GREENING THE BLUE: urban futures of regeneration and repair

A community workshop about urbanisation and climate justice.

Climate change and climate crisis can already be observed with rapidly melting glaciers, a rising average global temperature, and increasingly frequent and extreme weather patterns resulting in biodiversity loss and breakdown. While these environmental changes are damaging and irreversible, there are still things we can and must do now. People in the built environment professions are invited to be exemplars of positive change, become active in transforming industry thinking, education and practice, and become a part of a critical mass to regenerate and permanently repair this Earth. We must affect policy, rethink the design of our homes, suburbs, cities, lifestyles, habits and care for the natural environment.

Architects for Peace, Engineers Without Borders and special guests will come together on the 31st October - World Cities Day. We offer an evening long community workshop to investigate the issues of urbanisation and climate justice. We invite you to participate in transdisciplinary, solutions-based discussion and take decisive action to repair and regenerate now.

Event details:

Thursday 31st October, 2019

Collingwood Library Meeting Room

11 Stanton Street, Abbotsford, Melbourne

6.30pm - 9.30pm

Light refreshments provided

Bookings essential on Eventbrite

This is a free event run by Architects for Peace and Engineers Without Borders and sponsored by the City of Yarra Council.

Resilience in Infrastructure & Urban Form | Thurs. 10 Nov. 7pm | by Che Biggs

Thursday 10 November
7.00pm
Building 50
Orr Street Carlton

Che’s talk will focus on system design principles for transformation and resilience in infrastructure and urban form. It will argue that much of our built environment and critical infrastructure has been (and still is) designed, built and managed under outdated assumptions of environmental and resource stability. This dominant ‘centralised’ model is not only unsustainable, it exacerbates society’s vulnerability to climate change, peak oil and resource scarcity. With these global scale contextual disruptions ‘in the pipeline’, we urgently need new design models for the built environment that are adapted to greater contextual uncertainty, volatility and disruption – models that are more resilient.

The talk will explore results from on-going research at the Victorian Eco-Innovation Lab that has identified the ‘distributed systems’ model as having considerable promise. Che will draw on examples from the natural and built environment to explore what this model looks like and how a distributed approach can benefit society in four critical areas, by:

• Reducing society’s base load environmental footprint
• Increasing the resilience of critical infrastructure to shocks and disturbances
• Supporting and fostering behavior change, community capacity and adaptive governance
• Undermining the viability of existing production and consumption systems

The talk will end with an open discussion about the types of opportunities and challenges that people within Architects for Peace may face in enabling distributed systems.

Bio:
Che Biggs is Distributed Systems Research Fellow at the Victorian Eco-Innovation Lab (VEIL). His work focuses on the development of strategies and tools to build society’s resilience to long-term sustainability challenges. A key component of this work addresses the need for new provision systems (for food, energy and water) that strengthen community capacity to adapt to resource scarcity and climate change while enhancing natural capital. Che has a particular interest working with communities to draw out place-based knowledge, envisage common aims and ensure local ownership of development strategies - particularly those increasing people’s relationship to place and nature. Che has a background in environmental science, management and policy and has worked internationally in the environmental sector since 2001 as a consultant, facilitator and researcher.

http://www.architectsforpeace.org/

Landscape Food Paradigm | Thursday 13 October 2011 at 7pm | Public talk by Michael Howard

Words@Bldg50 October Edition:

Landscape food paradigms, with Michael Howard

Much of the current conversation around new food paradigms has a focus on domestic urban production . A boutique model that will come and go and have little affect on our broader food world . How can we shift these paradigms of production across a range of scales without loosing the the energy currently generated by the community groups? What are the considerations and how can we engage with them through design. The role of design is often ignored in this area of agriculture and considered only through pragmatics. What else can working landscapes offer and how do we infiltrate what we understand as closed industrial sites?

Will be joining us is Michael Howard. Michael is a founding member of FOODLAB: Food and landscape architecture bureau and lectures in landscape architecture at RMIT University, Australia. His research interests include food systems, productive landscapes and designing for future food urbanism. His design teaching focuses specifically on the spatiality of food systems in urban, regional and remote Australian Landscapes. His recent projects have investigated ideas around efficiency, redundancy and cross programming of peri urban food production zones in Melbourne Australia.

Join us for an evening of talk and conversation, followed by light refreshments. Entry by gold coin donation.

Video of the event:

Part 1


Part 2


Q&A

Public lecture :. Thursday 14 May 2009 :. Reforestation : Urban agriculture movement presented by Future Canvas

Thursday 14 May 2009 - 7.00pm

RMIT Building 50, Orr St, Carlton

Entry by gold coin donation..
refreshments provided.




Members of fledgling social enterprise Future Canvas will discuss their efforts to introduce agriculture and permaculture to the urban landscape. The Future Canvas Reforestation project is a global collaborative project that seeks to achieve the following vision in Melbourne:

“A metropolis alive with music and festivities radiating from a nucleus in the city centre community garden. Reforestation Day will enliven and inspire the city; people will get involved in sustainable urban agriculture in Melbourne’s centre, as well as their local neighborhoods, schools and universities. Groups of people interested in Reforestation will become productive communities through initiatives such as sharing their knowledge on urban agriculture through a central website and permaculture workshops. People will green the institutions that make up their everyday. The joy of this experience will echo around the world as Re-foresters share their experiences through various media including the internet, television and print”

Come along to hear about what Future Canvas has already been up to and what's happening right now.

Download the flyer for this event here

More info on Future Canvas at http://www.futurecanvas.org