vol. 33, pp. 522-549.
Rajasekhar, P, Fan, L, Nguyen, T & Roddick, F 2012, ‘Impact of sonication at 20 kHz on microcystis aeruginosa, anabaena circinalis
and chlorella sp.’, Water Research, vol. 46, pp. 1473-1481.
McShane, I 2012, ‘Learning to share: Australia’s ‘building the education revolution’ and shared schools’, Journal of Educational
Administration and History, vol. 44, pp. 105-119.
Robertson, S 2012, ‘Teaching language politics in Australian contexts: a reflective case study’, Local-Global Journal, vol. 9, pp. 94109.
Meaney, R & Gavidia-Payne, S 2012, ‘Staff characteristics and attitudes towards the sexuality of people with intellectual disability’,
Journal of Intellectual and Developmental Disability, vol. 37, pp. 269-273.
Rowe, J 2012, ‘Clients are central to any independent and rigorous evaluation of the services they use’, International Journal of Drug
Policy, vol. 23, pp. 103-110.
Mees, B 2012, ‘The Meldorf fibula inscription and epigraphic typology’, Beitraege zur Namenforschung, vol. 47, pp. 259-284.
Mees, P 2012, ‘The compact city and sustainable transport: another look at the data’, Australian Planner, vol. 48, pp. 202-213.
Scerri, A & Magee, L 2012, ‘Green householders, stakeholder citizenship and sustainability’, Environmental Politics, vol. 21, no. 3,
pp. 387-411.
Mendes, P, Johnson, G & Moslehuddin, B 2012, ‘Young people transitioning from out-of-home care and relationships with family of
origin: an examination of three recent Australian studies’, Child Care in Practice, vol. 18, pp. 357-370.
Scerri, A 2012, ‘Green citizenship and the political critique of injustice’, Citizenship Studies, vol.17(3), online first, http://dx.doi.org/10.
1080/13621025.2012.707002
Mills, A, Lingard, H, McLaughlin, P & Iyer-Raniga, U 2012, ‘Pathways to industry: work practices of undergraduate students in
construction programs in Australia’, International Journal of Construction Education and Research, vol. 8, pp. 159-170.
Scerri, A 2012, ‘The world social forum: another world might be possible’, Social Movement Studies: Journal of Social, Cultural and
Political Protest, vol.11(3) online, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14742837.2012.711522
Minas, J, Hearne, J & Handmer, J 2012, ‘A review of operations research methods applicable to wildfire management’, International
Journal of Wildland Fire, vol. 21, pp. 189-196.
Scerri, A 2012, ‘Ends in view: the capabilities approach in ecological/sustainability economics’, Ecological Economics, vol. 77, pp.
7-10.
Moghimi, F, Seif Zadeh, H, Schaffer, J & Wickramasinghe, N 2012, ‘Incorporating intelligent risk detection to enable superior decision
support: the example of orthopaedic surgeries’, Health and Technology, vol. 2, pp. 33-41.
Scerri, A 2012, ‘Political legitimacy, cultural legitimacy: promoting ‘practical reason’ by facilitating deliberation on policy for
sustainability’, Local-Global Journal, vol. 10, pp. 82-97.
Mohseni, H, Setunge, S, Zhang, G, Edirisinghe, R & Wakefield, R 2012, ‘Deterioration prediction for community buildings in
Australia’, The International Journal of the Constructed Environment, vol. 1, pp. 175-195.
Scerri, D, Hickmott, S, Bosomworth, K & Padgham, L 2012, ‘Using modular simulation and agent based modelling to explore
emergency management scenarios’, Australian Journal of Emergency Management, vol. 27, pp. 44-48.
Molla, A & Abareshi, A 2012, ‘Organizational green motivations for information technology: empirical study’, Journal of Computer
Information Systems, vol. 52, pp. 92-102.
Scutella, R & Johnson, G 2012, ‘Locating and designing ‘journeys home’: a literature review’, Journeys Home: A Longitudinal Study
of Factors Affecting Housing Stability: Melbourne Institute Working Paper Series Working Paper No. 11/12, vol. 11, pp. 1-34.
Morrissey, J, Iyer-Raniga, U, McLaughlin, P & Mills, A 2012, ‘A strategic project appraisal framework for ecologically sustainable
urban infrastructure’, Environmental Impact Assessment Review, vol. 33, pp. 55-65.
Shi, E 2012, ‘A tiger with no teeth: genuine redundancy and reasonable redeployment under the Fair Work Act’, University of
Queensland Law Journal, vol. 31, pp. 101-114.
Muhammad, I, Teoh, S & Wickramasinghe, N 2012, ‘Why using actor network theory (ANT) can help to understand the personally
controlled electronic health record (PCEHR) in Australia’, International Journal of Actor-Network Theory and Technological Innovation
(IJANTTI), vol. 4, pp. 44-60.
Singh, M, Dwivedi, Y, Hackney, R & Peszynski, K 2012, ‘Innovation in communication: an actor-network analysis of social websites’,
International Journal of Actor Network Theory and Technological Innovation, vol. 4, pp. 39-51.
Mulligan, M, Ahmed, I, Mercer, D, Nadarajah, Y & Shaw, J 2012, ‘Lessons for long term social recovery following the 2004 tsunami:
community, livelihoods, tourism and housing’, Environmental Hazards: Human and Policy Dimensions, vol. 11, pp. 38-51.
Murray, S & Heenan, M 2012, ‘Reported rapes in Victoria: police responses to victims with a psychiatric disability of mental health
issue’, Current Issues in Criminal Justice, vol. 23, pp. 253-268.
Nelson, A 2011/2012, ‘The dialectics of capitalism’, Journal of Australian Political Economy, no. 68, pp. 266–68.
Nguyen, Q, Naguib, R, Papathomas, M, Shaker, M, Culaba, A, Wickramasinghe, N & Ton, T 2012, ‘Multinomial logistic regression
modelling of cardiologists’ awareness of the impact of air pollution on cardiovascular disease in Vietnam and the Philippines’,
International Journal of Biomedical Engineering and Technology, vol. 10, pp. 38-54.
Nyland, B & Acker, A 2012, ‘Young children’s musical explorations: the potential of using learning stories for recording, planning
and assessing musical experiences in a preschool setting’, International Journal of Music Education, online, http://dx.doi.
org/10.1177/0255761412459162
Nyland, B & Alfayez, S 2012, ‘Learning stories – crossing borders: introducing qualitative early childhood observation techniques to
early childhood practitioners in Saudi Arabia, International Journal of Early Years Education, online, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/096697
60.2012.743097
212
Singh, S & Bhandari, M 2012, ‘Money management and control in the Indian joint family across generation’, The Sociological
Review, vol. 60, pp. 46-67.
Singh, S & Blake, M 2012, ‘The digitization of pacific cultural collections: consulting with pacific diasporic communities and museum
experts’, Curator the Museum Journal, vol. 55, pp. 95-105.
