Sustainable Cities Enquiry: Public Hearing

Matt Fisher (UEA Convenor), May 2004

Recently UEA put forward a written submission to an enquiry into Sustainable Cities being conducted by the Federal House of Representatives Standing Committee on Environment & Heritage. As a follow up to that submission, representatives of UEA were invited to participate in a Public Hearing with Committee members held in Adelaide. UEA was represented by Board member Michael Robertson, and myself.

Info on the enquiry and copies of all submissisons are available at the enquiry website: www.aph.gov.au/house/committee/environ/cities

The process at the hearing was for UEA to make an initial short presentation, which is reproduced below. Following that, Michael and I enjoyed close to an hour of further discussion with the Committee, responding to particular questions they put forward. It was interesting to learn from them that they had received roughly 200 submissions to their enquiry, and from very many different sources. This certainly suggests that the nature of our cities and how they function is a ‘core issue’ that can be arrived at from many different starting points.

At the recent "Just & Sustainable SA” Conference in Adelaide, Peter Newman argued the same point; that cities and the way they function within their regions are the primary manifestation and driver of contemporary social, ecological and economic trends.

The perspective offered to us by the Committee about ‘where things are at’ was also of interest – although perhaps nothing greatly new for UEA members. In general terms, they had found that there were many individuals, groups, organisations, companies and government bodies at all levels beginning to talk about ‘triple bottom line’ sustainability.

However, effective examples of practice, or clear pathways to get the ideas into practice, are still exceptional and relatively rare or partial (doing bits and pieces of good things but not the ‘whole package’).

Thus much of what we discussed revolved around this basic question; the ‘how to’ of moving ideas about sustainability from rhetoric to reality. In response, the main points put forward by UEA were as follows:

Following is the text of the initial blurb presented at the hearing.

The matter of cities and sustainability is core business for Urban Ecology Australia. Further to our submission, there are a number of key points we would like to emphasise.

Firstly, something I’m sure you already know; the way we design, build, live and work in the typical modern city is deeply implicated in many if not all of the serious environmental issues we confront.

In particular, for Australia, we would point to the issue of profound, designed dependence on the private car, and fossil fuel-powered road transport in general. This dependence, together with projected decline in world oil supplies, we see as a matter of grave concern for our future economic and social well-being: and yet it has barely begun to be addressed.

However, given that cities also deliver a great many social, cultural and economic benefits, the message of UEA is a positive and practical one. Just as the contemporary city is a locus of problems, equally therefore is intelligent, planned change to our cities a key opportunity for improving our sustainability performance, and improving our lives.

The question of course is how.

We recognize there are now many laudable activities and programs in place to improve sustainability outcomes in specific areas of city performance, such as energy and water use, public transport, building design, waste and recycling and so on.

Despite the benefits of these measures, however, to our eyes they do not add up to a coherent, strategic and practical pathway towards genuinely sustainable cities. The problem, in essence, is that some of the main obstacles to sustainability result from the way whole urban conglomerates function as systems, and it is these systemic characteristics that ultimately must be addressed. This begs a question of course, of how then to proceed, when clearly wholesale change to whole cities is impossible.

The answer to this conundrum, in our view, lie in two key methodologies.

The first is to agree to some working principles based on designing out car dependence and designing in a range of triple bottom line outcomes. To have in other words, a coherent working model of sustainable urban form, on multiple scales from neighbourhoods to whole districts and regions. This is the substance of our written submission. We believe the essential ideas and working examples of such models on a small scale are already quite well known and are beginning to be well tested in various places around the world.

The second methodology asserts that, rather than any aspirations of wholesale change, it is in fact vitally important to proceed by creating concentrated pieces of best-practice sustainable urban form; working examples that integrate the full range of factors one seeks to address. These examples need to be substantial in scale, they need to draw on every ounce of expertise and experience we have in public, private and community sectors, they need to be actively supported by government, and they need to be happening now. Despite all the talk, substantial on-the-ground examples still are rare – and that is also an opportunity to be seized.

Why is this approach important? We offer a number of reasons:

  1. It is an opportunity to experiment and refine working models and trial various methods.
  2. It offers working examples to the wider community; educating, alleviating fears, and changing market expectations.
  3. It can engage and involve those members of the community already seeking to enact change in their own lives (and these numbers will only increase).
  4. It will represent valuable intellectual property and attract interest, support and investment.
  5. It will drive the development of sunrise industries and new employment opportunities.
  6. It offers hope, practical achievement and positive direction to a society currently fearful of what the future holds for itself and future generations

Most importantly, this approach offers a way to create the systemic changes required in achievable steps. It offers a process of change combining leadership with community engagement. A strong Federal position would, we believe, be of immense benefit in leading the way.

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