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Beck: Our final speaker tonight is Rod Simpson.
He's the Environment Commissioner of the Greater Sydney Commission.
He's an architect, and urban designer, and now an adjunct professor at UTS.
Rod's work has spanned planning, and urban design, and energy efficiency.
It's working with all three levels of Australian government, which in my book deserves a special
award now that I'm trying to do that myself.
He's here tonight to tell us more about new architecture, and directions, and opportunities
right here in Sydney.
Please welcome Rod.
Rod Simpson: Is this working?
Beck: Yep.
Rod Simpson: Thanks, Beck.
I'm going to get straight into it.
This is going to be a repeat.
I think one of the things that struck me over the last 18 months with resilience is that
it's a pretty vague concept and it's actually only through these sorts of discussions that
it starts to become embedded in the way we think about things.
There'll be a bit of repeat.
Rob talked about intuitive responses to disasters.
That's probably the role it was possibly in 1867, the Great Nepean Flood.
A lot of people lost their lives.
If you look at the trend of mortality across Australia, this is the whole of Australia,
you can see things are generally improving.
They're improving because there's better understanding.
There's better emergency services in place and so forth.
In other words, there's better formal responses to some of these risks and hazards.
For example, with the Hawkesbury-Nepean, we understand very well how those river systems
will behave.
These are the escape routes that are mapped out, carefully sequenced to when roads are
cut to make sure that people can get out.
You can see why it's such an issue over there on the left.
Unlike most river systems, which have what's called a possible maximum flood, the big black
line, up in most rivers they're a little bit higher.
In the Hawkesbury-Nepean, in that area, it's nine metres higher because there's a constriction
in the river.
I'm showing that because we can understand risk.
We can actually model this.
This is essentially like understanding the way we design for peak loads of any sort.
It can be predicted to a certain extent in terms of risk.
That risk, of course, translates into dollar impacts.
It translates into, as you can see here, the variety.
We've got the full spread of disasters in Australia.
Earthquake, not so much.
We rely on New Zealand for that.
But what we've got here, though, you can see that even the earthquake, though it's very
rare, is actually one of the major events from an insurance point of view, from the
cost of that initial impact.
But, of course, as has already been pointed out, it's actually the ongoing impact that
we need to be concerned about.
That ongoing impact isn't going to be covered by insurance, only by those formal structures.
What's going to happen is there's going to be a build-up in the capacity for our entire
community to respond.
The insurance companies know this.
There's Munich Re over there.
There's Deloitte looking at the business round table on resilience and disaster preparedness.
Over here on the right is basically showing the numbers of, yes, the tangible, the direct
impacts, the flooded house, the plasterboard that's come off, the deaths and injuries.
But look at the grey area.
That's the psychological stress, the mental health impact, the impact on social cohesion
and on economy long-term.
The insurance industry is interested in that because of course those things also then affect
their business.
It affects the entire country's ability to respond to disaster.
It's well understood, is my point.
The point I'm making is that there's a limit to the formal responses that we can mount
in anticipation and in response to these disasters.
Now, when you look at the projected cost of that, you can see over here on the right,
we're going from $10 billion, up to around about $25, some say $33 billion.
That sounds like a total disaster.
Right?
It's a big increase.
But if you look at the increase in the economy, a strange thing can be noticed there.
It actually is relatively smaller on rough figures, but basically staying as the same
proportion of the growth, relative to the growth in the economy.
One problem with those figures, and it's not shied away from in that report: this doesn't
include climate change.
Okay?
In other words, this is a graphing of risk.
It's not a graphing of uncertainty.
Yet, everything we heard previously is talking about what's the compounded risk that comes
from the things that we can't predict?
We need to distinguish risk from uncertainty.
What I want to do in this little 15 minutes is talk about the possible linkage between
a risk framework, a way of conventionally planning the city, and one that's actually
dealing with an uncertainty, not only in terms of disaster preparedness, but uncertainty
as something that we contend with in design.
Beck's talked about this.
What you can see here is the shocks and stresses.
I don't need to go into this much more, I think, except to say that there's a very important
proposition, if you like, put here, a fundamental proposition in the 100 Resilient Cities' work.
These are not empty words.
There's a causality verity in there that says it's concerned with the stresses and the acute
shocks.
It's concerned as much with the adaptive capacity as it is with the formal responses.
It's concerned with the capacity of the whole society, the social cohesion that Beck's already
talked about.
That's the fundamental basis.
If we rely purely on emergency responses and hard engineering, you've seen what happened
in New Orleans.
It doesn't work because we can't predict it to be effective.
I want to talk a little bit more in detail about heat, which has come up.
This is mapping of a Parramatta, as you can see, compared to Sydney as a trend line going
up.
We know it causes deaths.
This is the deaths increase in 2009 in Melbourne.
There's nothing new about this.