Singh, S, Robertson, S & Cabraal, A 2012, ‘Transnational family money: remittances, gifts and inheritance’, Journal of Intercultural
Studies, vol. 33, pp. 475-492.
Siracusa, J 2012, ‘The eight pillars of the nuclear non-proliferation regime and the search for global security’, Global Policy Essay,
Online September, pp. 1-17.
Smart, J & Quartly, M 2012, ‘Mainstream women’s organisations in Australia: the challenges of national and international cooperation after the Great War’, Women’s History Review, vol. 21, pp. 61-79.
Stead, V 2012, ‘Embedded in the land: customary social relations and practices of resilience in an East Timorese community’, The
Australian Journal of Anthropology, vol. 23, pp. 229-247.
Stone, J, Mees, P & Imran, M 2012, ‘Benchmarking the efficiency and effectiveness of public transport in New Zealand cities’, Urban
Policy and Research, vol. 30, pp. 207-224.
213
Steger, MB & Wilson, EK 2012, ‘Anti-globalization or alter-globalization? Mapping the political ideology of the global justice
movement’, International Studies Quarterly, vol. 56, pp. 439-454.
Zwicker, M, Seitz, J & Wickramasinghe, N 2012, ‘A tale of two cities: e-health in Germany and Australia’, International Journal of
Actor-Network Theory and Technological Innovation, vol. 4, pp. 24-38.
Strengers, Y 2012, ‘Peak electricity demand and social practice theories: reframing the role of change agents in the energy sector’,
Energy Policy, vol. 44, pp. 226-234.
Zwicker, M, Seitz, J & Wickramasinghe, N 2012, ‘Critical people considerations when designing e-health solutions: the importance of
barrier-free e-Kiosk systems’, International Journal of Biomedical Engineering and Technology, vol. 9, pp. 163-176.
Strengers, Y & Maller, C 2012, ‘Materialising energy and water resources in everyday practices: insights for securing supply systems’,
Global Environmental Change, vol. 22, pp. 754-63.
Subic, A, Shabani, B, Hedayati, M & Crossin, E 2012, ‘Capability framework for sustainable manufacturing of sports apparel and
footwear’, Sustainability, vol. 49, pp. 2127-2145.
Refereed Conference Papers 2012
Tacchi, J 2012, ‘Open content creation: The issues of voice and the challenges of listening’, New Media & Society, vol. 14, pp. 652668.
Abareshi, A, Molla, A & Rahman, S 2012, ‘A green logistics absorptive capacity model for transport and logistics sector’,
in Proceedings of the 17th International Symposium on Logistics, (ISL 2012) New Horizons in Logistics and Supply Chain
Management, pp. 1-10.
Thanthri Waththage, K & Deng, H 2012, ‘A citizen-oriented approach for evaluating the performance of e-government in Sri Lanka’,
International Journal of Electronic Government Research, vol. 8, pp. 43-63.
Acker, A., Nyland, B., Ferris, J. & Deans, J, 2012, ‘The kindergarten children’s chorus: a collaborative music project’, in International
Society of Music Educators – Early Childhood Music Seminar, Corfu, July 2012.
Thomas, I & Day, T 2012, ‘Careers in the environment in Australia’, Australasian Journal of Environmental Management, vol. 19, pp.
5-20.
Alahmari, F, Thom, J, Magee, L & Wong, W 2012, ‘Evaluating semantic browsers for consuming linked data’, in Proceedings of the
Twenty-Third Australasian Database Conference (ADC 2012), pp. 89-98.
Tyler, M, Fairbrother, P, Chaplin, S, Mees, B, Phillips, R & Toh, K 2012, ‘Gender matters: applying a gendered analysis to bushfire
research in Australia’, Working Papers in Sustainable Organisations in Australia, vol. 3, pp. 1-26.
Alzain, M, Pardede, E, Soh, B & Thom, J 2012, ‘Cloud computing security: from single to multi-clouds’, in Proceedings 45th Hawaii
International Conference on Systems Science (HICSS-45 2012), pp. 5490-5499.
Von Treuer, K & McMurray, A 2012, ‘The role of organizational climate in facilitating workplace innovation’, International Journal of
Entrepreneurship and Innovation Management, vol. 15, pp. 292-309.
Arham, A & Muenjohn, N 2012, ‘Leadership and organisational performance in Malaysian SMEs: the mediating role of entrepreneurial
orientation’, in Proceedings of Business and Information, International Business Academics Consortium (iBAC), pp. 31-41.
Welch, B, Vo-Tran, H, Pittayachawan, S & Reynolds, S 2012, ‘Crossing borders: evaluating a work integrated learning project
involving Australian and Vietnamese students’, Australian and Academic Research Libraries, vol. 43, pp. 120-134.
Barrow, E 2012, ‘Drawing as intervention: site specific art and the translation of meaning’, in Drawing Out 2012 Conference, 28-30
March 2012, University of Arts London and RMIT University collaboration.
Whittaker, J, Handmer, J & Mercer, D 2012, ‘Vulnerability to bushfires in rural Australia: a case study from East Gippsland, Victoria’,
Journal of Rural Studies, vol. 28, pp. 161-173.
Binti Wan Ibrahim, W, Ibrahim, W & Muenjohn, N 2012, ‘Self-initiated expatriate academics (SIEAs) with job satisfaction and
organisational commitment: a conceptual link’, in Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Business & Management
Education (ICBME), pp. 1-29.
Whyte, J & Barrow, E 2012, ‘Us, not us: religious meaning, existential othering and dimensions of concordance and contention’, The
International Journal of the Humanities, vol. 9, pp. 113-126.
Wibowo, S & Deng, H 2012, ‘A fuzzy rule-based approach for screening international distribution centres’, Computers and
Mathematics with Applications, vol. 64, pp. 1084-1092.
Wibowo, S & Deng, H 2012, ‘Intelligent decision support for effectively evaluating and selecting ships under uncertainty in marine
transportation’, Expert Systems with Applications, vol. 39, pp. 6911-6920.
Wickramasinghe, N, Bali, R & Tatnall, T 2012, ‘A manifesto for e-health success: the key role for ANT’, International Journal of ActorNetwork Theory and Technological Innovation, vol. 4, pp. 24-35.
Wickramasinghe, N, Tatnall, A & Goldberg, S 2012, ‘Understanding the advantages of mobile solutions for chronic disease
management: the role of ANT as a rich theoretical lens’, International Journal of Actor-Network Theory and Technological Innovation,
vol. 4, pp. 1-12.
Williams, L 2012, ‘ Darwin and Derrida on human and animal emotions: the question of shame as a measure of ontological
difference’, New Formations: A Journal of Theory/Culture/Politics, no. 76, Summer, pp. 21-37.
Wong, T, Leach, G & Zambetta, F 2012, ‘Virtual subdivision for GPU based collision detection of deformable objects using a uniform
grid’, The Visual Computer: international journal of computer graphics, vol. 28, pp. 829-838.
Wood, G & Ong, R 2012, ‘Sustaining home ownership in the 21st century: emerging policy concerns’, AHURI Final Report No 187,
pp. 1-34.
Wood, G, Ong, R & Winter, I 2012, ‘Stamp duties, land tax and housing affordability: the case for reform’, Australian Tax Forum, vol.
22, pp. 331-350.
Wood, G, Ong, R, Cigdem, M & Taylor, E 2012, ‘The spatial and distributional impacts of the Henry Review recommendations on
stamp duty and land tax’, AHURI Final Report No 182, pp. 1-62.
Wooden, M, Bevitt, A, Chigavazira, A, Greer, N, Johnson, G, Killackey, E, Moschion, J, Scutella, R, Tseng, Y & Watson, N 2012,
‘Introducing ‘Journeys Home’’, The Australian Economic Review, vol. 45, pp. 368-378.
Zhao, S, Molyneaux, T, Law, D, Li, Y & Pan, L 2012, ‘Behaviors of long-term exposure concrete to sulfate solution’, Advanced
Materials Research, vol. 368-373, pp. 790-794.
214
Chang, S, Alzougool, B, Berry, M, Gomes, C, Smith, S & Reeders, D 2012, ‘International students in the digital age: do you know
where your students go to for information?’, in Proceedings of the Australian International Education Conference (AIEC 2012).
Chin, S & Wilson, B 2012, ‘Product placement in the digital world: a conceptual framework’, in The Changing Roles of Advertising,
European Advertising Association, Stockholm.
Chin, S, Wilson, B & Russo, A 2012, ‘Product placement redefined’, in Proceedings of the Australian and New Zealand Marketing
Academy Conference, 3rd-5th December, University of South Australia, Adelaide.
Cook, K, Maller, C & Martin, S 2012, ‘Gendered inequalities in policy processes: an illustration of women on the periphery in
environmental design and public health policy’, in Proceedings of The Australian Sociology Association Conference (TASA), 2629th November, University of Queensland, Brisbane, pp 1-7.
Cooper, V & Molla, A 2012, ‘A contextualist analysis of green IT learning in organisations’, in Proceedings of the 2012 International
Conference on Information Resources Management (Conf-IRM 2012), pp. 1-12.
Cooper, V & Molla, A 2012, ‘Developing green IT capability: an absorptive capacity perspective’, in Proceedings of the 2012 Pacific
Asia Conference on Information Systems (PACIS), pp. 1-15.
Edirisinghe, R, Setunge, S & Zhang, G 2012, ‘Reliability-based deterioration and replacement decision model for community
buildings’, in ICOMS Asset Management Conference Proceedings, Asset Management Council Limited, Hobart, pp. 1-9.
Fernandes, J, Law, D & Molyneaux, T 2012, ‘A finite element 3-D model for simulating concrete deterioration in port assets’, in
Proceedings International Congress on Durability of Concrete (ICDC), Trondheim, Norway, pp. 1-14.
Greuter, S, Tepe, S, Peterson, F, Boukamp, F, D’Amazing, K, Quigley, K, Van Der Waerden, R, Harris, T, Goschnick, T & Wakefield,
R 2012, ‘Designing a game for occupational health and safety in the construction industry’, in Proceedings of The 8th Australasian
Conference on Interactive Entertainment: Playing the System (ACM), Auckland, New Zealand, pp. 1-8.
Hickmott, S, Magee, L, Thom, J & Padgham, L 2012, ‘An adaptive system for proactively supporting sustainability goals’ in
Proceeding of the11th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS), Valencia, pp. 11631164.
Ijab, M, Molla, A & Cooper, V 2012, ‘Green information systems (green IS) practice in organisation: tracing its emergence and
recurrent use’, in Proceedings of the18th Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS 2012), Association of Information
Systems (AIS), USA.
215
LE, C, Cheong, F & Cheong, C 2012, ‘Developing a risk management DSS for supporting sustainable Vietnamese catfish farming’,
in Proceedings of the 45th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS), IEEE, United States, pp. 1167-1176.
Magee, L 2012, ‘Simulating a “Fierce Planet”: a web-based agent platform and sustainability game’, in Proceedings of SpringSim
2012, Orlando.
Maller, C 2012, ‘Using social practice theory to understand everyday life in a master-planned estate: outcomes for health and
wellbeing’, in Proceedings of The Australian Sociology Association Conference (TASA), 26-29th November, University of Queensland,
Brisbane, pp. 1-8.
Thangarajah, J, Sardina, S & Padgham, L 2012, ‘Measuring plan coverage and overlap for agent reasoning’, in Proceedings of the
11th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, International Foundation for Autonomous Agents
and Multiagent Systems, Valencia, Spain, pp. 1-8.
Wardhono, A, Law, D & Molyneaux, T 2012, ‘Strength of alkali activated slag and fly ash-based geopolymer mortar’, in Proceedings
of the 2nd International Conference on Microstructural-related Durability of Cementitious Composites, RILEM, Amsterdam,
Netherlands, pp. 1-8.
McNevin, A 2012, ‘Can refugees add value? Australia’s humanitarian migration stream and the multicultural project’, in Australian
Political Science Association Conference Proceedings, Hobart, September 2012.
Wibowo, S & Deng, H 2012, ‘A group decision model for evaluating and selecting intelligent building systems under uncertainty’,
in Proceedings of the 2012 International Conference on Cyber Technology in Automation, Control, and Intelligent Systems, IEEE
Computer Society, Washington, USA, pp. 227-232.
Mohseni, H, Setunge, S, Zhang, G & Wakefield, R 2012, ‘Probabilistic deterioration prediction and cost optimization for community
buildings using Monte-Carlo simulation’, in ICOMS Asset Management Conference Proceedings, Asset Management Council
Limited, Hobart, pp. 1-9.
Wickramasinghe, N, Chalasani, S & Koritala, S 2012, ‘The role of healthcare system of systems and collaborative technologies in
providing superior healthcare delivery to native american patients’, in Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on
System Sciences, IEEE Computer Society, United States, pp. 962-972.
Moloney, S & Goodman, R 2012, ‘Rethinking housing affordability and provision in the context of climate change’, in Proceedings for
the 10th International Urban Planning and Environment Symposium, Sydney, 25-26 July 2012.
Wong, W, Cavedon, L, Thangarajah, J & Padgham, L 2012, ‘Goal-driven approach to open-ended dialogue management using
BDI agents’, in Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, International
Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent
Systems, Valencia, Spain, pp. 1-2.
Morris, B & Verhoeven, D 2012, ‘“Second city syndrome”: media reportage of urban rankings’, in Proceedings of the ECREA
Evaluation in the Media Conference, Paris, 15-16 March 2012.
Nelson, A 2012, ‘Degrowth equals regrowth: a discussion of Eduardo Galeano’s work’, in The International Conference on Degrowth
in the Americas, Montreal (Quebec), 13–19 May 2012.
Nelson, A 2012, ‘Degrowth and money: future scenarios’, in The International Conference on Degrowth in the Americas, Montreal
(Quebec), 13–19 May 2012.