Right?
We've got to understand that extreme heat, we've already got a climate which is at a
large scale.
There's hot air coming off the centre of the continent.
There's cold air coming from the northeast, on the eastern side of the city, stopping
about Parramatta.
But we've got now is that climate, overlaid by climate change, overlaid by the urban heat
island effect, in fact, what we're actually building in the city.
You put those three together and you've got an increase in vulnerability.
Now, I'm not going to dwell on all these technical diagrams.
They're not that technical, but what this really shows is it's the relationship between
exposure to the hazard, combined with the sensitivity of the population, that's going
to vary across the city.
It's specific to a particular event.
The adaptive capacity, which is actually the ability of people to respond, which is really
what combined, means that we've got vulnerability.
Just looking at what happens in Sydney, here's the heat.
The sensitivity in the case of heat is generally young children under the age of five, people
over 85.
They're the sensitive population.
When we start to talk about adaptive capacity there, we're talking about the capacity of
that community to respond.
That's largely to do with social disadvantage.
All right, why is that coming in with heat?
Well, social disadvantage might mean that you can't afford to own and run an air conditioner.
There's the mapping of vulnerability.
That's Fairfield, basically, that red circle, where people are basically doing it tough,
and at the same time, they're the ones who are exposed to the extreme heat.
We might then look at canopy and say, "Well, the obvious thing to do is plant more trees
because it's quite clear from here that they could do with a few more trees in Fairfield."
Trees take 20 years to grow, so that's probably not going to be the immediate solution.
The slides have gone from black to white, which is I think what happened to you, Rob.
But what this shows is a relationship between canopy ... This has disappeared over here.
I do apologise.
But what you see here is that with an increase in canopy, you actually get a reduced temperature.
It would seem like an easy thing to do to say, "Let's plant more trees."
This is what we're building at the moment.
That's that compounding of climate in the city, plus climate change, plus the urban
heat island effect.
Now, the government has already said that we're going to be changing the code and requiring
a tree in the front and a tree in the back, which is great.
That's the current condition in that place.
Now, the reason I'm showing it is that we do want to plant more trees and we will.
However, let's look at another area in Fairfield.
Over here, you have Orphan School Creek.
I'm going to be talking about these two areas in the two circles.
Orphan School Creek has been restored.
This is a wonderful project, which actually turned that channel 20 years ago into this
wonderful environment.
It takes 20 years, though.
But it was achieved through a lot of community participation.
It involved people.
The reason there's no trees in that street is probably because that particular group
of people aren't particularly enamoured of trees.
For us to come in and say, "Thou shalt plant trees," is probably not going to be an effective
policy.
We can do the analysis, we can do the top-down suggestions, but it's going to rely on processes
like 100 Resilient Cities to go out and engage with that community.
Getting the community involved, which is not only a product out of that process, but the
process itself, will be one of the things that will generate discussion and hopefully
build community cohesion.
Resilience is about building that capacity.
It's both a product and a process.
It's not going to be easy to actually reforest Fairfield, is my point.
The other thing is, as I said before, really for extreme heat, the critical thing is if
you haven't got a neighbour looking after you, and looking out for you, which is what
happened in Paris in 2003.
Thousands of people died from extreme heat in 2003 in Paris.
Why?
They were largely old, as I've already touched on.
The critical thing was it was during holiday season.
Most of their families had gone on holidays to the south of France.
They were left alone.
That's why so many people died.
Those social networks are absolutely critical.
At a metro scale, what we're trying to do with the Greater Sydney Commission is make
sure that there's more opportunity in the west of the city.
Part of that is about building the economy, of course, but also building social capacity.
That's why we've talked about the three cities.
There's a great emphasis on improving a whole lot of things in the west.
I'm going to click through this quickly.
But that big macro scale needs to be accompanied by an understanding of the micro scale.
How on earth do you do that at the scale of the city?
If we think about self-organizing, back in 1867, this is a very few diagrams just to
tease out a point.
The self-organization that we'd expect in a community has been formalised through institutions,
through banking arrangements, and so forth, through emergency services.
We've come to rely on that.
We've got a top-down system that's actually pretty good in Australia, but what we've seen
with the insurance companies is we can't simply rely on a top-down process.
In making that top-down process effective, we've come to rely on it.
Through relying it, we've actually created vulnerability in itself.
You've got to have what Rob referred to as redundancy.
You've got to have backup systems.
You've got to have multiple ways of operating, which seems inefficient, but it's more resilient.
What you can see I'm getting at here is that there's actually a tension here between the
idea of a functional city and a resilient city.
It's a different set of parameters.
It's as Elizabeth has said, it's largely refocusing on social capacity.
It's putting people front and centre in terms of the way that we approach planning.
I'll keep on going.
I'm getting the wind-up.