O’Brien, D & Ahmed, I 2012, ‘Stage two and beyond: improving residents’ capacity to modify reconstruction agency housing” in
8th Annual Conference of the International Institute for Infrastructure Renewal and Reconstruction (IIIRR) on Disaster Management,
Kumamoto, Japan.
Pimpa, N 2012, ‘Poverty alleviation: CSR approaches by multinational corporations in Lao PDR and Thailand’, in Proceedings of
World Business Research Conference 2012, World Business Institute Australia, Melbourne, Australia.
Pimpa, N, Gekara, V & Fry, S 2012, ‘Multinational corporations, CSR and poverty alleviation: views from Lao PDR and Thailand’, in
Proceedings of World Business Research Conference, World Business Institute Australia, Victoria, Australia, pp. 1-13.
Raffe, W, Zambetta, F & Li, X 2012, ‘A survey of procedural terrain generation techniques using evolutionary algorithms’,
inProceedings of Congress of Evolutionary Computation (CEC 2012), pp. 2090-2097.
Rajapaksha, R & Singh, M 2012, ‘Alignment of global business operations with ERP systems capabilities for improved business
performance’, in Proceedings of the eighteenth Americas Conference on Information Systems 2012, Association for Information
Systems (AIS), United States, pp. 1-11.
Rajapaksha, R, Singh, M & Pita, Z 2012, ‘Meeting global business information requirements with enterprise resource planning
systems’, in Proceedings of the Eighteenth Americas Conference on Information Systems, Association for Information Systems (AIS),
pp. 1-10.
Scerri, D, Hickmott, S & Padgham, L 2012, ‘User understanding of cognitive processes in simulation: a tool for exploring and
modifying’, in Laroque, C, Himmelspach, J, Pasupathy, R, Rose, O & Uhrmacher, A. M. (eds), Proceedings of Winter Simulation
Conference (WSC), Berlin, 9-12 December 2012.
Shapiro, S, Sardina, S, Thangarajah, J, Cavedon, L & Padgham, L 2012, ‘Revising conflicting intention sets in BDI agents’, in
Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems 2012, International Foundation
for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems - IFAAMAS, United States, pp. 1-8.
Singh, M, Dwivedi, Y, Hackney, R & Peszynski, K 2012, ‘Determining dimensions of social websites: insights through genre theory’,
in Proceedings of the 45th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, IEEE, United States, pp. 1728-1736.
Strengers, Y, Moloney, S, Maller, C, & Horne, R 2012, ‘Beyond behaviour change: applied research along a theoretical continuum’,
in Proceedings for Beyond Behaviour Change: A Symposium on Social Practice Theories and their Implications for Environmental
Policy and Programs, RMIT University, Melbourne, 12-14 November 2012.
Teo, L, Singh, M & Cooper, V 2012, ‘Adopting CVA to evaluate ES benefits impact on organisational effectiveness in Australia’, in
PACIS 2012 Proceedings, Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam, pp. 1-17.
216
217
The Global Cities Institute is collaborating with the National Institute of Urban Affairs in Delhi on the issue of urban
regeneration. To the north-east of New Delhi, three hours from the centre, is a slum-settlement called Rohini that
exemplifies the new approach. Rather than just bulldozed, the settlement is being refurbished and changed is
supported through consultation with the people. Here the municipality and local organizations such as JEET, Joint
Efforts for Empowerment through Training, are working together to improve the lives of local people.
New Delhi, India, 2012.
218
219
9. Conferences and Forums
Migrant Money Flows Workshop
Human Security and Natural Disasters Conference
Tokyo, February 2012
Speakers: Robin Cameron and Paul James (RMIT) as well as others from Japan, the USA, Canada
and Hong Kong. Visit http://global-cities.info/content/conferences_forums/human-security-andnatural-disasters-conference for a complete list
Environmental security was identified as a core component of human security, as outlined in UNDP’s
1994 report. Nevertheless, human security debates and policies have tended to focus more on
human-made disasters, such as armed conflicts and human rights abuses. As recent catastrophes
like the earthquakes in Haiti and Japan have clearly shown, however, the actual threats that people
struggle with following a natural disaster are similar to those of a human-made crisis such as armed
conflict: fear (aftershocks and deteriorating social order) and want (lack of food, water and shelter).
The human-security dimension of such events is also reflected in the interdependent nature of the
threat as natural disasters and pre-existing vulnerabilities, such as poverty and/or conflict, which can
interact in a mutually reinforcing and damaging manner. While the environmental security component
of human security has begun to be considered in relation to climate change, there is relatively little
work that focuses on natural disasters. It this context the conference addressed how a humansecurity framework can help us understand and respond to these catastrophes such as the 2011
earthquake and tsunami in Japan, the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, Hurricane Katrina in 2005,
the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, the 2009 ‘Black Saturday’ bushfires in Australia and the 2010 Haiti
earthquake. This conference was organized by Waseda University, United Nations University, Global
Cities Institute, the Japan Foundation, the United Nations Global Compact Cities Programme and
the Global Cities Institute.
Cosmopolitanism in the Multipolar World (2012 Tom Nairn Lecture)
Melbourne, March 2012
Speaker: David Held, Durham University, England
Thinking about the future of humankind on the basis of the early years of the twenty first century
does not give grounds for optimism. From 9/11 to the present-day, terrorism, conflict, territorial
struggle and the clash of identities define the moment. While this talk acknowledged these
challenges, it argued that the twentieth century established a series of cosmopolitan steps which
develop respect for others and forms of action beyond nation-states, to a more rule-based
international order. The Globalism Research Centre presented this major address with support from
RMIT Foundation and Global Cities Research Institute.
Cities Resilient to Energy Crises
Melbourne, March 2012
Speaker: Andy van den Dobbelsteen, Delft University of Technology, Netherlands
Andy van den Dobbelsteen is Professor of Climate Design and Sustainability, at the Faculty of
Architecture, Delft University of Technology. He lectures and leads research projects in various areas
of sustainability in the built environment, notably on sustainable energy systems for neighbourhoods,
cities and regions. This talk was followed by a facilitated discussion lead by Rob Roggema from the
SURF Program. It was presented by the Centre for Design and the SURF Program.
220
Melbourne, April 2012
Speakers: Ling Deng (School of Management, RMIT), Heather Horst (School of Media and
Communication), Shahadat Khan (School of Business Information Technology and Logistics), Alberto
Posso (School of Economics, Finance and Marketing), James Scambary, (Consultant and PhD
candidate), Supriya Singh (Graduate School of Business and Law).
This workshop brought together researchers interested in migrant remittances, transnational
businesses and investment. The research goes beyond a one-way flow of remittances to family and
community. It broadens to include two-way migrant money flows including business and foreign
direct investment. The workshop was sponsored by the Community Sustainability Program, College
of Design and Social Context, and the Graduate School of Business and Law.
Arab Uprisings and Turkish Transformations: The Turkish Model and Beyond
(Inaugural Professorial Lectures)
Melbourne, May 2012
Speaker: Nevzat Soguk, RMIT
Born of the political and economic wears and tears of a world in crisis, the uprisings in the Arab
world erupted on to the historical stage in early 2011 and are still pushing for fresh historical
openings. But how do we comprehend these ongoing militations? Are these reforms or revolutions?
Will they produce genuine democratic changes or will they result in authoritarianism of other
varieties? The talk reflected on these questions against the background of developments in a
country that is not Arab but yet is playing a significant role in the Arab world: Turkey.
Consultation for Better Remote Aboriginal Housing
Melbourne, June 2012
Speaker: Michael Christie, Charles Darwin University
After 20 years as a linguist in east Arnhem land communities, Professor Christie started the
Yolngu Studies program at CDU in 1994 which continues to involve language owners in teaching
and researching their own language traditions, and collaborative transdisciplinary research and
consultancy work in a wide variety of fields. This seminar began with some reflections on learning
through collaborative research with Aboriginal knowledge authorities, and went on to give some
details of recent research into the effectiveness of Housing Reference Groups in remote Aboriginal
communities. This seminar was sponsored by the SURF Program.
Global Studies Consortium
Speakers: visit http://globalstudiesconsortium.org/meetings/melbourne-2012 for more details
RMIT hosted the annual conference of the Global Studies Consortium, the most prominent
professional association in the growing transdisciplinary field of global studies. Delegates came from
30 universities from across four continents. The participating universities included UC-Santa Barbara,
University of Minnesota, University of Pittsburgh, Moscow State University, University of Leipzig,
Shanghai University, Sophia University Tokyo, Shanghai University, and American University in
Cairo—to name a few. Some of these universities run the most successful global studies programs
in the world. According to Mark Juergensmeyer, former President of the American Academy of
Religion, and current Professor of Global Studies at UC-Santa Barbara, which houses the largest
global studies undergraduate program in the world, speaking at the conference: ‘RMIT is clearly in
the top three global studies universities in the world’. The three-day conference was co-sponsored
by RMIT’s School of Global, Urban, and Social Studies, the Global Cities Research Institute, and the
Globalism Research Centre.
221
Current and Future Trends in Globalization Research
Ancient Cultures, New Futures: Sri Lanka
Colombo, August 2012
Speakers: Manfred B. Steger, Paul Battersby and Chris Hudson, all from RMIT
Speakers: Paul Komesaroff, Paul James and numerous others
During the last two decades, Global Studies has emerged worldwide as a new transdisciplinary field
of academic inquiry in the context of and in response to globalization. Responding to strong interest
by students and academics, Global Studies programs and departments have sprung up in hundreds
of universities around the world. The rise of Global Studies has facilitated the ongoing movement of
globalization research from the margins of academic inquiry into the mainstream. The participants of
this roundtable introduced and discussed cutting-edge trends in globalization and suggested ways in
which interested RMIT staff might link their work to these trends—with an eye toward achieving concrete
outcomes such as externally funded research projects and high-level publications. This event was
sponsored by Globalism Research Centre and Globalization and Culture Program.
This conference was the first national civil-society reconciliation conference in Sri Lanka since the war.
It brought together over fifty participants from across the country and across political and religious
lines. Sri Lankan society has for many years been beset by conflict, the most destructive experience
of which occurred during the war from 1983 to 2009 in which many tens of thousands of people
died. Despite the formal end of hostilities the legacy of division, hostility and suspicion continues, in
many areas compounded by poverty and economic and political disadvantage. The conference,
organized by RMIT and Monash University through Global Reconciliation, built upon work begun in
2009 to respond to this continuing crisis. A follow up event was held in Melbourne with the Sri Lankan
diaspora (see the next entry).
The Arab Spring: Root Causes and Implications
Silver Lining or Darkening Cloud
Melbourne, September 2012
Speaker: Jamal R. Nassar, California State University, USA
Speakers: Jeremy Liyanage (Director, Diaspora Lanka), Paul James, (RMIT)
Born in Jerusalem, Palestine, Professor Nassar is a leading international authority on the politics of the
Middle East. The Arab Spring did not emerge from nowhere. It had root causes that have been festering
for a long time. These causes include forces of frustration, forces of humiliation, and forces of anger. Jamal
Nassar discussed now such forces of change found their outlet of rage through a number of instruments of
mobilization that ultimately brought down some governments and are poised to bring down a few more.
Amidst negative scenarios and bad news stories from post-conflict Sri Lanka, glimmers of hope
of a people-centred approach to reconciliation are emerging. Learning from a recent reconciliation
conference in Colombo, together with grounded experiments of trust-building in North Sri Lanka,
were presented in a constructive conversation seeking to discover whether people’s ideal hopes for
Sri Lanka can be realized in a situation that is anything but ideal. The forum was presented by RMIT
University, Monash University, Diaspora Lanka, Global Reconciliation and the Global Cities Research
Institute.
Rediscovering Social Democracy
Melbourne, July 2012
Speakers: Manfred B. Steger (RMIT University), Andrew Scott (Deakin University) and Tony Piccolo (ALP
Member)
This public lecture was about exploring social democratic responses to contemporary issues facing
Australian society. Highlighting some essential features of Eduard Bernstein’s life and main ideas, Manfred
Steger argued that Bernstein’s contribution to socialist theory lies chiefly in his call for critical self-reflection
and theoretical renewal. Social democracy in Australia has a strong and important history. The current
electoral unpopularity of the Australian Labor Party (ALP) is partly the result of the ALP’s failure to adequately
pursue social democratic philosophies. Andrew Scott argued for a return to egalitarian economic policies
which promote security in people’s lives and which build scope for the pursuit and acceptance of more
compassionate, outward looking social policies. Tony Piccolo expressed concern about the drift to
neoliberalism by the ALP on social and economic issues respectively. He believes both the ALP and its
supporters need to rediscover social democracy. This public lecture was sponsored by Globalization and
Culture Program.
Neoliberalism, Sovereignty and the Disappearance of the ‘Commons’ in Contemporary India
Speaker: Sankaran Krishna, University of Hawai’i at Manoa, USA
The rise of the BRIC economies (Brazil, Russia, India, China) is often acclaimed as a resurgence
of capitalist accumulation under neoliberal auspices and a harbinger of better times for the Global
South. Yet, their recent growth has been accompanied by one of the biggest land-grabs in the history
of the modern world-system. Through the assertions of eminent domain, a redefinition of public
welfare in corporatist terms, the reduction of sovereignty to state sovereignty; and physical violence,
millions—mostly indigenous people and the agrarian poor—are being deprived of access to land and
livelihood. In this investigation, Professor Krishna focused on the actions of one of the world’s largest
mining companies, Vedanta Corporation, in the Niyamgiri mountains region of the state of Odisha
in India where a gigantic bauxite mine is under construction. The paper drew connections between
the modernist definitions of property, sovereignty, economic growth, and natural resources, and the
disappearance of the ‘commons’ and the indigenous in contemporary India.
Globalization and Delhi: Where to from here?