That concentration is accompanied at the same time because we've relied on those formal
arrangements.
There's a fragmentation at this level.
That fragmentation is what I'm talking about in Paris.
What we've got is almost a dual system.
That fragmentation is at this scale.
At the central scale, of course, it results in silos.
Again, this is where, if we're talking about place and communities, we've actually got
to have a cross-cutting strategy.
To plant those trees in Fairfield is going to involve multiple government departments,
multiple levels of government, and multiple agencies to be involved, cross-cutting.
In doing that, what we're talking about is concentrating on precincts or place.
How the hell do we understand that at the city scale?
We talk about the mosaic of the city.
The way we do it is to actually model a city, get the data, and understand.
An amusing carbon modelling here as an example.
This shows where it's going to be most effective to have policy to achieve improved carbon.
It's different in different places.
In a high-performance, low-carbon precinct, what you can see here is that this over here,
this is in the renewal areas.
A major part of it's to do with electric vehicles and autonomous vehicles having a huge potential
impact.
Very different to what you might do out in the west.
The reason I'm showing you this is not to talk about the carbon so much, but to say
that what we've got to aim for is understanding the detail, the particular problems that exist
in particular places like Fairfield, and still be able to understand it from the top down,
and formal understanding of the city.
We've also got to understand why do we do that?
Because, and this is again just to illustrate a concept of what is a system, and it's only
by thinking about places in all their complexity that we can deal with that complexity, but
not be overwhelmed by the scale of it.
We can do with complexity in place.
This is just chasing through the complexity, if you like, of the system of what the impact
might be when you combine electric cars with autonomous vehicles, with no on-street parking.
You see what I'm saying?
The complexity that's here might apply to a particular part of the city, and that's
why it's so important to concentrate on place.
Then we can assemble those places and understand the entire city.
That's a data issue.
It's not the way that we manage the city, necessarily.
You need both.
You need the top-down, as well as the bottom-up, which is the accumulation of places.
We can look overseas.
When we think about place, we can start to think, well, are we going to really need much
parking when there's autonomous vehicles?
Probably not.
Well, wouldn't it be a good idea to build a dedicated parking area that is actually
a prime, mortar-front location that's probably going to be demolished in 10 years?
This is starting to think about the adaptive capacity at a precinct scale or a place scale.
What about how do we transfer it in Sydney?
How do we transfer it in Sydney?
If you look at what's happened in, say, Kings Cross, which was until recently the densest
suburb in the city, how did it come to be like that?
Picking on what Rob said, it didn't actually have a lot of rules.
What it had was a very resilient, robust framework, which is actually the street and the grain
of the subdivision.
That's what allowed that to actually iterate and intensify over 200 years.
Canberra, and we'll finish on Canberra, my favourite place.
Why am I talking about Canberra?
Because you might think that it is the perfect example of a place that was designed, planned,
built.
Of course, that was when they were still looking for the site.
There's Burley Gryphon.
That's what it turned into.
The conception in the 1970's, when it was designed, was there was a drawing.
You can see it was simply built pretty much.
Job over.
Finished.
Our work is done.
Move on.
But if we think about the challenges that then face Canberra, which is accommodating
population growth, putting in new transport, and so forth, the irony is that that perfect
design, which actually put in so much surface car parking, you can see it all over there,
not intended, is actually where the adaptive capacity is for 50% of the houses in the future.
My point is this.
If we look back at Kings Cross, if we look over to the continent and look at what is
going on in Denmark, if we look at Canberra and then think, "Well, hang on," we can see
that by doing that, by having that redundancy, by having that space left over, by not trying
to be super effective, we can actually then have a capacity at an urban scale to accommodate
change and shifts in economy and social expectations, and of course what we need to do in response
to climate.
You can see here this is the amount of existing built form and surface car parking.
Those areas are going to accommodate 50% of Canberra's growth.
What are we going to do in the west of city?
The challenge here is to not do it historically, but look back on that experience, and now
to consider this new approach of resilience as being a guiding set of principles, adaptive
capacity, redundancy in terms of infrastructure capacity, but redundancy in governance, as
well as what we're talking about formal and informal systems, bottom-up and top-down processes.
Sounds inefficient, but now we're interested in resilience, not necessarily hyper-efficiency.
Hyper-efficiency is also very fragile.
Fragility means it's vulnerable, right?
If you're trying to get the last percentage out of a system, you're really risking a lot.
There we are.
That's the last slide.
I think what I've tried to do is to paint a bit of a picture, I suppose, of how resilience
principles might be related to some of the things that we really value in urbanity across
to some of those principles then embedded in planning practise.
I think that's our greatest challenge.
How do we now go from what is emerging as a new way of thinking, a new way of prioritising
the way we make decisions in an urban context, and starting to build it into our professional
practise, our governance, the way we engage with communities?
I'll leave it at that.