Melbourne, August 2012
Playing Ball? The Ins and Outs of the Indo-Australian Relationship
Speaker: Partha S. Ghosh, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India
Delhi is India’s eternal city. From the days of Mahabharata in the second millennium BC to the present
it has figured prominently in Indian life whether its rulers were Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims or Christians.
As a symbol of Indian nationalism no other city laid any comparable claim. After it became British India’s
capital its population grew as never before to which the Partition and the recent economic boom, thanks
to India’s plunge into globalized economy, have contributed massively. With its present 22.2 million people
the National Capital Territory (NCT) of Delhi is the largest Indian metropolitan region by area and second to
Greater Mumbai by population. In world ranking it is amongst the top ten. But in spite of all this Delhi is
still provincial in several respects. Its politics is parochial, its migratory patterns are ethnically driven and the
presence of Delhi villages is anachronistic. In that sense is Delhi is India’s microcosm. This public lecture
was sponsored by Globalism Research Centre and Globalization and Culture Program.
Speakers: Ashis Nandy and others. For more information visit http://ipcs.org.au
222
The Institute of Postcolonial Studies, in partnership with the Australia India Institute and the Global
Cities Research Institute, hosted a three-day symposium on the relationship between India and
Australia seen in its changing international context. A distinctive feature of the program was the
analysis of Indo-Australian relations into the realm of relations between states generally.
223
Indigenous Peoples in Japan: Redefining the Concept of Indigenous Peoples in Asian Context
Wellbeing, not Winning: Sport and Men’s Health in Aboriginal Communities
Melbourne, October 2012
Speaker: Hideaki Uemura, Keisen University, Tokyo, Japan
Speakers: Speakers included organizers of sporting events and leagues, practitioners who support
people through their life-journeys, and academic researchers
The Ainu are an indigenous people in the northern part of Japan. Their traditional territory covers
Hokkaido, southern Sakhalin and the Kuril islands. In 2008, the Japanese government reluctantly
recognized that they were an ‘indigenous people’ and they have been the victims of a wrongful
(colonialist) policy since 1869. At the end of 2009, a governmental Council for Promotion of Ainu
Policy was established, but still any rights of them have not been approved by the government. In
Asia, some governments including China, India and Bangladesh, for the past few decades, have
insisted all the Asian peoples have been the indigenous peoples since the Europeans’ arrival, as
all the American or Oceanian peoples became the indigenous peoples when European colonialists
had arrived. Therefore there are no indigenous peoples in Asia. Through this seminar introduced a
mechanism of the ‘birth’ of indigenous peoples in an Asian context, while analysing the Ainu policy
of the Japanese government. This seminar was presented by Global Indigeneity and Reconciliation
Program and SURF.
Through sharing experiences, gain fresh insights into meaningful ways in which young Aboriginal
men can engage in sporting activities whilst fulfilling family and community obligations and retaining
a connection to Country can be achieved. The day consisted of a series of short presentations of
life experiences, practical projects and research insights to raise current issues and opportunities for
young Aboriginal men playing sport today in Australia. Following the presentations, a panel session
discussed opportunities to take practical steps towards assisting Aboriginal men in balancing their
sporting talents and ambitions with their personal health and wellbeing and that of their families,
communities and Country. This one-day research and practice symposium was organized by the
Global Indigeneity and Reconciliation Program to bring together speakers with firsthand experience
of issues associated with men’s health in the context of sport.
Shelter and Disasters: Do Built Environmental Professionals Matter?
The Pursuit of Architecture: People and Practice
Speaker: Geoff Barker, Director of PM+D Architects
Geoff’s work brings a holistic perspective to architecture, recognizing the importance of community
engagement, and the need to consider disparate criteria and their impact on a project’s
development and delivery. Geoff has worked in Timor Leste, Papua New Guinea, Tanzania, and
Southern Sudan, but is best known for his work in Aboriginal communities in Australia. Presented
by the SURF Program.
Speaker: Graham Saunders, International Federation of Red Cross (IFRC)
Graham Saunders specializes in the design, management and technical support of shelter and
settlement relief and development programmes. As the Global Shelter Cluster Co-ordinator, he is
also responsible for overseeing the inter-agency co-ordination role of the IFRC in natural disasters
at global and country level. The discussion followed with a Panel including Esther Charlesworth
(School of Architecture and Design), John Fien ( Sustainability and Innovation), Brett Moore (Shelter &
Infrastructure Advisor, World Vision International) and Tyabb Maksood (School of PCPM). This event
was presented by the SURF Program.
The PEACE Exhibition
City Maintenance Conference
Speaker: Paul James, RMIT
Singapore, October 2012
The Shrine of Remembrance presented the PEACE exhibition at the Shrine of Remembrance. This
exhibition asked the question: what is peace? It examines international, national and local efforts
for peace that seek to ensure stability and opportunities for creative collaboration in our world. The
PEACE exhibition was officially launched by Professor Paul James, Global Cities Research Institute,
RMIT at the Shrine of Remembrance. PEACE explores Australia’s roles in peacekeeping in recent
decades and in international initiatives for peace. Using images, stories and memorabilia, this
exhibition reveals some formal and informal pathways to peace. These are widespread and layered,
from grass roots initiatives in disempowered communities to multinational collaborative projects.
Regardless of who is behind work for peace, the need for dialogue; inclusive and creative, is integral
to the success of negotiations.
Chairperson and keynote speaker: Paul James, Global Cities Research Institute
Urban Regimes and Grey Spacing: Between Privatizing Democracy and ‘Creeping Apartheid’
Speaker: Oren Yiftachel, Gurion University, Israel
The lecture analysed the impact of structural economic, identity and governance tensions on urban
regimes and societies in the twenty-first century. Drawing attention to the pervasive emergence of
grey spaces; that is, informal, temporary or illegal developments, transactions and populations. Grey
spacing has become a central feature of urbanism in most parts of the world, as well as a strategy
to manage the unwanted/irremovable. Grey spacing enables the mobility of marginalized groups into
privileged regions, often under the guise of liberalizing economies, but at the same time puts in train
a process of ‘creeping urban apartheid’. These tensions and trends were illustrated by highlighting
research findings from cities around Europe, Africa and Asia, with special focus on the ‘ethnocratic’
cities of Israel/Palestine, such as Beersheba, Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem.
224
Speakers: Christina Leifman, Stockholm, and others from Singapore, New Zealand, England and
Malaysia. For more information visit http://citiesprogramme.com/archives/event/city-maintenanceconference-singapore
City maintenance is usually taken for granted as a background feature of cities, done in the
quiet of night as part of engineer’s or waste collector’s secret business. Maintenance, done well,
should however, be seen as part of the central and long-term planning of a city. It is crucial for the
sustainability, vibrancy, and liveability of good cities. With these concerns to the fore, the Global
Compact Cities Programme and the Global Cities Institute sponsored this major conference in
Singapore.
Climate Change Adaptation Toolkit Launch
Speakers: Burke Renouf, Coordinator Sustainability from the City of Greater Geelong and Hartmut
Fünfgeld, Climate Change Adaptation Program, RMIT
The Climate Change Adaptation Toolkit has been developed to integrate climate adaptation into
processes and decisions (i.e. mainstream climate-change adaptation) and support robust decisionmaking in the face of uncertainty. The Toolkit is relevant for government and organizations currently
considering the impacts of climate change to their business / services / community. This event was
presented in partnership with Net Balance, RMIT and the City of Greater Geelong.
225
Sustainability in the Nepal Himalayas: Challenges and Opportunities
Towards a Research Partnership in Disaster Management and Resilience
Melbourne, November 2012
Speaker: Hum Gurung, Himalayan Sustainable Future Foundation
Speakers: Various speakers from RMIT University and Salford University, United Kingdom
The Nepal Himalayas are dynamic with outstanding natural beauty and provide valuable ecosystem
goods and services to support livelihoods of more than 1.8 million people—directly and indirectly.
However, in recent years the mountain communities have also witnessed increased snow and
glacial melt and the frequency of extreme events have exacerbated the livelihood risks resulting
from increasing poverty, food insecurity, natural hazards and social inequities. Building capacities
of local communities with introduction of environmentally appropriate technologies and education
for sustainability is the key element to promoting sustainable mountain development. This seminar
highlighted the plans and strategies of the Himalayan Sustainable Future Foundation. This event was
presented by the SURF Program.
RMIT has formed a Research Network on Disaster Management to network our many individual staff
and research groups interested in the themes of disaster preparedness, risk reduction, management
and community resilience. International research linkages are increasingly becoming important in
securing competitive grants and demonstrating global impact. This one-day research symposium
enabled the sharing of disaster and resilience research undertaken by RMIT University and the
University of Salford’s Centre for Disaster Resilience and was an opportunity to develop a strong
research partnership between our institutions.
Beyond Behaviour Social Theory and Climate Change Policy
Speaker: Elizabeth Shove, Lancaster University, England
In this presentation, Professor Shove outlined the pervasive ABC—Attitudes, Behaviour, Choice—
model permeating policy-making and program delivery, and introduce new theoretical perspectives
that reframe the major sustainability challenges of our time. She provided novel examples of how
everyday life is changing, how policy-makers are already intervening, and how they might seek to
reorient normal ways of life. This event was presented by the SURF Program.
Why Poverty Exists: Poverty Dynamics in Asia and Africa
Speaker: Bob Baulch, RMIT International University Vietnam
Why are some people trapped in chronic poverty, while others are able to escape it? This
presentation aimed to provide an overview of the major findings and policy recommendations from
a recently published book on poverty dynamics in Asia and Africa: Why Poverty Persists: Poverty
Dynamics in Asia and Africa (Cheltenham, UK and Northhampton, USA: Edward Elgar, 2011). This
event was presented by the SURF Program.
Human Security and Disasters: A Dialogue
Melbourne, December 2012
Speakers: Speakers representing a wide range of perspectives from research and practice
This workshop was organized to create a productive exchange of ideas between human security
and disaster management. Human security seeks to reprioritize the central role of the state, instead
locating people as the referent around which security is oriented. Security as much as it is a practice
is also an existential condition, with people experiencing greater or lesser degrees of security and
insecurity as they interact with political, social and natural events. Similarly in disaster management
it is clear that disasters are primarily human events. The exposure of people and the vulnerability of
communities to disaster events are key predictors in the level of disaster risk. Disaster risk reduction
policies can thus equally address underlying conditions of social inequality and work towards a
broader goal of human development. Given these shared goals, this workshop will create dialogue
on the differing methods and terminologies with a view to energizing the respective approaches to
addressing conditions of human insecurity and vulnerability. This workshop was presented by the
Human Security and Disasters Program in conjunction with the Centre for Risk and Community
Safety.
Musical Modernities: Princess Siti and the Particularities of Post Islamist Pop
Speaker: Dr Bart Barendregt, Leiden University, Netherlands
For decades Malaysia has been known as the home of contemporary nasheed, a musical approach
that addresses questions about what it is to be a modern Muslim youth in Southeast Asia and how
to reconcile piety with a ‘funky but shariah’ consumerist lifestyle. Bart Barendregt discussed how
modernity is musically articulated in a Muslim Southeast Asian context and how such articulations
have challenged the secular public sphere. Islamic popular music stirs controversy among both
orthodox Muslims and the Malaysian entertainment industry. Muslim Malay female artists are a
particular target of public debates, but they are also key agents in defining an emergent Islamic chic.
This event was presented by the Globalization and Culture Program.
226
227
London has become its own point of reference. These mannequins stand in a shopfront on
Regent Street, used to sell suits. London, England, 2012.
228
229
10. Postgraduate Students
The Global Cities Institute has over 200 Postgraduate students supervised by our members including the following:
Qasim Al-Mamari
Motivating Factors for Implementing e-Government in Oman
Fatemeh Poodat
Assessment of Ecological Connectivity in Urban Environments: A Multi-species Approach
Ahmed Ali Alhazmi
Phenomenological Study on Saudi International Students Experiences in Australian Gender-mixed
Environment
Prita Puspita
Decolourisation of Secondary-treated Effluent by Advanced Oxidation Processes (AOPs)
Jen Rae
Transforming Ecologies: A Culturally Adaptive Approach to Environmental Issues Through
Collaboration and Public Art
Antoinette Mary Saliba
Beyond the Prison Walls: The Role of a Criminal Record Check in Balancing Risk Management and
Reintegration through Employment: Is There a Critical Role for Society in the Reintegration of ExOffenders?
Mehrdad Arashpour
Cost of Risk Transfer for Residential Construction Production Systems
Ahmad Fadhly Arham
The Relationships Between Leadership Behaviours and Entrepreneurial Orientation Towards
Organisational Performance of SMEs in Malaysia
Kristen Bell
Elements of Public Transport Service Quality
Shuo Chen
Toolkit Towards Performance Based Green Retrofit of HVAC Systems
Anita Samardzija
Contemporary Serbian Nationalisms: A Study of Serbian Political Discourse
Hung Pai Chen
The Integration of Information Technology in Music Teacher Education and School Music Education in
Taiwan
Stefan R. Siebel
Cooperative Economies in a Global Age
Victoria Stead
Entanglements of Custom and Modernity: Land, Power and Change in Papua New Guinea and
Timor-Leste
Sarah Taylor
Geographical Information Systems for Cultural Urban Research: The Case of the Live Music Industry
in Melbourne and Sydney
Nooshin Torabi
Integrated Ecological and Socio-Economic Modelling of Biodiverse Plantings for Carbon
Sequestration
Tran Tuan Anh
Developing Sustainable Housing Options Through Community Consultation for Disaster Prone
Regions of Central Vietnam
Mittul M. Vahanvati
Post-disaster Housing Reconstruction as a Bridge to Building Community Resilience: The Case of
Eastern & North-Eastern India
Roberto Colanzi
How is Vietnam Managing its Automotive Industry Alongside Carbon Minimisation and Urban
Development Vulnerabilities and Pressures in its Major Cities?
Louise Coventry
Challenges and Responses to Good Governance Practices Within Civil Society in Cambodia
Ray David
Apollo Come Dance with Me. Chaos and Order; the Paradigm of Creation
Claire Davison
Presentation of Digital Self in Everyday Life: Towards a Theory of Digital Identity
Marco De Sisto
The Complex Network Within Bushfire Investigation Strategy: An International Comparative Analysis
of Internal and External Dynamics Between Post-Bushfire Investigative Departments
Robin Dunstone
Does the Involvement of Local Communities Improve the Planning, Design and Development of
Previously Developed Land in Australian Cities? A Case Study of the Maribyrnong Valley
Tommaso Durante
The Symbolic Construction of the Global Imaginary in the Contemporary Australian Cities: Sydney
and Melbourne
Vinita Godinho
Understanding of Money in Indigenous Australia and Implications for the Design of Financial Inclusion
Laura Green
The Sibling Experience: Quality of Life and Adjustment in Siblings of Individuals with Autism Across
the Life Course.
A. M. M. Maruf Hossain
On the Theoretical and Empirical Foundations of Sustainability Science
Md. Khalid Hossain
Climate Change Adaptation, MNC Strategy and Environmental Pragmatism: A Cross-Country
Perspective
Ellis P. Judson
Heritage in Contention: Homeowners’ Renovation Practices in an Era of Environmental Concern
Pushpitha Kalutara
An Integrated Decision Making Framework for Sustainable Management of Community Buildings in
Australia
Lee Kofman
Living in a Marked Body: Experiences of Women with Non-facial Scarring
Matthew Kwan
Visualization and Analysis of Mobile Phone Location Data
Rafeah Legino
Malaysian Batik Sarongs: A Study of Tradition and Change
Robyn Martin
Revolving or Evolving Doors: Women’s Homeless Pathways
Ilyas Mas’udin
Location-Allocation Modelling for Indonesian Multi-Echelon LPG Supply Chain
Mark McCrohon
An Examination of Chinese International Student Perspectives of Academic Integrity
Trevor McMahon
The Development of Insecurity in Vanuatu and Beyond: Seeking New Ways to Evaluate Land and
Livelihood
Jessie Pomeroy
Urban Infrastructure in Melbourne: Who Pays For It, Who Benefits, and Is It Giving Us the City We
Want?
Philip Pond
Media Flows: A Spatial-Temporal Analysis of Twitter Communication During Acute Media Events
230
Andres Felipe Vargas-Marino Re-territorialisation and Identity in Conurbated Latin American: The Environmentalist in Usme
Arie Wardhono
The Durability of Geopolymer and Alkali Activated Slag Concretes in Structural Engineering
Components
Tintin Wulia
Chance Geopolitics: Art and Critical Play at the Border
Dashi Zhang
An Integrated Study of Corporate Social Responsibility and Organization–Public Relationships in
China: From an Interpretive Perspective
231
Identity Image
The identy image was designed by Sarah Rudledge from Midnight Sky based on a brief to find a composite set of symbols that
carried a dialogue between complexity and simplicity, between modern trajectories and mythological stories, and between
existing realities and the possibilities of rethinking cities as places of sustainable living. We asked her to construct an image that
abstracted from images found in the cities in which we were working but still carried an identifiable and concrete sense of those
places. The source of inspiration for the ambiguous form that the city might take was to be the Tower of Babel.
The image draws upon a number of elements.
• The building profiles used in the image include the
Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, 333 Collins Street in
Melbourne, and the Oriental Pearl Tower in Shanghai.
• The bridge in the image is the Donghai Bridge in Shanghai
spanning the Zhejiang Gulf.
• The customary boat represents people living in cities by the
water. Historically some of the cities chosen as research
locations for the Global Cities Institute were once fishing or
trading villages.
• The bicycle-rider and the person on bridge are
representations of people inhabiting cities and either moving
from the hinterlands to the cities or living in the cities in
different ways. It also links to the most appropriate alternative
forms of transport to the current emphasis on the car namely walking and cycling.
• The tuk tuk is the Southeast Asian version of a vehicle known
elsewhere as an auto-rickshaw or cabin-cycle.
• From a quite different context, the balloon and the light tower
are silhouettes from the Melbourne Cricket Ground, past and
present. The MCG opened in 1853. It is built on the site of
the first ‘recognized’ Australian Rules game and the first Test
cricket match between Australia and England in 1877.
Hot-air balloons often grace the skies of Melbourne, and the
light towers are a recent addition to the MCG allowing the
hyper-commercialization of the two sports while transcending
the previous limitations of night and day. This is signified
also by the nineteenth-century Victorian street lamp, now
a romantic reference to the supposedly elegant past of
‘Marvellous Melbourne’.
• The graphic symbols include the Ashoka Chakra (white
wheel) an ancient Indian depiction of the Dharmacakra, the
Wheel of Life and Cosmic Order. The wheel has twentyfour spokes, each of which signifies a spiritual principle. A
symbol from the Tamil language swirls at the bottom of the
image. Tamil is a language spoken predominantly by Tamils
in India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and Singapore, and is one of
the few living classical languages which has an unbroken
literary tradition of over two millennia. The sign near the white
wheel is from the Cantonese language one of the five major
Chinese languages, and is part of the old name for
Ho Chi Minh City - Sái Gón.
• The propellers of a wind power-generator represent
alternative sustainable energy sources in the context of
climate change.
• The illustration of the Papua New Guinea crested Bird of
Paradise is derived from the Papua New Guinea national
flag. This element is sitting in the tree profile, which itself
represents the old-growth forest of Kuala Lumpur, the only
city in the world to have a million-year-old primary forest
within the heart of the city.
The Tower of Babel is one of the most enduring and ambiguous images amongst the various images that relate to cities. References to Babel
occur in the Bible, the Torah and the Qur’an, the books of three of the world’s global religions. The story refers to the dispersal of the world’s
languages occasioned, at least in the Christian and Judaic traditions, as God’s response to their hubris is attempting to build a city that reaches
the heavens. Other traditions from South America have similar stories, including one about Montezuma who escaped a great flood, and
attempted to build a house reaching to heaven, which the Great Spirit destroyed with thunderbolts. Given this ambiguity of aspiration, hubris and
globalized pluralism, this image became the basis for thinking about how to represent graphically the concerns of the Global Cities Institute.
232

Global Cities Research Institute

Transcription

Similar documents

Teaching Sustainability thru Interac"ve Systems Thinking Educa"on

Sustainability brochure - Queen Mary University of London

A Week In Melbourne

accompanying presentation slides

The Sustainable University

2015 July/August - Sun Newsletter

A Different Look at Game Day and Special Event Recycling

Sustainability Report - Sustainability Disclosure Database

asia pacific leadership in green building awards roadshow asia

and print